UN IPCC Lead Author Oppenheimer: Barbra Streisand gave me quarter of a million dollars — ‘So what?’

Watch March 30, 2015 Video below or click this link:

Remarks begin about 29 minute mark:

New York Times journalist Andrew Revkin asked Prof. Michael Oppenheimer about his association with Environmental Defense Fund and his advocacy role as a scientist during a March 30, 2015 streaming interview at Pace University.

Oppenheimer responded: “I have been attacked plenty, but we are all…People who want to disagree with me, they will say things like I worked for EDF…Barbra Streisand, once gave EDF a few hundred thousand to support my work, and then it’s like so what?” — “It’s very hard to catch me saying something that is wrong, because I don’t.”

Climate Depot Response: ‘So what?’ That is the point. All scientists have biases — both personal, professional and funding —  to some extent. Why does the media and the climate establishment act like it is only skeptical scientists that should be placed under funding scrutiny?

Despite his own well-funded activist background, Oppenheimer, has a history of smearing skeptics as having a “financial interest” in promoting skepticism. In 2006, Oppenheimer told Tom Brokaw that many skeptics had a “financial interest” in the status quo and therefore reject man-made global warming claims.

Oppenheimer has the audacity — despite having drawn nice salaries from Environmental Defense – to tell the media that skeptics are all in the pay of big oil. See: Climate Cash: Enviro Activist Michael Oppenheimer of EDF wins 2010 greenie Heinz Awards (Each Heinz Award recipient receives $100,000!)

Streisand admitted: ‘I, and others have spent countless millions on this issue’ – She funded UN IPCC Lead Author to tune of $250,000

Reality Check: Streisand admitted key climate role and gave at least a quarter of a million dollars to fund the climate activism of a lead author of the UN IPCC.

Scientist to the Hollywood Stars: UN IPCC Lead Author Michael Oppenheimer ‘was the holder of the ‘Barbra Streisand Chair of Environmental Studies’ at Environmental Defense Fund’

Streisand: ‘My Foundation started supporting climate change work in 1989, when I donated a quarter of a million dollars to support the work of environmental scientist Dr. Michael Oppenheimer at EDF. Since then, I, and others have spent countless millions on this issue.’

The green group, the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) hosted the Barbra Streisand Chair of Environmental Studies, the perch of UN IPCC lead author Michael

‘Climate Sensitivity and Environmental Worries Are Trending Downward’

You Ought to Have a Look: Climate Sensitivity and Environmental Worries Are Trending Downward

http://www.cato.org/blog/you-ought-have-look-climate-sensitivity-environmental-worries-are-trending-downward

Patrick J. Michaels and Paul C. “Chip” Knappenberger You Ought to Have a Look is a feature from the Center for the Study of Science posted by Patrick J. Michaels and Paul C. (“Chip”) Knappenberger. While this section will feature all of the areas of interest that we are emphasizing, the prominence of the climate issue is driving a tremendous amount of web traffic. Here we post a few of the best in recent days, along with our color commentary. — More evidence this week that high-end forecasts of coming climate change are unsupportable and Americans’ worry about environmental threats, including global warming, is declining. Maybe the general public isn’t as out of touch with the science as has been advertised? First up is a new paper by Bjorn Stevens from Germany’s Max Plank Institute for Meteorology that finds the magnitude of the cooling effect from anthropogenic aerosol emissions during the late 19th and 20th century was less than currently believed, which eliminates the support for the high-end negative estimates (such as those included in the latest assessment of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC). Or, as Stevens puts it “that aerosol radiative forcing is less negative and more certain than is commonly believed.” This is important, because climate models rely on the cooling effects from aerosol emissions to offset a large part of the warming effect from greenhouse gas emissions. If you think climate models produce too much warming now, you ought to see how hot they become when they don’t include aerosol emissions. The IPCC sums up the role of aerosols this way: Despite the large uncertainty range, there is a high confidence that aerosols have offset a substantial portion of [greenhouse gas] global mean forcing. The new Stevens’ result—that the magnitude of the aerosol forcing is less—means the amount of greenhouse gas-induced warming must also be less; which means that going forward we should expect less warming from future greenhouse gas emissions than climate models are projecting. Researcher Nic Lewis, who has done a lot of good recent work on climate sensitivity, was quick to realize the implications of the Stevens’ results. In a blog post over at Climate Audit, Lewis takes us through his calculations as to what the new aerosols cooling estimates mean for observational determinations of the …

‘U.S. biologists used same flawed models for listing walrus and polar bears as ‘threatened’

US biologists used same flawed models for listing walrus and polar bears as ‘threatened’

http://polarbearscience.com/2015/03/30/us-biologists-used-same-flawed-models-for-listing-walrus-and-polar-bears-as-threatened

More bad science: US biologists successfully used a scientifically flawed model to get polar bears listed as ‘threatened’ and thus emboldened, went on to do the same for walrus. The intricate US Geological Survey model of ‘expert opinion’ that was used to support the listing of polar bears as ‘threatened’ under the US Endangered Species Act (ESA) has been soundly rejected by the world’s leading conservation organization, the IUCN,1 which has has tightened its rules for using “future conditions” (e.g., effects of global warming) in generating Red List assessments. That IUCN condemnation means the USGS model was never “the best available science” for evaluating the status of polar bears ̶ it was (and still is) substandard, inadequate science that makes a mockery of serious conservation efforts. However, not only has this flawed model continued to be used by the USGS for polar bears, it has also been used to assess the conservation status of Pacific walrus, which are now officially “candidates” for being listed as ‘threatened’ (US Fish and Wildlife Service 2011).2 It turns out that an updated version of the USGS polar bear model was released earlier this year (Atwood et al. 2014), without fanfare, apparently as part of a required polar bear “recovery” plan.3 The so-called “2nd generation” model used in this document simply added a few more expert opinions to the complex and numberless Bayesian Network model [“numberless” in the sense that no population numbers were used]. That’s up from the single expert opinion (Steven Amstrup) used in the 2007 version of the model (Amstrup et al. 2007, 2008), which supported the 2008 ESA listing of ‘threatened’ (US Fish and Wildlife Service 2008) — but a substantial improvement of the method it is not. Compounding the 2007 model errors, the same flawed approach was used in 2011 to assess the potential future of walruses (Jay et al. 2011; Oakley et al. 2012). This partially explains the hysteria over last fall’s brief gathering of a large walrus herd on an Alaskan beach, now an annual event similar to the hue and cry about polar bears generated every September when the annual sea ice extent minimum is reached. And, surprise, surprise: no reports of huge numbers of dead or dying walruses associated with this incident, even in a March 2015 follow-up. The ‘walruses are …