Guest post by Christopher Booker

To the colourful Daily Telegraph blogger James Delingpole, it was winner of the coveted award for the "Biggest front page non-story in history of journalism". What he was referring to was a tale published a week ago under the by-line of The Times's enviromment correspondent Ben Webster which led the paper, covering virtually the entire front-page and with a whole further page inside, beneath the huge headline "Oil giant gives £1 million to fund climate sceptics."

View full article here

Masterly stuff as usual. Thank you, Mr Booker.

The "Big Oil is denialist" argument has never been borne out by the facts. My favourite (and most concise) counter punch is this:

"We [the Climatic Research Unit at UEA] would like to acknowledge the support of the following funders... British Petroleum... Shell."

http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/about/history/

As far as I know, those two funded the CRU from the start (1972).

Any sane person should run a mile if one sees B J Clintoon's name involved

This REDD project looks like theft, as surely the forest belongs to the countries it is in, not some UN body........

US billionaire Jeremy Grantham sits on the management boards of his Grantham Institutes for Climate Change, with Carter Roberts, President and CEO of World Wildlife Fund, http://www.worldwildlife.org/who/media/ ... em803.html and Fred Krupp, President of Environmental Defense. http://www.edf.org/page.cfm?tagID=870.

Brian Hoskins, (Grantham Imperial) and Sam Fankhauser, Grantham LSE, (Stern) are significant members of the UK Climate Change Committee, mandated to push UK policy on emissions, together with Martin Parry (visiting scientist at Grantham), of Parry Associates. Fankhauser and Stern are principal advisors at Idea Carbon, http://www.ideacarbon.com/advisors/index.htm.

Fankhauser also serves as Chief Economist at Globe International, (where former Rector of Imperial, Lord Oxburgh is Vice Chair) and has worked at the Global Environment Facility, and the World Bank.
Check out the Rogues Gallery..... http://copenhagen.globeinternational.or ... pants.aspx

I'm guessing that Mr Booker wanted to publish this in the Telegraph, but was prevented from doing so.

So where do the Barclay brothers fit into all this ?

"So where do the Barclay brothers fit into all this?" Not personally but:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sponsored/bu ... forchange/

Nothing to do with the Barclay brothers ...

Globe International's significant involvement is in rapeseed biodiesel promotion in the UK (2OC - Oxburgh and blue-ng - Oxburgh - both honorary adviser). They are (probably) behind the recent EU legislation to have paper pulp from Indonesian forests declared 'illegal' - helped by WWF campaigning - July 7th to be precise.

Oxburgh was chairman of D1 Oils which is going down the tubes and barely tottering on the edge, because its hyped-up bogus biodiesel from Jatropha plants in 50-50% partnership with British Petroleum and Pachauri's TERI went bust. The plants do not grow with all the 'slight precipitation' that was promised to make them proliferate like weeds, they don't give that much diesel either. TERI and British Petroleum, incidentally, have kept their long-standing relationship alive, via Mission New Energy from Australia, which is running the same jatropha show. The morons in India who created a 'market' by legislation, by mandating 20% of all diesel by 2020 be biodiesel, had the brilliant former Indian President, nuclear scientist APJ Kalam, backing their jatropha fantasies.

Goeffrey Boulton, UEA, IPCC contributor is of Univ of Edinburgh, which recently awarded a honorary degree to BP CEO Anthony Hayward, who earned his PhD from the Geology department at the same university. BP's David Eyton and Geoffrey Boulton, ex-UEA teamed up with Russel to form the Russel panel.Baron, and later the Lord Oxburgh is ex Shell International. Pachauri is ex-Indian Oil Corporation

Anyone who says big oil is funding skeptics can take a flying ....

Philip Campbell of Nature magazine, stepped down, so rapidly after his 'conflict of interest' was 'discovered' by skeptic bloggers (they must have been rolling in the aisles after they staged that one).

What this tells us is that we can no longer trust anything we are told in the mass media, whatever their percieved position, left or right. The Warmist have infiltrated everywhere, along with the hundreds of salaried "activists" ie press officers employed by nWWF (Not-the-World-Wildlife-Fund) Greanpeace or thousands of other salaried warmists, pumping out propaganda daily. There are no more investigative journalists left except the handful here RAENorth Booker Dellingpole. Climate is the industry designed to soak up the huge surplus of graduates churned out by Tony's 50% target. CV Charity/ Third Sector para-NGO.

What we are witnessing is a version of the prescient Douglas Adams "Shoe Event Horizon":

"The theory is summarized as such: as a society sinks into depression, the people of the society need to cheer themselves up by buying themselves gifts. This is usually done through the purchase of shoes. As more money is spent on shoes, more shoe shops are built, and the quality of the shoes begins to diminish as the demand for different types of shoes increases. This makes people buy more shoes. The above turns into a vicious cycle, the end result being that other industries begin to falter. Eventually the titular Shoe Event Horizon is reached, where the only type of store economically viable to build is a shoe shop. At this point, society ceases to function, and the economy collapses, sending a world into ruin."

Except it's not shoes, it's climate change.

Firstly let me say how glad I am that Chris Booker is writing as a guest for this blog. I hope this well researched story now goes viral because it is a scandal and people should know that the Times has given up trying to cover climate stories in a balanced or fair way.

When I saw this headline I was simply amazed and wrote a letter telling the editor that a more honest way to boost his readership would be to amalgamate The Times with its sister tabloid The Sun. I also told them how pleased I am that the public will be unable to read their drivel on Googel news or other free news sites on the internet because no one on the internet would ever want to pay to read such trash as they had just put on their front page.

I mentioned that I used to buy their newspaper regularly but this unbalanced story had convinced me never to waste my money again.

Power corrupts...

Dr Denis Rancourt now thinks the whole climate change hypothesis is a mental disease. - Biassed BBC.

The Green exodus from the Big Scare

Physicist Dr. Denis Rancourt is a former professor and environmental science researcher at the University of Ottawa (as green as they come), and has officially bailed out of the man-made global warming movement. He runs a radio show, and speaks with many activists and NGO’s around the world. He claims that the “activists in the developing world, who need to directly defend their own neighborhoods, they understand that this global warming thing is an invention.”

Climate Depot has released a video of Dr. Rancourt: Man-made global warming is nothing more than a “corrupt social phenomenon.” “It is as much psychological and social phenomenon as anything else” .

“I argue that by far the most destructive force on the planet is power-driven financiers and profit-driven corporations and their cartels backed by military might; and that the global warming myth is a red herring that contributes to hiding this truth. In my opinion, activists who, using any justification, feed the global warming myth have effectively been co-opted, or at best neutralized,” Rancourt said.opted, or at best neutralized,” Rancourt said.

“Global warming is strictly an imaginary problem of the First World middleclass,” he stated.

http://joannenova.com.au/2010/07/the-ex ... big-scare/

More above.

Dear Mr Booker,

Congratulations on another entertaining fairy tale – it’s a shame you didn’t have space for all this in your amusing column for ‘The Sunday Telegraph’!

But I am slightly puzzled by a rather curious omission from your conspiracy story.

The story in ‘The Times’ pointed out that ExxonMobil gave $275,000 in 2009 to the Heritage Foundation, the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, the Pacific Research Institute and the Media Research Center. We only know this because ExxonMobil publishes retrospectively a list of its contributions to these groups, which themselves try to keep the identities of their sponsors secret.

This money is listed by ExxonMobil as a contribution to “Public information and policy research” which, according to the company’s website, “provides support to organizations that promote international relationships and understanding, as well as organizations that assess public policy alternatives on issues of direct importance to the petroleum and petrochemical industries”.

These four organisations were co-sponsors of the “International Conference on Climate Change”, which was held in New York between 8 and 10 March 2009. The title of this conference was ‘Global warming: was it ever a crisis?’, and its organisers stated that its aim was “to demonstrate once again the breadth and high quality of support that the ‘skeptical’ perspective on climate change enjoys”.

I am sure it was just an oversight on your part not to mention that you were a speaker at this conference, plugging your book ‘Scared to Death’, which was co-written with Richard North.

Steve McIntyre, who was one of the other speakers at the conference, has already admitted that he received money from the sponsors for his attendance. However, you have been strangely silent about this issue. So how about coming clean – were you paid for your role at the conference? And if so, why did you not declare this vested financial interest when you plugged the conference in your column in ‘The Sunday Telegraph’ on 15 March 2009?: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/4990704/Nobody-listens-to-the-real-climate-change-experts.html

Dear Bob, like you always mention your paymasters when writing comments like this?

Mr Ward should revisit his old friends at Climate Resistance and remind himself how much funding is received by WWF, including from Jeremy Grantham, who is currently paying his wages.

http://www.climate-resistance.org/2008/ ... -fear.html