Climate Change Deniers' Own Scientists Said Global Warming Was Real

[G_j]

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/04/climate-change-deniers-own-scientists-said-global-warming-was-real.php

Climate Change Deniers' Own Scientists Said Global Warming Was Real
by Matthew McDermott, New York, NY on 04.25.09
Business & Politics


The New York Times has broken the story that even as far back as 1995, a few years after climate change denier the Global Climate Coalition began lobbying against doing anything about climate change (read: anything that might hurt their backers = industries which will get the short end of the stick as we cut carbon emissions), their own scientific advisors told them that global warming was real:

An internal report from 1995 said,

The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate change is well established and cannot be denied.
William O'Keefe (who was leader of the Global Climate Coalition at the time) was asked by the Times why there was such a gap between their public campaign—which stressed that the uncertainties regarding climate science were such that a cautious approach was the best thing—and that of their own advisors. O'Keefe said that the leadership of the Coalition was not aware of such a gap existing.

The Global Climate Coalition was disbanded in 2002. William O'Keefe is now chairman of the Marshall Institute, another group which opposes mandatory caps on greenhouse gas emissions.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/24/science/earth/24deny.html?_r=3&hp


Industry Ignored Its Scientists on Climate

By ANDREW C. REVKIN
Published: April 23, 2009

For more than a decade the Global Climate Coalition, a group representing industries with profits tied to fossil fuels, led an aggressive lobbying and public relations campaign against the idea that emissions of heat-trapping gases could lead to global warming.

Document File: Advisers to Industry Group Weigh In on Warming
“The role of greenhouse gases in climate change is not well understood,” the coalition said in a scientific “backgrounder” provided to lawmakers and journalists through the early 1990s, adding that “scientists differ” on the issue.

But a document filed in a federal lawsuit demonstrates that even as the coalition worked to sway opinion, its own scientific and technical experts were advising that the science backing the role of greenhouse gases in global warming could not be refuted.

“The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied,” the experts wrote in an internal report compiled for the coalition in 1995.

The coalition was financed by fees from large corporations and trade groups representing the oil, coal and auto industries, among others. In 1997, the year an international climate agreement that came to be known as the Kyoto Protocol was negotiated, its budget totaled $1.68 million, according to tax records obtained by environmental groups.

Throughout the 1990s, when the coalition conducted a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign challenging the merits of an international agreement, policy makers and pundits were fiercely debating whether humans could dangerously warm the planet. Today, with general agreement on the basics of warming, the debate has largely moved on to the question of how extensively to respond to rising temperatures.

..more..

[TheBigotBasher]

1. Read the speech of one of the GOP Patron Saints

http://www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches/displaydocumen...

..But the threat to our world comes not only from tyrants and their tanks. It can be more insidious though less visible. The danger of global warming is as yet unseen, but real enough for us to make changes and sacrifices, so that we do not live at the expense of future generations.

Our ability to come together to stop or limit damage to the world's environment will be perhaps the greatest test of how far we can act as a world community. No-one should under-estimate the imagination that will be required, nor the scientific effort, nor the unprecedented co-operation we shall have to show. We shall need statesmanship of a rare order. It's because we know that, that we are here today.

For two centuries, since the Age of the Enlightenment, we assumed that whatever the advance of science, whatever the economic development, whatever the increase in human numbers, the world would go on much the same. That was progress. And that was what we wanted.

Now we know that this is no longer true.

We have become more and more aware of the growing imbalance between our species and other species, between population and resources, between humankind and the natural order of which we are part.

In recent years, we have been playing with the conditions of the life we know on the surface of our planet. We have cared too little for our seas, our forests and our land. We have treated the air and the oceans like a dustbin. We have come to realise that man's activities and numbers threaten to upset the biological balance which we have taken for granted and on which human life depends.

We must remember our duty to Nature before it is too late. That duty is constant. It is never completed. It lives on as we breathe. It endures as we eat and sleep, work and rest, as we are born and as we pass away. The duty to Nature will remain long after our own endeavours have brought peace to the Middle East. It will weigh on our shoulders for as long as we wish to dwell on a living and thriving planet, and hand it on to our children and theirs.

I want to pay tribute to the important work which the United Nations has done to advance our understanding of climate change, and in particular the risks of global warming. Dr. Tolba and Professor Obasi deserve our particular thanks for their far-sighted initiative in establishing the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The IPCC report is a remarkable achievement. It is almost as difficult to get a large number of distinguished scientists to agree, as it is to get agreement from a group of politicians. As a scientist who became a politician, I am perhaps particularly qualified to make that observation! I know both worlds.

Of course, much more research is needed. We don't yet know all the answers. Some major uncertainties and doubts remain. No-one can yet say with certainty that it is human activities which have caused the apparent increase in global average temperatures. The IPCC report is very careful on this point. For instance, the total amount of carbon dioxide reaching the atmosphere each year from natural sources is some 600 billion tonnes, while the figure resulting from human activities is only 26 billion tonnes. In relative terms that is not very significant. Equally we know that the increases of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere date from the start of the industrial revolution. And we know that those concentrations will continue to rise if we fail to act.

Nor do we know with any precision the extent of the likely warming in the next century, nor what the regional effects will be, and we can't be sure of the role of the clouds.

[BeFree]

4. Sea level rise

It's happening. Here is a file that while long is well written about sea level rise around CONUS - Continental US.

http://climatescience.gov/Library/sap/sap4-1/public-review-draft/

[Richard Steele]

2. K&R

[Democracyinkind]

3. Gotta love the Marshall Institute - Empire's finest.

http://www.exxonsecrets.org/maps.php

[G_j]

5. thanks

for the link

:hi: