People are either in or out of the game. It’s a conspiracy for fun and profit. I was reminded of this while covering the 2009 UN Copenhagen Climate Change Conference at which Obama appeared briefly and gave a speech. Nothing much really occurred there that was substantive other than delegates and press spending a few days in one of Western Europe’s most beautiful cities, schmoozing and drinking aquavit. (Climate conferences tend not to happen in Dubuque.) Half the US Congress seemed to be there on a taxpayer-funded junket. When I ran into Rep. Charlie Rangel in the gift shop of the Marriott where most of the delegation was staying and asked the New York congressman whether he believed in anthropogenic global warming, he looked at me as if I were joking. When he realized I might be serious, he waved me away as some kind of crank and returned to the important business of examining the expensive Danish jewelry on display.
More interesting (and telling) was an encounter I had the next day with the delegate from the island of Tuvalu—a tiny place in the Pacific said to be about to disappear under water from the predicted ocean rise due to global warming. We were sitting next to each other waiting for one of these lectures that never seemed to get started, so I commiserated with the poor fellow about the sad fate of his country. He started laughing and tapped me on the arm in a friendly way very unlike Rangel. I suddenly got suspicious and asked hesitantly “You don’t believe it’s happening?” The man grinned and nodded affirmatively. “Then why are you here?” I continued.
“For the money,” he said, as if it were the most evident thing in the world.
You couldn’t but like him for his honesty. Half a decade later nothing much has happened to Tuvalu but that hasn’t stopped its prime minister, Enele Sopoaga, from warning the world at yet another conference in New York in 2014 that climate change was “like a weapon of mass destruction.”1 Sopoaga, who is seeking cash for the repatriation of his sinking citizens to other countries, further said of his island nation, “We are very, very worried—we are already suffering.” How, he doesn’t specify, but he did provide a few photos of a few sandbags stacked along the oceanfront. Actual climate data for the island is sparse but records from nearby American Samoa indicate virtually no change for decades.2
Tuvalu, of course, is not alone in working the climate change side of the street from a developing world perspective. But the amount of money involved here is the proverbial peanuts compared to the big league game going on in the background at Copenhagen. A new market had recently been formed to trade so-called credits for the use of the supposedly evil carbon, the cap-and-trade strategy. And as with most markets, the numbers of zeros involved boggled the mind and brought out the 3.0 reading glasses—for good reason. According to a December 10, 2009, report in the Telegraph,
Carbon trading fraudsters may have accounted for up to 90pc of all market activity in some Europeans countries, with criminals pocketing an estimated five billion Euros mainly in Britain, France, Spain, Denmark and Holland, according to Europol, the European law enforcement agency. The revelation caused embarrassment for European Union negotiators at the Copenhagen climate change summit yesterday, where they have been pushing for an expansion of their system across the globe to penalize heavy emitters of carbon dioxide. Rob Wainwright, the director of the Interpol serious crime squad, said large-scale organized criminal activity has “endangered the credibility” of the current carbon trading system.3
These “embarrassing” carbon exchanges have, not surprisingly, largely disappeared. And if you mention them at a cocktail party to your average climate change true believer—most of whom would be likely to have heard, at most, only vaguely of these exchanges—it is almost certain they will dismiss them with a laugh. After all, bad people can take advantage of all manner of good things. But what if those same people were actually the initiators of those good things in the first place? Here’s Maurice Strong—Canadian oil and mining businessman, former undersecretary general of the United Nations, unanimously-elected head of UNEP (United Nations Environment Programme), secretary general of the 1992 Earth Summit, winner of the U Thant Peace Award and the Jawaharlal Nehru Award for International Understanding, and the so-called “godfather of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol”: “Climate change is the biggest single challenge humans have ever faced. Unlike other problems, which can be solved regionally or sectorally, climate change affects the very future of life on earth. It is the greatest security problem we have ever faced.”
What a man! Have more righteous words ever been spoken? Has a more impressive vitae ever been written? Maybe so, but the reality of this environmental godfather is rather different. Strong has been linked to virtually every scandal coming out of the UN for decades, including the notorious Oil-for-Food debacle—in which unprecedented sums of money were siphoned off from a program that was designed to help the starving in Iraq—to cash being funneled through UN agencies into North Korea. One of the more bizarre of these was a little known UN Strong-directed offshoot in Costa Rica called the University of Peace that gives degrees in “peaceology” as well as foundation grants to the North Koreans. For what is undetermined.4 Strong is currently living in Beijing with his ties to the UN more or less severed after a controversy concerning his relationship to Tongsun Park—the so-called “Asian Great Gatsby” convicted on federal conspiracy charges over Oil-for-Food—and a mysterious million-dollar check made out to “M. Strong.”
But the existence of Strong and other dodgy characters like Northwestern University business professor Richard L. Sandor—father of the Chicago Climate Exchange (whose panicked investors bailed out for $600 million in 20105 and who had been named a Time Hero of the Environment in 2007) do not themselves mean climate change isn’t occurring. Indeed, on January 16, 2015, NOAA and NASA jointly announced that 2014 had been the hottest year on record, with several scientists simultaneously concluding that serious man-made global warming was now a certifiable crisis. One of them came to the extreme conclusion that 2014 was the hottest year in five thousand years.6 Less than an hour later, the gang at Climate Depot—a skeptics blog—had launched a counterassault by another group of respected scientists who quickly pointed out that the supposedly monumental warming of 2014 was in the low hundredths of one percent, an immeasurable difference, and that the pause in warming had continued. And so it went—tit for tat—and will go on into the foreseeable future, one would imagine.7
James Delingpole in his book Watermelons: The Green Movement’s True Colors posits the entire environmental movement is like that large melon, green on the outside but red (communist) on the inside. It is a mask adopted to disguise overtly political purposes. There’s undoubtedly some truth to that but an argument can also be made that it is instead the ultimate crony capitalism—making up a market that doesn’t exist, making a fortune from it, and then closing it down, leaving a gaggle of losers in the lurch. Moral narcissism provides the necessary underpinning either way. People think they’re doing either socialist utopian good (money to the poor of Tuvalu) or proving how free markets (via carbon exchanges) are the answers to all the world’s problems.
Since most people have nowhere near the scientific expertise to have an educated opinion on global warming/climate change, their opinions on the subject are closer to rooting for a sports team then they are to science. They simply pick a team—in this case, of scientists (or politicians who approve certain scientists)—to believe in, actually root for, and almost always stick with them for the duration, just as most do with their sports teams through the team’s ups and downs. Only a few people know the actual names of the scientists on their team the way they do a quarterback in football, but it comes to the same thing. They’re with them anyway, largely because the scientists are expressing what the group in question wanted to believe in the first place. Almost all are prey to this. I know I am. I have picked my scientists, admittedly without anywhere close to a full understanding of their work.
One of them is Richard Lindzen, the atmospheric physicist and retired MIT meteorology professor known for his work on the dynamics of the middle atmosphere and ozone chemistry. He was also one of the lead authors of the IPCC Third Assessment Report on climate change. In other words, he comes from the belly of the beast—the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) is the UN sponsored body that shares the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore. What seduced me about Lindzen was his ability to write well in plain layman’s English, making clear that