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« Green vision | Main | South Australia today, UK tomorrow? »
Tuesday
Nov032015

Who's behind the RICO push?

Shub Niggurath has been taking a look at a report by the Climate Accountability Institute, a small California non-profit, with links to the renewable energy industry, and which features Michael Mann among its advisers. The Institute seems to have been coordinating efforts to bring racketeering charges against climate dissenters in the USA.

The report in question describes a 2012 conference at which the strategy was agreed and Shub's report makes for fascinating reading. The list of those who took part is interesting. Some were entirely expected - Naomi Oreskes and James Hoggan for example - but it was slightly more surprising to see Myles Allen there.

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Reader Comments (81)

Dave Salt, in climate science, academic qualifications are irrelevant. If however you have some half witted fictitious horror story printed in a pseudo psyance pscary pscam comic, your financial fortune awaits. See Paul Ehrlich and Naomi Oreskes for more detail.

Nov 3, 2015 at 5:01 PM | Unregistered Commentergolf charlie

Bish....

rolled up newspaper please - the buzzing and bumping into things is getting annoying.

Nov 3, 2015 at 5:21 PM | Registered Commentertomo

It is interesting that the Climate Accountability Institute would like us to believe that if we all went along with their agenda then the world would be a benign place where we all lean on farm gates, sucking straw and waiting for the horses to bring in the bountiful harvest, all hand reaped by Aidan Turner lookalikes. We would repair to the communal farm building, sing a few kum-by-yas then eat prolifically of our tofu and broccoli stew before retiring to bed by the light of the harvest moon. Of course they would be in charge of this Heaven on Earth, just as benign directors to prompt and prod our happy hearts in the right direction
Yet by their actions they show themselves to be corrupt conniving individuals, prepared to prosecute and imprison any one who stands in their way.

They seem to have lost the plot to such an extent that in their desire to see the unbelievers punished they forget that they need to project the former image of benign academics with our best interests at heart to the proletariat until they have the power, not show their true colours to everyone before the power is theirs. I refer them to Pol Pot for an example. He did not tell the population that he was going to kill them all BEFORE he had the power to do it.

Nov 3, 2015 at 5:39 PM | Unregistered CommenterIvor Ward

Once more (wearily) - troll comments and follow-ups removed.

Nov 3, 2015 at 5:54 PM | Registered CommenterBishop Hill

Ivor Ward, I wonder if the Climate Accountability Institute can be held accountable for any of their actions, and whether their financial backers will share liability, if matters do not proceed favourably.

Mann has soaked up a fair bit of money for legal fees already. Lawyers must love climate science, for all the fees it brings in. If only they had not jumped on the band wagon, when it was supported by a defective Hockey Stick, they might still be rolling along.

Nov 3, 2015 at 6:08 PM | Unregistered Commentergolf charlie

Bishop Hill @5:54 PM

thanks

I once would have railed against a basic registration - but - given the propensity of some folk to be behave like toxic teenagers I can see the sense in having a sensible "door policy". Pushing the willful nause crew off to Twitter/FB would not be a bad thing.

Nov 3, 2015 at 6:21 PM | Registered Commentertomo

Good to hear that European police are getting stuck into FIFA over allegations of fraud and corruption concerning the World Cup.

Are they using it as a warm-up game prior to the IPCC's party in Paris? American investigators have the RICO shenanigans to learn more about the opposition's team tactics and strategy, and shub has revealed the coaching playbook, going back a few years.

Nov 3, 2015 at 6:22 PM | Unregistered Commentergolf charlie

Basic science from the 19th century:

By the influence of the increasing percentage of carbonic acid in the atmosphere,
we may hope to enjoy ages with more equable and better climates, especially
as regards the colder regions of the earth, ages when the earth will bring forth
much more abundant crops than at present, for the benefit of rapidly propagating
mankind.

Svante Arrhenius, Worlds in the Making

Nov 3, 2015 at 6:32 PM | Registered CommenterAlbert Stienstra

golf charlie

in your dreams... the wafting pong from assd. Brussels / Strasbourg projects has not afaiks precipitated any inquiry at all from Europlod.

Nov 3, 2015 at 6:32 PM | Registered Commentertomo

tomo, journalists and others 'in the know', have known about FIFA fraud and corruption for years. It took an American fraud inquiry to trigger the sequence of continuously unraveling events. Platini, the clean man, brought in to hold things steady, has also been implicated.

One of the lessons of climate scamology, is that nothing can be predicted. But it is good to know that the US President takes his science advice from John Holdren, a disciple of Paul Ehrlich. Even climate alarmists are distancing themselves from Ehrlich, who has chosen this moment in time to seek more publicity for his failed predictions.

Perhaps a blog thread on Ehrlich's disastrous legacy of failed predictions would be timely, as a warning lesson to all in the countdown to Paris? There seems to be a ready market in the UK, USA, Canada, Australia India, etc, so it would not need translating, initially.

Nov 3, 2015 at 7:00 PM | Unregistered Commentergolf charlie

GC, as with FIFA, it's a bit like Lance Armstrong in the Tour de France. I long gave him the benefit of the doubt, and then felt foolish for doing so, but almost everybody in the game knew he was corrupt. Individuals were intimidated from attempting to blow the gaff, and the relevant authorities were either too incompetent or corrupt to take action, partly because they knew most of the rest were just as bad. Armstrong's main legacy, like Ben Johnson, was that he was better at playing the game than the rest of the dishonest part of field.

It took an outside American investigation of an American rider, who was probably hated by the French establishment mostly for being American and winning, to bring back some semblance of decency into the premier French sporting event.

When and how that will happen with the scourge of "climate science", I honestly don't know.

Nov 3, 2015 at 7:26 PM | Unregistered Commentermichael hart

From:Natural climate variability during 1880-1950: A response to Shaun Lovejoy ( on Judith Curry's blog)


"If you take thegoodness of fit to Arrhenius’s logarithmic law after 1950 as a measure of the goodness to expect in general [with its astonishing R2 of 99.83%] , then climate before 1950 very badly fails that law!"

Einstein observed it only takes one failure to invalidate a law in physics.

Nov 3, 2015 at 7:33 PM | Unregistered CommenterPaleoclimate Buff

Check out this letter from US House of Representative members to the Securities Exchange Commission:

https://lieu.house.gov/sites/lieu.house.gov/files/documents/2015.10.30%20TWL_SEC_ExxonMobil.pdf

Nov 3, 2015 at 7:46 PM | Registered Commentershub

Sorry, Bishop and tomo.

I just try to be polite and engaging and informative.

Sometimes I fail.

Nov 3, 2015 at 7:55 PM | Registered CommenterM Courtney

"one of the most important lessons to emerge from the history of tobacco litigation’ was the ‘value of bringing internal industry documents to light’.

Which is exactly why NOAA/Mann/CRU and the whole "Green Blob" resist FOIA request for their dodgy science.

Nov 3, 2015 at 8:04 PM | Unregistered CommenterDon Keiller

Shub Niggurath: “… try thinking of a more reverse-engineered form of activism …” is a neat summary.
It is the new scientific method as Simon Schaffer clearly explained at the end of the BBC programme In Our Time discussing The Scientific Method and ‘where trust and authority should lie’ as:
’… how we [presumably practicing scientists, although he isn’t one] make up stories about the world that compel …’.
Oreskes and her pals are seeking that compelling narrative: “…we currently lack a compelling public narrative about climate change in the United States …” — they admit it themselves.

Nov 3, 2015 at 9:06 PM | Unregistered CommenterChristopher Hanley

Don Keiller
FoI is such an affront to their exalted status and unimpeachable integrity

Nov 3, 2015 at 9:28 PM | Unregistered Commentertomo

This guy is so believable - yeah right!
Check this out
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twWflzr2dnE

Nov 3, 2015 at 9:30 PM | Unregistered CommenterDouglas

Shub Niggurath, thanks for the link. I suppose it is only fair to ask the IPCC when they knew Michael Mann's Hockey Stick was flawed science. It was once so prominent in IPCC reports, so who knew what and when?

Surely the IPCC must have had more than 97% confidence in the Hockey Stick, once upon a time?

Nov 3, 2015 at 9:54 PM | Unregistered Commentergolf charlie

I have said for a few years that the cliamte kooks will not stop until they either lose or silence free people who dare to disagree with them.
The cliamte extremists are no better than well mannered thugs or religious fanatics. that they are social parasites, producing nothing of value and totally reliant on the money of others only inflames their parasitism.

Nov 4, 2015 at 12:47 AM | Unregistered Commenterhunter

Doesn't this simply illustrate their absolute desperation and underneath it all they believe they are close to losing their argument/battle ?

Nov 4, 2015 at 4:00 AM | Unregistered CommenterRoss

Michael Harts' analysis, wrt Lance Armstrong and Ben Johnson above, is probably the best I have seen yet of corrupted science.

Nov 4, 2015 at 5:41 AM | Unregistered Commenterpatrick healy

"Doesn't this simply illustrate their absolute desperation and underneath it all they believe they are close to losing their argument/battle ?"

Not necessarily. It seems to me leftists are pretty good at using the law and the courts to further their wrecking agenda. (Look up one Gareth Peirce on Wikipedia ....the agitators advocate, a lady who has decided its all sooooooo unfair that among other things she uses a man's name.... ) And anyway has it not already happened in Netherlands, that some bunch of agitators took Dutch government to court over failing to curb emissions, governemnt lost and now has to do more than it was doing or something? I think what the Left are taking away from 50 years of agitation, is that check-mating opponents in court is far more effective than chucking bricks at policemen. It does however diminish the role of the proletariat as the vanguard of the revolution, so I suppose there is much agonising over that in Marxist study groups up and down the land.

Nov 4, 2015 at 10:33 AM | Unregistered Commenterbill

The thing about tobacco and cancer is that nobody who has commenced smoking at least since the 1970's has been unaware of the link to lung cancer. Many of us have had family members die from it. Now you can obviously blame the companies for supplying the product in the first place but the public were never influenced by and mostly never even got to see any statements by any tobacco companies that said the cancer link was untrue or exaggerated. In reality most folk start smoking precisely because they've been told it is dangerous. Dangerous is cool and rebellious! In the light of that reality, governments had only one choice if they were truly serious about health and that was to ban smoking altogether. The fact that they didn't do that means the fault lies mainly with them and not with tobacco companies. Prosecuting tobacco companies was just a sneaky way of shifting that blame while still enjoying the tax revenue.

Nov 4, 2015 at 10:46 AM | Unregistered CommenterJamesG

June in CA:

http://www.ljshoreshotel.com/

Thank goodness somebody is prepared to go there to discuss "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations".

Nov 4, 2015 at 1:15 PM | Unregistered Commenternot banned yet

Recall how David Appell quoted Mann about skepticism becoming illegal:

"Are they? Are Anthony Watts and Marc Morano and Tom Nelson and Steve Goddard smart enough to be guilty of climate crimes?

I think so. You can't simply claim that CO2 isn't a greenhouse gas.

I think their crimes will be obvious in about a decade.

When I profiled Michael Mann for Scientific American, he said he thought it would eventually be illegal to deny climate change. I had doubts about that, but maybe."

http://davidappell.blogspot.com/2012/09/the-charlesh-problem.html

Nov 6, 2015 at 6:00 AM | Unregistered CommenterNikFromNYC

Crude oil isn't black, smelly poisonous stuff. Its a completely natural product, organic and biodegradable! What's not too like?

Ok, it is black and smelly! But its unreasonable to hold its colour against it. And even perfumes are made from some pretty smelly stuff.

Nov 6, 2015 at 7:22 AM | Registered Commenterthinkingscientist

It was the development of the oil industry that saved the whales (especially the Sperm whale).

Nov 6, 2015 at 7:22 AM | Registered Commenterthinkingscientist

TinyCO2: Oil and gas aren't expensive, they are pretty cheap. In fact considering the vast amounts of capital and the risk to oil explorers, its incredibly cheap. Oil companies do an amazing job bringing the energy that creates modern life, and yet everyone hates them.

Crude oil at the wellhead in Saudi Arabia costs well under $10/bbl, typically $7-8/bbl. Even in more expensive exploration areas such as offshore West Africa, finding costs are still below $30/bbl.

Pessimistically we can perhaps multiply the wellhead/market price by 2x to include refining and transportation costs. There are approximately 159 litres in a bbl. Assuming $/£ exchange rate is 1.6 then:

Saudi Oil at $8 at the wellhead translates to 6p / litre at the pump!
West Africa oil at $30/bbl at the well head translates to 24p / litre at the pump

North Sea oil is effectively taxed at around 300% via PRT, Corporation Supertax, Duty and VAT. At the current $50/bbl, the oil content in a litre of petrol is about 20p. The rest of the £1.10 you pay is transportation, refining but mostly tax.

In the UK, the fuel cost at the pump is the fuel, plus about 7p for refining, retail profit etc (North Sea transportation cost is low). The rest is tax. Using this formula we would calculate that:

At $110/bbl spot price the cost at the pump would be about 43p + 7p = 50p without tax The actual price was about £1.40, so about 90p in tax.
At $50/bbl spot price the cost at the pump would be about 20p + 7p = 27p without tax. The actual price is about £1.10, so about 83p in tax (remember VAT is applied after duty - yes, tax on a tax!).

As a rule of thumb, a $2/bbl increase in the spot price of crude oil will increase the pump price by about 1p / litre

Oil isn't expensive. Its western governments tax policies that make it expensive. Can you imagine how much economic growth we might have if the cost of the raw material energy was only taxed at VAT rates and fuel currently cost 32p/litre? How many lives would be saved each winter?

Nov 6, 2015 at 8:08 AM | Registered Commenterthinkingscientist

thinkingscientist, you're talking to the converted. My comment was to explain why people resent oil. People see what they pay for petrol and that oil companies make huge profits. What they don't consider are the things you list and many more. Curiously they are happy to pay high prices for software or phones, even though the product is far less essential and the companies involved are equally profitable. Sadly we take energy for granted. The public can understand paying a premium for novelty and fashion but not the staples of our existence.

Nov 6, 2015 at 9:50 AM | Unregistered CommenterTinyCO2

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard at the DT has this on the subject.
Since comments are closed on the article, maybe someone with the right contact could point A E-P in the direction of shub's article. We really are going to have to start doing something to counter this idiocy.

Nov 7, 2015 at 10:18 AM | Registered CommenterMike Jackson

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