Sherwood Idso, father (Wikipedia)

Craig Idso, son/brother (Wikipedia)

Keith Idso, son/brother (Wikipedia)

Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change — funding: reported 90K from Exxon since 1998 (see Wikipedia)

Greening Earth Society — non-profit front organization spawned by Western Fuels Association

and

Robert C. Balling, Jr.
Sourcewatch: Balling has acknowledged that he had received $408,000 in research funding from the fossil fuel industry over the last decade (of which his University takes 50% for overhead). Contributors include ExxonMobil, the British Coal Corporation, Cyprus Minerals and OPEC.

Richard Lindzen
Sourcewatch: Gelbspan reports Lindzen charged “oil and coal interests $2,500 a day for his consulting services; [and] his 1991 trip to testify before a Senate committee was paid for by Western Fuels and a speech he wrote, entitled ‘Global Warming: the Origin and Nature of Alleged Scientific Consensus,’ was underwritten by OPEC.

Sallie Baliunas
Willie Soon
Sourcewatch: Soon’s co-authors were Sallie Baliunas, also from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center; Sherwood Idso and his son, Craig Idso of Tempe, Ariz., who are the former president and the current president of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change; and David Legates, a climate researcher at the University of Delaware. The Idsos, who have been linked to Western coal interests, do not reveal financial sources. But IRS records filed by ExxonMobil Foundation show that it provided a grant of $15,000 to the center in 2000.

Other parties cited in the previous two posts can be easily vetted across the internet, and share the same kinds of relationships with fossil fuel producers.

I suspect that “tkb” and “tek” could be paid for their efforts here today.

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In his 21 March 2007 testimony before the United States Senate’s Environment & Public Works Committee, former U.S. Vice President Al Gore talked passionately about what he referred to time and again as a “climate crisis,” which he characterized as “a planetary emergency – a crisis that threatens the survival of our civilization and the habitability of the Earth.” Using the word “crisis” an amazing 10 times in his 14-paragraph testimony, Gore mentioned several things designed to supposedly justify his prolific use of the scary word; yet he truly outdid himself when he ominously added that “new evidence shows that it [i.e., the climate crisis] may be even worse [our italics] than we thought.” And that’s saying a lot, particularly when the “thinker” is Al Gore!
So what was the ominous bad news? According to Gore, “a recent study published by the University of Alaska-Fairbanks indicates that methane is leaking from the Siberian permafrost at five times the predicted levels,” and considering the possibility that this revelation might not be scary enough to convince people of his take on the issue, he added that “methane is 23 times as potent a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide.” And in case that little bit of information was not enough to do the job, he went on to say “there are billions of tons underneath the permafrost.” No wonder Gore claims the situation is even worse than a crisis! But is it really?

Most people would probably conclude that if methane was escaping from such a vast and long-inert reservoir as the Siberian permafrost, and at such an unexpectedly high rate, its atmospheric concentration would also likely be rising at an unexpectedly high rate; and that’s probably what Gore was counting on their thinking. However, that’s not what’s been happening. After rising rapidly until the early 1990s, the atmosphere’s methane concentration continued to rise, but at an ever-slowing rate; and the decline in its rate-of-rise continued to the point that since the turn of the century the methane concentration of the atmosphere has essentially stabilized – ceasing to rise any further – as demonstrated by the updates of atmospheric methane concentration data provided by Dlugokencky et al. (2003) and Khalil et al. (2007). What is more, the nature of the rate-of-rise decline in methane concentration suggests that atmospheric methane concentrations could well begin to decline in the not-too-distant future, as we discuss in more detail in our editorial of 8 Jan 2003.

Why are these facts so incredibly important? The answer resides in the degree of radiative forcing induced by the increase in atmospheric methane concentration since preindustrial times. Shine and Sturges (2007) indicate that since 1800 the increase in the air’s methane content has produced an enhanced radiative forcing of approximately 0.5 W m-2; and they note that because “rising methane concentrations can cause increases in ozone and stratospheric water vapor concentrations … methane’s true contribution was nearer 0.9 W m-2, equivalent to more than half the radiative forcing caused by CO2,” which is estimated to have been 1.66 W m-2.

This being the case, the cessation of the historical increase in the atmosphere’s methane concentration – which appears to have actually been accomplished, and without any overt help from mankind – will likely do more to slow the increase in total greenhouse-gas radiative forcing than any program humanity will ever be able to implement. And if the atmosphere’s methane concentration actually starts to decline (which looks to be a real possibility in the very near future), the increase in radiative forcing due to continued increases in the air’s CO2 content will be significantly countered by the decline in methane-induced radiative forcing, once again accomplishing more than anything man will ever be able to do in this regard. In fact, it allows for the important and wonderful possibility that the ongoing rise in the air’s CO2 concentration will be able to continue and thereby provide the boost in agricultural productivity we are going to need by the mid-point of this century to adequately feed the planet’s rapidly-rising human population without having to usurp – or steal from nature – so much of the world’s remaining cultivatable land and freshwater resources (see our editorials of 13 Jun 2001 and 4 Sep 2002), and without having to worry about the increase in atmospheric CO2 creating a dangerous degree of global warming.

Sherwood, Keith and Craig Idso

References
Dlugokencky, E.J., Houweling, S., Bruhwiler, L., Masarie, K.A., Lang, P.M., Miller, J.B. and Tans, P.P. 2003. Geophysical Research Letters 30: 10.1029/2003GL018126.

Khalil, M.A.K., Butenhoff, C.L. and Rasmussen, R.A. 2007. Atmospheric methane: Trends and cycles of sources and sinks. Environmental Science & Technology 10.1021/es061791t.

Shine, K.P. and Sturges, W.T. 2007. CO2 is not the only gas. Science 315: 1804-1805.

Turn to CO2 Science for all your greenhouse gas reporting needs.

Is carbon dioxide a harmful air pollutant, or is it an amazingly effective aerial fertilizer?

Explore the positive side of the issue in two half-hour documentaries — The Greening of Planet Earth and The Greening of Planet Earth Continues.

Click here for details.

Gore/ Kerry ‘08 has a nice in their face ring to it..but frankly I want every Decent Senator to stay put for awhile.

Oh, if only it could happen! That would be my absolute dream ticket — it would be Karma to have them run together. I’m just hoping Gore will run — I’ve been working on the draft campaign and I hope we’re not spending our time on a lost cause.

Richardson has been my second choice, but I heard Edwards speak Saturday night at our JeffJack dinner, and he’s moved up in my book. I’d love either a Gore/Richardson or a Gore/Edwards ticket with Richardson as Secretary of State. If Gore really doesn’t run, I’d love to see an Edwards/Richardson (or vice versa) ticket. I just don’t know if Edwards would take VP again. I think with Gore that maybe he would.

None other than Ned Lamont, who walked over from the Kennedy School to show support for someone who (in Lamont’s own words) did more for his campaign than most other dems put together. A nice moment.

Citizen landofthefree and the firepups:

Senator Kerry has plenty enough seniority in his own right to get a formal spot in leadership on the floor or a big committee chairmanship…there are two reasons he hasn’t achieved anything in this regard: his ambition for the White House and ,as a result, his alienation from his Democratic Party colleagues.

KEEP THE FAITH AND DON’T LET ANY OF ‘EM OFF THE HOOK!!

Eureka Springs @ 46

Gore/ Kerry ‘08 has a nice in their face ring to it..but frankly I want every Decent Senator to stay put for awhile.

You don’t know how much I wanted that ticket in 2000. (I think Kerry did, too… and Gore may have, in hindsight).

I’m a proud supporter of Kerry for a couple decades now, and I’m not shy of saying that I was volunteering for his Presidential campaign back in the days people laughed at us in the (fall and winter of 2003). It’s mind boggling to think what our nation and our world would be like today if Kerry were elected.

I think he made a good decision to not run this time, like Gore made a good decision in ‘04. He doesn’t deserve the dissing he gets from many people, even in our own party. It’s much like how people ragged on Gore for the first couple years after he “lost” in 2000, and now he is respected more than ever. The same will happen for Sen. Kerry, I’m sure. He will keep working on the issues that are of most concern to him, the environmental crisis being one of them.

Beautifully expressed dear ES – as always. Damn, made this ole tough brat tear up and looking for a hanky.