Putin's promise was apparently made under duress. His personal economic advisor, Andrei Illarionov, accused Britain's Tony Blair of declaring "all-out and total war on Russia" and using "bribes, blackmail, and murder threats" to force it to ratify the Kyoto Protocol "Moscow Times 7/12/04, posted at www.sepp.org).
An international confrontation occurred at a Moscow symposium on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol organized by the Russian Academy of Sciences. Putin ordered climatologists to study the issue in detail. The academicians' long list of searching questions to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change "IPCC) had received no response except for assertions that the only question that mattered was whether Russia trusted Britain and the rest of the European Union. Against this backdrop, Sir David King, chief British science advisor, presented an ultimatum demanding that about two-thirds of the invited speakers not be given the floor, including Richard Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
"When this attempt to introduce censorship...failed, other attempts were made to disrupt the seminar," stated Illarionov at a press conference.
On scientific issues, Illarionov stated that "none of the assertions made in the Kyoto Protocol and the `scientific' theory on which [it] is based [have] been borne out by actual data.... There is no evidence confirming a positive linkage between the level of carbon dioxide and temperature change. If there is such a linkage, it is [of] a reverse nature.... The statistical data...are often considerably distorted if not falsified. The most vivid example is the so-called `ice-hockey stick....' It is alleged that there were insignificant temperature fluctuations for 900 years but there was a sharp rise in temperature in the 20th century."
The ideological basis of the Protocol, Illarionov said, "can be juxtaposed and compared...with man-hating totalitarian ideology with which we had the bad fortune to deal during the 20th century, such as National Socialism, Marxism, Eugenics, Lysenkovism and so on. All methods of distorting information existing in the world have been committed to prove the alleged validity of these theories. Misinformation, falsification, fabrication, mythology, propaganda. Because what is offered cannot be qualified in any other way than myth, nonsense and absurdity." He described the Protocol as "one of the biggest, if not the biggest international adventures based on man-hating totalitarian ideology which, incidentally, manifests itself in totalitarian actions and concrete events, particularly academic discussions, and which tries to defend itself using disinformation and falsified facts. It's hard to think of any other word but `war' to describe this."
Yuri Izrael, one of the IPCC's three vice-chairs added: "The Kyoto Protocol aims to impoverish our country, and not only us but our children and grandchildren...." Illarionov concluded: "There have been examples in our fairly recent history of how a considerable portion of Europe was flooded with the brown Nazi ideology, the red Commie ideology that caused severe casualties and consequences for Europe and the entire world. Now there is a big likelihood that a considerable part of Europe has been flooded with another type, another color of ideology but with very similar implications for European societies and human societies the world over. And now we in Russia are facing a historical opportunity: are we going to let the genie out of the bottle as the previous generations let the Nazi and Communist genies out of the bottles or not?"
Meanwhile, Senators McCain, Lieberman, et al. want to force Americans to reduce carbon dioxide emissions without treaty ratification. The Climate Stewardship Act, S. 139, would create the infrastructure necessary for hydrocarbon rationing. Economists and climatologists are trying to calculate the costs and results by the method of putting their best guesses into the pot and stirring, explain Jay Lehr and Joseph Bast of the Heartland Institute. This much is certain: reduced CO2 emissions mean economic losses with negligible impact on climate. So why are we doing this? Ideology seems to be the only possible answer.
"One of the great propaganda icons of the United Nations climate-change machine... is about to get swept away as junk science," writes Terence Corcoran "Financial Post 7/13/04, see www.sepp.org). On July 1, Michael E. Mann, one of the creators of the 1,000- year temperature chart published a corrigendum in Nature, acknowledging that "the listing of the `proxy' data set...contained several errors." After describing the errors, Mr. Mann said that "none of these errors affect our previously published results."
The Canadian researchers who pointed out the errors, Ross McKitrick and Steve McIntyre, stated that the claim that nothing had changed was "categorically false."
In a letter that Nature declined to publish, Bob Carter of the Marine Geophysical Laboratory, James Cook University, Australia, wrote: "The "corrected) Mann et al. graph shows that the northern hemisphere temperature index attained its highest values in the early 15th century, and that the 20th century warming cycle has so far only equalled a secondary warm peak that occurred late in the 15th century."
As Willie Soon pointed out at the DDP meeting, the hockey stick graph fails to see either the medieval warm period or the Little Ice Age.
The 2005 meeting has been scheduled for July 16-17 in Las Vegas. On Monday, July 18, there will be a tour of the Nevada Test Site. Mark your calendars now!
America lost another great scientist and friend on July 19, when J. Gordon Edwards died of a heart attack at age 84 while climbing Divide Mountain in Glacier National Park.
Dr. Edwards was a world expert on insects, the transmission of vector-borne diseases, and DDT. He has collected insects from around the world, and the J. Gordon Edwards Museum of Entomology at San Jose State University displays millions of species of insects.
Talks by Dr. Edwards were a highlight of six DDP meetings. He received the Petr Beckmann Award in 2001 for his work in exposing scientific frauds related to DDT.
During his very active career, Dr. Edwards was a park ranger/naturalist, a combat medic, and an explorer who pioneered routes to more than 70 peaks. He authored A Climber's Guide to Glacier National Park. He survived an attack by a charging grizzly bear.
He continued to work on overcoming barriers to effective control of malaria and other arthropod-borne scourges until the time of his death.
DDP, 1601 N. Tucson Blvd. Suite 9, Tucson, AZ 85716, (520)325-2680, www.oism.org/ddp