During the last forty years the Arab- American carbon barons; Western multibillionaires, Russian and Middle East petro tyrants and extreme Islamists have lived high on oil profits. They invest massively in propaganda to delay political action and mislead the public.

You will probably have encountered a conspiracy theory claiming that environmentalist groups, the UN, climate researchers and politicians in most of the democratic countries of the world and a worldwide fascistoid elite with the aim of killing off most people, have joined forces in a scam to scare people enough to make them accept more taxes on petrol and coal. They have allegedly invented something called global warming, according to the theory a pure fantasy invention claiming that CO2 accumulating in the atmosphere will increase global temperatures. According to the conspiracy theory this invention is false, and the following claims are the most common:

a) there is no accumulation of CO2.

b) if there is any such accumulation, it has no impact. It is actually getting colder. There is no correlation between the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and global warming (the “skeptic’s” null hypothesis) .

c) if the climate is changing, it has nothing to do with human activities – it is just natural variations that would have taken place anyway. Cosmic dust, tectonic movements, volcanoes, ocean current shifts and changes in solar activity may cause climate change. Changes in the composition of the atmosphere have no impact.

d) the researchers are not real scientists but corrupt politicians. There might be 50 scientists in the UN Panel of climate change. The rest are political representatives.

e) if they are scientists they are not honest and they don’t follow normal scientific rules

f) the UN, the researchers, the environmentalists and the politicians are dishonest people who are willing to do anything to make some quick dollars or increase taxes.

g) if this doesn’t convince everybody, the claim is that there are two roughly equal groups of scientists disagreeing on whether there is global warming or not. If there is, the debate is whether CO2 emissions and human activities have anything to do with it

h) oil will last forever, and is continuously produced in the core of the Earth and pressured up towards the crust, gradually refilling the oil wells

i) CO2 is natural and it will just be beneficial for nature to get more of it

j) if there is any climate change, it is due to increasing solar activity or water vapor. Humans have no impact on the big climate systems

k) if there actually is global warming – we can just adapt. The climate has changed also in previous times

l) the world and its resources have no limits

m) God has given us the Earth as a gift. It is our duty to consume it. Preserving the Earth means that you don’t appreciate God’s gifts.

Conspiracy theory sources:

NIPCC

http://www.climatechangereconsidered.org

(Financed by the Heartland Institute)

Climate4you – also associated with Heartland institute

Heartland Institute: http://heartland.org/ In turn financed by Philippe Morris tobacco, Exxon Mobile and the Koch brothers and others | | Lord Monckton | The global warming swindle | Climate negotiators are like Nazis, says this helpful, industry-funded group | The Heartland “experts” | Meet the Powerful Billionaire Family Hell Bent on Imposing Their Right-Wing Agenda and Defunding the Left | House Natural Resources Committee: ‘Carbon Emissions Are Good’ | Senator Inhofe to Climate Deniers: ‘You’re Doing the Lord’s Work’ | Busted: Academics-for-Hire Exposed for Failing to Disclose Fossil Fuel Funding (Dec 2015) | Trump, Putin, and ExxonMobil team up to destroy the planet (Dec 2016)

***

Various reactions to these conspiracy theories:

IPCC report: sceptic groups launch global anti-science campaign | *| Fact free Bjørn Lomborg | * | Elizabeth Warren Comes Down Hard Against Global Warming, Separates Herself From Hillary Clinton On Climate Change | * | The Koch brothers: all the influence money can buy | * | The Koch Brothers & Their Amazing Climate Change Denial Machine | * | Why Growing Harassment of Scientists by Climate Change Deniers Is So Dangerous | * | Mont Pelerin Society A Window Into Ideological Heart Of Kochtopus Climate Denial | * | Science and Oil Don’t Mix: Wyoming Becomes First State to Reject New U.S. Science Standards for Schools (April 2014) |* | New study looks at how the Agenda 21 conspiracy is poisoning public discussion about sustainability | * | NRDC: Agenda 21 conspiracy theorists threaten cities’ sustainability effort | * | How politics hijacked the fight against global warming | * | 11 Things The Koch Brothers Don’t Want You To Know, From Robert Greenwald’s Newly Updated Documentary | * | Is Climate Change Real? Here’s Why Some Americans Still Have Doubts | * | Smoke, Mirrors & Hot Air How ExxonMobil Uses Big Tobacco’s Tactics to Manufacture Uncertainty on Climate Science- | * | The Climate Deception Dossiers (Union of concerned scientists July 2015) | * | From Herro to Zero – Meet the GWPF Funder Who Just Donated to the Heartland Institute’s Paris Campaign (Nov 2015) | * | Lord Lawson Denier Charity Investigated After Advisor Accepts Cash from Coal Company (Dec 2015) | *| 21 Teens Tell Exxon and Koch Brothers: Get Out of Our Lawsuit (Dec 2015) || Not Just Exxon: The Entire Oil and Gas Industry Knew The Truth About Climate Change 35 Years Ago (Dec 2015) |*| Flat Earthers Vs Climate Change Skeptics: Why Conspiracy Theorists Keep Contradicting Each Other. Conspiracy theorists have an à la carte attitude to data and trust, so what can scientists do about it? ( May 2018) |*|

Fake science, fakexperts, funny finances, free of tax Modern anti-science was created by the tobacco industry in the 1950s and then used against climate science, often by the same well-experienced think tanks and individuals. Tobacco anti-science is strangely entangled with climate anti-science, as the attached report shows in detail involving Fred Singer’s SEPP, Joseph Bast’s Heartland, and more. (Fakery 2 10/25/12 updates this post with more data.)

Background for another story:

The stone age did not end for the lack of stones – but because better alternatives were found.

The fossil fuel age will end when better alternatives are available.

The fossil fuel multibillionaires; the carbon barons – big oil CEOs, the Middle East petro tyrants and extreme islamists, Russian superrich oligarchs and Chinese Communist Party oil princelings living high on the fossil fuel paradigm will do anything to postpone the inevitable paradigm shift from the fossil fuel paradigm to the paradigm of an ecologically sustainable future.

United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) – one of the founders of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) together with World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) coordinate the writing of extensive reports on the changing climate every 6th – 7th year. The report is compiled by almost 2000 of the most respected climate researchers in the world, who all publish frequently in peer reviewed scientific journals. These reports are aggressively attacked by especially the American fossil fuel industry through their enormous propaganda apparatus with unlimited petro-dollar funding.

A bit more than a decade and some years ago, I worked as an information manager at UNEP/GRID-Arendal, and was involved in making information material to decision makers and the public about the IPCC reports on climate change. I was quite surprised to see fancy, two page full color advertisements in the biggest international magazines claiming that everything that the IPCC said was false. Somebody in UNEP calculated the costs of all these ads to be about the same as the entire 1999 UNEP annual budget of 95 million dollars.

Somebody called ’Global Climate Coalition’ was behind the ads. I did some research on this organisation and learned that it was a PR group financed by ‘Western Fuels Association’ and more or less all oil and coal companies in Europe and the USA and US car manufacturers like General Motors among others. That year, in 1999, BP, Shell and GM left the organisation because they had lost faith in its integrity. The CEOs of BP as well as Shell said they believed the IPCC made accurate reports, and would start investing in developing non-fossil energy sources instead.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Climate_Coalition

The American oil and coal companies stayed on for some more years, before closing Global Climate Coalition and making new similar groups or simply hiring PR companies. The accusations against the UN and environmental groups were very aggressive, untrue and harsh, and I tried to find out why.

I knew from experience that if you want to become rich, neither research nor environment activism are the right places to go, so I knew the accusations had to be false. If you want to become a billionaire, research and environment simply are not your fields of interest. Fossil fuels on the other hand, may offer quite a lot of pecuniary gains. Scientists as a rule venture into a research career because they are curious and want to search for the truth. Obviously there are exceptions, but the big majority of researchers are of high integrity.

Furthermore, the global scientific system makes it hard for dishonest research, since all scientists have to ask other scientists to take a critical look at what they are doing; findings as well as methods, through the peer review system. A research career requires publishing findings in peer reviewed scientific journals. The scientists also have to present their work to critical audiences at international conferences. The body of scientists present at those conferences are trained in being critical, and can be quite merciless. The international science system systematically looks for errors and ways to improve or correct the current knowledge in the academic field of research. A person claiming to be a scientist but who has failed to publish articles in international, peer reviewed scientific journals the last ten years has low credibility as researcher.

Most researchers are lecturers and professors at universities. If they get less money for research, they teach more. Research money does not go into private pockets but into projects. Research funding usually involves a lot of work, a lot of reporting and accounting, but very little personal monetary gain. If you think that people become teachers in order to become multimillionaires, you should try a teacher’s salary for some years.

If you venture into a career in oil business, you are not necessarily there because you are curious or search for the truth. You are most likely there to make money.

Powerful groups

I soon realised I had ventured into powerful groups of people I until then had not quite realised existed. I also realised that the information I found was so bizarre and scary, that it would be difficult talking about it outside the UNEP information groups without being accused of believing in crazy conspiracies. Read for yourself !

Anyway, when you bring in the argument that the UN, certain researchers and green lobbies may make some extra money by deceiving and scaring the world, please consider the points below:

“The deceit behind the attempts to discredit evidence of climate change reveals matters of importance. This deceit has a clear purpose: to confuse the public about the status of knowledge of global climate change, thus delaying effective action to mitigate climate change. The danger is that delay will cause tipping points to be passed, such that large climate impacts become inevitable, including the loss of all Arctic sea ice, destabilization of the West Antarctic ice sheet with disastrous sea level rise later this century, and extermination of a large fraction of animal and plant species. Make no doubt, however, if tipping points are passed, if we, in effect, destroy Creation, passing on to our children, grandchildren, and the unborn a situation out of their control, the contrarians who work to deny and confuse will not be the principal culprits. The contrarians will be remembered as court jesters. There is no point to joust with court jesters. They will always be present. They will continue to entertain even if the Titanic begins to take on water. Their role and consequence is only as a diversion from what is important. The real deal is this: the ‘royalty’ controlling the court, the ones with the power, the ones with the ability to make a difference, with the ability to change our course, the ones who will live in infamy if we pass the tipping points, are the captains of industry, CEOs in fossil fuel companies such as EXXON/Mobil, automobile manufacturers, utilities, all of the leaders who have placed short-term profit above the fate of the planet and the well-being of our children. The court jesters are their jesters, occasionally paid for services, and more substantively supported by the captains’ disinformation campaigns.” http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/20070816_realdeal.pdf

Dr James Hansen, director, NASA Goddard Institute “Global warming stopped in 1998,” has become a recent mantra of those who wish to deny the reality of human-caused global warming. The continued rapid increase of the five-year running mean temperature exposes this assertion as nonsense. In reality, global temperature jumped two standard deviations above the trend line in 1998 because the “El Niño of the century” coincided with the calendar year, but there has been no lessening of the underlying warming trend. NASA – GISS 2007 report http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/

1998 was special: high solar activity and the strongest EL Nino on record, giving unusually warm weather. If you only talk about air temperatures on the northern hemisphere, 1998 was record warm. But this is meaningless when discussing climate. Annual variation is weather. Climate is average weather over 30 years. 1994 was exceptionally cold. According to the same kind of reasoning, the warming of the world has been unusually steep upwards since then. Scientifically, this is called “cherry picking”. You just pick some marginal information that suits you, and forget about the mainstream information. This is dishonest, and any scientist doing this will instantly be discredited in scientific circles. PR companies of course, don’t worry about that.

NASA: Evidence of climate change Global climate change NCDC: State of the global climate Royal society: Climate change | National Research Council (2013) Abrupt impacts of climate change (National Academies press) | Methane Levels going through the Roof |

Who created the global warming “pause”? | Reddit’s science forum banned climate deniers. Why don’t all newspapers do the same?

Trend and variation – Climate vs weather Connect the dots: climate change and extreme weather | Climate change denials is just hot air | | The scientific consensus on climate change (AAAS) | Massive scientific consensus | Five shots against global warming denialism | America’s most dangerous enemy | Study Confirms Tea Party Was Created by Big Tobacco and Billionaire Koch Brothers | How the Koch brothers screwed over the climate even more than you know | Secret funding helped build vast network of climate denial thinktanks (Guardian, Feb 2013) | The ATM for climate deniers | 10 worst billionaires on the Forbes list | Zombie films and climate change | “The greedy, lying bastards” takes on climate change deniers and big oil | Greedy lying bastards | Documenting the Fossil Fuel Industry’s Climate Deception (Union of concerned scientists July 2015) | The Climate Deception Dossiers (Union of concerned scientists July 2015) | A Supreme Threat to American Democracy. We’re one judge away from government of the corporations, by the corporations, and for the corporations |

The climate of the future (?) Video

The Stern report

Former chief economist and WB senior vice president, Nicholas Stern:

Climate change constitutes the greatest market failure the world has ever seen. By mid century, CC will account for a loss of at least 5% in global growth (USD 2200 billion at current values) each year. Adding impacts on environment and health and knock-on effects, it could be as much as 20% of annual growth (around USD 9000 billion). By contrast, the cost of taking action would only be 1% of global GDP per year, enabling us to avoid entering critical threshold of average temperature increase 2 C higher than preindustrial levels. To achieve this, atmospheric CO2 equivalents must stabilise below 550 ppm. Global emissions must peak within the next 10-20 years and then fall to 25% below current level by 2050.

http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/d/Executive_Summary.pdf

Climate change is a fact

All we can do now is to limit global warming. It can no longer be stopped or reversed in the present century.

Munich re

http://www.eea.europa.eu/themes/climate/links/climate-change-impacts-adaptations-and-vulnerabilities/munich-re-reinsurance-company

It has become fashionable in some parts of the UK media to portray the scientific evidence that has been collected about climate change and the impact of greenhouse gas emissions from human activities as an exaggeration.

The Royal Society: Climate Change: Evidence & Causes

https://royalsociety.org/policy/projects/climate-evidence-causes/ |

It is now clear that man-made greenhouse gases are causing climate change. The rate of change began as significant, has become alarming and is simply unsustainable in the long-term.

The Met Office UK – Hadley Centre

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate-change

The build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere alters the radiative balance of the atmosphere. The net effect is to warm the Earth’s surface and the lower atmosphere because greenhouse gases absorb some of the Earth’s outgoing heat radiation and reradiate it back towards the surface. The overall warming from 1850 to the end of the 20th century was equivalent to about 2.5 W/m2; CO2 contributed some 60 per cent of this figure and CH4 about 25 per cent, with N2O and halocarbons providing the remainder. The warming effect that would result from a doubling of CO2 from pre-industrial levels is estimated to be 4 W/m2.

World Meteorological Organisation

http://www.wmo.int/pages/themes/climate/causes_of_global_warming.php

The combined global land and ocean surface temperature was the second warmest September on record, according to NCDC/NOAA http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/ncdc.html in Asheville, N.C. Based on records going back to 1880, the monthly National Climatic Data Center analysis is part of the suite of climate services NOAA provides.

See also:

Bjerknes Centre for Climate research http://www.bjerknes.uib.no/default.asp?lang=2

CICERO (University of Oslo) http://www.cicero.uio.no/home/index_e.aspx

The facts of the enhanced greenhouse effect and global warming

Who then, are the deniers?

The Arab-American coal & oil lobby – the world’s biggest propaganda industry, financed by:

The biggest companies in the world: The world’s biggest companies (Forbes 2012)

The ten biggest companies (Explordir 2011) – almost all big oil companies

The 10 richest companies in the world 2012 |

Charles and David Koch |

The Number of Billionaires Is Growing Across the Planet, as Global Inequality Spreads

Mont Pelerin Society A Window Into Ideological Heart Of Kochtopus Climate Denial

Meet The Saudi Prince Who Finances the Murderous Egyptian Military, and Crushes Democracy in the Middle East

The 22-Year Bush War of Aggression on Iraq

Fighting for Oil? The Kuwait connection

Persian gulf war

Inbred Oil Kings & Bush League Criminals

The Bush Saudi connection

The Prince: Meet the Man Who Co-Opted Democracy in the Middle East

Saudi Arabia’s Brilliant Recipe for Dominating the Middle East

President Putin – the world’s biggest oil exporter – and dependent on oil

Hard-Nosed Advice From Veteran Lobbyist: ‘Win Ugly or Lose Pretty’ Richard Berman Energy Industry Talk Secretly Taped (NYT Nov 2014)

Halliburton – American multinational corporation and currently one of the world’s largest oil field services companies with operations in more than 80 countries. Registered in several tax havens, close ties with petro tyrants in the Middle East and Africa and found guilty of corruption in several cases

State owned Petro China; China’s biggest oil producer with more than a trillion dollars in capitalisation and Sinopec – both companies among the world’s biggest, and controlled by the Chinese Communist Party. The same is the case with the gigantic China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC), also among the richest companies of the world, and suspected of investing billions in tax havens in the Caribbean.

Top Two Oil Companies Earn $160,000 Per Minute, Paid Low Tax Rate

The daily profits of the biggest oil companies (Graphics, 2012)



ARAMCO: Arabian American Oil Company founded by ESSO (Exxon) (John D. Rockefeller) and Saudi Arabian royal family. It is thought to be by far the world’s most valuable company (Wikipedia) – but competes with Petro China on being the biggest, as both have a capitalisation over USD one trillion

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aramco

ARAMCO home page

http://www2.saudiaramco.com/en/home.html

It is the largest oil corporation in the world with the largest proven crude oil reserves and production. Saudi Arabia exports between 7 and 12 million barrels of oil per day, year round, year after year. Currently a barrel of oil goes for between USD 100 and 130. If you start calculating, now, you will see where the BIG money is. (100 billion USD every 100 days – and this is just for the crude oil). The global coal and gas production is of similar proportion. The scale and the profits of the fossil fuel industry are so enormous it is difficult to grasp.

If you add the oil exported from Kuwait, Qatar, the Emirates, Iran, Iraq etc you will arrive at quite astonishing sums of money gained per day by those who control oil. And now we just talk about crude oil. Add the extra value from refined products like petrol, kerosene, asphalt, plastic etc. In addition comes income from the financial sector in which the oil industry has invested massively.

USA imports oil for USD 2 billion per day (2008)

(John McCain, US presidential candidate 2008)

The Americans try to reduce their dependency on Middle East oil by increasing their own consumption through the method called fracking. This is still problematic, since it is very harmful to the environment and pollutes huge amounts of groundwater. Due to climate change and overconsumption, large parts of the USA is now very vulnerable to freshwater scarcity. In many places they will soon have to choose between water and fracking

(30 facts about the coming water crisis).

The Carter doctrine:

President Jimmy Carter in his State of the Union Address of January 23, 1980:

The free flow of Persian Gulf oil is a “vital interest” of the United States,

USA can employ “any means necessary” to protect that interest, “including military force.”

War on terror

No matter how hard we try, we cannot prevail in the “war on terror” so long as we continue to ignore the oil dimensions of the conflict.

The Osama bin Ladens and their lieutenants understand full well that America’s presence in their backyard is driven by our addiction to Middle Eastern oil, and that so long as we do nothing to curb this addiction we will continue to embrace policies that will generate ever more recruits for al-Qaeda.

Only through self-discipline and the elimination of our oil dependency can we break this cycle and so win the war against terror.

Michael T. Klare Taking Oil Out Of The Equation September 21, 2006 http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/09/21/taking_oil_out_of_the_equation.php

The US – Saudi connection

President Franklin D. Roosevelt surmised that the US would become dependent on imported oil as domestic reserves were drained, and set out to establish American control over a major foreign source of supply—Saudi Arabia.

On February 14, 1945, he met with King Abdul Aziz ibn Saud aboard a U.S.warship in the Suez Canal and forged an oil-for-protection arrangement. USA pledged to defend the Saudi royal family in return for privileged access to Saudi petroleum reserves.

To carry out the terms of the 1945 Roosevelt-Ibn Saud agreement, successive American presidents deployed an ever-larger U.S.military presence in the region and helped establish both the Saudi Royal Army and the Saudi Arabian National Guard (SANG), responsible for internal security. The growing U.S.military presence was coupled with the growing presence of American oil companies, which helped turn Saudi Arabia into the world’s leading producer.

With fields in most other parts of the world in decline—the United States reached its “peak,” or maximum sustainable output in 1971—production from the Persian Gulf became increasingly essential for the smooth operation of the global economy.http://countrystudies.us/saudi-arabia/59.htm

Read more about the US-Saudi connections in the US bestseller

Thomas Friedman (2008): Hot, Flat and Crowded.

U.S. and Saudis in Growing Rift as Power Shifts (NYT, Nov 2013)

“The US is addicted to oil”

George W. Bush in State of the Union address January 2006

“We need greater use of wind and solar energy, expanded use of clean diesel vehicles, and accelerated research into the batteries needed for plug-in hybrid vehicles. These technologies will help us be better stewards of the environment, and they will help us confront the serious challenge of global climate change.”

George W Bush: “Twenty in Ten initiative” in State of the Union address January 2007

The production of oil levels out in 2004. We have a maximum of another 15 years, and the production will fall.

Sadad Al Husseini, head of research, Saudi Aramco, 2000

Global daily oil production has been stable since 2004. Between 85 and 95 million barrels per day in spite of increasing prices.

(The global oil production has never managed to exceed more than 97 million barrels per day.)

(The global oil production has never managed to exceed more than 97 million barrels per day.) IEA prognosis: Daily demand in 2030: 116 million barrels

http://www.iea.org/weo/2008.asp

”After 2015 the amount of easily accessible oil cannot meet the demand”

Jeroen van der Veer, CEO, Shell, 2008

Postulates:

Ever wondered why NATO – the military super-super power does not win in Afghanistan?

I leave it to you to choose which conspiracy theory you believe more likely, and where you are likely to find the most money.

Anyway – as you probably realise – there are a lot of documents around that are not reliable. Be critical. Find out who is behind and whose interests they represent

The greenhouse effect and climate change lecture