click for original source

It’s a long weekend here in Canada. The sun in shining and my garden beckons. But here I am at my desk, catching up on the latest developments.

According to environmentalists, the climate debate is David against Goliath. They fancy themselves in the role of David and believe they’re losing ground because they’re up against a well-orchestrated, funded-by-the-fossil-fuel-industry campaign.

Anyone who thinks about this for three minutes knows it’s a foolish analysis. In the entire world there’s a grand total of one organization solely devoted to discussing climate change from a skeptic perspective: the UK’s Global Warming Policy Foundation. One. The last I heard its office was staffed by – drumroll, please – two people.

Yes, the Heartland Institute and other conservative US think tanks have played a role in this debate. But climate is a small part of what those groups do with their time and relatively meager budgets.

Compare that to the green side of the climate debate. I’ve mentioned previously that the David Suzuki Foundation has offices in four Canadian cities, including nearly 60 employees in Vancouver. I’ve also observed that the chairman of the board there isn’t a scientist but the head of a public relations firm.

I’ve noted that Greenpeace is now so lavishly funded it recently purchased a custom-built, £14 million ($22 million) yacht.

I’ve talked about how the World Wildlife Fund (WWF)

• has nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars at its disposal annually
• is active in more than 100 nations
• has offices everywhere you look, including 11 in Pakistan alone

In fact, the WWF is so stinking rich that last week we learned it has hired Clear, a strategy consultancy owned by M&C Saatchi, “to focus on developing its brand in Australia.”

M&C Saatchi is a global advertising agency. Its client list includes companies such as Hyundai, Coca-Cola, Porsche, and Reebok. Reporting on this development, an Austalian website quoted WWF employee Marni Ryan. Please note her title:

“Australians know who we are, but not always what we do,” said WWF National Manager of Brand, Marketing and Innovation’s Marni Ryan. “We want our brand in Australia to be known for the big initiatives in our own backyard and the region.” [bold added]

Like Coca-Cola and Reebok, the WWF knows it’s in the business of selling us something. Like those at Coca-Cola and Reebok, WWF employees spend time actively and consciously managing their “brand.”

I think I’ll go outside and dig some holes in the ground now. And chuckle at the fools who imagine, for one second, that people like me are playing the role of Goliath in the climate debate, that it’s people like me (getting by on book sales and the occasional, modest speaking honorarium) who have the money advantage.

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If you haven’t already, please buy my book. In my universe, every sale does matter :-)

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The United Arab Emirates (UAE) is not a democracy. Instead, seven hereditary rulers (of the seven emirates/territories) make all the political decisions.

It isn’t just women who are denied the vote in that country – men are, too. 84 different political parties were recognized by the Afghan government in 2012. At least 10 political parties participate at the national level in The Netherlands. In Poland, the number is 13.

But political parties are outright banned in the UAE. Not only can’t you vote, it’s against the law to join together with your fellow citizens to peacefully advocate for a different way of doing things.

Eleven weeks ago, Amnesty International issued an Urgent Action alert regarding dozens of people scheduled to be tried in that country despite having received minimal access to lawyers. Three days later, an Amnesty representative who’d planned to attend the trial as an observer was denied entry into the country.

According to Reporters Without Borders, while foreign journalists enjoy more freedom in the UAE than in other Persian Gulf countries, British and French publications have been banned for discussing not just sexuality, but the nation’s economic shortcomings.

Internet users can be imprisoned in the UAE for the crime of insulting “any religion recognised by the state.” Online journalists have been fined for “insulting” and “humiliating” the state-owned media company. Moreover, says Reporters Without Borders,

Several websites are blocked in [the capital city of] Dubai, particularly those dealing with human rights, prisons, the royal family and freedom of expression.

The wealth of the UAE and its dictator rulers rests on oil. According to environmental activists, the carbon dioxide emissions associated with recovering, refining, selling, and consuming oil are dooming our grandchildren.

So what on Earth are the anti-oil, holier-than-thou folks at the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) doing holding an event three days from now in the UAE?

The website for this TED-branded, WWF event advises us that:

As humans, we have no choice but to make changes to the way we live in order to keep our planet healthy.

In my view, basic human rights are a precondition to any serious discussion – or activism – regarding the state of the planet. But you can bet that none of the speakers at this event will be speaking truth to power in that regard.

Instead, a WWF press release tells us that Julie-Ann Odell will talk about “using music to connect to life’s rhythm,” that Lucy Orta is a “contemporary visual artist who tackles ecological and social factors through her artwork,” and that a third speaker, Luc Martin, is a sand artist.

How pathetic.

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click to see full document

Activist economist Mark Jaccard is currently in Europe portraying Canada’s oil sands as a climate criminal.

For years, this Simon Fraser University professor has erroneously been described by journalists, event organizers, and speakers’ bureaus as a Nobel laureate.

In actual fact, he is merely one of thousands of people who contributed to a bureaucratic, report-writing exercise by a 25-year-old UN body called the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

In 2007, that body shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore. This is a symbolic award. It is not a Nobel in science. It is not a Nobel in Jaccard’s own field – economics.

The IPCC has declared unequivocally that the Peace Prize was awarded to it as an organization. An IPCC statement says “it is incorrect to refer to any IPCC official, or scientist who worked on IPCC reports, as a Nobel laureate or Nobel Prize winner.”

Four days ago Jaccard wrote on his blog:

I have never spoken or written of myself as a Nobel laureate.

In November 2011, however, he submitted written testimony to a British Columbia Utilities Commission inquiry. Near the beginning of his 47-page document, he discussed his credentials. This is standard practice. It is intended to communicate one’s professional stature and accomplishments.

Jaccard listed many achievements of which he has a right to be proud. He also said this:

I have been honoured with the Nobel Peace Prize (2007) as an author with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change… [see page 4, numbered as page 2]

I did not have sex with that woman. I never said I was a Nobel laureate.

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Jaccard’s written testimony is backed up here
his blog post, containing his denial, is backed up here
not only is Jaccard against oil development, he opposes coal, too

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UPDATE: May 15, 2013 11:27 am:

Jaccard’s most recent Tweet links to this poster.

The EU “expert meeting” at which Jaccard spoke is billed as “an evening debate on EU regulation of tar sands as high carbon fuels.” But the three featured speakers sing from the same hymnbook (poster backed up here).

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see also:

Speakers Bureau Still Says Jaccard is a Nobel Laureate
Mark Jaccard, Counterfeit Nobel Laureate
The Activist Economist & the IPCC (Part 1)
The Activist Economist & the IPCC (Part 2)
A Few Crumbs of Pastry: More Nobel Nonsense
Slivers of the Nobel Pie
All for a Nobel Cause
The Uses and Abuses of a Nobel Prize

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click to see full document

Mark Jaccard is an economics professor at Simon Fraser University. A few days ago he told readers of his blog that an “anonymous person” has falsely accused him of claiming to be a Nobel laureate.

There’s nothing anonymous about my own accusations in this regard. I recently called him a counterfeit Nobel, and my concerns extend back a full year.

Jaccard insists: “I have never spoken or written of myself as a Nobel laureate.” According to him, he’s being subjected to “misinformation” and “misrepresentation” because he vigorously expresses his views.

When Jaccard deliberately got himself arrested last May by illegally interfering with coal trains, multiple media sources highlighted his fake Nobel status (see here, here, here, and here).

click for full story

Could that have had anything to do with the fact that he issued a statement beforehand, on the StopCoal.ca website, which includes a biographical paragraph that says he has “won the Nobel Peace Prize as a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change”?

Could it have had anything to do with the fact that this same statement was printed out and distributed to people such as journalists? (Readers new to this controversy may wish to consult this post.)

Jaccard says the source of all the confusion is really a two-month-old magazine article. He says the editors referred to him as a Nobel laureate

in connection to an article I wrote and this reference was apparently also in newspaper articles and in a press release that was not issued by me. I will work hard to prevent future occurrences, but cannot guarantee that people will not make this mistake in future. [bold added; link in original]

In other words, it’s someone else’s fault. Third parties, totally of their own accord, have been going around mistakenly describing him as a Nobel laureate. What’s a fella to do?

Colour me unconvinced. Jaccard’s bio at the National Speakers Bureau continues, to this day, to bear the following headline:

Nobel Peace-Prize Winner, Professor & Former CEO, British Columbia Utilities Commission [bold added, backed up here]

Notice that the Nobel claim comes first – before mention of the fact that he’s a professor, and before we learn that he once led a provincial regulatory agency. (If you look closely, you’ll find the word “Nobel” used twice more on that page.)

click for original source

The WayBack Machine over at Archive.org, tells us that this headline has been in place since at least November 2010.

Are we supposed to believe that Jaccard didn’t write – or sign off – on this description of himself when that webpage went live? Are we supposed to believe he’s never looked at it in more than two three years?

Is Jaccard not mortified that organizations seeking speakers (and willing to pay handsomely) continue to be falsely advised that he’s a Nobel winner? A listing over at MarketPlaceESpeakers.com bears the identical headline, by the way.

It’s great news that Jaccard says he’s now prepared to work hard to prevent future misunderstanding. After he arranges for the speakers bureau listings to be fixed, here are some other places in which the record needs to be corrected:

• a 2008 media release concerning a report authored by Jaccard – describing him as “a winner of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize”
• an official-looking website promoting an October 2009 speech that continues to tell the world he’s a “Nobel Peace Prize laureate.”
• a May 2012 CBC news story that describes him as “a Nobel Peace Prize winner” in its second paragraph
• a Sept. 2012 Vancouver Observor article that describes him a “Nobel Prize Laureate”
• an online listing that says “Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Mark Jaccard” will speak in October 2012 following a screening of the documentary film Chasing Ice
• a news item posted last month by Simon Fraser’s public affairs office that describes him as a “Nobel laureate” (backed up here)

And then there’s that trifling matter of the poster for a 2009 speech Jaccard gave at a public library. The one in which, totally against his will, he was falsely described as a “Nobel Laureate” in large letters.

It appears, in all its glory, at the top of this blog post – and is backed up here.

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see also:

Mark Jaccard, Counterfeit Nobel Laureate
The Activist Economist & the IPCC (Part 1)
The Activist Economist & the IPCC (Part 2)
A Few Crumbs of Pastry: More Nobel Nonsense
Slivers of the Nobel Pie
All for a Nobel Cause
The Uses and Abuses of a Nobel Prize

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click for original source – note the 3
highlighted-in-yellow appeals for donations

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says there were 280 molecules per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere back in 1750. The gradual rise in that number over the past 260 years is an important part of the global warming scare.

As of last week, there are now 400 molecules of CO2 per million in our atmosphere. This has sent Al Gore and others into a tizzy.

According to Gore, this event should cause us to “reflect on the fragility” of our “planetary ecosystem” – and inspire us to dedicate ourselves to “the task of saving our future.” (Alternative perspectives are available here, here, here, and here.)

But since practically everything that gentleman utters is melodramatic, this installment of the Drama Queen Files isn’t about Gore. The honour instead goes to Oceana, which describes itself as “the largest international organization focused solely on ocean conservation.”

Founded in 2001, Oceana is led by Andrew Sharpless, who “holds degrees from Harvard Law School, the London School of Economics, and Harvard College.” Last week, it issued a media release titled Oceana Reacts: Atmospheric CO2 Levels Surpass 400ppm.

Totaling a mere 250 words, it includes statements such as these:

• “This is a bad sign for our oceans and our society as a whole.”
• “the rate of change in ocean pH…is unprecedented in Earth’s history.”
• “Ocean acidification has already caused massive die-offs…”
• “we could see the next mass extinction in this century.”
• “a stark reminder…”
• “this historic CO2 milestone…”
• “fossil fuel companies, which perpetuate pollution…”

Any organization that can pack that much loaded language into two paragraphs deserves to be noticed.

400 is a number. Like the number 13 (or, in Asian cultures, the number four), we humans are free to invest it with all sorts of significance. But that’s called superstition.

The media release also glibly declares:

The oceans can be part of the solution if we develop offshore wind energy instead of offshore oil and gas.

I guess Oceana, which says it looks forward to a future in which “dolphin sightings are common” and “whales thrive,” hasn’t heard about the danger that wind farm noise poses to whales and porpoises.

Or that German banks have been banned from financing offshore wind farms because, as a “non-proven technology,” they’re considered too risky an investment.

Or that wind power is falling out of favour in ultra-green Germany because even slow learners have discovered that it’s an insanely costly way to generate electricity.

To quote a spokesperson for the Federation of German Consumer Organizations, offshore wind is:

the wrong road to go down, both economically and technologically speaking. It doesn’t make sense to support this technology, as it is too expensive.

Green groups often have lovely intentions. The problem is that they are on autopilot. They promote the same shallow-as-dishwater analysis over and over again:

• Fossil fuel companies are polluters – rather than sources of affordable, dependable energy who’ve made enormous investments in pollution reduction.
• Wind power is the answer – even though we’ve been hearing that since the 1970s and it still isn’t true.
• Everything happening now is unprecedented and historic – despite the huge gaps that remain in our understanding.

If you sincerely believed the planet was in mortal danger would you really be this intellectually lazy? Would you cling so stubbornly to such outmoded thinking?

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see also
The Drama Queen Files – Exhibit #1 – Greenpeace’s ‘Battle for Britain’
The Drama Queen Files – Exhibit #2 – The ‘Carbon Bomb’ Pipeline
The Drama Queen Files – Exhibit #3 – The ‘Outraged’ Sierra Club
The Drama Queen Files – Exhibit #4 – Earth Day, 1970
The Drama Queen Files – Exhibit #5 – Arctic Hunters ‘Gasping for Life’

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It turns out there’s an entire magazine aimed at sucking the joy out of parenthood. It’s called Green Child.

Apparently, we aren’t smart enough to teach kids to respect Mother Earth all on our own. We need a preachy periodical to show us the way. A periodical whose mission is to help us “raise a child the way nature intended.”

I find that statement astonishing. Allow me to explain.

Shortly after it appeared back in 1980, I read a book titled The Sceptical Feminist. It left an indelible imprint on my thinking.

For thousands of years, women were considered intellectually inferior to men. Our great-grandmothers were told that nature was responsible for this state of affairs, and that fighting for property or voting rights was therefore unnatural.

Shamefully, many feminists now employ similarly specious reasoning. For example, they believe women should get custody of the kids when a marriage breaks down because nature made the mother-child bond more intense than the father-child bond.

Rigorous thinking shining from every page, The Sceptical Feminist eviscerates this sort of shoddy analysis. In Radcliffe Richards’ view, equating what’s “natural” with virtue amounts to a cheap debating trick.

Chapter 2 is titled The Proper Place of Nature. Several pages in, Section 5 is headed: An Analysis of the Natural. Like a splash of cold water, it asks:

why should it be considered good to act naturally? The natural world contains quite as much evil as good.

Surely anyone who has spent an afternoon watching the Nature Channel has figured this out. Wild animals terrorize their prey before tearing it to pieces. Nature is vicious, cruel, heartless.

It is civilized human beings who believe that the weak, the sick, and the old deserve protection. Nature destroys those beings first. She cares not whether we suffer, whether we live or perish.

Getting to the heart of the matter, Radcliffe Richards challenges the “what nature intended” promoters to turn their backs on modern medicine. Dying in childbirth is perfectly natural. So is suffering brain damage due to infections such as syphilis.

In her words:

This sort of arguing from the natural is an unmitigated menace. If the people who use [these] arguments come to the right conclusions, it is entirely by accident and for the wrong reasons.

Amen to that.

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Today is Mother’s Day here in Canada. A female acquaintance has long argued that green initiatives aimed at altering people’s everyday behaviour are another manifestation of busybodies using maternal guilt to push their own agendas.

Breast milk rather than formula. Cloth diapers rather than disposable ones. Homemade baby food rather than the sort that comes in jars. Packaging your child’s school lunch in a washable plastic container rather than a disposal sandwich bag.

Far too many decisions that should be matters of personal choice have become emotionally-charged opportunities for strangers to boss parents around. My friend is especially resentful of people whose “green solutions” invariably  increase the amount of time the average mother spends on mind-numblingly boring tasks.

There’s a growing mountain of evidence, for example, that curbside, consumer recycling is close to pointless. In some respects, it’s actually worse for the environment. But every week millions of mothers sort (and, in the case of empty cans and jars, wash) their family’s refuse.

As if they had nothing better to do with that most non-renewable resource of all – their limited time on this Earth.

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Over at his RealScience blog, Steven Goddard has unearthed a fabulous news clipping from the 19th century.

131 years ago this month, an Australian newspaper (archived by the national library of that country) reprinted a story that had appeared in London’s St. James’s Gazette. The Gazette said it was informing its readers about “a timely note of warning” that had appeared in “one of the American papers.”

The concern back then involved the effect an expanding telegraph system might have on – you guessed it – the climate. The article says that if there were “sufficient electrical connection by wires around the earth” with the Earth itself, the planet’s polarity could be reversed.

The result would be a “sudden melting of the vast ice fields” followed by a “glacial flood” that would wipe out the human race. The article continues:

Of course, tremendous earthquakes would follow…Whether this theory prove [sic] correct or not, there cannot be a doubt that something has of late gone wrong with atmospherical arrangements, and perhaps the telegraph wires are not wholly blameless in the matter. [bold added]

Goddard asks a rhetorical question: “Would President Obama have banned telegraph lines to save the planet?”

I think it’s useful to pose a few others: Would green activists have protested telegraph lines in the same manner that they currently protest natural gas fracking and oil pipelines?

Would they have insisted that the risk was too high, that our children and grandchildren would condemn us for permitting so dangerous a technology as the telegraph to go forward?

It’s also worth observing that, back in 1881 (well before automobiles or airplanes), people were certain that something had “gone wrong” with the climate – and that we were the guilty party.

The more things change, the more we humans stay the same.

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A PDF of the news article, produced by the Australian National Library website, is available here.

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Magda Stoczkiewicz, director of the European chapter
of Friends of the Earth

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Feminine Mystique – the book credited with igniting the second wave of American feminism (the first wave involved the struggle for the vote).

Which means it’s an excellent time to raise an important question: Why are so few green groups led by women?

Environmentalists are prone to sanctimony. They claim to be building a more just and equitable world – a world superior to that old, hierarchical one.

click for source

Except that, if you examine green groups, you find pretty much the same old hierarchical structures – and the same shortcomings.

It’s men who are in charge of green organizations, while the word “assistant” still seems more likely to appear in a woman’s title.

Who’s the executive director of Greenpeace International? A gent named Kumi Naidoo.

Greenpeace USA? That would be Phil Radford.

Greenpeace Canada? Bruce Cox.

Greenpeace Australia Pacific? David Ritter.

Greenpeace UK? John Sauven.

Greenpeace Europe? Jorgo Riss.

Wait, I’ve found an exception. According to this news article, Brigitte Behrens is the chief executive director of Greenpeace in Germany.

I haven’t examined the executive personnel of every country in which Greenpeace operates (indeed, this info seems oddly difficult to obtain in many cases), but there’s a decided trend. At Greenpeace, men rule.

click for source

What about the largest, wealthiest, activist organization on the planet – the World Wildlife Fund (WWF)?

The director general of WWF International is Jim Leape. No woman has filled that post since the organization was founded in 1962.

The president and CEO of the WWF’s American arm is a man named Carter Roberts.

Until six months ago, the president and CEO of WWF Canada was Gerald Butts. His replacement has apparently not yet been hired.

The CEO of WWF Australia is Dermot O’Gorman and, in the UK, the WWF is led by David Nussbaum.

In June 2011, 13 WWF national leaders signed a letter addressed to the president of the European Union (an additional signature belonged to a Sweden-based director of a WWF programme in the Baltics).

Only three of those 13 national leaders (23 percent) were female:

• Magdalena Dul-Komosińska (Poland)
• Liisa Rohweder (Finland)
• and Hildegard Aichberger (Austria).

Since then, the latter has been succeeded by a gent named Gerald Steindlegger.

Poland, Finland, and Austria are not the beating heart of the green movement. Between them, these countries add up to only 52 million people. Yet these appear to be the only places in which women have managed to break through the WWF’s glass ceiling.

Let’s take a quick look at a few other organizations. The current executive director of the Sierra Club – which describes itself as “America’s oldest, biggest, and most influential grassroots environmental organization” is Michael Brune.

In Canada, the Sierra Club’s executive director is John Bennett.

Women appear to be better represented on the boards of directors of green organizations – a role that is distant from day-to-day operations. Concerned with philosophical leadership and oversight, an individual’s presence on a board is sometimes largely symbolic. But not always.

You can see all the presidents of the US Sierra Club here, stretching back to 1892. Of the 54 people who’ve filled that position, eight (15 percent) have been female – including Robin Mann, the current president.

That number, though, is perhaps unfair. If we start counting from 1964, a year after The Feminine Mystique burst onto the scene, there have been 29 Sierra Club presidents – seven of whom were women. That raises the female leadership count to 24 percent.

Across the pond, the international coordinator of Friends of the Earth (FOE), based in the Netherlands, is Dave Hirsch. In the UK, FOE’s executive director is Andy Atkins.

But don’t despair, there’s a bit more good news. My random, far-from-exhaustive Googling has succeeded in locating another green female leader.

Her name is Magda Stoczkiewicz and she is the director of the European chapter of FOE.

Let’s hear three cheers for Magda, Brigitte, Magdalena, Liisa, and Hildegard – inspiring pioneers in the male-dominated world of green activism.

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click to go to news story

According to a headline in the UK’s Independent newspaper, the ocean is turning to acid and the Arctic’s soaring CO2 leaves fish and hunters gasping for life. The subtitle tells us that “Greenhouse gases are making seawater toxic.”

Goodness gracious, with all that gasping going on it’s easy to miss the fact that the story itself is rather disappointing. Indeed, it contains a lot of fudge:

• “a report suggests“
• “potentially huge implications”
• “This could affect the livelihoods…”
• “The acidification could also put further pressure…”
• “‘This could have significant implications…”
• “communities are extremely worried…”
• “Ocean acidification is likely to affect…”

Let’s dial 911. People are worried about potential implications. Bad things could happen – a report suggests.

This article says the lead author of the report is a man named Richard Bellerby, who works for the Norwegian Institute for Water Research. But I can’t find it on the institute’s website. What I see, instead, is a “news article” written in-house, that says:

For three years the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP), a working group of  scientists appointed by the Arctic Council, have collaborated on the first comprehensive study of ocean acidification in the Arctic. The results are now ready, and it is evident that ocean acidification is an environmental factor in marine ecosystems.

The results from the AMAP working group are presented this week, at an international conference on arctic ocean acidification. Read more about the conference and the key findings (.pdf). [italics and links in original]

If you click that key findings link you’re taken to a two-page press release. It fails to mention whether the report underwent any sort of peer-review, and doesn’t even tell us how long it is.

At the bottom of the institute’s website there’s a “Reports” button and a “Publications” button. Neither of them are helpful, since the most recent entries are dated 2012.

Over at the BBC, Roger Harrabin includes a link – in his own news story on this report – to a four-page document titled Article Ocean Acidification Assessment: Key Findings.

Let us be clear: this is a brochure. The title page and the final page contain no relevant content. A significant percentage of the other two pages are devoted to colour photographs. The only thing this document does is list 10 “key findings.” There are no footnotes or citations. This is the furthest thing from a scientific report – it is, instead, a marketing tool.

Ladies and gentleman, we are looking at yet another case of science-by-press-release. These people haven’t provided any evidence. They haven’t shared their data openly so that we can make up our own minds about the quality of their analysis. We’re simply expected to trust them.

The institute and its employees seem to think that all they need do is issue a press release and design a slick brochure.

Sadly, they’re absolutely correct. That was all the Independent required before it told the world that hunters are gasping their last in the Arctic.

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see also
The Drama Queen Files – Exhibit #1 – Greenpeace’s ‘Battle for Britain’
The Drama Queen Files – Exhibit #2 – The ‘Carbon Bomb’ Pipeline
The Drama Queen Files – Exhibit #3 – The ‘Outraged’ Sierra Club
The Drama Queen Files – Exhibit #4 – Earth Day, 1970

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I recently received a press release from Terry Collins & Associates. This media relations company writes and distributes news releases about, among other things, “science research at the UN.”

As the author of an entire book about the scandalous state of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), I now have a good idea what the UN means when it talks about “science.”

What’s really going on is that UN bureaucrats hand-pick people with certain scientific credentials and, shall we say, certain political predispositions.

They present these people with an outline of what they should write about, tell them how many words they are allowed to say it in, and make it near impossible for them to stray beyond a tightly-controlled framework. No thinking outside the box or colouring outside the lines.

And then, voila! The UN claims the final report is the product of some of the world’s leading minds, representing nations all over the world.

Think I’m exaggerating? Check out my earlier post Cogs in the Climate Machine. As I explain there, the authors currently at work on a chapter of the IPCC’s upcoming report have no authority to change the word “systems” to “ecosystems” in that chapter’s title:

A change as minor as this one – involving only three letters – cannot be made without petitioning multiple layers of the IPCC’s bureaucracy.

But to get back to the press release that landed in my inbox. The online version can be seen here. It tells us that a gentleman at the International Institute for Sustainable Development is applauding a decision by the province of Ontario to continue funding for a project I’ve never heard of.

It’s called the Experimental Lakes Area and, according to the press release, it’s a source of “important science” and “a rare opportunity for research, perhaps unique in the world.”

A few days ago, journalist Mark Bonokoski expressed a different point-of-view. The subtitle of his column: For decades, scientists have taken pristine lakes and polluted the hell out of them – just to see what would happen.

It seems that our homegrown environmentalists – including Elizabeth May, the leader of Canada’s Green Party -  find themselves in an odd position. They appear to be aggressively championing a project that involves the deliberate despoiling of remote lakes.

I have no idea who’s interpretation is correct in this instance. But I can say this:

• I’m highly skeptical of press releases containing the term “sustainability”
• I don’t believe a word uttered by Green Party politicians
• “United Nations” and “science” don’t belong together

The process of writing my book has taught me that it is unwise to take the opinions of any “scientist” at face value. Scientists are merely people. They bring all kinds of baggage to the table – hidden assumptions, philosophical positions that blind them to alternative possibilities, and plain old self-interest.

In that regard, the New York Times recently ran a profile of Diederik Stapel, a disgraced Dutch professor who has confessed to making up research results out of thin air.

His fraudulent work was published in some of the world’s most prestigious journals. Indeed, he himself was a senior editor at one such journal.

Cathy Foley, president of Science and Technology Australia, is a fan of the peer-review process employed by academic journals. In a 2011 opinion piece, she urged us to trust what appears in these publications:

when scientists get it wrong, the self-correcting nature of the peer review process has allowed knowledge to be refined…Scientists have no harsher critics than other scientists…What we can do is respect the peer-reviewed science as the best information we have…

But the peer-review process failed to notice Stapel’s fraud. It wasn’t anyone associated with Science who blew the whistle on him. It was two of his own graduate students.

Supporting the idea that scientists are only people, that New York Times profile contains the following passage:

What the public didn’t realize, [Stapel] said, was that academic science, too, was becoming a business. “There are scarce resources, you need grants, you need money, there is competition,” he said. “Normal people go to the edge to get that money. Science is of course about discovery, about digging to discover the truth. But it is also communication, persuasion, marketing. I am a salesman. I am on the road. People are on the road with their talk. With the same talk. It’s like a circus.” He named two psychologists he admired…neither of whom has been accused of fraud. “They give a talk in Berlin, two days later they give the same talk in Amsterdam, then they go to London. They are traveling salesmen selling their story.” [bold added]

Today’s moral lesson: scientists aren’t holy men, pronouncing the gospel truth. They may, in fact, be closer to circus performers.

Just because some of them insist that the Experimental Lake Area is a sound and sensible project, therefore, doesn’t make it so.

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