UN agencies, especially the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) and its offspring the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), were orchestrated to achieve the goal of convincing public and policy makers that warming and climate change were a human created disaster. Manipulation of the process was first publicly exposed in the Chapter 8 issue (here). Sadly, it was just the first of several that established the pattern of IPCC behavior.

It was not the first time the unsupportable claim that humans were causing global warming had made the news. A major incident occurred in 1988 when James Hansen, Director of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS), appeared before Senator Al Gore’s committee and said he was “99 percent” certain the Earth had warmed.

Back in August 1973, a biologist found a humble fish called the snail darter (pictured) in the Little Tennessee River. At the time, it was believed that this species would be pushed to extinction if the Tennessee Valley Authority finished its Tellico Dam.

The snail darter became a celebrity, as environmentalists used the Endangered Species Act to halt the project. It took six years and an act of Congress to complete the dam.

Since then, the snail darter has been the poster child of endangered species litigation. The fish, which subsequently was found in other Tennessee waters, established the conventional wisdom about the interaction between endangered species and development. The pattern is familiar. Someone discovers a rare species in a local area. It is declared endangered, and then local projects are blocked.

Do today’s soaring food prices and Third World food riots mean we’re headed for global famine?

Not any time soon—if we suspend the biofuels mandates quickly. Unfortunately, if we keep burning corn, wheat, and palm oil in our vehicles, there’s no limit to the hunger, malnutrition, wildlife extinction and political disruption we can cause.

The problem is simple: Food demand is inelastic. People need about the same number of calories whether they’re expensive or cheap. But the demand for biofuels is almost without limit. An acre of corn produces only 50 gallons worth of gasoline per acre, while humans worldwide burn more than a trillion gallons of gasoline per year.

Thursday is the deadline set by a federal judge in Alaska for the Fish and Wildlife Service to decide whether the polar bear is a threatened or endangered species.

All the evidence shows the polar bear doesn’t need his help.

Environmental groups petitioned for such a listing and sued when a decision was not forthcoming by the deadline. They claimed that global warming had already diminished polar ice, would continue to do so and doom the estimated 23,000 or so bears to extinction by perhaps 2050.

You've probably seen those phone-message forms with check boxes in ascending order of urgency from "FYI—no need to return call" all the way up to "the future of civilization hangs in the balance." We might see that last category as light-hearted exaggeration, but it's no laughing matter to McKibben. In his jeremiad in today's LA Times literally entitled "Civilization's last chance," McKibben solemnly declares that "the world looks a little terminal right now" and "it isn't morning in America, it's dusk on planet Earth." OK. Just so long as it's nothing serious.

Never mind that in 2006 it was reported that levels of the second most important greenhouse gas, methane, have stabilized.

Scientists are now working to create a new “tootless” grass for bovine enjoyment which will help cut methane emissions from the bovine tailpipes. What next? A moratorium on baked beans at BBQs?

According to the Scientific American article: “During the two decades of measurements, methane underwent double-digit growth as a constituent of our atmosphere, rising from 1,520 parts per billion by volume (ppbv) in 1978 to 1,767 ppbv in 1998. But the most recent measurements have revealed that methane levels are barely rising anymore — and it is unclear why.”

From NewScientist: “Although this is good news, it does not mean that methane levels will not rise again, and that carbon dioxide remains the 800-pound gorilla of climate change.”

It must be nice to be on Old Media's "free pass" list.

For years, Apple Computer has been on that list (disclosure: yours truly is a 23-year Mac user). Apple has been the cool, innovative tech darling, the noble foil of big, bad monopolist Microsoft.

Another free-pass beneficiary is Al Gore, who sits on Apple's Board of Directors.

Wait until you see what ClimateCounts.org thinks of Apple's record on "fighting global warming," especially in comparison to its industry peers (HT InfoWorld via Kevin at Pundit Review):

(h/t to Sharon) B.C. [British Columbia] is about to be hit with new taxes to achieve the government’s greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction goal of 33% below current levels by 2020. But the BC Liberals were elected to reduce taxes and burdensome regulations, not increase them.

So just how did the premier come up with this goal and what is the outlook for B.C.?

While in Hawaii for his Christmas 2006 vacation, the premier is said to have read a couple of books on catastrophic climate change, including Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. Tellingly, the British High Court ruled showing the movie version of that book, and misleading students into believing it accurately represented climate science, was in violation of the political indoctrination section of the country’s Education Act. The experience in Europe goes beyond propaganda, however. The experience in Europe is one of job losses with little, if any, GHG reduction.

The Real Climate guys have offered odds on future temperature changes, which is great because it gives us a sense of their confidence in predictions of future global average temperatures. Unfortunately, RCs foray into laying odds is not as useful as it might be.

The motivation for this bet is the recent Keenlyside et al. paper that has caused a set of mixed reactions among the commenters in the blogosphere. Some commenters here have stridently argued that the predictions in the Keelyside et al. paper are perfectly consistent with predictions of climate models in the IPCC. However, when one such commenter here was asked to show a single IPCC climate model run showing no temperature increase for the 2 decades following the late 1990s he submitted an irrelevant link and disappeared. Others have argued that the Keenlyside et al. projections (and this includes Keenlyside) are inconsistent with the IPCC predictions. Real Climate apparently falls into this latter camp.

Students at a California public school have written a series of letters to Chicago's Heartland Institute, which works to discover and develop free-market solutions to society's problems, attacking its members for "destroying our planet" by refusing to endorse the politics of Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" film.

According to students in the sixth-grade class of teacher Michael Steria at David A. Brown Middle School, the institute consists of "fools" and "horrible people."

"I think your (sic) fools for denying G.W. you know it could kill us all & you're just adding to it. I want you to help stop G.W. not increase it," said one letter.

"We are going to tell you about global warming. I don't care if you don't want to read, but I'm making you read it you horrible people," said another.