Osama Bin Laden Embraces Environmentalism as “Junk Science” Goes Unreported

Osama Bin Laden is still out there but there’s a new twist to his attacks on the United States and other allied nations. The Al Qaeda leader added “climate change” to his list of grievances against the West in a new audiotape message that was released through Al Jazeera last Friday. His timing is particularly unfortunate now that the “junk science” underpinning alarmist claims has been largely debunked.

The New York Times, which has been quite congenial in its coverage of the environmental cause, provides readers with a good overview of Bin Laden’s main points. However, the paper continues to ignore the “climategate” scandal involving the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU) in Great Britain and new documentation that rigorously questions the credibility of United Nation’s reports that have been used as a rationale for the Kyoto Treaty Bin Laden says he now favors.

Environmentalism is often used  as a vehicle to attack the free market system and the American economy in particular. Apparently, this point is not lost on Bin Laden, according to the New York times piece, which reads in part as follows:

 “In the message broadcast on Friday, Mr. bin Laden veered away from his traditional vows to inflict death and destruction on the United States, and instead discussed climate change, globalization and monetary policy in a message that he said was directed to `the whole world.’”

“He called for a worldwide boycott of American goods and the dollar. He faulted the United States for failing to sign the Kyoto Protocol, which sought to curb global warming by restricting greenhouse gas emissions.”

There is a strong nexus between environmentalism and anti-Americanism that is often overlooked in “mainstream” media outlets. However, The Times does tip its hand by acknowledging Bin Laden’s affinity for Noam Chomsky, a noted left-wing academic. Is there any other kind?

The Al Qaeda leader praises Chomsky for equating U.S. policy with unsavory practices that unsettle the international community, according to the report.

“Noam Chomsky was correct when he compared the U.S. policies to those of the Mafia,” Al Jazeera quoted Mr. bin Laden as saying. “They are the true terrorists, and therefore we should refrain from dealing in the U.S. dollar and should try to get rid of this currency as early as possible.”

There is a larger story here concerning the far-left agenda behind the Kyoto Treaty and the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).  Organizations like the Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP) have gone a long way toward debunking the “junk science” that The New York Times and others have reported as fact.

Listed below are just a few of the highlights from SEPP:

• In mid-August, after repeated requests for such data under the Freedom of Information Act, the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (CRU), one of the three international agencies that calculate global temperatures, announced that it discarded the raw data used to calculate global surface temperatures. The CRU action renders independent review and verification of the temperature trends published by the CRU impossible – a clear violation of principles of science and the Freedom of Information Act

• In October, at the 2009 annual meeting of the Geological Society of America, Dr. Don Easterbrook presented graphs demonstrating how tree ring data from Russia showing a cooling after 1961 were truncated and artfully disguised in IPCC publications. The artful deceit, so exposed, indicates that the IPCC Assessment Report 4 (AR4) contains deceptions rendering the entire document scientifically questionable.

In mid-December, the Russian Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) reported that the Hadley Center for Climate Change of the British Meteorological Office (Met Office) had probably tampered with Russian climate data and that the Russian meteorological station data do not support human caused global warming. The Met Office collaborates with the CRU in reporting global temperatures. The reported global surface temperature trends are unreliable and probably have a strong warming bias of an unknown magnitude.

 The Times has persistently covered the IPCC but it has given very little weight and attention to new evidence that calls into question man-made global warming theories that continue to fuel radical policy proposals. This does a great disservice to readers and provides extreme figures with a political opening they should not have.

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