Copenhagen Climate Treaty & Climategate

Kyoto Protocol Fraud: Watchdog Group Unearths Carbon Trading Scam

Carbon trading can lead to smoke and mirrors

June 14, 2010

Take Part - According to an industry watchdog, some companies participating in a Kyoto Protocol carbon trading system are falsely inflating their greenhouse gas emissions.

Countries that committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions under the Kyoto Protocol must do so primarily through national measures.

As a way to help signatories meet designated targets, Kyoto introduced three market-based mechanisms—Emissions Trading, Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), and Joint Implementation—in effect creating a carbon market.

The CDM market alone was worth $2.7 billion in 2009.

With such huge amounts of money at play, it's no wonder industry watchdog group CDM Watch—according to Reuters UK—found “that chemical plants that destroy a potent gas called hydrofluorocarbon-23 (HFC-23), may have inflated their emissions in order to destroy them and sell more offsets.”

"Analysis of monitoring data from all registered HFC-23 destruction projects revealed that plants are intentionally operated in a manner to maximize the production of CERs [Certified Emission Reductions]," CDM Watch said in a statement. "Because of the extra revenue ... far more HFC-23 is generated than would occur without the CDM."

"It's completely unacceptable for the U.N. to keep issuing an inflated number of bogus credits that create vast profits for carbon trading groups and chemical companies,” said CDM Watch director Eva Filzmoser.

According to Reuters UK:

CDM Watch said it made an official submission calling for new Certified Emission Reductions (CERs) handed to HFC projects to be discounted by over 90 percent, and for projects up for renewal to be reviewed at a panel meeting.

If approved, the revision could drastically alter the 2,236-project strong CDM, which to date has been ruled by the credits of 19 HFC projects, mainly in China and India.

The IPCC Consensus on Climate Change was Phoney, says IPCC Insider

A group of politicians inextricably linked to banking and big business who've never cared about anything but power throughout history, put forward a theory of environmental catastrophe with ZERO evidence from which they will make trillions at the expense of world populations. The Government quotes the findings of a group of scientists, who depend on the government for funding and grants, and who have been proven to be manipulating and hiding data to fit the pro-AGW agenda. The Earth has been warming steadily since the Maunder minimum 300 years ago, well before humans had industry. The late twentieth century gradient (1970s to 2001) has been repeated many times in the past even before the 20th century, and it's cooled for the past 8 years! The mediaeval period was hotter than today! Ice coverage is normal, sea levels have been rising at the same rate for thousands of years. Polar bears are in record numbers, sea temperatures have not increased......it goes on and on...... - Comment by Sabretruthtiger, June 16, 2010

June 13, 2010

National Post - The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change misled the press and public into believing that thousands of scientists backed its claims on manmade global warming, according to Mike Hulme, a prominent climate scientist and IPCC insider. The actual number of scientists who backed that claim was “only a few dozen experts,” he states in a paper for Progress in Physical Geography, co-authored with student Martin Mahony.

“Claims such as ‘2,500 of the world’s leading scientists have reached a consensus that human activities are having a significant influence on the climate’ are disingenuous,” the paper states unambiguously, adding that they rendered “the IPCC vulnerable to outside criticism.”

Hulme, Professor of Climate Change in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia – the university of Climategate fame — is the founding Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and one of the UK’s most prominent climate scientists. Among his many roles in the climate change establishment, Hulme was the IPCC’s co-ordinating Lead Author for its chapter on ‘Climate scenario development’ for its Third Assessment Report and a contributing author of several other chapters.

Hulme’s depiction of IPCC’s exaggeration of the number of scientists who backed its claim about man-made climate change can be found on pages 10 and 11 of his paper, found here.

Q&A With Professor Phil Jones (Excerpt)

February 13, 2010

BBC - Phil Jones is director of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA), which has been at the centre of the row over hacked e-mails.

The BBC's environment analyst Roger Harrabin put questions to Professor Jones, including several gathered from climate sceptics. The questions were put to Professor Jones with the co-operation of UEA's press office.

Do you agree that according to the global temperature record used by the IPCC, the rates of global warming from 1860-1880, 1910-1940 and 1975-1998 were identical?

... the warming rates for all 4 periods are similar and not statistically significantly different from each other.

Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming

Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods.

Do you agree that from January 2002 to the present there has been statistically significant global cooling?

No. This period is even shorter than 1995-2009. The trend this time is negative (-0.12C per decade), but this trend is not statistically significant.

Do you agree that natural influences could have contributed significantly to the global warming observed from 1975-1998, and, if so, please could you specify each natural influence and express its radiative forcing over the period in Watts per square metre.

This area is slightly outside my area of expertise. When considering changes over this period we need to consider all possible factors (so human and natural influences as well as natural internal variability of the climate system). Natural influences (from volcanoes and the Sun) over this period could have contributed to the change over this period. Volcanic influences from the two large eruptions (El Chichon in 1982 and Pinatubo in 1991) would exert a negative influence. Solar influence was about flat over this period. Combining only these two natural influences, therefore, we might have expected some cooling over this period.

How confident are you that warming has taken place and that humans are mainly responsible?

I'm 100% confident that the climate has warmed. As to the second question, I would go along with IPCC Chapter 9 -- there's evidence that most of the warming since the 1950s is due to human activity.

If you agree that there were similar periods of warming since 1850 to the current period, and that the MWP is under debate, what factors convince you that recent warming has been largely man-made?

The fact that we can't explain the warming from the 1950s by solar and volcanic forcing.

Would it be reasonable looking at the same scientific evidence to take the view that recent warming is not predominantly manmade?

No .