It was Fortune that reported just days ago that leaders of some of the world’s biggest oil and gas companies have promised to “do their part to transition the planet to a low-carbon future” in response to a personal appeal by Pope Francis.
The Catholic leader insisted the wealthy and influential chiefs “follow sound science to avert ‘a climate emergency’ that risks ‘perpetrating a brutal act of injustice towards the poor and future generations.'”
The leaders of ExxonMobil, BP, Royal Dutch Shell, Total, Chevron, Eni and others then promised to call for sustainable energy, carbon pricing mechanisms and even carbon taxes.
The problem, contends Christopher Monckton of Brenchley, a former adviser to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, is that the pope has his facts wrong.
In an open letter posted at Climate Depot, he said the pope should understand that “global warming that will happen between now and the exhaustion of accessible resources of coal, oil and gas will be small, slow, harmless and net-beneficial.”
However, the “same cannot be said of the insane policies currently being inflicted upon the world’s blameless population by crazed Western extremists, now unwisely supported by Your Holiness.”
“Given the egregious lack of evidence for harm caused by warmer weather, and the overwhelming evidence that current global-warming policies are killing tens of millions,” he continued, “I invite Your Holiness to speak up for the poor who are poor, and dying, because the policies Your Holiness imprudently advocates are not just scientifically unjustifiable, not just theologically off message. They are – not to put too fine a point on it – actually genocidal.”
Monckton pointed out that the church’s objective is to uphold, affirm and continue the church.
“Your Holiness is reported as having told chief executives of oil companies and investment houses that inflicting heavy taxes on their corporate emissions of the satanic gas carbon dioxide was ‘essential’ to prevent dangerous ‘global warming,'” he wrote. “With respect, that was off message.”
Further, he said: “I have listened carefully, and I can inform Your Holiness that science is divided on the climate question. A small number of totalitarian profiteers of doom in various self-serving national academies have issued pompous statements about it, but a large number of papers from reputable scientists, and a larger amount of hard data, suggest that global warming is and will continue to be a non-event.”
He pointed out that the warming between 1850 and 2011 was “just 0.75 degrees, equivalent to 1 degree of warming in response to doubled CO2 concentration. That is less than a third of the 3.35 degrees that is the totalitarian scientists’ grossly inflated midrange prediction.”
‘This wicked policy’
The damage from the alarmists’ campaign is evident, Monckton said.
“Why has Your Holiness never spoken out in condemnation of the World Bank, which, from 2010 onward, refused and still refuses – citing global warming as their rationale – to lend to developing countries so that they can build coal-fired power stations? This dismal institution has decided that from this year it will not lend for oil or gas projects either, for the same reason.
“And what is the effect of this wicked policy? Let me repeat the figures I gave recently here. According to the International Energy Agency, 1.3 billion people – one in six worldwide – has no access to electrical power, even though the Agency defines ‘access’ as the ability to turn on no more than one 60-Watt lightbulb for an average of just four hours a day,” he said.
Then there’s the World Health Organization estimate that “4.3 million people die every year from particulate pollution in open cooking fires because they have no mains electricity or gas, and that another 500,000 women die in childbirth each year because they have no electricity,” Monckton said.
“In darkest sub-Saharan Africa, where there is hardly any electricity, life expectancy is about 65 years, compared with 80 years in the electrified West. And it’s no good telling third-world countries they should install solar panels and windfarms: the electricity produced by these boondoggles is up to five times costlier than proper electricity from coal-fired power stations.”
Monckton then addressed the fretting about the rise of sea levels, noting the sea has rising at a rate of only 11 centimeters a century.
“Food production? Output of all staple crops is increasing rapidly worldwide. Warmer weather is good for them, because they breathe in carbon dioxide. CO2 is not a satanic gas. It is plant food,” he said.
Forest fires, hurricanes, tropical cyclones, tornados all are, he said, “in decline … because warmer weather reduces the temperature differentials that power such storms.”
He also pointed out: “Over the past 100 years, the number of weather-related deaths has plummeted worldwide. What is more, research for the EU Commission found – to the unelected Kommissars’ horror – that in the next 100 years deaths from global warming will be comfortably outstripped by lives saved from cold weather. More people will live than will die if the world continues to warm, because warm weather is better than cold weather.”
Oh, and those “cuddly polar bears?”
“They’re not cuddly, but there are now thought to be 35,000 of them, compared with just 5000 in the 1940s.”
The lobbying for alarmism over what once was global cooling, then became global warming and now is climate change often has reached the absurd, he said.
Recently, “experts” warned that cleaner air could mean more global warming, and there were reports that China and Russia were experimenting with how to make global warming happen.
Then there were the scientists who said the sun should be “dimmed” to address global warming and the studies that showed wind farms could cause global warming.
Recently a U.N. official called for an “ark,” to save the world from global warming.
Inconvenient facts
WND reported when Al Gore used the extreme results of “Superstorm Sandy” to support his contention that sea waters are rising significantly.
The claim is in the sequel to his 2006 movie “An Inconvenient Truth.”
The original movie wasn’t without controversy, as a judge in the United Kingdom said it could be shown to schools only if they alert students to nine statements “that are not supported by current mainstream scientific consensus.”
In the promotions for “An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power,” critics have found yet another misstatement by Gore.
According to the Media Research Center’s Newsbusters, Gore claims in his film that the flooding caused by Superstorm Sandy at the site of the Twin Towers memorial in New York City is a fulfillment of his prediction in his original movie that a rise in the ocean level would flood the site.
But that isn’t what happened.
In his 2006 film, he said, illustrated by an animation, “If Greenland broke up and melted, or if half of Greenland and half of West Antarctica broke up and melted, this is what would happen to the sea level in Florida.”
Then he showed animations of what he believed would happen to San Francisco, the Netherlands, Beijing and other places.
Turning to Manhattan, he said, “This is what would happen to Manhattan; they can measure this precisely.”
The animation shows water reaching the 9/11 memorial.
But Newsbusters argued Gore has twisted his original words to make it appear his prediction about Manhattan came true.
In a newly released clip from the movie, he said: “Ten years ago when the movie ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ came out, the single most criticized scene was an animated scene showing that the combination of sea level rise and storm surge would put the ocean water into the 9/11 memorial site, which was then under construction. And people said, ‘That’s ridiculous. What a terrible exaggeration.'”
The movie then shows news footage of Superstorm Sandy water reaching the memorial site.
Newsbusters pointed out the original prediction “was not about extenuating circumstances of a storm like Sandy slamming into New York or any ‘storm surge’ at all.”
The report noted the latest maps show that Greenland still has ice 11 years after Al Gore’s prediction of catastrophic melt.
Even scientists dispute Gore’s contention that Superstorm Sandy was the product of “manmade climate change.”
Gore also told an audience in 2009 that “the entire north polar ice cap during some of the summer months could be completely ice-free within the next five to seven years.”
