Because what these murderers and madmen have said differs very little from what spokespersons for the United Nations, journalists for the “mainstream” media, and liberal politicians say about global warming. They are so similar, in fact, that a Web site has a quiz that asks if you can tell the difference between what Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, wrote in his “Manifesto” and what Al Gore wrote in his book, Earth in the Balance.

The point is that believing in global warming is not “mainstream,” smart, or sophisticated. In fact, it is just the opposite of those things. Still believing in man-made global warming – after all the scientific discoveries and revelations that point against this theory – is more than a little nutty. In fact, some really crazy people use it to justify immoral and frightening behavior.

The people who still believe in man-made global warming are mostly on the radical fringe of society. This is why the most prominent advocates of global warming aren’t scientists. They are murderers, tyrants, and madmen.

Well if they did that they've jumped the shark big time.

Fritz Vahrenholt, head of the renewable energy arm of RWE and a former hero of the German environmental movement, has been derided in Germany as a lobbyist for the fossil fuel sector after he published a book highly critical of the global warming consensus. But Vahrenholt's message is far from simplistic. He supports the idea of an "Energy Transformation", but argues that the current German approach is too costly and even counterproductive. Germany's renewable energy policies are undermining the country's biodiversity and destroying its forests, he says in an interview with EER. He is convinced that the contribution of CO2 to global warming is being exaggerated and that there is more time to come to genuinely sustainable solutions. "We run the risk of destroying the foundations of our prosperity."

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When your job is to produce renewable energy and when you are responsible for almost 1500 employees, what made you decide to write such a detailed book about the global warming debate?

This was directly related to my work. Every year RWE invests 1.2 billion euros in RWE Innogy. But in 2009 there was little wind in the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, Poland and our profits went down. During the annual meeting, Jürgen Großmann, the CEO of RWE, said to me: ‘I give you so much money, but you bring back too little, what’s going on?’ I said there is no wind. He said ‘come on, next year I don’t want to hear the same excuse’. But 2010 was again not very windy as was 2011. However, the climate models of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN body which coordinates international climate research, editor) said the rise of CO2 concentrations would lead to more wind in Northern Europe!I started looking in the scientific literature and found out the lack of wind had nothing to do with CO2 and global warming. In our region the weather is influenced by the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), a natural cycle with a period of about 60 years. For 30 years you have more wind in the winter, for 30 years less. And if there is less wind the winters are colder, like they were in 2009 and 2010. I published my findings in an op-ed in Die Welt in 2010. I was criticized by Stefan Rahmstorf, a well-known and influential German climate scientist. Sebastian Lüning then wrote in a reaction on Rahmstorf’s blog there was some merit in my analysis. I discovered that Lüning also worked for RWE and that we actually worked in the same building in Hamburg. We decided to team up and two years later we finished the book.

But you could have written a couple of op-eds, why a 450 page book in which you criticize mainstream climate science and the IPCC?

In Germany the Energiewende (energy transition) is mainly driven by fear of climate change. There is a generally accepted idea that global warming or climate change is the major environmental crisis facing us and that we have to act now. In my opinion this leads to hasty measures which cost the German economy many billions of euros. So when Sebastian and I realized we are being misinformed by the climate establishment, a book was the logical consequence.

Did you have indications that the dangers of global warming were overblown?

For years I believed the science of the IPCC was solid. I had the famous hockey stick graph (a graph purporting to show that current global temperatures are by far the highest in the last 1000 years, editor) in all my presentations. But then I read the book The Hockey Stick Illusion by Andrew Montford, which is very critical about this graph. Slowly I started to realize we have been misguided by the IPCC about the natural fluctuations in the climate in the past thousands of years. The whole purpose of the IPCC has been to get rid of the so-called Medieval Warm Period, a warm period around the year 1000 when the Vikings settled on Greenland and were able to live there for a couple of centuries. After this warm period we have had the Little Ice Age which coincided with a very quiet sun. Many papers have been published in the last few years which show that the Little Ice Age was not a local European phenomena, as the IPCC suggests. So yes, the IPCC has underestimated the natural fluctuations of the climate and overestimated the role of CO2.

You do not deny though that CO2 is a greenhouse gas and that it will generate warming. What is the main difference between your view and the generally accepted view that CO2 is currently the dominant climate factor?

The IPCC has made a couple of errors. The first is that they have diminished the influence of the sun to about five percent of the effect of CO2. So the IPCC is claiming that since the end of the Little Ice Age CO2 caused twenty times more warming than the sun. In this period the sun went from a very quiet to a
The fear for climate change is so big that the Germans are even sacrificing their forests
very active state. From 1950 to 2000 the sun was more active than it has been for probably a thousandyears. Now the IPCC mainly looks at sunspots and what is called total solar irradiation. But there is more, there is the strong magnetic field of the sun and there are probably mechanisms in the climate system that amplify fluctuations in solar activity. The amplifying mechanisms are still under investigation, but the IPCC ignores these in their climate models. We therefore think that the contribution of the sun is much larger and that it can explain around 50 percent of the warming we have had so far. This also means the effect of CO2 is smaller.

A second major issue is that temperatures have been on a plateau now for fifteen years. Yes it is warm, but it has not been getting warmer anymore. When we and other critics point this out we are criticized. Our critics say fifteen years is not enough to make judgments about the climate. However the climate models of the IPCC expected a warming of 0.2 degrees between 2000 and 2010 and another 0.2 degrees until 2020. So far this warming has not taken place. We can explain this, but the IPCC should come up with an explanation too. So far they haven’t done this. Worse, most people are not even aware that the climate hasn’t been warming for the past fifteen years.

Has the IPCC failed to provide us with a balanced assessment of the scientific literature?

In 2010 I was asked to review a special IPCC report on renewable energy. I noted many errors and in the end someone from Greenpeace edited a main part of the summary of the report. A Greenpeace scenario, claiming that in 2050 we can produce 80 percent of our energy with renewables was presented as one of the major conclusions. The approach was not very scientific and I started wondering how other IPCC reports were being made.

I found out that one third of the core writing team of the Summary for Policymakers in 2007 had connections with Greenpeace and WWF. Now I don’t claim this proves the report is false, but suppose that people found out that IPCC summary reports were written by people with connections to Exxon or Shell, would that be acceptable?

The IPCC is first of all a political organization. Most of the 31 members of the IPCC Secretary come from developing countries like Sudan, Madagascar, Iran or Cuba. These countries are mainly interested in having money transferred from the north to the south. From that perspective it is understandablethat they do not support the view that the sun is playing a major role in global warming.

In recent years there has been growing evidence that the effect of black carbon on the climate is much bigger than we thought, more than fifty percent of the effect of CO2. This is something that we can address relatively easy in a global program. However, black carbon is a problem of the south, of Africa and countries like China and India. So the UN will never address this as a main topic.

With the book you have made your own assessment of the literature and you have even made your own prediction of the future. What can we expect?

The IPCC has underestimated the influence of a natural 60 year cycle, which is dominated by the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation. The climate models cannot yet simulate these natural variations. So part of the recent warming was not caused by CO2. These oscillations now move from their warm to their cooler phase. And at the same time the sun is moving to an inactive phase. We therefore expect cooling to at least 2035 and maybe even 2050. But we do expect a modest warming from greenhouse gases in 2100, in the order of one degree Celsius. So the good news is that we can stay below the two degree target. The sun is giving us time to make sensible decisions about the energy transition.

The Heartlands bill boards were being pulled at 7.00 AM EST today and so they should be!

WUWT; From Joe Bast via email:

We will stop running it at 4:00 p.m. CST today. (It’s a digital billboard, so a simple phone call is all it takes.)

Interesting article in The Australian today - makes alot of sense as well - "Adam Creighton's article reports that the head of the federal Department of Climate Change will be paid $700,000 a year in 2014 and that there are 118 people on more than $280,000 a year in the Department of Sustainability and Environment and the Department of Climate Change. No wonder they and their supporters are quick to try and discredit anyone who questions the global warming science and the money they are wasting. The global warming business is a nice little earner and they don't want anyone to get in the way".

I’m not sure cognitive dissonance describes The Australian’s approach to reporting on this. It’s borders on the pathological:

The Australian in 2011: Scientists receive death threats

The Australian in 2012: No they don’t…

If it was at all possible for corporations to develop Alzheimer’s disease, then The Australian qualifies as the first known example.