Climate Change & Magnetism.

[Ohio XB]

I am old enough to remember when man could first take photographs of the ozone layer, and noticed the large holes in it, and remember the fear that was immediately spread about this phenomenon.

Due to the holes in the ozone layer the Earth was going to get hot because the sun's rays would not be filtered out. We had to take steps as soon as possible to reduce ozone depleting chemicals from our use. Scientists predicted that due to the amount of time it would take to reduce and get rid of many chemicals while replacements were decided upon would take about 20 years for there to be a significant change in our usage of these chemicals, and then another 15 years before the ozone layer holes would be significantly reduced.

15 years later the holes were closing up, before any significant change in man's use of ozone depleting chemicals could be performed. The scientists then decided that the holes are a natural part of the ozone layer and that they fluctuate in size on their own, over time.



So, I look at climate change with much the same light gleened from that experience.


Steve

[trippytaka]

Scientists have been monitoring the intensity of the intensity of the sun (from Earth and on satellites) and it hasn't changed markedly, which one would expect if this theory were to show a weakening in the atmosphere.

[trippytaka]

Originally Posted by Ohio XB

I am old enough to remember when man could first take photographs of the ozone layer, and noticed the large holes in it, and remember the fear that was immediately spread about this phenomenon.

Due to the holes in the ozone layer the Earth was going to get hot because the sun's rays would not be filtered out. We had to take steps as soon as possible to reduce ozone depleting chemicals from our use. Scientists predicted that due to the amount of time it would take to reduce and get rid of many chemicals while replacements were decided upon would take about 20 years for there to be a significant change in our usage of these chemicals, and then another 15 years before the ozone layer holes would be significantly reduced.

15 years later the holes were closing up, before any significant change in man's use of ozone depleting chemicals could be performed. The scientists then decided that the holes are a natural part of the ozone layer and that they fluctuate in size on their own, over time.



So, I look at climate change with much the same light gleened from that experience.


Steve

The Ozone layer was in relation to the UV rays and their intensity. Yes, the Ozone has been repaired, but it had nothing to do with heat, it was UV intensity.

[MO]

Originally Posted by onfire

I see Kevin has bought in " Little Gracie " .. a young girl, he's sworn he'll protect from climate change.. ahh, putting a face on ' future generations ' PR at it's finest or most cunning.

Do I detect a hint of panic,why else would they put a face on it.

[SSD-85]

Originally Posted by onfire

I see Kevin has bought in " Little Gracie " .. a young girl, he's sworn he'll protect from climate change.. ahh, putting a face on ' future generations ' PR at it's finest or most cunning.

That is sick. Really sick. Evil even. :

And as for that Journo getting kicked out for asking "inconvenient" questions, just more proof that democracy is a joke, and "might makes right".

[onfire]

You know what the worst part about this is, lets say if and when they implement an agreement and thus implement an ETS.. 10 years down the road, some climate change believer of a politician will stand up and say " look we saved the world, the climate didn't change! "

When in reality nothing actually changed at all in regards to temp and CO2.

It's like taking a pill for an illness you don't have, then thanking the company that makes those stupid $40.00 a pack tablets from the supermarket, for " improving eye sight " and what not, because you havn't gone blind.

[BHDOGS]

haha i love it how everybody on aff is a climate change expert all of a sudden a vocal minority repeatedly beating there drums about how climate change isnt real and its not our fault well i say climate change is real and is our fault and this magnetic stuff is all a load of bollocks your all that egotistical and arrogant you'd rather believe kevin rudd wants your pitiful pathetic dollar coins like he couldn't find a more convenient way to get money of you then a global climate change conspiracy give me a break and i think i will by never reading these pointless threads again.

[FalconXR6]

Originally Posted by BHDOGS

haha i love it how everybody on aff is a climate change expert all of a sudden a vocal minority repeatedly beating there drums about how climate change isnt real and its not our fault well i say climate change is real and is our fault and this magnetic stuff is all a load of bollocks your all that egotistical and arrogant you'd rather believe kevin rudd wants your pitiful pathetic dollar coins like he couldn't find a more convenient way to get money of you then a global climate change conspiracy give me a break and i think i will by never reading these pointless threads again.

No.
People are simply looking at alternatives rather than swallowing the official line.

Let me guess...your a "speed kills" believer as well ??? Swallowing the official line, doing as you are told ???

CH.

[grandpa_spec_F6]

Great to hear a different side.

At a guess (and a very uneducated one at that) I'd think the reason that the carbon based climate change theory has taken hold is that there is someone to blame, something to rally behind. As they would have you believe, we, the people of earth, are the polluters and plunders, and are therefore to blame for climate change, the inevitable response from the planet. Its simple and easy to understand, there is a good side and a bad side, and you can guilt people into paying lots of money to "fix" the issue.

Blaming magnetism or the poles shifting doesn't present such a favorable outcome. No one is a fault, its just happening, but that doesn't present a good business opportunity, or unite people for the "common good".

my 2c

[Bossxr8]

Originally Posted by BHDOGS

haha i love it how everybody on aff is a climate change expert all of a sudden a vocal minority repeatedly beating there drums about how climate change isnt real and its not our fault well i say climate change is real and is our fault and this magnetic stuff is all a load of bollocks your all that egotistical and arrogant you'd rather believe kevin rudd wants your pitiful pathetic dollar coins like he couldn't find a more convenient way to get money of you then a global climate change conspiracy give me a break and i think i will by never reading these pointless threads again.

So you're one of the mindless sheep that can't think for yourself, and believe everything the government tells you. :

Do you seriously believe that the earth, that has heated and cooled over millions of years time and time again, can be controlled by us humans with emmisions of gas?

What do you think happened last time the earth heated, the dinosaurs polluted the planet with their cars and factories?

[snappy]

Originally Posted by BHDOGS

haha i love it how everybody on aff is a climate change expert all of a sudden a vocal minority repeatedly beating there drums about how climate change isnt real and its not our fault well i say climate change is real and is our fault and this magnetic stuff is all a load of bollocks your all that egotistical and arrogant you'd rather believe kevin rudd wants your pitiful pathetic dollar coins like he couldn't find a more convenient way to get money of you then a global climate change conspiracy give me a break and i think i will by never reading these pointless threads again.

Well with such a educated response like yours we would silly to believe it not real now .
By the way kevin rudd wont be getting the money , third world countries will be do you work hard and pay taxes so you can fill the pockets of corrupt goverments and ditatorships . All in the name of a belief . An me for the record i believe kevin is setting himself up for a job in the U.N . Dont forget members of goverment in other countries said how irrelevant proposals such as the ETS which in their opinion achieves nothing other than raising taxes.
Do some research dude because your vote could contribute to make life alot harder then it needs to be . Please do some research yourself then make your judgement .

[rodderz]

some people just don't want to believe anything out of the norm. Normally i would take conspiracies with a grain of salt but a bit of reading on why this ets scheme is being pushed through and why there are so many world bank and business power brokers will make it clearly obvious. Whether or not climate change is real it is being used to make a hell of a lot of money.

[MO]

@BHDOGS,I'm seriously hoping that you're just stirring. Because to come across as adamant as that is very much like the old fire and brimstone preachers of days gone by.Where if you did'nt believe and give money to his church you were going straight to hell to burn in abject pain for eternity.

Sound familiar just that the only difference is now the preacher has spin doctors and uses a different approach.

[RATT]

Got to keep this thread alive as I am a firm believer we are being taken for a ride.

Here is the first of a 5 part series of videos involving Scientists, not just points of view:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fr5O1...98DE90&index=0

Also check out Alex Jones and his views and interviews. Here is a sample:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kb9aA8JL0VI

[RATT]

Some more great reading on the topic:
http://www.space.com/scienceastronom...ut_030320.html

[Thornie]

Originally Posted by BHDOGS

haha i love it how everybody on aff is a climate change expert all of a sudden a vocal minority repeatedly beating there drums about how climate change isnt real and its not our fault well i say climate change is real and is our fault and this magnetic stuff is all a load of bollocks your all that egotistical and arrogant you'd rather believe kevin rudd wants your pitiful pathetic dollar coins like he couldn't find a more convenient way to get money of you then a global climate change conspiracy give me a break and i think i will by never reading these pointless threads again.

you keep watching today tonight and a current affair buddy it will all be good

[Assassinbm]

Everyone knows about "Global Warming" as reported by the worlds governments, the media (continuously to sell more ratings & papers...) & the story put together by the ex vise president Al Gore, but do they have all the facts right?

Are the pollies using the info on the back of what the media twist & contort while selling their stories to keep the puplic in fear & introduce more new taxes & levies as they squander the public purse with handouts?

Is the info portrayed in the mainstream media actually true??

See the attached You Tube video which has 12 episodes, & make up your own mind as to who is right or not right, or if anyone is right at all? if you are going to be a sheep........be a black sheep, dont follow the crowd, make up your own mind...............


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nhq7Z9zqP80


You will spend quite a while watching to finish all episodes

[Romulus]

I'm confused (sarcasm mode on). The Rudd Labor Government is says it has proof the climate is warming, citing selective data from the Bureau of Meteorology that 2009 was a hot year.

In the mean time the Northern Hemisphere is experience it's coldest snap for centuries http://www.perthnow.com.au/news/free...-1225817385957

However, the cold snap in the UK is what the weather was like 20-30 years ago. People have simply forgotten what it used to be like.

[Chopped]

Nasa has released a statement on the movie 2012 (basically debunking it) but they also touch on the following >

"Q: What is the polar shift theory? Is it true that the earth’s crust does a 180-degree rotation around the core in a matter of days if not hours?
A: A reversal in the rotation of Earth is impossible. There are slow movements of the continents (for example Antarctica was near the equator hundreds of millions of years ago), but that is irrelevant to claims of reversal of the rotational poles. However, many of the disaster websites pull a bait-and-shift to fool people. They claim a relationship between the rotation and the magnetic polarity of Earth, which does change irregularly, with a magnetic reversal taking place every 400,000 years on average. As far as we know, such a magnetic reversal doesn’t cause any harm to life on Earth. A magnetic reversal is very unlikely to happen in the next few millennia, anyway. "

"Q: Is there a danger from giant solar storms predicted for 2012?
A: Solar activity has a regular cycle, with peaks approximately every 11 years. Near these activity peaks, solar flares can cause some interruption of satellite communications, although engineers are learning how to build electronics that are protected against most solar storms. But there is no special risk associated with 2012. The next solar maximum will occur in the 2012-2014 time frame and is predicted to be an average solar cycle, no different than previous cycles throughout history."

link > http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/2012.html

I think we need to study the sun more. It is a BIG, BIG mass of energy, how can we predict how stable it is ?

[olfella]

Just read in the Australian that Lord Monckton is coming to town to coincide with the Parliament debate on Feb 2. Apparently he will also be interviewed by Alan Jones and address the National Press Club. I expect this debate will now hot up in the press. :
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news...-1225817401456

[steamin63]

Originally Posted by Chopped

Nasa has released a statement on the movie 2012 (basically debunking it) but they also touch on the following >

"Q: What is the polar shift theory? Is it true that the earth’s crust does a 180-degree rotation around the core in a matter of days if not hours?
A: A reversal in the rotation of Earth is impossible. There are slow movements of the continents (for example Antarctica was near the equator hundreds of millions of years ago), but that is irrelevant to claims of reversal of the rotational poles. However, many of the disaster websites pull a bait-and-shift to fool people. They claim a relationship between the rotation and the magnetic polarity of Earth, which does change irregularly, with a magnetic reversal taking place every 400,000 years on average. As far as we know, such a magnetic reversal doesn’t cause any harm to life on Earth. A magnetic reversal is very unlikely to happen in the next few millennia, anyway. "

"Q: Is there a danger from giant solar storms predicted for 2012?
A: Solar activity has a regular cycle, with peaks approximately every 11 years. Near these activity peaks, solar flares can cause some interruption of satellite communications, although engineers are learning how to build electronics that are protected against most solar storms. But there is no special risk associated with 2012. The next solar maximum will occur in the 2012-2014 time frame and is predicted to be an average solar cycle, no different than previous cycles throughout history."

link > http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/2012.html

I think we need to study the sun more. It is a BIG, BIG mass of energy, how can we predict how stable it is ?

google "crustal displacement theory" by charles hapgood.

[Hillbilly F Truck]

[QUOTE=wulos]

With all the 'mumbo jumbo' surrounding the climate change debate, it is difficult to understand why there hasn't been discussion as to 'alternative theories, rather then simply pushing the CO2 argument.

Ian Plimer has written a great book outlining the need for debate and offers alternate theories to human induced climate change. The book is called Heaven and Earth : the missing science. http://www.connorcourt.com/catalog1/...roducts_id=103

[durtyharry]

Originally Posted by Hillbilly F Truck

Ian Plimer has written a great book outlining the need for debate and offers alternate theories to human induced climate change. The book is called Heaven and Earth : the missing science. http://www.connorcourt.com/catalog1/...roducts_id=103

Perhaps have a view at the transcript :http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/conte...9/s2772906.htm

I think the only relevant title would be the misleading nonscience.

Does he mention in the foreword that he is a director on the board of three miner companies, including a coal mining company. Does he list his bonuses in shares etc?

[durtyharry]

Originally Posted by olfella

Just read in the Australian that Lord Monckton is coming to town to coincide with the Parliament debate on Feb 2. Apparently he will also be interviewed by Alan Jones and address the National Press Club. I expect this debate will now hot up in the press. :
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news...-1225817401456

Look no further than who is financing his visit.

Geez, cant wait for him to be interviewed by Alan Jones, one cash for comment journalist interviewing another. Will Jones ask him about the one scientist Monckton uses as his evidence agw is a scam, Jones wouldnt have even bothered to find out who he is.

If the abc were to allow this self credentialed snake oil merchant on, a real journalist that does research like Tony Jones would certainly expose him.

[Auslandau]

Originally Posted by durtyharry

Perhaps have a view at the transcript :http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/conte...9/s2772906.htm

I think the only relevant title would be the misleading nonscience.

Does he mention in the foreword that he is a director on the board of three miner companies, including a coal mining company. Does he list his bonuses in shares etc?

And? There would not be many out there who are voicing there opinions on either side to the media who do not have ulterior motives.

What about rebuking the claims rather than just the person? Things are either true or false, no matter who is saying it.

I was told once .... "Don't shoot the messenger!" Don't know who it was ... must have been a little birdie.



| [/url] |

[cs123]

Originally Posted by auslandau

And? There would not be many out there who are voicing there opinions on either side to the media who do not have ulterior motives.

What about rebuking the claims rather than just the person? Things are either true or false, no matter who is saying it.

I was told once .... "Don't shoot the messenger!" Don't know who it was ... must have been a little birdie.

Read the transcript. Lots of debunking going on in there. I saw the interview and Plimer avoided answering lots of questions.

[Auslandau]

Originally Posted by cs123

Read the transcript. Lots of debunking going on in there. I saw the interview and Plimer avoided answering lots of questions.

Was a very bad interview .... I would think its more of a case of not letting someone answer a question. Thats the problem when you have 2 journalists with there minds made up interviewing 1 bloke with an opposing view.

But anyway, that was not the point of my statement .... it was directly related to what was being stated by 'Harry' stating that people who are in this debate, on the 'dark side' only, have ulterior motives.



| [/url] |

[cs123]

Originally Posted by auslandau

Was a very bad interview .... I would think its more of a case of not letting someone answer a question. Thats the problem when you have 2 journalists with there minds made up interviewing 1 bloke with an opposing view.

But anyway, that was not the point of my statement .... it was directly related to what was being stated by 'Harry' stating that people who are in this debate, on the 'dark side' only, have ulterior motives.

I always though Jones was a reasonably balanced interviewer. He was asking questions that Plimer was flat out refusing to answer and they were questions about assertions from his book. He actually shut down the other journalist on a few occasions.

As for ulterior motives, you are right, they are not limited to people from the deniers side. One thing to note is that published scientists are peer reviewed and most will have their source of funding disclosed. The ones that don't should be treated with caution.

[xbgs351]

Originally Posted by durtyharry

Perhaps have a view at the transcript :http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/conte...9/s2772906.htm

I think the only relevant title would be the misleading nonscience.

Does he mention in the foreword that he is a director on the board of three miner companies, including a coal mining company. Does he list his bonuses in shares etc?

Is that all? How is he meant to compete with Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the UN's climate change panel.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/6847...-Pachauri.html

Questions over business deals of UN climate change guru Dr Rajendra Pachauri
The head of the UN's climate change panel - Dr Rajendra Pachauri - is accused of making a fortune from his links with 'carbon trading' companies, Christopher Booker and Richard North write.

No one in the world exercised more influence on the events leading up to the Copenhagen conference on global warming than Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and mastermind of its latest report in 2007.

Although Dr Pachauri is often presented as a scientist (he was even once described by the BBC as “the world’s top climate scientist”), as a former railway engineer with a PhD in economics he has no qualifications in climate science at all.

What has also almost entirely escaped attention, however, is how Dr Pachauri has established an astonishing worldwide portfolio of business interests with bodies which have been investing billions of dollars in organisations dependent on the IPCC’s policy recommendations.

These outfits include banks, oil and energy companies and investment funds heavily involved in ‘carbon trading’ and ‘sustainable technologies’, which together make up the fastest-growing commodity market in the world, estimated soon to be worth trillions of dollars a year.

Today, in addition to his role as chairman of the IPCC, Dr Pachauri occupies more than a score of such posts, acting as director or adviser to many of the bodies which play a leading role in what has become known as the international ‘climate industry’.

It is remarkable how only very recently has the staggering scale of Dr Pachauri’s links to so many of these concerns come to light, inevitably raising questions as to how the world’s leading ‘climate official’ can also be personally involved in so many organisations which stand to benefit from the IPCC’s recommendations.

The issue of Dr Pachauri’s potential conflict of interest was first publicly raised last Tuesday when, after giving a lecture at Copenhagen University, he was handed a letter by two eminent ‘climate sceptics’. One was the Stephen Fielding, the Australian Senator who sparked the revolt which recently led to the defeat of his government’s ‘cap and trade scheme’. The other, from Britain, was Lord Monckton, a longtime critic of the IPCC’s science, who has recently played a key part in stiffening opposition to a cap and trade bill in the US Senate.

Their open letter first challenged the scientific honesty of a graph prominently used in the IPCC’s 2007 report, and shown again by Pachauri in his lecture, demanding that he should withdraw it. But they went on to question why the report had not declared Pachauri’s personal interest in so many organisations which seemingly stood to profit from its findings.

The letter, which included information first disclosed in last week’s Sunday Telegraph, was circulated to all the 192 national conference delegations, calling on them to dismiss Dr Pachauri as IPCC chairman because of recent revelations of his conflicting interests.

The original power base from which Dr Pachauri has built up his worldwide network of influence over the past decade is the Delhi-based Tata Energy Research Institute, of which he became director in 1981 and director-general in 2001. Now renamed The Energy Research Institute, TERI was set up in 1974 by India’s largest privately-owned business empire, the Tata Group, with interests ranging from steel, cars and energy to chemicals, telecommunications and insurance (and now best-known in the UK as the owner of Jaguar, Land Rover, Tetley Tea and Corus, Britain’s largest steel company).

Although TERI has extended its sponsorship since the name change, the two concerns are still closely linked.

In India, Tata exercises enormous political power, shown not least in the way that when it expressed its interests in developing land in the eastern states of Orissa and Jarkhand, it led to the Indian government displacing hundreds of thousands of poor tribal villagers to make way for large-scale iron mining and steelmaking projects.

Initially, when Dr Pachauri took over the running of TERI in the 1980s, his interests centred on the oil and coal industries, which may now seem odd for a man who has since become best known for his opposition to fossil fuels. He was, for instance, a director until 2003 of India Oil, the country’s largest commercial enterprise, and until this year remained as a director of the National Thermal Power Generating Corporation, its largest electricity producer.

In 2005, he set up GloriOil, a Texas firm specialising in technology which allows the last remaining reserves to be extracted from oilfields otherwise at the end of their useful life.

However, since Pachauri became a vice-chairman of the IPCC in 1997, TERI has vastly expanded its interest in every kind of renewable or sustainable technology, in many of which the various divisions of the Tata Group have also become heavily involved, such as its project to invest $1.5 billion (£930 million) in vast wind farms.

Dr Pachauri’s TERI empire has also extended worldwide, with branches in the US, the EU and several countries in Asia. TERI Europe, based in London, of which he is a trustee (along with Sir John Houghton, one of the key players in the early days of the IPCC and formerly head of the UK Met Office) is currently running a project on bio-energy, financed by the EU.

Another project, co-financed by our own Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the German insurance firm Munich Re, is studying how India’s insurance industry, including Tata, can benefit from exploiting the supposed risks of exposure to climate change. Quite why Defra and UK taxpayers should fund a project to increase the profits of Indian insurance firms is not explained.

Even odder is the role of TERI’s Washington-based North American offshoot, a non-profit organisation, of which Dr Pachauri is president. Conveniently sited on Pennsylvania Avenue, midway between the White House and the Capitol, this body unashamedly sets out its stall as a lobbying organisation, to “sensitise decision-makers in North America to developing countries’ concerns about energy and the environment”.

TERI-NA is funded by a galaxy of official and corporate sponsors, including four branches of the UN bureaucracy; four US government agencies; oil giants such as Amoco; two of the leading US defence contractors; Monsanto, the world’s largest GM producer; the WWF (the environmentalist campaigning group which derives much of its own funding from the EU) and two world leaders in the international ‘carbon market’, between them managing more than $1 trillion (£620 billion) worth of assets.

All of this is doubtless useful to the interests of Tata back in India, which is heavily involved not just in bio-energy, renewables and insurance but also in ‘carbon trading’, the worldwide market in buying and selling the right to emit CO2. Much of this is administered at a profit by the UN under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) set up under the Kyoto Protocol, which the Copenhagen treaty was designed to replace with an even more lucrative successor.

Under the CDM, firms and consumers in the developed world pay for the right to exceed their ‘carbon limits’ by buying certificates from those firms in countries such as India and China which rack up ‘carbon credits’ for every renewable energy source they develop – or by showing that they have in some way reduced their own ‘carbon emissions’.

It is one of these deals, reported in last week’s Sunday Telegraph, which is enabling Tata to "mothball" nearly three million tonnes of steel production at its Corus plant in Redcar, while opening a new plant in Orissa with a similar scale of production, gaining in the process a potential £1.2 billion in ‘carbon credits’ (while putting 1,700 people on Teesside out of work).

More than three-quarters of the world ‘carbon’ market benefits India and China in this way. India alone has 1,455 CDM projects in operation, worth $33 billion (£20 billion), many of them facilitated by Tata – and it is perhaps unsurprising that Dr Pachauri also serves on the advisory board of the Chicago Climate Exchange, the largest and most lucrative carbon-trading exchange in the world, which was also assisted by TERI in setting up India’s own carbon exchange.

But this is peanuts compared to the numerous other posts to which Dr Pachauri has been appointed in the years since the UN chose him to become the world’s top ‘climate-change official’.

In 2007, for instance, he was appointed to the advisory board of Siderian, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm specialising in ‘sustainable technologies’, where he was expected to provide the Fund with ‘access, standing and industrial exposure at the highest level’,

In 2008 he was made an adviser on renewable and sustainable energy to the Credit Suisse bank and the Rockefeller Foundation. He joined the board of the Nordic Glitnir Bank, as it launched its Sustainable Future Fund, looking to raise funding of £4 billion. He became chairman of the Indochina Sustainable Infrastructure Fund, whose CEO was confident it could soon raise £100 billion.

In the same year he became a director of the International Risk Governance Council in Geneva, set up by EDF and E.On, two of Europe’s largest electricity firms, to promote ‘bio-energy’. This year Dr Pachauri joined the New York investment fund Pegasus as a ‘strategic adviser’, and was made chairman of the advisory board to the Asian Development Bank, strongly supportive of CDM trading, whose CEO warned that failure to agree a treaty at Copenhagen would lead to a collapse of the carbon market.

The list of posts now held by Dr Pachauri as a result of his new-found world status goes on and on. He has become head of Yale University’s Climate and Energy Institute, which enjoys millions of dollars of US state and corporate funding. He is on the climate change advisory board of Deutsche Bank. He is Director of the Japanese Institute for Global Environmental Strategies and was until recently an adviser to Toyota Motors. Recalling his origins as a railway engineer, he is even a policy adviser to SNCF, France’s state-owned railway company.

Meanwhile, back home in India, he serves on an array of influential government bodies, including the Economic Advisory Committee to the prime minister, holds various academic posts and has somehow found time in his busy life to publish 22 books.

Dr Pachauri never shrinks from giving the world frank advice on all matters relating to the menace of global warming. The latest edition of TERI News quotes him as telling the US Environmental Protection Agency that it must go ahead with regulating US carbon emissions without waiting for Congress to pass its cap and trade bill.

It reports how, in the days before Copenhagen, he called on the developing nations which had been historically responsible for the global warming crisis to make ‘concrete commitments’ to aiding developing countries such as India with funding and technology – while insisting that India could not agree to binding emissions targets. India, he said, must bargain for large-scale subsidies from the West for developing solar power, and Western funds must be made available for geo-engineering projects to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere.

As a vegetarian Hindu, Dr Pachauri repeated his call for the world to eat less meat to cut down on methane emissions (as usual he made no mention of what was to be done about India’s 400 million sacred cows). He further called for a ban on serving ice in restaurants and for meters to be fitted to all hotel rooms, so that guests could be charged a carbon tax on their use of heating and air-conditioning.

One subject the talkative Dr Pachauri remains silent on, however, is how much money he is paid for all these important posts, which must run into millions of dollars. Not one of the bodies for which he works publishes his salary or fees, and this notably includes the UN, which refuses to reveal how much we all pay him as one of its most senior officials.

As for TERI itself, Dr Pachauri’s main job for nearly 30 years, it is so coy about money that it does not even publish its accounts – the financial statement amounts to two income and expenditure pie charts which contain no detailed figures.

Dr Pachauri is equally coy about TERI’s links with Tata, the company which set it up in the 1970s and whose name it continued to bear until 2002, when it was changed to just The Energy Research Institute. A spokesman at the time said ‘we have not severed our past relationship with the Tatas, the change is only for convenience’.

But the real question mark over TERI’s director-general remains over the relationship between his highly lucrative commercial jobs and his role as chairman of the IPCC.

TERI have, for example, become a preferred bidder for Kuwaiti contracts to clean up the mess left by Saddam Hussein in their oilfields in 1991. The $3 billion (£1.9 billion) cost of the contracts has been provided by the UN. If successful, this would be tenth time TERI have benefited from a contract financed by the UN.

Certainly no one values the services of TERI more than the EU, which has included Dr Pachauri’s institute as a partner in no fewer than 12 projects designed to assist in devising the EU’s policies on mitigating the effects of the global warming predicted by the IPCC.

But whether those 1,700 Corus workers on Teesside that will be losing their jobs next month will be quite as excited about the international ‘carbon market’ as Dr Pachauri, is quite another matter.

[Auslandau]

Originally Posted by cs123

I always though Jones was a reasonably balanced interviewer. He was asking questions that Plimer was flat out refusing to answer and they were questions about assertions from his book. He actually shut down the other journalist on a few occasions.

Yes I do not mind Jones, he usually does a good job. But thats the problem when you have a 5 minute interview on the questions that were being discussed by 2 people to 1. In the end no one came off great .... as Jones was getting frustrated by both. I am sure he wished he had just done it as a one on one.

I couldn't see where Plimer was flat refusing though ....... didn't do the best of jobs but not all Scientist are 'personalities'



| [/url] |