Never Forget Kent State

It's important to remember that Kent State was not an isolated incident. It was part of a pattern of history of our country, a pattern that continues today.

We've been watching "The Kennedys," a Canadian mini-series about the iconic Kennedy dynasty. It was controversial when it was first aired, partly due to some inaccuracies, but mostly because it challenges the popular image of the young, idealistic President and his family. The truth is sordid, grey, mundane human emotions and aspirations, just like everyday life. Grasping for power and influence. Opportunistic alliances among organized crime, government officials and the security establishment. All of which led to the Kennedy assassinations and the abomination of US hegemony that came after.

The startling public events of the 60s and 70s, assassinations, blatant quelling of dissent, militaristic confrontation, have given way to steady, day-to-day oppression, media control, covert intervention and overt invasion and occupation. The principles on which the United States was allegedly founded are ignored and rank expediency has taken their place. Government no longer serves the people, nor even cares what the people think, even those who do think, and act. The art of control has been honed to such a fine state that it blends invisibly with popular culture.

Kent State must never be forgotten. It was the warning shot across the bow, that, alas, has been forgotten or outgrown. It was the end of the beginning of the end of democracy.

Michael

The Real Limits of the Earth

Scientific American Blogs presents Part 1 of a disappointing two-part post on limits to growth: The Limits of the Earth, Part 1: Problems.

Part 1 begins with an explanation of human innovation, by the author of a book, of course, about how human innovation can overcome limits to growth.

"Ramez Naam is a computer scientist and award-winning author. He believes innovation can save the planet and lift billions into prosperity, but only if we make the right choices to embrace it. His next non-fiction book, The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet, lays out the path to harnessing innovation to maximize our odds of overcoming climate change, finite fossil fuels, and the host of other environmental and natural resource challenges that face us."

The remainder of Part 1 is a laundry list of some of the problems facing humans due to resource limitations.

I can see where this is going. This is yet another unscientific, anthropocentric paean to technology, human economics and the mythology of perpetual growth in a finite world. This is another young man who has yet to feel his mortality, who thinks that humans with computers can overcome all obstacles, and who is largely ignorant of basic biology, ecology, earth sciences and natural history.

There really are limits to human growth, hard limits that cannot be fantasized away with unreasoning belief in human innovation. We can't invent our way into a rosy Star Trek future with unlimited energy and natural resources. We can't turn the world into computer-managed agro-business to feed 10 billion people. We can't convert all natural habitat into solar and wind farms for human energy demands.

Like it or not, humans are but one species of life on this planet. Humans must relearn how to live in
cooperation with, not at the expense of, all other species. We can do this. We just put away the toys of youth and start acting like responsible adult residents of the planet that sustains us.

And discontinue our subscriptions to the pseudo-science rag formerly known as Scientific American.

The Myth of Economic Growth

I've written about the myth of economic growth quite a lot on Hayduke Blogs. Us the search bar in the lower right for a sampling. I've held for many years that growth is not the solution to our economic, social and environmental woes, growth is the problem.

Today I found an interview on Truthout: Power Shift Away From Green Illusions, with Ozzie Zehner, author of Green Illusions: The Dirty Secrets of Clean Energy and the Future of Environmentalism.

They're not really secrets, of course. We've known for a long time that alternative energy sources are dependent on fossil fuel energy sources, that our present level of energy use, consumption and economic growth cannot be sustained in a world of finite resources. We've even known that solar and wind power are not amenable to centralized collection and distribution and there is no way we can sustain our present society on renewable energy alone.

The future is not more. The future is less.

Less energy. Less growth. Fewer people. Less consumption.

It's inevitable. That which cannot go on forever, won't.

It's good to read a book (a free chapter is available on Zehner's web site), that lays this all out very logically, in a readable and entertaining volume. He also makes the case for a rational, science-based approach to moving toward a steady state economy based on a smaller population and reduced per capita consumption.

My wife and I lowered our standard of living and increased our quality of life over ten years ago.

The Myth of Economic Growth stops right here at home.

Report: Global warming didn't cause big US drought

Report: Global warming didn't cause big US drought | Business & Technology

"Last year's huge drought was a freak of nature that wasn't caused by man-made global warming, a new federal science study finds."

"This is one of those events that comes along once every couple hundreds of years," said lead author Martin Hoerling, a research meteorologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "Climate change was not a significant part, if any, of the event."

"Other scientists have linked recent changes in the jet stream to shrinking Arctic sea ice, but Hoerling and study co-author Richard Seager of Columbia University said those global warming connections are not valid."

And one more time, with four-part harmony and feeling:

"Hoerling noted that in the past 20 years, the world is seeing more La Ninas, the occasional cooling of the central Pacific Ocean that is the flip side of El Nino. Hoerling said that factor, not part of global warming but part of a natural cycle, increases the chances of such droughts."

http://drought.gov/media/pgfiles/DTF%20Interpretation%20of%202012%20Drought%20FINAL%202%20pager.pdf

http://drought.gov/drought/content/drought-task-force-report-page

What's Happening, Santa Cruz?

Visit my new blog: What's Happening, Santa Cruz?

My first post is on the City's plans to build a $125 million ocean water desalination plant.

Children, and Adults, Should Be Allowed to Get Bored

A recent article on the BBC, Children Should Be Allowed to Get Bored, pointed out that children, and adults for that matter, should be allowed to get bored to develop creative abilities and self-reliance, and that constant stimulation limits the use of their imagination.

I can't say anything about raising children, other than having been a children raised by my parents. I have only my experience (and a thankfully brief stint as an adoptive parent) to judge by.

Fear of the Outdoors

Two things come to mind. Most children in our developed world are largely indoor children, kept in isolation by fearful parents and school administrators, fed by daily doses of lurid headlines, violent TeeVee and movies, and a steady diet of cacophonic computer input. Compared to the snug safety of the confines of home, the unstructured, untrammeled out of doors has little appeal, other than as a venue for organized sports and the regrettable necessity of walking from the house to the car.

The Necessity of Technology

One thing I learned in college, studying something called "Instructional Technology," is that technology creates its own necessity. Technological applications are invented for problems that don't yet exist. Technology is developed, marketed, sold, and consumed without thought for, or even the ability to contemplate, the unintended consequences of its adoption and ubiquitous presence in society. Who'd have thunk that the 80 pound "car phones" in the doctors' cars in the 70s would morph into the tiny pink plastic devices glued to the ears of every nubile young girl in malls across America?

The ubiquitous presence of cell phones quickly led to smart phones, tablets and other mini-computers, iPods and who knows what other electronic distractions that have become the norm rather than a remarkable exception. Plugged-in is the preferred state of the human being in this day and age, child or adult.

Compared to this onslaught of electronic stimulation, soon to be upgraded with "virtual reality glasses," the natural world bears little appeal. Why even go to a natural area when you can "see" and "hear" it from the comfort and safety of the home or mall? Why care about the preservation of natural areas, when we can "experience" them electronically without muddy feet, bug bites and danger from homeless people in the bushes?

Everything is Entertainment

As a museum curator, I witnessed the transition of museum management from conservation, preservation and presentation to entertainment. Every new  technology had to be employed to entertain the children and relieve the children's parents from their responsibilities to the charges, if just for a brief few moments of respite. Museums are becoming theme parks, where visitors are plugged in to canned tour guides and explanations, rarely encouraged to explore and discover on their own, experiencing a mediated version of the already limited museum experience. A simulacrum of a simulacrum.

And so life has become a mediated experience of a world bounded by fear, ignorance and superstition. The Dark Ages have returned in the full glare of media exposure.

Has Global warming stopped or paused to catch its breath?

Continuing reports of a “global standstill” in average surface temperatures compare the flat temperature trend since 1998 with the continuing linear increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration, reducing the correlation between them and arguing that increasing CO2 does not cause increasing global average surface temperature. (http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/719139main_2012_GISTEMP_summary.pdf)

It has also been pointed out, sometimes in the same articles, that paleoclimate proxy records indicate that increasing global average surface temperature precedes increases in atmospheric CO2 concentration by 200 to 800 years, indicating, therefore, that increased temperature causes increased CO2 concentration, not the other way round. Oceanic temperature lag is proposed as the mechanism for this lag in ocean CO2 absorption/emission.

If both the above are true, that would mean that the observed rise in CO2 concentration is caused by global average temperature increases that occurred 200 to 800 years ago, not by the presently observed temperature increase. That would place the temperature increase that caused the present CO2 rise from ~1200 to ~1800 AD.

This would mean, then,  that the present increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration is the result of the continuing rebound from Little Ice Age temperatures at the end of the 16th Century, as global average surface temperature returns to the long-term normal average surface temperature of 15 degrees C. As average temperature approaches the long-term “normal,” we would expect a flattening of the rate of increase until a plateau is reached, all other influences remaining equal.

Natural Climate Variation
Holocene temperature fluctuations are the result of combinations of natural insolation cycles, overlain by much shorter cycles of multi-decadal oscillations and periods of varying volcanic activity. (See Akasofu, S., 2010, On the recovery from the Little Ice Age, Natural Science, Vol.2, No.11, 1211-1224)

This does not mean that anthropogenic CO2 does not affect climate variation, but it cannot be supported as the sole cause of observed climate variation in the historical record. Until we understand and quantify natural climate variation and its proximate causes, we cannot fully quantify the effects of anthropogenic CO2. However, if the above proposition is true, the contribution of anthropogenic CO2 to the atmosphere can have only a minimal effect on global average surface temperature, in the range of .5C per century or less. (Akasofu 2010)

This understanding of the causes of atmospheric CO2 increase undercuts the IPCC policy position on anthropogenic global warming, as well as the political and economic arguments for lowering anthropogenic CO2 emissions as a means of influencing observed climate variation. Under this scenario, reduction of fossil fuel use and the revival of a nuclear energy program will not reduce observed increases in global average surface temperature to any significant degree.

The Decline of Environmentalism
This growing realization of the nature of observed climate variation is already finding expression in popular press and is changing the rhetoric of the global warming debate. Unfortunately, the contentious debate between “deniers” and “alarmists” has poisoned the well of environmental activism and popular appreciation and understanding of science in general. It will be an uphill struggle to reestablish a public appreciation for the necessity of continuing work in pollution reduction, habitat preservation, energy conservation and renewable energy production. 

Ironically, it may well turn out that the recent unwarranted concentration on “global warming” has set back the cause and the course of working toward resilient societies that are better able to accommodate to a naturally variable climate.

Three Cheers for the Porcupine!

I've always admired the porcupine, Erethizon dorsatum, a prickly critter, with a prickly personality. They don't care much for the barbs and jabs of other critters, as they are so well supplied with their own. Mostly, they keep their quills to themselves, losing a few here and there to mark their path back to their favorite piney lunch tree. They make their slow plodding way through the forest, climbing a favorite meal when hungry. It's a pleasant life; admirable, puzzling in the sex department, but they manage somehow known mostly to themselves.

Unfortunately, porcupines are a frequent target of dogs, bears and truculent children who throw rocks and poke them with sticks just to see them squirm. Their slow waddling pace, myopic eyes and single-minded determination give a false impression of stupidity, but who else knows how to make a living by hoarding bacteria to digest cellulose.

Three cheers for the porcupine,

He has his quills and I have mine.

Come on Erethizon dorsatum,

Let's get up and at 'em!

Michael

San Lorenzo Valley Water District eyes cap-and-trade program

The Santa Cruz Sentinel printed this article today, as straight news, not even in the comics section. 

BOULDER CREEK -- Surveying will begin next month on about 1,600 acres of land in Boulder Creek, Zayante and Olympia to find out how much carbon those forests contain, with the San Lorenzo Valley Water District hoping to fetch a princely sum in the state's newly launched cap-and-trade program.

Earlier this month, the district's Board of Directors approved spending $45,000 on the "carbon sequestration" project, which will be headed by the Alameda-based forestry consulting firm Buena Vista Services. Work is expected to begin within the next 30 days, and "by the fall, we'll have the inventory number locked down," said Jim Mueller, district's general manager. 

That number will be certified by an independent third party, and soon after, the district will be able to enter the cap-and-trade auctions.
During a meeting to discuss the project several months ago, Joe McGuire, a principal with Buena Vista Services, estimated the district's lands contain up to 850,000 tons of carbon, and that those credits can be sold for a total of $550,000 during the next 12 years. 

Betsy Herbert, the district's environmental analyst, said the team will take samples from trees in different sites, and that data will then be crunched to get an estimate on how quickly the forests will grow during the next 12 years, she said. The study will be updated in 2025, and every 12 years thereafter, she said.

How much more absurd can this be? The forest is standing there, growing, breathing in CO2 and breathing out O2, as it has for centuries. Now some upstart snert in the water department can make money off it by selling "carbon credits," as if the Department was responsible for making the trees do their natural thing.

The other side of the story, not included here, is that someone, whoever is buying the "carbon credits," is buying the right to pollute.

This is why economics is a fantasy discipline. It has nothing to do with reality and everything to do with human audacity. Who would have thought of such a thing but an economist?

Chaining them to the ocean floor is too good for them.

Where Does Santa Cruz County End?

We all know where Santa Cruz County is. It’s all around us. Most of us live here.

The County starts somewhere north of Davenport, climbs the mountains to the northeast and wanders along Summit Drive. It crosses Highway 17 at The Summit, and skirts the edge of Loma Prieta. Fortunately, the County line is anchored in geography, not geology, so the 1989 earthquake didn’t knock it off track. The County makes a turn near Watsonville and heads back to the ocean in the main channel of the Pajaro River.

We don’t worry where the County is. We know when we are in it. There are signs on the roads that tell us when we’re leaving the County, and when we come back home.

But where is the Santa Cruz County boundary on the seaward side? At the cliffs looming over the beach? On the beach itself? The high tide line? The low tide line? Somewhere in between?

As it turns out, the boundaries of Santa Cruz County are carefully defined by the State of California, and enshrined in crisp black and white in California Government Code Section 23144.

Copyright 2003 Microsoft Corporation

According to the State of California, the County starts “at a point in the Pacific Ocean south 45 degrees W., three nautical miles from the intersection of the east line of Rancho Punta del Ano Nuevo with said ocean, forming the western corner.” At the opposite end, “westerly along said river [the Pajaro], on the northern line of San Benito and Monterey, to the Bay of Monterey, and three miles westerly into the ocean, forming the southwest corner; thence northwesterly along a course three nautical miles distant from the shore to the point of beginning.”

What this means is that Santa Cruz County ends, not at the beach, nor at any particular tide line, but three miles off-shore. This also means that jurisdiction for all County departments also extends three miles off-shore, covering the entirety of all beaches in the County.

Stand on the beach with your toes in the water on a clear day and look out to the open ocean. The horizon you see is three miles away. That’s the end of Santa Cruz County, where the sky meets the sea.

Beyond that edge, dragons lie.

Good economic news at last!

IMF: Global economic recovery 'weakening'

"Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell." Ed Abbey

There is no basis for continued economic growth in a world of finite resources. We have overtopped Peak Oil, and are sliding down the back slope of oil discovery and production. There will never be as much energy available as there is today.

This is as it should be. Humans are no privileged species with peremptory rights to all resources, as the expense of all other life.

It's time to take our place in the queue and camly wait our turn.

"There is no safe and responsible way to drill for oil and gas in the Arctic ocean."

Shell's plans in Arctic at risk as Obama advisers call for halt to oil exploration

"After several equipment failures and safety and environmental lapses, Shell's drilling plans now under review."

DRONENET The next BIG thing

DRONENET The next BIG thing. - Global Guerrillas

Here's another really bad idea, brought to you by technology maniacs who think anything humans can do should be done.

Image the air filled with hundreds of these buzzing drones, madly dashing hither and yon!

There is a limit to human intelligence, but human stupidity knows no bounds.

Starting the New Year... Right?

Oil ship runs aground in Alaska

Shell oil starts out the New Year... with a ship wreck!

Not an auspicious beginning for what everyone knows and no one admits will be a disaster-ridden effort in the world's largest technology-free zone. It's a difficult place just to survive, let alone deal with millions of gallons of toxic crude.

Did we learn nothing from the Exxon Valdez?

My Response to Wayne Lapierre:

My Response to Wayne Lapierre:

Mr. Lapierre:

I will not live in an armed camp so you and gun industry executives can make obscene profits from the blood of our dying children.

I am among many who are fed up with the NRA and the gun industry for supplying militarized weapons to criminally insane murderers. You can no longer hide behind the fiction of the 2nd Amendment.

There is no other truth than the fact that you and your minions make obscene amounts of money through the killing of innocent human beings throughout the world.

Stop it. Stop it now. We will no longer tolerate your corporate dominance of the government of the United States.

Drawing the Line on Gun Control

It’s pretty clear we’re at a watershed in our national debate about gun ownership. 

The majority of the people in the United States are fed up with seeing their children murdered in public places by deranged individuals using militarized firearms. Arms manufacturers, gun lobbyists and their Congressional lobbyees have discovered an unsuspected capability for silence.

Fundamentalist interpreters of the 2nd Amendment to the United States Constitution are forced to consider the possibility that Constitutionally guaranteed “right to bear arms” may not include the right to own semi-automatic weapons with large capacity magazines. The Constitution doesn’t specify what is meant by “arms,” just as it doesn’t define “a well organized militia.”

In the absence of Constitutional direction, Congress decided long ago that the right to bear arms does not mean the right to bear any sort of weapon manufactured by the global arms industry. Citizens of the United States already may not possess fully automatic weapons, explosives, bazookas, cannons, tanks, battleships, F-16s, nuclear weapons or B-1 bombers to deliver them. 

So the question or whether or not to have gun control is moot. Gun control is already on the books. The only thing left to discuss is the degree of gun control desired by the people. Where do we draw the line? 

As long as there are guns of any sort, deranged people will use guns to kill other people. Where do we find the risk balance in public ownership of guns between guns with legitimate civilian purpose and those that result primarily in public mayhem?

It must be noted that the children of Sandy Hook were murdered by guns that were legally and legitimately purchased on the open market. Would the outcome have been different if the only guns available to the murderer were single action, six shot revolvers and bolt action rifles? Perhaps not. Perhaps to a lesser degree. 

The possibilities must be weighed against the legitimacy of militarized weapons in the hands of the general public. Is there any overarching justification for the general public to possess semi-automatic firearms and extended capacity magazines? Can the desire for personal protection be equally served by less than semi-automatic weapons? 

Is there any reason why we cannot extend already existing gun control legislation to include all militarized weapons? 

Yearning for the Hypsithermal

Yearning for the Hypsithermal

Global warming’s bad they say,

For us and caribou, too.

Every dog shall have its day,

But the climate’s gone to pooh.

Singing: Hey nonny-nonny for the Hypsithermal,

That glorious age of heat,

When Africans swam in their own back yards,

And glaciers began to retreat.

Carbon dioxide is nasty old stuff

That humans leave lying about.

Unless you’re a tree, and breathe it with glee

Making O2 we can’t live without.

Singing: Hey nonny-nonny for the Hypsithermal,

The greatest age of the Holocene.

Life was jolly, trees were tall,

Every color was a shade of green.

It’s coming back, so the alarmists say,

But this time it’s gonna be bad.

Hotter than Hell, drier than sand,

The worst climate we’ve ever had.

Singing: Hey nonny-nonny for the Hypsithermal,

Paradise wouldn’t be so bad.

Warmer than glaciers, softer than ice.

The best climate we ever had.

Happy Birthday, Peter Kropotkin

December 9th is the 170th anniversary of the birth of Peter Kropotkin, who birthed the concept of mutual aid and anarchism.

I suspect modern tonsorial practices have much to do with the state of the world today, that and ties. The constant scraping of face and neck, the tiny hair bits breathed at the barber shop, the toxic chemicals used by the average barber have all contributed to the lowering the average IQ of the American male.

Ties obviously reduce blood flow to the brain. When men turned from the loosely gathered cravat to the modern four-in-hand neck ornament, somewhere around the American (un)Civil war, brain cells began a steady decline. Now we see the results. The loosening of morals, ignorance rampant on the streets and in the halls of power. 

Who needs ties? Let's decorate our necks with the natural feature that inalterably distinguishes the male of our species from the female: a blossoming beard in all its natural variety. Thus we refute militarized conformity, economic servitude and post-industrial ennui. 

On anarchism, socialism and things environmental

Any discussion of historical anarchism and socialism is interesting in itself, giving us some perspective on how we got here today. However, things are different today than in 1936 during the Spanish Civil War, government bureaucrats and politicians have learned much in the interim about how to mold public opinion, manufacture consent and manipulate election outcomes. The corporate oligarchy has strengthened and expanded it stranglehold on the public franchise.

The fact still remains that anarchism and socialism have no intrinsic environmental advantages over capitalism, totalitarianism and corporate oligarchy. The state capitalism of the late Soviet Union was far more destructive to wild lands than Chicago School free market capitalism exported by the United States, as badly as that turned out. It is not capitalism or socialism that is the problem, it is industrialism.

industrialism - an economic system built on large industries rather than on agriculture or craftsmanship

"Industrialism, whether of the capitalist or socialist coloration, is the basic tyrant of the modern age." Ed Abbey

"Our modern industrial economy takes a mountain covered with trees, lakes, running streams and transforms it into a mountain of junk, garbage, slime pits, and debris." Ed Abbey

Case in point: Here in Santa Cruz, on the Left Coast, the good coast, our City Fathers (and Mothers) have decided we don't have enough water to last through periods of drought. Their proposed solution is to build a $120+ million desalination plant, that requires 4 to 5 million dollars annual maintenance costs, and enormous energy consumption, whether it's used or not. They refuse to listen to the argument that we have outgrown our water supply, and therefore, an equally applicable solution is to stop growing, increase conservation and make do with what we have. Rather than deciding to step back from the edge of the precipice, turn around and walk forward, they've decided to pretend they can walk on air beyond the abyss.

Our task then is to prevent, by whatever means necessary, further degradation of the Earth's natural systems, and find a way to organize human societies such that we do not consume more resources than are naturally replenished, that we do not produce more wastes than can naturally be dispersed, and that allows us to exist within naturally occurring cycles of resource availability. 

"To The States, or any one of them, or any city of The States, Resist much, obey little;
Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved;
Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city, of this earth, ever afterward resumes its liberty." Walt Whitman 

"If America could be, once again, a nation of self-reliant farmers, craftsmen, hunters, ranchers, and artists, then the rich would have little power to dominate others. Neither to serve nor to rule: That was the American dream." Ed Abbey

"Be of good cheer, the military-industrial state will soon collapse. Meanwhile, we must do all in our power to oppose, resist, and subvert its desperate aggrandizements. As a matter of course. As a matter of honor." Ed Abbey

Solar Reality is Climate Reality

It is abundantly clear that recent observations of global average surface temperature increase are the result of complex interactions among a variety of factors influencing natural global climate variation.

The combination of periodic oscillation cycles of solar irradiance, solar magnetic flux, internal heliophysical solar cycles, cosmic ray intensity and solar system precession create regular fluctuations in global climate on all planets in the solar system. The coupled ocean/atmospheric system on Earth further complicates the interactions among these cycles, creating a chaotic complex adaptive system that results in perceived climate variation. (D’Aleo 2011 http://icecap.us/docs/change/OceanMultidecadalCyclesTemps.pdf)

The effect of human produced greenhouse gases on climate variation is minimal, amounting to 0.28% (28/100 of 1 percent) of the total atmospheric “greenhouse effect,” more accurately called radiative forcing. The largest contributor to atmospheric radiative forcing is natural water vapor, at 94.999% of the total greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. (Hieb 2007, http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html) 

Atmospheric concentration of water vapor is a function of atmospheric circulation driven by solar energy. 

"I can only see one element of the climate system capable of generating these fast, global changes, that is, changes in the tropical atmosphere leading to changes in the inventory of the earth's most powerful greenhouse gas-- water vapor." Dr. Wallace Broecker, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University, R. A. Daly Lecture, American Geophysical Union, May 1996.

What all this means is that proposed changes in human produced greenhouse gases would result in imperceptible changes in total overall climate variation.

The present world-wide focus on human produced greenhouse gases is a politically and economically motivated propaganda campaign to generate support for World Bank and United Nations “Sustainable Development” programs. The World Bank has produced an internally written document, “Turn Down the Heat,” purportedly, according to the World Bank’s own promotional press release, a “scientific report.”

“The world is barreling down a path to heat up by 4 degrees at the end of the century if the global community fails to act on climate change, triggering a cascade of cataclysmic changes that include extreme heat-waves, declining global food stocks and a sea-level rise affecting hundreds of millions of people, according to a new scientific report released today that was commissioned by the World Bank.” (http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/2012/11/18/new-report-examines-risks-of-degree-hotter-world-by-end-of-century)

However, the report was prepared by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, which states as its mission, “PIK addresses crucial scientific questions in the fields of global change, climate impacts and sustainable development,” (http://www.climateanalytics.org/) with help from Climate Analytics, which claims: “Our vision is to devise science-based policy to prevent dangerous climate change, enabling sustainable development.” (http://www.climateanalytics.org/)

Global Warming and climate change alarmism are promoted to the public by a vast interlinked system of global NGOs, “progressive” foundations, public relations firms and web-based advocacy groups. To “follow the money,” go to any web site promoting global warming and click on their “Who We Are,” “Funding” or “Partners” links. You’ll find yourself quickly immersed in a sea of interconnected links, from foundation to foundation to environmental group to NGO, populated by self-identified experts feeding at the global warming funding trough.

Proponents of human caused climate change claim that “climate skeptics” and “deniers” are a large, well-organized group, massively funded by oil companies, who sow seeds of doubt among the consensus of climate scientists who believe in anthropocentric global warming. (http://www.examiner.com/article/deceit-and-corporate-manipulation-of-the-dialogue-on-climate-change-redux)

The truth is exactly the opposite. The well organized and highly funded effort is the economic and political manipulation and misrepresentation of climate science to further global political and economic agendas.