More lies: Australians back climate action

This is the triumphant headline in The Age today, which goes on:

THREE-QUARTERS of Australians believe that the price of fossil fuels should be increased to deal with climate change and 92 per cent believe a legally binding global climate deal is urgent and should be made at the conference to be held in Copenhagen in December.

Gosh, that's pretty convincing… or it would be if it bore any relation to the truth. The survey was carried out by the Danish [think Copenhagen] Board of Technology. The Age gives little away about the survey:

The project, Worldwide Views on Global Warming, had demographically representative groups of citizens deliberating in 38 countries, sending strong messages to their political leaders on the issue of climate change action.

But literally ten seconds digging on their web site (http://www.wwviews.org) would have revealed to the journalist, Kelsey Munro (if he had bothered to look), that the whole exercise is nothing more than a carefully orchestrated propaganda machine for the Copenhagen talks, "educating" participants to give the answers they want:

How did a WWViews meeting take place? 

The national and regional WWViews meetings took place during one full day and involved roughly100 citizens. The citizens were informed thoroughly about the issues in ways that are locally appropriate -information videos, expert speakers, teaching sessions or video recorded interviews. The participants were put into smaller groups of 6-8 people with a moderator connected to each group.

The moderator guided the discussions at the table through four consecutive sessions of debating and voting on different issues related to climate change. Towards the end of the meeting, each group of citizens formulated one recommendation for negotiators at the COP15. These recommendations were gathered and put to a general vote that determined the priority of the recommendations produced and the prominence, which they are given in the following communication to politicians.


How will the WWViews achieve impact on climate policy?

Together the partners of the WWViews Alliance have a truly awesome network of friends and colleagues reaching across the political globe. All parts of this network are now busy disseminating the results of WWViews to reach maximum impact on the COP15 negotiations and the debate surrounding it.

To illustrate, a few highlights are appropriate:

• Connie Hedegaard, the Danish Minister of Climate and Energy, is not only a formal Ambassador for WWViews; she is also the host of the U.N. COP15 negotiations. While no formal promises can be made, the Minister is ideally positioned to help bring the results of WWViews to the attention of the COP15 participants.

• Each National Partner in WWViews has the responsibility to try to bring their respective national deliberation's results to the attention of their own nation's COP15 delegates and political decision makers.

• The WWViews secretariat plans to organize public exhibits about WWViews and its results in Copenhagen during the COP15 deliberation. COP15 delegates will see those exhibits. The exhibits will also prompt local media coverage in Copenhagen and Denmark, which may in turn directly or indirectly come to the attention of COP15 delegates. 

• The WWViews secretariat has organized a global media strategy publicized the WWViews process and results. Among other things, the WWViews deliberations were held worldwide during a single 36-hour period, and publicized immediately via the World Wide Web, building excitement, drama and media interest throughout the day. All of this media attention brings the project results to the attention of ordinary people, interest groups and political decision makers worldwide. Those people and institutions may, in turn, bring the results to the attention of national decision makers and COP15 delegates.

Do you think any of this included anything not part of the IPCC-based "consensus of alarmism"? Here are a couple of the questions. Now here's a tricky one: what do you think happened between questions 1 and 2?

Yes, that's right - they would have been brainwashed with an undiluted diet of pure climate alarmism, to scare them into thinking that AGW is real and dangerous and that we should act now. Do you think there was any presentation of the alternative science? You know, the thousands of peer reviewed papers that challenge the CO2-based hysteria? Er, I don't think so. I have emailed the organisers requesting copies of the materials used - I don't expect a response.

And the list of links tells us all we need to know:

COP15
The Cop15 takes place in Copenhagen in Dec 7 - Dec 18, 2009. This is the official homepage for the event: http://www.cop15.dk/en

COP14
The Cop14 took place in Poznan in Poland in December 2008. The debate and results made at this conference is the stepping stone for the COP15.
http://www.cop14.gov.pl/index.php?lang=EN

IPCC
The homepage of The Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change. The IPCC is a UN organisation - the IPCC conducts the COP meetings and negotiations. The IPCC has also done extensive research in climate change.
http://www.ipcc.ch/

UNFCCC
The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is the predecessor to the Kyoto Protocol. The UNFCCC secretariat supports all institutions involved in the climate change process, particularly the COP, the subsidiary bodies, and their Bureau.
http://unfccc.int/2860.php

UNEP
The United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) works to facilitate the transition to low-carbon societies, to support climate proofing efforts, to improve understanding of climate change science, and to raise public awareness of this global challenge. UNEP has also been involved in creating the IPCC and UNFCCC.
http://www.unep.org/

People's Climate Action
PCA is funded by the Danish Foreign Ministry and was founded in November 2008 to prepare for COP15. The People's Climate Action is an umbrella organisation of more than 40 large and small Non Governmental Organisations and individual projects related to the COP15.
http://www.peoplesclimateaction.dk/uk/

350.org
350.org is a campaign founded by U.S. author and amabassador for this project, Bill McKibben. The purpose of this campaign is to highlight the efforts of existing organizations and knit these many efforts together for a powerful global, scientific, and specific call to action.
http://www.350.org/

C-40
C40 is a group of the world's largest cities committed to tackling climate change, based on the thought that cities have a central role to play in tackling climate change, particularly as cities bear a disproportional responsibility for causing it.
http://www.c40cities.org/

This is not an impartial survey, or anything approaching an impartial survey. It is a partisan, biased exercise in brainwashing in order to obtain misleading results to achieve a particular political outcome. Shame on The Age for uncritically publishing such obvious nonsense.

Read it here.