Gore: Break the law to push through Copenhagen

Civil unrest has a role in stopping climate change, says Gore

Ahead of Copenhagen summit, former US vice-president says ‘non-violent lawbreaking’ is legitimate in persuading governments to cut emissions

guardian.co.uk | Nov 6, 2009

by Oliver Burkeman in Los Angeles

Al Gore has sought to inject fresh momentum into the Copenhagen build-up, saying he is certain Barack Obama will attend and predicting a rise in civil disobedience against fossil-fuel polluters unless drastic action is taken over global warming.

Amid increasing incidents of climate protesters disrupting the operations of fossil-fuel industries and airports in Britain and elsewhere, Gore suggests the scale of the emergency means non-violent lawbreaking is justified. “Civil disobedience has an honourable history, and when the urgency and moral clarity cross a certain threshold, then I think that civil disobedience is quite understandable, and it has a role to play,” he says. “And I expect that it will increase, no question about it.”

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Radical Environmentalism: Gore Pushes Lawlessness to Save the Planet

Choice, Gore says it is crucial for Obama to attend Copenhagen in person, adding: “I feel certain that he will.”

He remains optimistic, he insists, that the US Senate will pass a climate change bill before Copenhagen – a move widely seen as vital for persuading the world, especially developing countries, that the US is serious about reducing emissions.

But Gore was speaking before reports this week that Harry Reid, the Senate Democratic leader, would back Republican demands for a full cost analysis of any such legislation – a process that could take five weeks, postponing debate until after the Copenhagen summit.

On Thursday the UK climate change secretary, Ed Miliband, acknowledged that hopes were fading that Copenhagen would result in a full treaty.

Nevertheless, there are “surprises … in store” on a potential Senate bill, Gore says, citing confidential conversations between Democrats and Republicans in which he has been involved. This week Democrats made small but significant progress when they pushed the bill through a vital committee stage despite a Republican boycott.

Clouds hang over the global-warming alarmists

Associated Press | Nov 10, 2009

By Paul Mulshine/The Star Ledger

President Obama’s headed to Copenhagen next month to talk climate change. Al Gore’s headed toward profits that could make him the world’s first “carbon billionaire.” But where’s global temperature headed?

Nowhere, it seems.

The most reliable readings of the Earth’s temperature show that it peaked back in 1998. This was not widely reported in America, where the state of science reporting is dismal. But over in England, where they take that sort of thing more seriously, the British Broadcasting Corp. created quite a stir with an article headlined “What Happened to Global Warming?” In it, BBC climate correspondent Paul Hudson gave a summary of the problems facing the alarmists: “For the last 11 years, we have not observed any increase in global temperatures. And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise.”

Hudson went on to cite numerous scientists skeptical of the theory of anthropogenic global warming. But perhaps the most damning observation came from a scientist who supports the theory. Mojib Latif is a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the group that set the panic off with its 1996 report on global warming. According to Hudson, Latif concedes “that we may indeed be in a period of cooling worldwide temperatures that could last another 10-20 years.”

Hmmm. Ten to 20 years is what I would call “the near future.” Didn’t a certain former vice president of the United States win a Nobel Prize by pushing a movie that told us that the melting of the polar ice would cause sea levels to rise by up to 20 feet “in the near future?”

Perhaps Al Gore was talking about a different future, one in which he gets rich off the panic he helped create. If the Senate passes that cap-and-trade bill that’s now before it, Gore stands to make a fortune through his stake in the investment firm he set up with former Goldman-Sachs exec David Blood to deal in carbon credits. So there’s a lot at stake in that Senate decision for the firm known to Wall Street wags as “Blood and Gore.” There’s even more at stake for consumers whose bills would go up by billions.

As for those senators, they’ll look pretty foolish if they pass a bill to curb global warming just as we enter a cooling trend. And Donald Easterbrook warns that is a distinct possibility. Easterbrook is a professor at Western Washington University who was quoted in that BBC article. When I called him at his home outside Seattle, Easterbrook informed me that we have just experienced the third coldest October in the past 115 years. There’s probably more cold to come, he said, and the amount of carbon dioxide in the climate will have little effect on it one way or the other. The reason? Contrary to popular belief, there just isn’t that much of it in the atmosphere.

“For every 100,000 molecules of air, only 38 are carbon dioxide,” Easterbrook said. The global-warming crowd likes to say that CO2 levels have risen 35 percent in the industrial era. “But 35 percent of nothing is still nothing,” says Easterbrook, and the increase in CO2 has virtually no effect.

The alarmists harp on that infinitesimal increase, he says, while they ignore the most prevalent greenhouse gas of them all — water vapor. Clouds reflect sunlight back into the sky. And that is at the center of a developing dispute among scientists. Easterbrook is on the side of a Danish scientist named Henrik Svensmark. In the 1990s, Svensmark developed a theory that links cloud formation to sunspots. When the number of sunspots is low, more cosmic rays get through to the atmosphere. And these rays, Svensmark theorizes, are the primary cause of cloud formation. The clouds reflect more sunlight back into space. Earth gets colder.

This fits in nicely with Easterbrook’s specialty, which is how ocean currents affect climate. “It turns out there is a correlation between ocean cycles and sunspots,” he told me. And the historical record shows many climate shifts that correspond to sunspot activity.

“There were 6,000 feet of ice here that all melted very suddenly 15,000 years ago,” Easterbrook said of his neck of the woods in the Pacific Northwest. “There have been big ups and downs throughout history. How do you explain them?”

Well, if you want to control people’s lives and/or make a lot of money, you explain them the way a lot of politicians do. As for the scientists, they’re divided. Most agree that, all things being equal, it would be better for man not to alter the atmosphere at all. But that’s an entirely separate question from just what effect that alteration will have on the climate.

And the answer to that question is: Nobody’s quite certain.

Except, of course, Al Gore.

Global Warming Buffs Baffled by Lack of Global Warming Over Past Ten Years

Stagnating Temperatures

Climatologists Baffled by Global Warming Time-Out

spiegel.de | Nov 19, 2009

By Gerald Traufetter

Global warming appears to have stalled. Climatologists are puzzled as to why average global temperatures have stopped rising over the last 10 years. Some attribute the trend to a lack of sunspots, while others explain it through ocean currents.

At least the weather in Copenhagen is likely to be cooperating. The Danish Meteorological Institute predicts that temperatures in December, when the city will host the United Nations Climate Change Conference, will be one degree above the long-term average.

Otherwise, however, not much is happening with global warming at the moment. The Earth’s average temperatures have stopped climbing since the beginning of the millennium, and it even looks as though global warming could come to a standstill this year.

Ironically, climate change appears to have stalled in the run-up to the upcoming world summit in the Danish capital, where thousands of politicians, bureaucrats, scientists, business leaders and environmental activists plan to negotiate a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Billions of euros are at stake in the negotiations.

Related

Al Gore Proposes Using Supercomputer Projections to Scare People on Global Warming

Reached a Plateau

The planet’s temperature curve rose sharply for almost 30 years, as global temperatures increased by an average of 0.7 degrees Celsius (1.25 degrees Fahrenheit) from the 1970s to the late 1990s. “At present, however, the warming is taking a break,” confirms meteorologist Mojib Latif of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in the northern German city of Kiel. Latif, one of Germany’s best-known climatologists, says that the temperature curve has reached a plateau. “There can be no argument about that,” he says. “We have to face that fact.”

Even though the temperature standstill probably has no effect on the long-term warming trend, it does raise doubts about the predictive value of climate models, and it is also a political issue. For months, climate change skeptics have been gloating over the findings on their Internet forums. This has prompted many a climatologist to treat the temperature data in public with a sense of shame, thereby damaging their own credibility.

“It cannot be denied that this is one of the hottest issues in the scientific community,” says Jochem Marotzke, director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg. “We don’t really know why this stagnation is taking place at this point.”

Just a few weeks ago, Britain’s Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research added more fuel to the fire with its latest calculations of global average temperatures. According to the Hadley figures, the world grew warmer by 0.07 degrees Celsius from 1999 to 2008 and not by the 0.2 degrees Celsius assumed by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. And, say the British experts, when their figure is adjusted for two naturally occurring climate phenomena, El Niño and La Niña, the resulting temperature trend is reduced to 0.0 degrees Celsius — in other words, a standstill.

The differences among individual regions of the world are considerable. In the Arctic, for example, temperatures rose by almost three degrees Celsius, which led to a dramatic melting of sea ice. At the same time, temperatures declined in large areas of North America, the western Pacific and the Arabian Peninsula. Europe, including Germany, remains slightly in positive warming territory.

Mixed Messages

But a few scientists simply refuse to believe the British calculations. “Warming has continued in the last few years,” says Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). However, Rahmstorf is more or less alone in his view. Hamburg Max Planck Institute scientist Jochem Marotzke, on the other hand, says: “I hardly know any colleagues who would deny that it hasn’t gotten warmer in recent years.”

The controversy sends confusing and mixed messages to the lay public. Why is there such a vigorous debate over climate change, even though it isn’t getting warmer at the moment? And how can it be that scientists cannot even arrive at a consensus on changes in temperatures, even though temperatures are constantly being measured?

The global temperature-monitoring network consists of 517 weather stations. But each reading is only a tiny dot on the big world map, and it has to be extrapolated to the entire region with the help of supercomputers. Besides, there are still many blind spots, the largest being the Arctic, where there are only about 20 measuring stations to cover a vast area. Climatologists refer to the problem as the “Arctic hole.”

The scientists at the Hadley Center simply used the global average value for the hole, ignoring the fact that it has become significantly warmer in the Arctic, says Rahmstorf. But a NASA team from the Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, which does make the kinds of adjustments for the Arctic data that Rahmstorf believes are necessary, arrives at a flat temperature curve for the last five years that is similar to that of their British colleagues.

Marotzke and Leibniz Institute meteorologist Mojib Latif are even convinced that the fuzzy computing done by Rahmstorf is counterproductive. “We have to explain to the public that greenhouse gases will not cause temperatures to keep rising from one record temperature to the next, but that they are still subject to natural fluctuations,” says Latif. For this reason, he adds, it is dangerous to cite individual weather-related occurrences, such as a drought in Mali or a hurricane, as proof positive that climate change is already fully underway.

“Perhaps we suggested too strongly in the past that the development will continue going up along a simple, straight line. In reality, phases of stagnation or even cooling are completely normal,” says Latif.

Part 2: The Difficulties of Predicting the Climate

Climatologists use their computer models to draw temperature curves that continue well into the future. They predict that the average global temperature will increase by about three degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century, unless humanity manages to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions. However, no one really knows what exactly the world climate will look like in the not-so-distant future, that is, in 2015, 2030 or 2050.

This is because it is not just human influence but natural factors that affect the Earth’s climate. For instance, currents in the world’s oceans are subject to certain cycles, as is solar activity. Major volcanic eruptions can also curb rising temperatures in the medium term. The eruption of Mount Pinatubo in June 1991, for example, caused world temperatures to drop by an average of 0.5 degrees Celsius, thereby prolonging a cooler climate phase that had begun in the late 1980s.

But the Mount Pinatubo eruption happened too long ago to be related to the current slowdown in global warming. So what is behind this more recent phenomenon?

Weaker Solar Activity

The fact is that the sun is weakening slightly. Its radiation activity is currently at a minimum, as evidenced by the small number of sunspots on its surface. According to calculations performed by a group of NASA scientists led by David Rind, which were recently published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, this reduced solar activity is the most important cause of stagnating global warming.

Latif, on the other hand, attributes the stagnation to so-called Pacific decadal oscillation (PDO). This phenomenon in the Pacific Ocean allows a larger volume of cold deep-sea water to rise to the surface at the equator. According to Latif, this has a significant cooling effect on the Earth’s atmosphere.

With his team at the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences, Latif has been one of the first to develop a model to create medium-term prognoses for the next five to 10 years. “We are slowly starting to attempt (such models),” says Marotzke, who is also launching a major project in this area, funded by the Federal Ministry for Research and Technology.

Despite their current findings, scientists agree that temperatures will continue to rise in the long term. The big question is: When will it start getting warmer again?

If the deep waters of the Pacific are, in fact, the most important factor holding up global warming, climate change will remain at a standstill until the middle of the next decade, says Latif. But if the cooling trend is the result of reduced solar activity, things could start getting warmer again much sooner. Based on past experience, solar activity will likely increase again in the next few years.

Betting on Warmer Temperatures

The Hadley Center group expects warming to resume in the coming years. “That resumption could come as a bit of a jolt,” says Hadley climatologist Adam Scaife, explaining that natural cyclical warming would then be augmented by the warming effect caused by anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.

While climatologists at conferences engage in passionate debates over when temperatures will start rising again, global warming’s next steps have also become the subject of betting activity.

Climatologist Stefan Rahmstorf is so convinced that his predictions will be correct in the end that he is willing to back up his conviction with a €2,500 ($3,700) bet. “I will win,” says Rahmstorf.

His adversary Latif turned down the bet, saying that the matter was too serious for gambling. “We are scientists, not poker players.”

Climategate: the final nail in the coffin of ‘Anthropogenic Global Warming’?

The world is currently cooling; electorates are increasingly reluctant to support eco-policies leading to more oppressive regulation, higher taxes and higher utility bills; the tide is turning against Al Gore’s Anthropogenic Global Warming theory. The so-called “sceptical” view is now also the majority view.

Telegraph | Nov 20, 2009

By James Delingpole

If you own any shares in alternative energy companies I should start dumping them NOW. The conspiracy behind the Anthropogenic Global Warming myth (aka AGW; aka ManBearPig) has been suddenly, brutally and quite deliciously exposed after a hacker broke into the computers at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (aka Hadley CRU) and released 61 megabites of confidential files onto the internet. (Hat tip: Watts Up With That)

When you read some of those files – including 1079 emails and 72 documents – you realise just why the boffins at Hadley CRU might have preferred to keep them confidential. As Andrew Bolt puts it, this scandal could well be “the greatest in modern science”. These alleged emails – supposedly exchanged by some of the most prominent scientists pushing AGW theory – suggest:

Conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more.

Full Story

Global Warming Conspiracy: “scandal that is one of the greatest in modern science”

“The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.”

Warmist conspiracy exposed?

Herald Sun | Nov 20, 2009

by Andrew Bolt

***************

8.15 PM UPDATE: The Hadley University of East Anglia CRU director admits the emails seem to be genuine:

The director of Britain’s leading Climate Research Unit, Phil Jones, has told Investigate magazine’s TGIF Edition tonight …”It was a hacker. We were aware of this about three or four days ago that someone had hacked into our system and taken and copied loads of data files and emails.”…

TGIF asked Jones about the controversial email discussing “hiding the decline”, and Jones explained what he was trying to say….

So the 1079 emails and 72 documents seem indeed evidence of a scandal involving most of the most prominent scientists pushing the man-made warming theory – a scandal that is one of the greatest in modern science. I’ve been adding some of the most astonishing in updates below – emails suggesting conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more. If it is as it now seems, never again will “peer review” be used to shout down sceptics.

This is clearly not the work of some hacker, but of an insider who’s now blown the whistle.

Full Story

Dream start for virtually every major ski area in northern hemisphere

iceagenow.com | Nov 18, 2009

* Great snowfalls in the Pyrenees – Formigal, Spain, may open early.

* Great snowfalls in the Rockies – resorts in Canada and Colorado already open

* Seven feet of snow in Whistler in past week.

* Great snowfalls in the Dolomites – Cortina, already open, has received more than 1.5m.

* Great snowfalls in the Alps – more resorts opening this week in Austria after the heavy snowfalls.

* Great snowfalls in Scandinavia – just in time for the World Cup in Levi, Finland, this weekend.

* Great snowfalls in Japan – Niseko opening soon

Fresh snow in the Dolomites

This website tells of huge snowfalls and early openings in Italy, Sweden, Japan, Finland, Austria, Germany, Switzerland, and France, including top resorts in the Alps and the Pyrenees mountains.

Resorts are also opening daily across North America, from New Hampshire to Colorado to Washington and north to Alberta and British Columbia.

See SCUK:  http://www.snowboardclub.co.uk/news-8790.html

Not finding any, Gore airbrushes in hurricanes for his new book

wattsupwiththat.com | Nov 19, 2009

Al Gore’s new book had a problem – no big hurricanes since Katrina to put in the book to look “threatening” to the USA. Any imagined link between hurricanes and global warming has evaporated.

Solution: the artists airbrush.

Not a lot of hurricanes here

Now with 4 scary hurricanes – hey where’s the ice?

Full Story

Top climate scientists discuss hiding contrary data, marginalizing dissenters

Hacked e-mails reveal global-warming fraud?

Top climate scientists discuss hiding contrary data, marginalizing dissenters

WorldNetDaily | Nov 20, 2009

Officials at a key global warming research center in the United Kingdom have authenticated a series of e-mails and other documents apparently taken from their computer system by a hacker, but they cannot explain what scientists in internal exchanges meant by references to a “trick” that would “hide the decline” of global temperatures nor by instructions to delete contrary data.

Author James Delingpole writes in a London Telegraph column the most damaging revelations indicate climate-change scientists may have “manipulated or suppressed evidence in order to support their cause.”

According to the Australian Investigate magazine, the 62 megabyte Zip file with documents, e-mail exchanges and other information from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit apparently was posted by an unidentified hacker on a Russian web server.

One e-mail said: “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd (sic) from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”

Another expressed internal doubts: “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.”

Further, an e-mail exchange suggested the suppression of information: “Can you delete any e-mails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment – minor family crisis.”

“And, perhaps most reprehensibly,” Delingpole writes, “a long series of communications discussing how best to squeeze dissenting scientists out of the peer review process. How, in other words, to create a scientific climate in which anyone who disagrees with AGW can be written off as a crank, whose views do not have a scrap of authority.”

He cites an e-mail: “This was the danger of always criticizing the skeptics for not publishing in the ‘peer-reviewed literature.’ Obviously, they found a solution to that – take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering ‘Climate Research’ as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board …What do others think?”

Myron Ebell, of the GlobalWarming.org website where “cooler heads prevail,” said the e-mails are “shocking.”

“Its kind of interesting to learn that petty politics seems to be more prevalent in the scientific community than in the political community,” he said.

The documents, he said, “raise a huge number of questions about the integrity of a lot of people in the alarmist community.

“What I’ve seen there is a very strong effort to manage the issue by scientists and not as a scientific issues. It’s very improper,” he said. ” One of the criticisms is that we need scientists to be scientist, and policy can be handled in public debate.”

Delingpole observes the world “is currently cooling; electorates are increasingly reluctant to support eco-policies leading to more oppressive regulation, higher taxes and higher utility bills; the tide is turning against Al Gore’s Anthropogenic Global Warming theory. The so-called ’skeptical’ view is now also the majority view.”

Phil Jones, head of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, confirmed to Investigate magazine the documents appeared authentic.

“It was a hacker. We were aware of this about three or four days ago that someone had hacked into our system and taken and copied loads of data files and e-mails,” he said.

“It’s completely illegal for somebody to hack into our system,” he told the magazine

But Jones denied there was any attempt to mislead or conceal.

“They’re talking about proxy data going further back in time, a thousand years, and it’s just about how you add on the last few years, because when you get proxy data you sample things like tree rings and ice cores, and they don’t always have the last few years,” he said.

Jones said he could not recall what he meant when he wrote about a plan to “hide the decline.”

In the e-mail, dated 10 years ago, Jones wrote: “Once Tim’s got a diagram here we’ll send that either later today or first thing tomorrow. I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd [sic] from1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline. Mike’s series got the annual land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999 for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998. Thanks for the comments, Ray. Cheers, Phil Prof. Phil Jones Climatic Research Unit.”

The documents also included a message dated last month from Kevin Trenberth to Michal Mann about the “U-turn on climate” by Britain’s BBC News.

“Well I have my own article on where the heck is global warming? We are asking that here in Boulder where we have broken records the past two days for the coldest days on record. We had 4 inches of snow. The high the last 2 days was below 30F and the normal is 69F, and it smashed the previous records for these days by 10F. The low was about 18F and also a record low, well below the previous record low. This is January weather (see the Rockies baseball playoff game was canceled on saturday and then played last night in below freezing weather).”

Despite the advocacy of a financially vested former vice president, Al Gore, and others, public opinion about whether mankind is causing an ultimately catastrophic rise in global temperatures is shifting.

Full Story

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Related Links

62 MB of Climate Gold

Hadley CRU hacked with release of hundreds of docs and emails

Mike’s Nature trick

Mike’s Nature Trick

http://wattsupwiththat.com/

http://www.climateaudit.org/

Climate Skeptics See ‘Smoking Gun’ in Researchers’ Leaked E-Mails

Fox News | Nov 20, 2009

Hackers broke into the servers at a prominent British climate research center and leaked years worth of e-mail messages onto the Web, including one with a mysterious reference to a plan to “hide the decline,” apparently in temperatures.

The Internet is abuzz about the leaked data from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (commonly called Hadley CRU), which has acknowledged the theft of 61MB of confidential data.

Climate change skeptics describe the leaked data as a “smoking gun,” evidence of collusion among climatologists and manipulation of data to support the widely held view that climate change is caused by the actions of mankind. The files were reportedly released on a Russian file-serve by an anonymous poster calling himself “FOIA.”

In an exclusive interview in Investigate magazine’s TGIF Edition, Phil Jones, the head of the Hadley CRU, confirmed that the leaked data is real.

“It was a hacker. We were aware of this about three or four days ago,” he told the magazine, noting that the center has yet to contact the police about the data breach.

TGIF Edition asked Jones about the controversial “hide the decline” comment from an e-mail he wrote in 1999. He told the magazine that there was no intention to mislead, but he had “no idea” what he meant by those words.

“That was an e-mail from ten years ago. Can you remember the exact context of what you wrote ten years ago?” he said.

The Telegraph has posted some of the more scathing excerpts from these emails, which the newspaper suggests points to manipulation of evidence and private doubts about the reality of global warming, though the much of the scientific language in the e-mails is esoteric and hard to interpret.

Others suggest the comments are simply “scientists talking about science.” In an interview with Wired, Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, points out that “if you read all of these e-mails, you will be surprised at the integrity of these scientists.”

Still, one notable e-mail from the hacked files clearly describes how to squeeze dissenting scientists from the peer review process:

“I think we have to stop considering Climate Research as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board…What do others think?”

UNFPA Report Uses Popular Green-Environment Campaign to Promote Abortion

LifeNews.com | Nov 19, 2009

by Piero Tozzi

New York, NY (LifeNews.com/CFAM) — The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) released its annual State of the World Population Report yesterday, linking efforts to promote “sustainable development” and affect “climate change” to its “reproductive rights” agenda.

Critics see the report as a thinly-veiled attempt to harness popular environmental concerns in service of population control.

The report, “Facing a Changing World: Women, Population and Climate,” asserts that achieving “universal access to reproductive health” would both contribute to declines in fertility and “help reduce green-house gas emissions in the long run.” It calls upon nations to “fully fund family planning services and contraceptive supplies.”

Sounding alarmist, UNFPA claims that “The harsh realities of high per capita emissions among industrialized countries and swiftly rising ones among developing countries highlight the urgency of mobilizing all of humanity to stop collectively at the brink of this possible climate disaster zone.”

In a statement accompanying the report, UNFPA Executive Director Thoraya Obaid avers that “rapid population growth and industrialization have led to a rapid rise in greenhouse gas emissions. We have now reached a point where humanity is approaching the brink of disaster.”

Peter C. Smith of the International Right to Life Federation observes that agencies such as the UNFPA always need a “looming disaster” to secure their funding.”

Smith sees the “true looming disaster” as the “demographic implosion of the developed world” which is being exported to the developing world. The report touts declining birth rates in Japan and the European Union (EU) as positives and criticizes higher fertility in the United States (US).

In places, the report disavows overt population control arguments and acknowledges development specialists such as Bangladesh’s Atiq Rahman, who attributes climate change to “consumption patterns” rather than “demographic considerations.”

Yet it also asserts that “Each birth results not only in the emissions attributable to that person in his or her lifetime, but also the emissions of all his or her descendents. Hence, the emissions savings from intended or planned births multiply with time.”

Further, the report states that “fear of appearing supportive of population control has until recently held back any mention of ‘population’ in the climate debate. Nonetheless, some participants in the debate are tentatively suggesting the need at least consider the impacts of population growth.” It points to an EU proposal “that population trends be among the factors that should be taken into consideration when setting greenhouse-gas mitigation targets.”

Critics also point to the report’s favorable citation of Obama administration’s science czar, John Holdren, as signaling openness to coercive measures. In the 1970s, Holdren called for forced abortion and sterilization in his writings.

Concern over UNFPA’s role in facilitating China’s one-child policy, which is beset by allegations of forced and sex-selective abortion, contributed to a recommendation by the US State Department under then-Secretary of State Colin Powell to suspend funding of the agency.

In March of this year, the Obama administration reversed the Bush administration policy and directed that $50 million be given to UNFPA, despite continued concerns over its China role.