Meet the President of Europe, one of the elite’s own

One of their own: Herman Van Rompuy, first President of the European Union

Brussels Journal | Nov 20, 2009

by Paul Belien

Herman Van Rompuy. Get used to the name. He is the first President of the European Union, which with the ratification of the Treaty of Lisbon by all the 27 EU member states in early November was transformed into a genuine United States of Europe.

The President of Europe has not been elected; he was appointed in a secret meeting of the heads of government of the 27 EU member states. They chose one of their own. Herman Van Rompuy was the Prime Minister of Belgium. I knew him when he was just setting out, reluctantly, on his political career.

To understand Herman, one must know something about Belgium, a tiny country in Western Europe, and the prototype of the EU. Belgians do not exist as a nation. Belgium is an artificial state, constructed by the international powers in 1830 as a political compromise and experiment. The country consists of 6 million Dutch, living in Flanders, the northern half of the country, and 4 million French, living in Wallonia, the southern half. The Belgian Dutch, called Flemings, would have preferred to stay part of the Netherlands, as they were until 1830, while the Belgian French, called Walloons, would have preferred to join France. Instead, they were forced to live together in one state.

Belgians do not like their state. They despise it. They say it represents nothing. There are no Belgian patriots, because no-one is willing to die for a flag which does not represent anything. Because Belgium represents nothing, multicultural ideologues love Belgium. They say that without patriotism, there would be no wars and the world would be a better place. As John Lennon sang “Imagine there’s no countries, it isn’t hard to do, nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too.”

In 1957, Belgian politicians stood at the cradle of the European Union. Their aim was to turn the whole of Europe into a Greater Belgium, so that wars between the nations of Europe would no longer be possible as there would no longer be nations, the latter all having been incorporated into an artificial superstate.

A closer look at Belgium, the laboratory of Europe, shows, however, that the country lacks more than patriotism. It also lacks democracy, respect for the rule of law, and political morality. In 1985, in his book De Afwezige Meerderheid (The Absent Majority) the late Flemish philosopher Lode Claes (1913-1997) argued that without identity and a sense of genuine nationhood, there can also be no democracy and no morality.

One of the people who were deeply influenced by Dr. Claes’s thesis was a young politician named Herman Van Rompuy. In the mid-1980s, Van Rompuy, a conservative Catholic, born in 1947, was active in the youth section of the Flemish Christian-Democrat Party. He wrote books and articles about the importance of traditional values, the role of religion, the protection of the unborn life, the Christian roots of Europe and the need to preserve them. The undemocratic and immoral nature of Belgian politics repulsed him and led to a sort of crisis of conscience. Lode Claes, who was near to retiring, offered Herman the opportunity of succeeding him as the director of Trends, a Belgian financial-economic weekly magazine. It is in this context that I made Herman’s acquaintance. He invited me for lunch one day to ask whether, if he accepted the offer to enter journalism, I would be willing to join him. It was then that he told me that he was considering leaving politics and was weighing the options for the professional life he would pursue.

I am not sure what happened next, however. Maybe word had reached the leadership of the Christian Democrat Party that Herman, a brilliant economist and intellectual, was considering leaving politics; perhaps they made him an offer he could not refuse. Herman remained in politics. He was made a Senator and entered government as a junior minister. In 1988, he became the party leader of the governing Christian-Democrats.

Our paths crossed at intervals until 1990, when the Belgian Parliament voted a very liberal abortion bill. The Belgian King Baudouin (1930-1993), a devout Catholic who suffered from the fact that he and his wife could not have any children, had told friends that he would “rather abdicate than sign the bill.” The Belgian politicians, convinced that the King was bluffing, did not want the Belgian people to know about the King’s objections to the bill. I wrote about this on the op-ed pages of The Wall Street Journal and was subsequently reprimanded by the Belgian newspaper I worked for, following an angry telephone call from the then Belgian Prime Minister, a Christian-Democrat, to my editor, who was this Prime Minister’s former spokesman. I was no longer allowed to write about Belgian affairs for foreign newspapers.

In April 1990, the King did in fact abdicate over the abortion issue, and the Christian-Democrat Party, led by Herman Van Rompuy, who had always prided himself on being a good Catholic, had one of Europe’s most liberal abortion bills signed by the college of ministers, a procedure provided by the Belgian Constitution for situations when there is no King. Then they had the King voted back on the throne the following day. I wrote about the whole affair in a critical follow-up article for The Wall Street Journal and was subsequently fired by my newspaper “for grievous misconduct”. A few weeks later, I met Herman at the wedding of a mutual friend. I approached him for a chat. I could see he felt very uncomfortable. He avoided eye contact and broke off the conversation as soon as he could. We have not spoken since.

Herman’s political career continued. He became Belgium’s Budget Minister and Deputy Prime Minister, Speaker of the Chamber of Representatives and finally Prime Minister. He kept publishing intellectual and intelligent books, but instead of defending the concept of the good, he now defended the concept of “the lesser evil.” And he began to write haiku.

Two years ago, Belgium faced its deepest political crisis ever. The country was on the verge of collapse following a 2003 ruling by its Supreme Court that the existing electoral district of Brussels-Halle-Vilvoorde (BHV), encompassing both the bilingual capital Brussels and the surrounding Dutch-speaking countryside of Halle-Vilvoorde, was unconstitutional and that Parliament should remedy the situation. The ruling came in response to a complaint that the BHV district was unconstitutional and should be divided into a bilingual electoral district Brussels and a Dutch-language electoral district Halle-Vilvoorde. This complaint had been lodged by… Herman Van Rompuy, a Flemish inhabitant of the Halle-Vilvoorde district.

In 2003, however, the Christian-Democrats were not in government and Herman was a leader of the opposition. His complaint was intended to cause political problems for Belgium’s Liberal government, which refused to divide the BHV district because the French-speaking parties in the government refused to accept the verdict of the Supreme Court. The Flemish Christian-Democrats went to the June 2007 general elections with as their major theme the promise that, once in government, they would split BHV. Herman campaigned on the issue, his party won the elections and became Flanders’ largest party.

Belgium’s political crisis dragged on from June until December 2007 because it proved impossible to put together a government consisting of sufficient Dutch-speaking (Flemish) and French-speaking (Walloon) politicians. The Flemings demanded that BHV be split, as instructed by the Supreme Court; the Walloons refused to do so. Ultimately, the Flemish Christian-Democrats gave in, reneged on their promise to their voters, and agreed to join a government without BHV being split. Worse still, the new government has more French-speaking than Dutch-speaking ministers, and does not have the support of the majority of the Flemings in Parliament, although the Flemings make up a 60% majority of the Belgian population. Herman became the Speaker of the Parliament. In this position he had to prevent Parliament, and the Flemish representatives there, from voting a bill to split BHV. He succeeded in this, by using all kinds of tricks. One day he even had the locks of the plenary meeting room changed so that Parliament could not convene to vote on the issue. On another occasion, he did not show up in his office for a whole week to avoid opening a letter demanding him to table the matter. His tactics worked. In December 2008, when the Belgian Prime Minister had to resign in the wake of a financial scandal, Herman became the new leader of the predominantly French-speaking government which does not represent the majority of Belgium’s ethnic majority group. During the past 11 months, he has skillfully managed to postpone any parliamentary vote on the BHV matter, thereby prolonging a situation which the Supreme Court, responding to Herman’s own complaint in 2003, has ruled to be unconstitutional.

Now, Herman has moved on to lead Europe. Like Belgium, the European Union is an undemocratic institution, which needs shrewd leaders who are capable of renouncing everything they once believed in and who know how to impose decisions on the people against the will of the people. Never mind democracy, morality or the rule of law, our betters know what is good for us more than we do. And Herman is now one of our betters. He has come a long way since the days when he was disgusted with Belgian-style politics.

Herman is like Saruman, the wise wizard in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, who went over to the other side. He used to care about the things we cared about. But no longer. He has built himself a high tower from where he rules over all of us.

________

Related

Europeans Meet (Soviet-Style) to Choose First-Ever EU President

Geo-strategists are debating whether Europe’s superpower moment is or is not just around the corner. But if the nomination process for the individual who will represent 500 million Europeans has demonstrated anything at all, it is that Europe is inexorably moving in a direction that has far more in common with Soviet totalitarianism than with Western liberal democracy.

Bankers move to abolish personal checks by 2018

Bounced out: The chequebook could be abolished by 2018 after the number issued every day has fallen drastically

After 350 years, cheques to be consigned to the history books

The Federation of Small Businesses said it will ‘strongly oppose’ any move to get rid of cheques.

Daily Mail | Nov 23, 2009

By Becky Barrow

Cheques are to be abolished under controversial plans being drawn up by bankers.

They are widely expected to vote next month for the chequebook to be consigned to history.

Yesterday, the move was criticised by consumer groups, business lobbyists and charities representing the elderly.

They raised fears that vulnerable people, who have relied on their chequebook all their lives, will be left confused.

Many others simply prefer to pay by cheque, instead of by direct debit or bank transfer.

The Payments Council said its research shows the number of cheques being written every day has fallen dramatically in recent years.

At their peak in 1990, around 11million cheques were written every day. Latest figures show the number has dropped to around 3.8million.

Cheques, which were first used in Britain 350 years ago, are also an expensive form of payment for banks.

They cost around £1 each to process, which is four times as much as electronic payments.

The council’s 15-strong board – made up of 11 banking representatives and four independents – will take a decision on December 16.

The most likely date for cheques to be phased out in the UK is 2018.

A growing number of stores including John Lewis and Tesco have stopped accepting cheques.

Stores claim they are the most insecure form of payment and that abolishing them cuts queues at checkouts.

But cheques are still widely used for making payments to local tradesmen and for utility bills.

Government departments, such as HM Revenue & Customs and the Department for Work and Pensions, rely on cheques to make millions of payments each year.

Andrew Harrop, head of public policy at Age Concern and Help the Aged, said: ‘Many older people use cheques and cash for all their transactions and are uncomfortable with alternative payment methods, such as credit or debit cards with PIN numbers.

‘To prevent older people becoming financially excluded, any plans to end the use of cheques must ensure there are alternative ways of paying which they are happy using.’

Vera Cottrell, of the consumer lobby group Which?, said: ‘There are still no cheap, safe alternatives to cheques. Until that time, cheques should not be withdrawn.’

The Federation of Small Businesses said it will ‘strongly oppose’ any move to get rid of cheques.

Sandra Quinn, a director of the Payments Council, said: ‘We are completely aware that elderly, disabled and disadvantaged people need alternatives to be in place.

‘If the decision is made [to end the cheque], there will be a long time before it comes into effect.’

Global Warming Fraud Exposed as Copenhagen Approaches

Blog Critics | Nov 21, 2009

by Dave Nalle

With the UN’s International Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen only weeks away, recent revelations have thrown a monkey wrench in the plans of global warming activists to implement a worldwide treaty which would impose costly sanctions on the industrialized west and effect a massive wealth transfer to developing nations. The Obama administration had appeared willing to sign away a great deal of U..S sovereignty and transfer significant power over U.S. citizens to an unelected international bureaucracy, but the latest news may make it impossible to use anthropogenic global warming as a pretext for expanding the power of the administration’s transnational socialist allies.

It started with the reluctant acknowledgment by many climatologists that despite past opposition, the claims of skeptics that the Earth has actually been cooling were essentially true. German scientists from the Liebnitz Institute for Marine Studies and the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology led the way, admitting that “global warming is taking a break,” referring to the increasingly widespread acknowledgment that for the last decade temperatures have remained stable and that over the last 40 years the level of overall warming is considerably lower than previously claimed.

Even “Global Warming Central” at Britain’s Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research had to admit that their past figures were suspect and that rather than a 0.2% temperature increase over the past decade their adjusted figures suggested only a 0.07% temperature increase during that period. Hadley has always been a leading source for global warming activism and their computer models and data analysis techniques are being looked at with increasing skepticism as they remain one of the few climate research groups still reporting any warming at all over the last 10 years.

This week Hadley became the center of a storm of controversy over “climategate” when a hacker accessed their internal network and made over a thousand emails and documents public, revealing what looks like a concerted effort to misrepresent the results of their research, manufacture bogus data, suppress data, tweak models to produce desired results, and carry out smear campaigns against climate change skeptics. As the story unfolds some are describing it as one of the greatest scientific scandals of the modern era. As the scandal has unfolded the reputations of some of the most prominent climate scientists have been placed in doubt and ties have been exposed to journalists and media outlets who seem to have been complicit in the conspiracy.

Reports from the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change which were used as the basis for hysteria about global warming were based primarily on data processed by Hadley scientists, data which has now been acknowledged to be incorrect by the authors as well as being exposed as possibly fraudulent. It seems possible that a cabal of politically motivated scientists directly manipulated the IPCC to produce reports based on bogus data to advance a globalist agenda.

Even former Vice President Al Gore, who has filled the role of High Priest for the global warming movement, admitted earlier this month that the science was not entirely convincing, that C02 probably did not cause the global warming he had previously claimed, and that the fight against pollution was more a spiritual than scientific one.

President Obama and other world leaders have been backing away from full support for UN climate regulation plans and it looks like the Copenhagen conference may turn into a debate over the legitimacy of global warming theory rather than the triumphant enshrining of a massive UN power grab as originally intended. With the new revelations of fraud and error fueling more widespread skepticism, Europeans have joined Americans in their growing opposition to draconian economic restrictions based on a suspect and politically-driven climate change theory. If President Obama does go to Copenhagen he may find himself in the middle of a firestorm of controversy which he and his party cannot afford going into an election year.

British climate change propagandists ‘conspired to keep sceptics in the dark’

‘I’m getting hassled by a couple of people to release the CRU station temperature data. Don’t any of you three tell anybody that the UK has a Freedom of Information Act !” – Professor Phil Jones, Climatic Research Unit Director

Climate-change sceptics claim emails they have discovered prove that data which did not support global warming was suppressed

Daily Mail | Nov 23, 2009

By Daniel Martin

Scientists at a British climate change research centre discussed ways of dodging Freedom of Information Act requests to release temperature data, it is claimed.

Leaked emails and documents appear to show that scientists at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit conspired to keep US climate change sceptics in the dark about the existence of the act.

The private messages have been seized upon by climate-change sceptics, who claim one email includes an admittance that robust data to prove the world is warming up simply doesn’t exist, and that data which did not support global warming was deliberately suppressed.

The embarrassing emails came to light after hackers targeted the CRU and published the files. Many are from the unit’s director, Professor Phil Jones, including one in which he appears to suggest using a ‘trick’ to massage years of temperature data to ‘hide the decline’.

In another, he says: ‘I’m getting hassled by a couple of people to release the CRU station temperature data. Don’t any of you three tell anybody that the UK has a Freedom of Information Act !”

It seems to show how scientists were able to persuade the FOI officer that requests from a climate- change sceptic, Stephen McIntyre, who runs a website called Climate Audit, should not be treated seriously.

‘When the FOI requests began here, the FOI person said we had to abide by the requests,’ the email says. ‘It took a couple of half-hour sessions to convince them otherwise.

‘Once they became aware of the types of people we were dealing with, everyone at UEA became very supportive. I’ve got to know the FOI person quite well and the chief librarian – who deals with appeals.’

Another email seems to show that the CRU discussed ways of evading the Freedom of Information Act entirely. The act allows organisations to decline requests for information if the requests are ‘repeated or vexatious’.

A spokesman for the University of East Anglia said: ‘The selective publication of some stolen emails and other papers taken out of context is mischievous and cannot be considered a genuine attempt to engage with this issue in a responsible way.’

Professor Jones confirmed that the email in which he talked of a ‘trick’ was genuine. He said: ‘The word ‘trick’ was used here colloquially as in a clever thing to do. It is ludicrous to suggest that it refers to anything untoward.’

A further email from Mr Jones raises questions over how the Freedom of Information process was being adhered to at the university.

Climate Change Skeptics Get to Say ‘I told you so!’

Climate scientist replies to issues revealed in email hack

Epoch Times | Nov 22, 2009

By Charlotte Cuthbertson

Climate change scientists have been manipulating and fixing data according to bloggers that are spreading information contained in hundreds of hacked emails.

Bloggers say the 62 mb worth of emails were hacked from the Climate Research Unit (CRU), part of Britain’s University of East Anglia and released onto the Internet.

The file containing the emails were packaged and posted on blogs by an anonymous hacker. A list of the emails is on a site called ‘an elegant chaos.’

“We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to be kept under wraps,” said the hacker on the global warming skeptic site Air Vent on Friday. “We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code, and document.”

The file contained data, code, and emails from Phil Jones, director of the CRU, to and from many people, including scientists involved global warming and climate change studies. Jones confirmed to Investigate magazine’s TGIF Edition Friday night that his organization had been hacked.

“It was a hacker,” Jones told TGIF. “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.”

Global warming skeptic and editor of the Climate Research journal, Chris de Freitas, said the emails are quite revealing.

“I think it’s serious because there have been many different people claiming the so-called ‘objective experts’ have been not totally 100 percent with their claims, and certainly the data they have used to back up their claims,” he said.

De Freitas is an Associate Professor at the School of Geography, Geology and Environmental Science at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He is also the subject of many of the hacked emails that discuss ways to exclude and discredit him and his theories that are contrary to the global warming theory.

American climatologist, Michael E. Mann wrote in one of the hundreds of hacked emails, “It seems to me that this ’Kinne’ character’s words are disingenuous, and he probably supports what De Freitas is trying to do. It seems clear we have to go above him. I think that the community should, as Mike H has previously suggested in this eventuality, terminate its involvement with this journal at all levels—reviewing, editing, and submitting, and leave it to wither way into oblivion and disrepute.”

De Freitas said he was aware of the animosity. “I don’t indulge in that sort of thing,” he said. “But now that the evidence is out… I was an editor of the Climate Research journal for 10 years, as you can see if you read the emails, they tried to get me out of that position because they thought I was being biased.”

In one email, scientists appear to admit they can’t find the data to back up their global warming theory.

“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.

“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.”

Another email thread talks about manipulating data. It is apparently from CRU’s Phil Jones.

“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] from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”

De Freitas said he does not hold much hope for the Copenhagen climate summit next month where sixty five world leaders are expected to convene. The representatives of 191 nations will seek agreement on a new global treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol in limiting emissions of greenhouse gases.

“Copenhagen will be a bit of a dog’s breakfast,” de Freitas said. “There’s no way you’re going to cut back emissions. Just look at New Zealand, they’re just climbing. No one does anything. If it is such a big problem, and of such concern, something would have been done about it.”

There are many important environmental and planetary problems, such as air pollution, sanitation, and health care, that aren’t controversial and quite serious, he said. “But we have this very narrow view of what should be done.”

The devastating book which debunks climate change

The Real Global Warming Disaster By Christopher Booker

Daily Mail | Nov 23, 2009

By Christopher Booker

Just imagine if we learned we were about to be landed with the biggest bill in the history of the world – simply on the say-so of a group of scientists. Would we not want to be absolutely sure that those scientists were 100 per cent dependable in what they were saying?

Should we not then be extremely worried – and even very angry – if it emerged that those scientists had been conspiring among themselves to fiddle the evidence for what they were telling us?

This is the extraordinary position in which we find ourselves thanks to news reported in Saturday’s Daily Mail which has raised huge question marks over the reliability of the science behind the theory of global warming.

Hundreds of emails leaked from the internal computer system of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia show how a small group of highly influential senior British and U.S. scientists have for years been secretly discussing ways in which their evidence could be manipulated to make the threat posed by global warming sound much worse than it is.

To place the significance of these revelations into context, let us recall how exactly a year ago, Parliament passed, virtually unopposed, what was far and away the most expensive new law ever put before it. On the Government’s own figures, the Climate Change Act is going to cost Britain £18 billion a year – that’s £720 for every household in the country – every year from now until 2050.

We shall be paying this through soaring ‘green taxes’ on everything from air travel to the £3,300 tax being proposed on each new car; through rocketing fuel bills to subsidise thousands more wind turbines and to pay for removing carbon dioxide from coal-fired power stations.

In fact, the true cost of the act, if complied with to the letter, would certainly be far higher, because what it lays down is that, over the next 40 years, we must cut our emissions of carbon dioxide by over 80 per cent.

Pretty well every aspect of our lives in today’s industrialised society involves emitting carbon dioxide – and short of some technological revolution as yet undreamed of, the only way we could meet that target would be to close almost every part of our economy. Yet, astonishingly, scarcely a single MP even questioned the need for such a law; only three voted against it.

I recently published a book on what I have no hesitation in calling the most alarming story I have ever reported in all my years as a journalist.

This is the story of how the belief that the world has to fight the threat of global warming has crept to the top of the political agenda, to the point where, not just in Britain but across the world, governments are solemnly discussing by far the most costly series of measures any bunch of politicians has proposed.

This is what they will all be discussing at next month’s great UN conference, when 20,000 politicians, officials, scientists and environmental activists from all over the world gather in Copenhagen to discuss a new treaty to decide just what measures we shall all have to accept to keep the supposed threat of global warming at bay.

We all know the basic thesis: that thanks to mankind burning fossil fuels, the world’s temperatures are hurtling upwards, and that unless the most drastic action is taken, we can look forward to an unprecedented global catastrophe – droughts, hurricanes, killer heatwaves, melting icecaps, sea levels rising to the point where many of the world’s major cities are submerged.

All this is what has been predicted by the expensive computer models relied on by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC), which the politicians tell us we must trust as the ultimate source of authority on the future of the world’s climate.

On every side we are told that ‘the science is settled’, that ‘2,500 of the world’s top climate scientists’ agree that these terrifying predictions will all come true unless we take the most drastic action. So carried away have they all been by this belief that scarcely a single politician dares question it.

Yet the oddest thing which has become increasingly evident in the past year or two is the fact that almost none of these things is happening, certainly not in the way those computer models have been predicting. Although carbon dioxide levels have continued to increase, temperatures have not been rising in the way the computer models all agree they should have done.

In the past decade, the overall trend of temperatures has been not upwards, but down.

The hard evidence tells us that there have actually been fewer major droughts, hurricanes and heatwaves in recent years than there were in earlier decades.

There is no less ice at the Earth’s poles today than there was 30 years ago. Sea levels may have been rising very slowly, but no faster than they have been for 200 years.

In other words, as a growing army of genuine experts across the world has been trying to tell us, there is not a single item on the list of apocalyptic predictions we have been fed for so long by the IPCC and the likes of Al Gore which is not being called into question by what is actually happening to the world’s climate.

The scientists who have been challenging almost every aspect of the official theory on global warming have ranged from world-ranking physicists such as Professor Richard Lindzen, of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Professors Will Happer and Freeman Dyson of Princeton University, to 700 scientists of many disciplines.

These include Nobel Prize-winners and former contributors to the IPCC, who signed a ‘minority report’ of the U.S. Senate’s environment committee.

It is beginning to look as though the panic over global warming, which has our politicians so in its grip, may have been no more than a colossal scare story – to line up alongside all those other scares which have raced in and out of the headlines in recent decades, such as the ‘Millennium Bug’, which at midnight on December 31, 1999, was going to crash the world’s computers.

So the real question which arises from this most terrifying of all scare scenarios is: why did the world’s politicians get swept along by it?

One of the more suspicious features of the man-made global warming theory is precisely this extraordinary pressure, which has been built up to insist the evidence for it is so overwhelming that it is a moral crime to question it.

For several years, anyone daring to doubt the theory – not least some of the world’s most eminent climate scientists – has been vilified as a ‘denier’, to be compared with those who try to deny the historical reality of Hitler’s Holocaust.

Al Gore was one of the first to condemn as ‘flat earthers’ anyone who was sceptical of his reckless scaremongering, likening such people to the cranks who believe the Moon landings were all somehow ‘faked on a movie lot in Arizona’ (delightfully, among the scientists who have come out as ‘climate sceptics’ are two of the U.S. astronauts who did land on the Moon, Dr Buzz Aldrin and Dr Jack Schmitt).

In the scientific world, notably in the U.S. and Europe, it has long been a major scandal that those daring to doubt the official orthodoxy on global warming face ostracism from their academic colleagues, have had research funding withdrawn and have not been allowed to publish their papers in the leading scientific journals.

But equally suspicious has been the way the advocates of the warming orthodoxy have been repeatedly shown to have fiddled the scientific evidence being used to promote it.

The most notorious example of this was the so-called ‘hockey stick’ graph, which for years was brandished to show that, after flat-lining for 1,000 years, global temperatures had suddenly soared upwards in the late 20th century to levels never known before in recorded history.

The hockey stick was used by the IPCC and Gore as the supreme icon of their cause. Then, two statisticians revealed that the graph had been created by a computer model programmed to produce hockey stick shapes whatever data were fed into it.

And now come these leaked emails showing that the very scientists who were responsible for championing the hockey stick – all at the heart of the IPCC establishment – have been regularly discussing how the evidence could be manipulated to promote their cause.

The greatest myth of all in this story is the claim that the succession of alarmist reports produced by the IPCC represents a ‘consensus’ of the views of ‘2,500 of the world’s top climate scientists’.

In every way, this is wildly misleading. The vast majority of those who contribute to those IPCC reports are not climate scientists. Many are not scientists at all, but economists or sociologists – even just environmental activists with no scientific qualifications whatever.

The IPCC was never intended to be an impartial body, weighing the evidence for and against man-made global warming and coming up with objective conclusions.

It was set up by a small group of scientists already so firmly committed to the belief in ‘human-induced climate change’ that they were not prepared to examine any evidence which contradicted it.

A detailed study of the contributors to the most recent IPCC report has shown that the number of scientists responsible for the key chapter on the extent and causes of global warming – on which everything else in the report depended – was not 2,500, but barely 50.

Almost all this handful of scientists were firmly committed to the official view on global warming before they were appointed – and they include those whose leaked emails have now created a shock wave running around the world.

Tellingly, what they also all have in common is that their findings are based on computer models programmed to assume the chief cause of global warming is the rise in greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide.

It is precisely this assumption which more than anything else has been called into question by the fact that global temperatures have not been continuing to rise as the computer models insisted they should.

Even some of the most committed scientific supporters of the global warming theory now admit the warming process has come to a halt – although they insist that in a decade or two it will re- emerge again stronger than ever.

The fact remains that the models on which the whole global warming panic was based have been proved dismally wrong, suggesting that the theory on which they were programmed may itself have been fundamentally flawed.

Yet on this basis, the world’s politicians, led by our own in Britain, are nevertheless proposing the most damaging measures ever put forward in history – cuts in carbon emission which, if implemented, would plunge our world back into the Dark Ages – to meet a crisis which it now seems was never going to happen anyway.

Before it is too late, we must insist our politicians re- examine the increasingly shaky scientific case on which all those proposals are based.

For nearly 20 years, from Al Gore to President Obama, they have been intoning to us that ‘the science is settled’. But as ever more scientists from outside the IPCC’s self- selected ‘magic circle’ now maintain, it has never been more obvious that this simply isn’t true.

No one has put this better than Professor Lindzen, one of the world’s leading climatologists, when he wrote: ‘Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21st-century’s developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally average temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree, and on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections contemplated a roll-back of the industrial age.’

With the entire future of our civilisation at stake, it is no longer good enough for our politicians just to shout ‘deniers’ and ‘flat earthers’ at all those genuinely expert scientists now begging them to look properly at the evidence. They must be prepared to listen – and, for the sake of our planet, to think again.

‘Global temperatures are declining’

weekendpost.co.za | Nov 23, 2009

by Guy Rogers

A retired Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University physics professor has rejected the theory of global warming, arguing that temperatures are, in fact, cooling.

Addressing a group of students and lecturers in his old department on Friday, Prof Koos Vermaak said a global temperature rise was “not possible”.

What fluctuations there were had nothing to do with human activity and the generation of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide – a cornerstone of the warning by the UN International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), he said. “Politicians, Greenpeace and the media are to blame for these global warming lies.”

Vermaak (who was president of the EP Rugby Football Union in 1990) said the IPCC’s famous “hockey stick graph”, which showed a dramatic increase in global temperature since the start of the industrial revolution a century ago, was a case of “cherry-picking select results”.

The mediaeval warming period 900AD-1300AD and the Little Ice Age 1280-1850AD had been left out, skewing the graph. The results were consequently wrong, he said.

He said a 1990-2007 satellite study of the temperatures in the inner atmospheric envelope of stratosphere and the outer envelope of troposphere ought to show global warming, if it was occurring, because this was where the reflected heat of the sun was absorbed, in terms of the greenhouse effect.

But results of this study showed a –0,493°C decline over the past decade, “so in fact there is a cooling trend”.

Asked about the melting of ancient ice caps and similar increased heat events in other parts of the world, as filmed and televised across the world, he said these were region-specific and cyclical.

Battling to reduce carbon emissions was going to cost “R13-trillion”, and it was not worth it, he said.

He scoffed at the warning by climate change scientists of a dangerous rise in sea levels unless greenhouse emissions were drastically reduced.

“The biggest victims will be developing countries, which will miss out on the subsidies they used to get from developed countries.

“The most disturbing aspect of the climate change lie is the way people’s legitimate environmental concerns have been manipulated to further a political and financial agenda.”

A South African representative on the IPCC, Dr Guy Midgley of the SA National Biodiversity Institute, said Vermaak’s statements appeared to be “regurgitated denialist material”.

The “hockey stick graph” had been confirmed by several independent reports, including one by the US National Academy of Science, and Vermaak’s allegation about previous ice ages having been left out of the IPCC report was incorrect, he said. “There is a whole chapter in the (last) IPCC report (www.ipcc.ch) devoted to palaeo-climate and how it fits in.”

He said Vermaak’s reference to the stratosphere warming study was also flawed.

“A subsequent review showed that satellite drift and loss of altitude affected its findings. The matter was sorted out in 2003-04 in a review by a least three scientific publications which confirmed warming results correlating with surface studies.”

Suggestions that the IPCC was biased made no sense as the panel included scientists from the developed and developing world, he said.

Developing countries had an opportunity through UN climate change negotiations to attract funding and other support for technology transfer, adaptation support, and capacity building.