RICO NEEDED TO SILENCE DENIERS
Environmental activists thought they had found a new weapon to use in their battle with global warming realists: the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), a law enacted by Congress in 1978 to battle the mafia. Environmentalists had hoped to use RICO to criminalize any exercise of free speech that was critical of their extreme views on climate change.
Rico Act 1978 Image Watts Up with that
The Left Exposed reported On September 1, 2015, that Jadadish Shukla, whose group the Institute of General Environment and Society (IGES), are alleged to have received up to $81.3 million in Federal funding. Under the guise of (IGES), and one of several groups, had issued a letter to the Attorney General and President along with 20 additional signatories, calling for a Federal investigation into possible “racketeering” and collaboration among entities questioning the science behind “climate change.”
Dear President Obama, Attorney General Lynch, and OSTP Director Holdren,
“As you know, an overwhelming majority of climate scientists are convinced about the potentially adverse effects of human-induced climate change on human health, agriculture, and biodiversity”.
Shukla Wanted RICO
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John Holdren OSTP
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“We applaud your efforts to regulate emissions and the other steps you are taking. Nonetheless, as climate scientists we are exceedingly concerned that America’s response to climate change – indeed, the world’s response to climate change – is insufficient. The risks posed by climate change, including increasing extreme weather events, rising sea levels, and increasing ocean acidity – and potential strategies for addressing them – are detailed in the Third National Climate Assessment (2014), Climate Change Impacts in the United States. The stability of the Earth’s climate over the past ten thousand years contributed to the growth of agriculture and therefore, a thriving human civilization. We are now at high risk of seriously destabilizing the Earth’s climate and irreparably harming people around the world, especially the world’s poorest people”.
Jail For Deniers
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“We appreciate that you are making aggressive and imaginative use of the limited tools available to you in the face of a recalcitrant Congress. One additional tool – recently proposed by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse – is a RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) investigation of corporations and other organizations that have knowingly deceived the American people about the risks of climate change, as a means to forestall America’s response to climate change. The actions of these organizations have been extensively documented in peer reviewed academic research (Brulle, 2013) and in recent books including: Doubt is their Product (Michaels, 2008), Climate Cover-Up (Hoggan & Littlemore, 2009), Merchants of Doubt (Oreskes & Conway, 2010), The Climate War (Pooley, 2010), and in The Climate Deception Dossiers (Union of Concerned Scientists, 2015). We strongly endorse Senator Whitehouse’s call for a RICO investigation”.
“The methods of these organizations are quite similar to those used earlier by the tobacco industry. A RICO investigation (1999 to 2006) played an important role in stopping the tobacco industry from continuing to deceive the American people about the dangers of smoking. If corporations in the fossil fuel industry and their supporters are guilty of the misdeeds that have been documented in books and journal articles, it is imperative that these misdeeds be stopped as soon as possible so that America and the world can get on with the critically important business of finding effective ways to restabilize the Earth’s climate, before even more lasting damage is done”…..Signed by Shukla and 19 others 2015
George Mason University Professor Jagadish is a leader author with the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and winner of numerous awards including the International Meteorological Organization Prize, the Rossby Medal of the American Meteorological Society, and the Padma Shri National Award from the President of India. He is currently president of the Institute of Global Environment and Society and a professor of Climate Dynamics.
Shukla and his comrades … accused fossil fuel companies of hiding climate risks from the American people, an impossible offense given the billions in annual government, pressure group, and media spending on climate advocacy. Yet, they refuse to acknowledge that their agenda, which would put an energy-starved world on an energy diet, poses serious risks to the world’s people, especially the poorest of the poor. By hiding climate policy risk, Shukla and his allies had deceived the American people. By his own logic, he should be the target of a RICO investigation.
A House committee wants to know more about the relationship between taxpayer money received by the academics and their urging of President Obama to use federal racketeering law to go after businesses and other groups that oppose his aggressive agenda against climate change.
Shukla, 71, is the founder and president of the Rockville, Md.-based Institute of Global Environment and Society, a nonprofit that received $63 million in taxpayer funds since 2001, according to financial data compiled by the Washington Free Beacon. A copy of Shukla’s letter to Obama has been taken from the institute’s Web site.
The $63 million accounts for over 98 percent of his environmental institute’s revenue in that time. By double-dipping between his university salary and his nonprofit, critics say, Shukla appears to have violated George Mason University’s conflict of interest stipulations and rules that federal grant recipients who work for universities are expected to observe.
John Costella Lavoisier Group
“The Climategate emails expose to our view a world that was previously hidden from virtually everyone. This formerly hidden world was made up of a very few players. But they controlled those critical Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) processes involving the temperature records from the past, and the official interpretation of current temperature data. They exerted previously unrecognized influence on the “peer review” process for papers seeking publication in the officially recognised climate science literature from which the IPCC was supposed to rely exclusively in order to draw its conclusions”.
“The IPCC was established by the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Panel (UNEP) in 1988. From the very beginning its brief was to report on mankind’s influence on climate change”.
17 Comments
With so much money being directed into proving man’s contribution to Climate Change over the last thirty years or so you would think we’d have it cut and dried by now. The IPCC have indicated that it is extremely likely that humans are responsible for more than 50% of the global warming since 1950. The scientific consensus around climate change largely rests on basic physics, which has been well understood for more than a century applicable to a very narrow claim about the discernible human impact on Global Warming/Climate Change but he minute you get into discussion about the rate and the severity of future impacts or the costs of and the best ways of addressing them, no semblance of consensus remains.
Introducing the RICO to punish climate skeptics would be huge blow against free speech.
Michael Mann the author of the Hockey Stick, that Gore and the IPCC have relied upon to prove that current warming was unprecedented, told the Congressional hearing he had no association or affiliation with the Climate Accountability Institute (one of the numerous ad hoc organisations formed in order to give the harassment of climate sceptics an air of scientific credibility).
Yet according to his CV he sits on the Climate Accountability Institute’s advisory board and has done since 2014.
Porkie Number Two
Mann denied having called his fellow climate scientist and special witness, former Georgia Tech Judith Curry, a “denier”.
“A number of statements have been attributed to me. I don’t believe I’ve called anybody a denier,” he solemnly told the hearing.
To which Judith Curry, sitting next to him, replied: “It’s in your written testimony. Go read it again.”
Why do politicians refer to carbon dioxide as a “carbon pollutant” when it is an essential trace gas that takes up 0.4% of our atmosphere? It is an entirely different thing because if it was carbon you would hardly see much because it would be black all around. And why do they show photos of power stations insinuating that what comes out of the huge concrete structures is white smoke when it is actually just steam?.
Carbon Dioxide is a plant food vital for the growing of our crops and the grazing areas for our animals that we slaughter to feed our burgeoning population. Also for our forests, a renewable energy source, that we need for the building of our homes etc..
There has been very little increase in world temperatures since the beginning of the 20th century …scarcely 1 degree C in 117 years….remarkable!
What is the optimum earth temperature for humans?…. we will never know. The vikings survived okay when they farmed in Greenland during the medieval warming period when carbon dioxide and temperature levels were much higher than they are today.
When you ask to what degree is man responsible for the small amount of current warming you can’t get a straight answer. ..little wonder when you find that none of the catastrophic predictions the experts have made have not materialised.
We cannot deny the world has gradually warmed albeit in fits and starts. For example, the average annual global warming since the late 1800’s was around 13.9 degrees Celsius. In 2017, claimed as the warmest year ever, it was 14.74 C, 0.84 C above the 1900 average. However most of the warming has occurred since 1940 when the annual average was 14.04 C … an increase of 0.70 C over a period of 77 years. Before you starting claiming victory for the deniers, the world cooled down and did not reach the 1940 world temperature level again until 1987 when the temperature shot up to 14.12 C, so in the thirty year period till 2017 the world temperature increased by a wopping 0.62 C equating to a rate of 0.020 C per year. However, I have difficulty with the notion that carbon dioxide is connected to global warming after a period of below averge temperatures, even cooling, between 1940 and 1987 when there would have been a surge in CO2 emissions due to a massive increase in industrial activity.
Evidence from the geologic record in carbonate rock indicates an abundance of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. The geologic record tells a story in which continents removed the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide from an early atmosphere that may have been as hot as 70 degrees Celsius (158 F). At this time the Earth was mostly ocean. It was too hot to have any polar ice caps.
Carbonate rock may indicate a higher presence of carbon dioxide in the past but it does not tell us when with any accuracy.
One Hundred years of world temperature history, much of it from early readings taken from sparsely located weather stations, is not a reliable sample from which to make any prediction about future climate. One hundred years is not even a split second in the celestial time clock. Scientists now seem to be treating global warming as a political “cause” rather than a balanced scientific inquiry with many now admitting privately that the science is weak and dependent on a deliberate manipulation of facts and data (modelling).
The very same experts who had written to President Nixon in 1972 warning of a the coming Ice Age, due to natural causes, were to switch to man made global warming ten years later!
Mr. President:
“Aware of your deep concern with the future of the world, we feel obliged to inform you on the results of the scientific conference held here recently. The conference dealt with the past and future changes of climate and was attended by 42 top American and European investigators. We enclose the summary report published in Science and further publications are forthcoming in Quaternary Research”.
“The main conclusion of the meeting was that a global deterioration of climate, by order of magnitude larger than any hitherto experience by civilized mankind, is a very real possibility and indeed may be due very soon.
The cooling has natural cause and falls within the rank of processes which produced the last ice age. This is a surprising result based largely on recent studies of deep sea sediments”. etc.. etc..
Restricting access to fossil fuels has very negative effects on the well being of the people around the world. It condemns over four Billion people in still undeveloped countries to continued poverty.
And what is the purpose of restricting carbon dioxide emissions that have nothing to do with climate change except that it is a gas vital to the growing of crops to feed the world’s population? If these crooks want to make the world better they can start cleaning up the oceans and addressing overpopulation. How gullible has the U.S. been to throw trillions of dollars up in the air by funding such a ridiculous science.
The IPCC was formed back in approximately 1988 with a brief to assess the extent of global warming due to human activity. A decade earlier the same scientists, Holdren and Ehrlich, had warned of the coming Ice Age. Not only were they able to “prove” the connection, despite a 40 year period of stable world temperatures, a period in which carbon emissions had increased spectacularly, but had shown through Michael Mann’s controversial Hockey Stick, (invalidated by the National Research Council and the National Academy of Science), that the current warming was unprecedented. This required the IPCC to remove the Medieval Warming Period and the Little Ice Age from their previous assessment reports. F. Gibbs
I don’t think anyone is denying that the world has been warming since the Little Ice Age. Apparently a denier is a person who believes that the majority of warming is natural and man’s contribution is minimal. It seems so unfair because even the scientists don’t know..
It appears the people running the show will do anything, even lie to make a quid. Michael Mann looks to be an example of that after he misled the house committee. If these bludgers who continue support him were sincere they would be pursuing legitimate causes like creating a watchdog to address the starvation and poverty in third world countries and how we can remove the plastics from the ocean. The Democrats and Republicans have got to stop farting around with a non problem and get their priorities right. The world is watching.
I can’t find anything in the climate data that would support the claim that carbon dioxide is the cause of global warming.
I have never witnessed a more disturbing corruption of the peer review process that has led to the IPCC reports. They started all this before the digital revolution had begun where recorded material contrary to the current narrative could not be accessed by the public, that’s why now, with all the information out there for all to see, the whole climate fraud is now being exposed.
Climate change policy is caught in a stalemate between those who fear the environmental consequences of not doing enough and those who fear the economic consequences of overreacting. But controversy over the extent and sources of climate change need not stand in the way of a positive economic policy response. “We could break the stalemate, Ross McKitrick says, if we tie a carbon tax directly to global temperature. Those who discount the likelihood of rising temperatures would expect a low carbon tax in the future, and would not worry about excessive costs associated with too strict environmental policy. Those who fear the rise of global temperatures, and its consequences, would expect the carbon tax to rise, and would not worry about loose environmental policy. Since both camps would expect to get the policy they want, this approach would end the climate-change stalemate”.
It would create a greater focus and scrutiny to help remove any bias in the measuring/modelling of global temperatures. No one is going pay tax on dodgy data.
Any plan that would allow the climate data to be examined outside the inner circle of scientists, who now approve their own data for adoption by the IPCC, would be welcomed. The proceeds of the temperature tax could then be directed towards removing the plastics from our oceans and addressing the problem of the world’s overpopulation.
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
The Climate of 1997
Annual Global Temperature Index
The global average temperature of 62.45 degrees Fahrenheit (16.92 degrees Celsius) for 1997 was the warmest year on record, surpassing the previous record set in 1995 by 0.15 degrees Fahrenheit. (62.30 degrees Fahrenheit ..16.83 C) which means all previous data must have been incorrect.
The chart reflects variations from the 30-year average) of the combined land and sea surface temperatures. The average temperature in 2017 was approximately 14.74 degrees Celsius or 58.53 Fahrenheit which would indicate the world has cooled by more than four degrees Fahrenheit or nearly two degrees Celsius. Obviously their method of temperature measuring was flawed.
But it raises serious questions about whether scientists understand Earth’s changing climate as well as they think they do, and whether it’s worth spending trillions of dollars to try to influence it when they keep making mistakes
Climate-of-1997-Annual-Global-Temperature-Index
This is significant because it calls into question all the temperature readings before 1997. The say also that 1996 was only .15 degrees cooler so they were using the same method of warming then as well. They had to leave it there much to their embarrassment.
Excerpt from the Ian Plimer’s book The Climate Change Delusion and The Great Electricity Ripoff. How did (Australia) one of the worlds largest exporters of coal, gas and uranium end up with unreliable and expensive energy? Massive subsidies for renewable energy, gaming of the electricity market and government mandates have closed coal-fired generators that previously provided cheap reliable electricity. Five hundred years ago, Martin Luther objected to indulgences. Today indulgences are sought as subsidies from consumers for renewable energy generators in the name of the environmental religion.It has never been shown that human emissions of carbon dioxide drive global warming and the recent massive increases in emissions have produced no warming.