Climate of freedom in Las Vegas

Patrick Moore, one of the founders of Greenpeace, told the Heartland Climate Conference in Las Vegas this week that his former organization is now plumb wrong on just about everything.

He left at a time when Greenpeace had bizarrely decided that chlorine and all its compounds should be banned outright. Now, he says, they oppose Golden Rice, a genetically modified strain that could save countless lives throughout the Third World.

Above all, they want the West shut down on the pretext of preventing global warming that is not happening anyway.

In the past, he has outspokenly condemned the new, scientifically illiterate Greenpeace as "neo-Marxist." His own campaigns as the spearhead of the old Greenpeace were based on science. He opposed atmospheric nuclear testing because it filled the atmosphere with radiation. He opposed whaling because the survival of several species was threatened.

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Now Greenpeace, like the governments on which it fawns and on whose taxpayers' often involuntary largesse it lives, has abandoned true science in favor of profitable superstition.

The Heartland conference attracts hundreds of the world's leading climate scientists and researchers every year to discuss the latest state of global warming science.

This year, the delegates' speeches showed that just about all the urban myths of the climate communists are false.

"Global warming is happening." No: According to the RSS satellite record, there has been none for 17 years 10 months.

"Warming is faster than we thought." No: In 1990 the climate models predicted that global warming would happen twice as fast as it has.

"There's a 97 percent consensus." No: Only 0.5 percent of the authors of 11,944 scientific papers on climate and related topics over the past 21 years said they agreed that most of the warming since 1950 was man-made.

"Droughts are getting worse." No: A recent paper in the learned journals shows the fraction of the world's land under drought has fallen for 30 years.

"Floods are getting worse." No: The U.N.'s panel has said in two recent reports that there has been no particular change in the frequency or severity of floods worldwide.

"Sea ice is melting." No: It has grown to a new record high in the Antarctic, though the Arctic icecap has been shrinking a little in summer.

"Sea level is rising dangerously." No: Some satellites show it as rising a little, while others show it as falling.

"Hurricanes are getting worse." No: Their combined frequency, severity and duration has been at or near the lowest in the 35-year satellite record.

"Global warming caused recent extreme weather." No: There has been no warming recently, so it cannot have caused any extreme weather in recent years.

"Global warming will reduce the number of redheads." No: This is one of many scare stories about imaginary effects of warmer weather. Besides, I prefer blondes.

"The ocean is acidifying." No: The ocean remains decidedly alkaline, and there cannot be much change in its acid-base balance because it is buffered by the basalt rocks in which it lies.

"It's cheaper to act now, just in case." No: It is 10-100 times costlier to try to prevent global warming today than to let it happen and pay the cost of adapting to it the day after tomorrow.

Just about everything the mainstream news media say about global warming and its supposed dangers is the opposite of the truth. The more extreme media, such as the BBC, are so determinedly one-sided that they train their reporters to go out of their way to avoid allowing climate skeptics to take part in on-air discussions of the topic.

The excuse for this prejudice is that climate skeptics are a "fringe" group and that only one point of view – that of the BBC, whose journalists' pension fund is heavily invested in "green" corporations – is permitted.

Some years ago the BBC decided to do a 90-minute hatchet-job on me. Its sneering reporter – in fact a Marxist environmentalist campaigner – pretended he was doing a documentary about climate skeptics, but I was just about the only one mentioned in the program.

I decided enough was enough and dragged the BBC into the High Court, where the judge decided I had substantially won the case. The BBC had to shorten the program by half an hour, taking out most of the poisonously unfair material it had originally aimed to broadcast.

The climate extremist movement, now almost exclusively confined to profiteers of doom among the world's ruling elite and the media that fawn upon them, is aiming to get the world's governments to sign up to a binding and irreversible climate treaty at a conference in Paris late next year.

Most of the steps toward creating what is in effect a world government have already been quietly put in place as a result of decisions by earlier annual U.N. climate conferences.

But one thing can stop them. Write to your congressman and your senators and tell them to press for the inclusion of an escape clause in the Treaty of Paris that will permit any State to resign from its obligations by giving a few months' notice to the depositary State. That way, as the world continues to fail to warm anything like as fast as predicted, nations can break free from the regime of terror by stealth that has been furtively planned.

And no more power should pass from elected hands here to unelected hands in global government, unless and until the institutions of that global government are elected by the peoples of the States parties to the treaties that created them. Fear of warmer weather is no excuse for the extinction of democracy worldwide.

Media wishing to interview Christopher Monckton, please contact [email protected].