Universities and other public institutions throughout America are being targeted in an aggressive climate crisis-premised campaign demanding that they divest themselves of all fossil energy investments and influences. In the process, legitimate funding sources are being sacrificed, objective education and science programs are being compromised, and careers of non-conforming researchers are under assault.
As reported by Kimberley Strassel in The Wall Street Journal, one such sponsoring organization, “UnKochMyCampus,” provides a “campus organization guide” on how to “expose and undermine” any college that works against “progressive values.”
Spearheaded by Greenpeace, Forecast the Facts, and the American Federation of Teachers, its website directs students to a list of universities which have received money from Koch foundations. It also offers step-by-step instructions on how “trusted allies and informants” (including other liberal students, faculty, and alumni) can be recruited to demand Freedom of Information legislation record disclosures from offending programs and professors.
The Federation of Teachers and National Education Association even sponsored a day-long March conference devoted to training students on “necessary skill to investigate and expose” any Koch influence. Funding influences of left-wing contributors, however, are quite a different matter.
It seems quite okay that billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer and his wife pledged $40 million to create the TomKat Center for Sustainable Energy at Stanford. Steyer, a prominent climate alarmist, anti-Keystone Pipeline lobbyist and carbon tax proponent, also spent $74 million supporting 2014 congressional candidates who would advance his uber-liberal agendas.
A recent National Association of Scholars report. titled “Sustainability: Higher Education’s New Fundamentalism,” discusses how universities continue to be co-opted as bastions of progressive ideology. Excerpted by Rachelle Peterson and Peter Wood of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, the movement can be heavily credited to the former senator, now the secretary of state, John Kerry and his wife Teresa Heinz following her previous husband’s fatal 1991 helicopter crash.
Upon meeting at the 1992 Rio de Janeiro UN Earth Climate Summit, the two recognized colleges and universities as important seedbeds for a new “sustainable development” initiative. This mantra was hatched by the UN under its Agenda 21 doctrine and became smuggled into unwitting American townships and counties through its International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI).
In 1992 Kerry and later-to-become wife Heinz launched the nonprofit “Second Nature” with the mission to “create a sustainable society by transforming higher education.” The organization began soliciting professors including ecologists, scientists, philosophers, and poets who were willing to introduce sustainability content into their courses along with encouraging the creation of new centers of sustainability study.
The group pledged to “recognize the scientific consensus that global warming is real and is largely caused by humans” and to set an example by going “carbon-neutral.” Among other things, they also committed to engage in shareholder activism to pressure the corporations in which the college owned stock to move towards climate neutrality. As of last January, 685 colleges and universities have signed on.
Joined by mega-funded Green groups, friendly media, and government politicos, the movement continues to gain fast-paced momentum. A recent Greenpeace-sponsored New York Times attack on Dr. Willie Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics accused him of personally failing to disclose research funding, even though those monies were properly processed through official institutional agreements.
Two days after the Times article appeared, ranking Democrat on the Natural Resources Committee Rep. Raul Grijalva, D-Ariz., sent letters to university employers of seven researchers identified as climate crisis skeptics. All were asked to provide details about their outside funding sources.
In addition, Senators Barbara Boxer (D, CA), Ed Markey (D, MA), and Sheldon Whitehouse (D, RI) attempted to intimidate climate apostates by sending 107 letters to think tanks, trade associations, and companies demanding that they provide the same information.
By extension, this presumably suggests that no scientist who ever accepts research funding from any special interest-linked sponsors should be trusted. Let’s remember, however, that government politicians and bureaucrats wishing to expand authority and budgets are as self-interested as anyone, and that nearly all university-based climate research depends upon federal grants they provide.
Those research conclusions, in turn, influence billions of dollars in regulatory and consumer energy costs. There’s little wonder then about the need for alarmist witch-hunting activists following 18 years and counting of flat global temperatures despite rising atmospheric CO2 levels. When the climate scare goes away, so does that power and money.
A version of this article also appeared at: http://www.newsmax.com/LarryBell/Climate-Change/2015/05/04/id/642337/#ixzz3ZE2h3Xbz
Do we need to be esoteric concerning where the Earths heat energy might be stored and the mechanisms involved. Surely hysteresis temperature curves of matter as it changes from form into another are a simple explanation. Freezing water the temperature falls to the freezing point in a uniform fairly straight line graph. As it starts to freeze the energy extraction remains constant but the graph levels off for a prolonged period suddenly dropping again as the state changes to solid. (We understand ice contains energy, and as it melts we are extracting it.)
We see the same shaped curve in wax as it reaches its melting point and energy input hardly moves the temperature until it is liquid. The interesting thing is both materials require a lower temp to revert to solid. Its the overlaid graphs I find so interesting in the shape produced. This both absorbs and releases considerable energy with little temperature variation.
Talking of the quantum physics properties of a minor gas CO2, is a nightmare to comprehend and quantify, but Polar Ice is much more physical and apparent. Can it make a difference? Can the likely mechanism be explained this way and measured to prove the temperature hold is meaningful?
I remain very skeptical with the overcomplicated and illogical CO2 argument being a cause of any imminent catastrophe. Or have I got it all wrong and there is a better explanation?
“Talking of the quantum physics properties of a minor gas CO2, is a nightmare to comprehend and quantify”
It’s difficult, but hardly impossible. Examples:
http://climatemodels.uchicago.edu/
Do you think CO2 can be the storehouse of energy that has been claimed by some supporters of the carbon theory? Any increase in the 400 parts per million is a still a very small amount in the atmosphere. If we can understand how the mechanism functions it will be a step in the right direction. When you have, I think it was 96 differing reasons why carbon might be a problem I wonder if any one knows the truth? Until its explained simply it remains a very dubious theory that CO2 is anything other than an essential minor gas.
IDIOTS!
The critics of GW of the pushers of GW???
climate change lovers are useful idiots!that’s all….there is no global warming!period!.if it were true,then what gore said decades ago,Florida would be under water and all the ice caps would be gone and we would have tidal waves 50ft high on a daily basis(surfers would love that)but we don’t…because it is a scam,a 22 billion dollar a year scam,to get your money(more of it)that’s all it is…a scam!
Outcome- The cost of higher education climbs again due to rising fuel/energy costs. Too many students do not stop to realize that the costs of which they complain are related to the discounts, etc.given to illegals, the cost of energy to maintain the institutions, money going to illegals rather than student living expenses… Wake up or shut up.
This article is about the POLITICS of the warmest smear campaign against the skeptics (and what I personally believe to be the truly honest scientists in the debate).
Has it dawned on any of us yet, that for the most part, this is the same group of political misinformers (the warmest crowd) that demonizes a Pamela Geller for Free Speech (she was the victim blamed in the Texas Cartoon Contest). Have we heard BHO or John Kerry say one word about that? No, but “Global Warming is the most important challenge of our time” is heard by both of them….all the time.
It’s also the same crowd that seems to support anti-Israel sentiments and says nothing about growing anti-semitism on US and European college campuses.
I’m not trying to use the correlations above to start a new campaign and get off topic, but the same people and techniques seem to be being used in all these debates.
Is it just me, or is this the Big Progessive Left at work – trying to make sure we’re all being controlled by the “Ministry of Thought” in Orwell’s “1984”?
Any defense of the Free Speech right to insult is incomplete without mentioning that half a dozen men are spending years in prison in Europe for simply questioning the dogma of the “Holocaust” . So zionists lose any claim to moral high ground .
I’m not aware of such imprisonments so perhaps you will enlighten us?
However, as “Zionists” are not doing the imprisonment, nor making any such laws (even in Israel), I don’t see your point?
Google “holocaust denial imprisonment” . Here’s one that is current : http://www.thelocal.de/20150225/ex-lawyer-jailed-again-for-holocaust-denial .
I don’t like to conflate “Jews” with zionists , but it is definitely the same mentality which excuses zionist supremacism which got those laws passed and continues to push for them in additional countries . And Pamela Geller herself is an “ardent Zionist” .
I don’t know how “Zionist supremacism” entered into this at all? It’s certainly not in the article you sent me. Indeed, this is Germany you are referring to.
Israel for instance has no laws denying the Holocaust. They certainly didn’t ask Germany to enact them. So I think you’re argument has gotten off topic.
I was referring to the groups of individuals that demonize Israel, attack climate realists and attack American Values of Free Speech seem to mostly to come from the same group of very outspoken far leftists who quash debate and their only tactic is to demonize and yell loudly.
They do not present an argument, rather they scream and demonize.
As you do not seem to see the difference between Zionists and Jews, I’d really like to hear your definition of Zionism?
Perhaps you’ll again, enlighten me?
I thought we were discussing the article on the hoax of global warming. Is there a tie-in somewhere?
Read my original post and I think you’ll see the tie in.
The way it went from there, I”m not sure? I’m not the poster who started to stray from topic.
I did indeed try and bring it back to where the Political issue was being addressed which was the point of the article.
thank you sir.
You’re very welcome….
Your comment about P.Geller as an ardent Zionists is BS. Besides this conversation has nothing to do with Zionism. You are on the wrong website. By the way, Geller’s organization is about free speech and she has very right to do so.
That’s a quote from Wikipedia which elaborates on it .
Yes this is off topic for this website , but it it was Fromafar who gratuitously brought the comparison in . And I just wanted to add some balance by pointing out that globally the Israeli lobby itself is hypocritical wrt free speech .
Indeed I do find parallels between the battle against the global statist CO2 fraud and that against the almost complete capture of the USA political establishment by extremist zionism — to the point of having all but 60 members of congress kowtowing to a foreign leader . ( I’ll refrain from quoting Jon Stewart on the display . )
A very useful reference in the recent http://IsraelLobbyUS.org/ conference on the influence of Israel on US politics . Gideon Levy from Haaretz gave a particularly insightful speech adding to the general consensus that wrt Israel the press may be freer there than here .
This is the last I will post on this off topic .
Every nation is hypocritical with free speech/ statements. What we all must do is look at the total picture. Israel is attempting to survive and will attempt to paint a picture that hopefully convinces the world its claims are real. Therefore, when Israel states that Iran and other Middle Eastern countries want to wipe Israel off the map, we can easily determine if that statement is true by looking up the statements from the Imams and leaders of these nations. Iran and the Palestinians, for example, has stated that Israel needs to be destroyed completely. To disregard that fact by clouding the issue with other propaganda is a diversion and nothing else. We all need to look at their statements and to call a “spade a spade”.
The same is true with the global warming issue. It is no longer a scientific issue but instead a political issue where the real facts do not matter. The climate models are flawed and have not been able to prove the claim that CO2 and humans play a significant part of the warming. This fact is evident from the 17+ years of no warming even though the CO2 levels are at a higher value of 400 ppm and the CO2 levels continued to rise. Instead, the plan is to convince the world that the claim is still real and that taxes on fossil fuels are the only way to correct and stop the warming cycle.
The Tornio River in Finland sheds some basic facts on warming the earth. This river has been monitored and data collected on the earliest ice breakup each year from 1693 to 2000. I like and believe this data since there wasn’t any climate scientists nor skeptics 307 years ago nor was there any significant burning of fossil fuels. The graph furnished shows that indeed the earth has been warming on a average basis for 307 years. Of course, the Warmists attempt to state that this is proof that CO2 and humans are the cause. If that is true then, there also should be evidence that there has been an increase in warming to account for the industrial era of 1940 to 2000. However, when the graph is examined, there is no change in the rate of warming. There is no evidence of an “inverted hockey stick” beginning around 1940 to 2000. NONE! The graph stays as a straight line. That means that CO2 and fossil fuel burning has not been a significant factor in the warming of earth. Instead, warming is primarily a cycle of warming since the ice age with alternate cooling periods with both conditions due to natural forces.
Well, there’s a twist.
And again, nothing to do with my original point.
The best example is David Irving the UK’s most knowledgeable WW2 historian who was jailed in Austria for tell us his views. I have heard him talk and he is telling the complete and absolute truth. Since measures were taken under the cover of the de nazification of Germany and Austria.
Again, I have no idea if what you said is true or not, nor was it germane to my original point.
Your original point was concerning the simple truth and smears campaigns, a comment was made by Bob that you may be locked up for for telling the truth, you did say that you were unaware of such imprisonments. It is true, and I hate deception.
The greatest enemy of
knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge
.
By Daniel Boorstin,
American Historian [Quoted by Lennart Bengtsson
]
I don’t mind folk who say they don’t understand. What I hate is the abuse after I disagree with their uninformed opinions on CO2 or Carbon. They have a problem knowing the difference it seems.
I read a little of the conversation/comments you have going with our brethren and you seem to have a genuine interest in the science and keeping it uncomplicated.
Here is a thought about positive feedback that AGW is fully dependent on. If any additional heating of the surface and boundry layer occurs from CO2 it will drive additional water vapor which itself being a greenhouse gas will drive some additional WV. As you pointed out this is a delicate process which could easily become unstable.
UNLESS it is controlled by some negative feedback terms. According to NASA, WV provides at least 70% of the surface cooling and transfer of energy up into the Troposphere where it radiates away the energy to balance the solar heating (and any other). Thus any ‘positive feedback’ by WV quickly becomes a negative feedback by cooling the surface and by convection to outward radiation altitudes. Much has been made of double CO2 as a greenhouse gas at altitude where it forces radiation to a higher cooler level where it is slightly less efficient as a radiator. They never mention that since it is doubled it is also twice as efficient radiator since there are twice as many molecules radiating in the CO2 ‘GH’ band. So much for significant GH effect of CO2 and positive WV feedback. So much for any significant significant CO2 driven global warming.
The ups and downs of temp we observe are driven by ocean cycles on order of 30 yrs cooling and 30 yrs warming cycles which makes it impossible to separate the 0.3C warming observed ’78 to’ 98 into GH and or ocean cycle warming.
Keep on questioning.
The ocean energy storage measurements where the global warming is ‘hiding’ is 2 atomic bombs per second or as real scientists like to say; average of 0.42 watts/meter^2. This is 9/10 of all global warming and is less than 1/10 of the alleged CO2 warming power. Quoted even in the UNIPCC Technical Summary Report (and then ignored in all of their dozens of GCM models.)
I sure do wish that GW critics would stop calling themselves skeptics. They are critics and should by proud of that title. Skeptic however suggests uncertainty and usually leads to denier in the mind of the public which the left promotes. Shout your title of critic from the rooftops.
Thanks I hadn’t thought of it like that when I said I remained Skeptical. I am decidedly Critical.
there isn’t any climate it’s the same as it was Obama just wants to us that to grab even more money from the American people and to stop the pipeline and kill all coal mines and take americans jobs just so Obama can gie more to his fat cat traders from hell
I think he wants America to return to 1200 A..D. or perhaps one of the poor African countries. Sorry Obummer we cannot go backwards. Global warming is a sham but it is as commonplace an expression as cup-of-java. Too many people do not question anything of the brainwashing silt transmitted through the television set.
Its a Global campaign with the UN driving it as hard as they can.
See this video of green quotes!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HloIPBp5Iig
Problem is. In my humble opinion, is that we don’t look hard enough at
the cartoon physics they are asking us to believe. C02 just simply does
not do what it’s being accused of. If you know anything at all about
basic physics or simple math it is very obvious. Until you add emotion
of course. Those poor baby animals all dying because I eat at burger
king drive-thru? You must be fricken kidding me.
I remember that moron Noah Wyle (The Librarian) who campaigned for the global warmists claiming New York would be under water within a year. He’s poster boy proof that entertainers should not try to be smart and just say their lines as fed to them.
They are purely evil.
To get a scope of the mass of the flywheel that is our atmosphere, just do some quick math and we find that when a storm drops 1″ of water, every square mile just received 77000 tonnes of water. Those who can’t relate to this number should consider that the average weight of a vehicle is about 4000 pounds, this 1 inch of water represents the same weight as 38,500 average vehicles falling out of the sky. Most of us can imagine the image of 38,000 cars falling out of the sky. 14.7 pounds per square inch sure adds up quickly when you consider the amount of square inches on earth. If you do not believe the above statement the truth that will set you free is in the math.
“Scientific consensus”…an oxymoron on a level with “therapeutic abortion,” “medicinal marijuana,” and a host of other glaring contradictions that fall glibly out of our mouths as though they actually meant something.
Plot idea: 97% of the world’s scientists contrive an environmental crisis, but are exposed by a plucky band of billionaires & oil companies.
best,
D
“Climate change is a hoax led by the United Nations so that it can end democracy and impose authoritarian rule, according to Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s chief business adviser.
Maurice Newman, the chairman of the Prime Minister’s business advisory council, has written in The Australian that scientific modelling showing the link between humans and climate change is wrong and the real agenda is a world takeover for the UN.”
In an article written for The Australian, Maurice Newman said the UN was using climate change to end democracy and establish communist rule.
He questioned the science behind global warming and said the UN was creating false fear to try and gain support from other nations and establish a new world order.
“We have been subjected to extravagance from climate catastrophists for close to 50 years,” Mr Newman wrote.
When questioned on whether he shared Mr Newman’s views, Mr Hunt distanced himself from the comments.
“It’s not been something that I’ve expressed, it’s not something that I would express,” he said.
Labor environment spokesman Mark Butler questioned Mr Newman’s position in relation to the Prime Minister.
“I’ve never been particularly clear why Maurice Newman holds the position he does hold, given how central climate change is to the future economic prosperity of Australia,” Mr Butler said.
“That, ultimately though, is a matter for the Prime Minister.”
UN climate change negotiator in line of attack
Mr Newman is vocal about his climate change scepticism and has written on the topic in the past.
UN Climate change negotiator Christiana Figueres speaking in Melbourne in May.
Photo: Maurice Newman accused UN climate change negotiator Christiana Figueres of having a “concentrated political agenda”. (ABC)
In another article, published in The Australian last year, Mr Newman accused Australia’s former Labor government of using “biased research to pursue ‘green’ gesture politics”.
In his latest piece, Mr Newman said Christiana Figueres, the executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, had an agenda aimed at “concentrated political authority”.
He said global warming was being used as a “hook” by Ms Figueres.
“Figueres is on record saying democracy is a poor political system for fighting global warming,” he wrote.
“Communist China, she says, is the best model.
“This is not about facts or logic.
“It’s about a new world order under the control of the UN.”
‘We want to address the problem’: Hunt
Mr Newman also said Australia should resist any action against climate change at the UN’s conference in Paris later this year.
“Resisting will be politically difficult,” he wrote.
“But resist we should. We are already paying an unnecessary social and economic price for empty gestures.
“Enough is enough.”
Mr Hunt said the Government was working alongside all parties to address climate change and that he had had “very constructive talks” with Ms Figueres earlier this week.
“We want to address the problem, we’re working with other countries and we’re working with the international organisations,” he said.