climate change denial

Credit first to Gary Mason of the Globe and Mail, who in a Vancouver weather story on Jan. 10, 2006 offered this "old joke."

A newcomer to Vancouver arrives and it's raining. He gets up the next day and it's still raining. It rains the day after that and the day after that. He goes for lunch five days later and it's still pouring. He sees a young boy walking down the street, and he says, "Does it every stop raining here?"

Google Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate and you will find a host of stories lauding a new international group nominally dedicated to reducing climate change by developing new technology.

Great, you say.

But, if you read very far into the material, you will find an international industrial spin project - a blatant effort to distract the public from the Kyoto process and to justify huge increases in the production and consumption of fossil fuels, especially coal.

Let's get up a great big hand for one of the best European climate change dissemblers, the previously unremarked Scientific Alliance.

The Alliance appears to be one of those "intellectual" sweatshops that industry cobbles together in the guise of a think tank. In these vacuous vessels, said intellectuals-for-hire produce dogma on demand -- questionable "scientific" material designed to excuse their industrial financiers from taking any responsibility for the environmental costs they are dumping on society.