Although it seems like just yesterday, Monday marks the 20th anniversary of the day James Hansen, the head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told members of Congress the world was doomed if the burning of fossil fuels didn't immediately cease.

To commemorate this inauspicious occasion, Hansen is going back to Capitol Hill to call for oil company executives to be put on trial for crimes against humanity and nature.

Can you imagine the media firestorm this is going to create?

Critical update: Audio of Hansen discussing this with NPR's Diane Rehm available here (h/t Anthony Watts).

While you ponder, the following was reported by England's Guardian Monday (emphasis added):

When Global Warmingest-in-Chief Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize last year, the media's prideful gushing was so obvious it was almost sick-making.

Now, six months later, a fellow Nobel Peace Prize recipient is part of a group asking the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change "admit that there is no observational evidence in measured data going back 22,000 years or even millions of years that CO2 levels (whether from man or nature) have driven or are driving world temperatures."

Since it is a metaphysical certitude media will ignore this Prize winner, the following is a complete reprint of a letter sent to the IPCC on Monday (with permission):

A long and carefully-worded December 14 Washington Post article about this week's climate change conference in Bali portrayed President Bush as the reason that the United States is not following Kyoto and the sole roadblock to saving Mother Earth.

On top of that, even while presenting the eco-blame-game's backstory, the reporter never mentioned the Clinton/Gore administration's involvement or that they set the standard for how America handles Kyoto.

After an article full of finger-pointing at Bush and quotes by enviro-saint and full-time jet-setter Al Gore, WashPost reporter Juliet Eilperin misrepresented Kyoto (bold mine throughout):

The United States took part in drafting the Kyoto pact, but it was repudiated by Bush in 2001.

Although it's a metaphysical certitude American media will be jumping for joy about this event, United States citizens on both sides of the political aisle should be deeply embarrassed and ashamed about the disgraceful things former Vice President Al Gore said Thursday at the United Nations' climate change meeting in Bali.

It's one thing to make a movie based almost exclusively on junk science and well-documented falsehoods whilst traveling the world evoking hysteria you yourself are financially benefiting from.

However, it is something else altogether to attend an international meeting, with delegates from every country on the face of the planet present, and disparage the nation you used to serve (truly disgraceful video available here):

CNN International’s Jonathan Mann, during an hour-long "love fest" in honor of Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s reception of the Nobel Peace Prize, gushed over the former vice president. "You went from being 'Ozone Man' to 'The Goracle.' This became -- the Nobel Prize became 'The Goronation.' You must be conscious of the change in perceptions about you in particular because of that film [An Inconvenient Truth]."

Later, at the very end of the program, Mann speculated that Gore’s prize could actually be shared with all those who contribute to the planet-saving cause. "We may not all agree about the politics of global warming or about the big solutions, but we can all do our own little part, and it will add up. And for that reason, this year, for the first time that I can remember, we can all share the Nobel Prize."

Video clips (2:27): Real (1.79 MB) and Windows (1.11 MB), plus MP3 audio (1.44 MB).

As NewsBusters has been reporting for many months, one of the key elements to the advancement of global warming hysteria is money, in particular, taking it from those that have to give to those that don't.

Of course, during this time, the media have been less than forthcoming concerning this inconvenient truth.

A fine example of where all this alarm is heading was surprisingly reported by the Associated Press Tuesday.

In a piece hysterically titled "Poor in Need of Help From Global Warming," AP author John Heilprin exposed - with tugs at the heartstrings, of course - the real modus operandi behind the hysteria (emphasis added throughout, h/t NBer DontFeedTheTrolls):

As climate alarmists from all over the world head to Bali to talk about the sacrifices regular folks have to make to save the planet from global warming, it seems certain media will ignore all the private jets clogging the tiny airport.

As if it’s not enough that the United Nations Climate Change Conference is being held at what NewsBusters reported as "a truly beautiful tropical island paradise," the management of the nearby airport has issued a warning to attendees that they are going to have to park their private jets somewhere else.

I kid you not.

As reported by Bali Discovery Tours on November 3 (emphasis added):

As NewsBusters readers are aware, one of the positions of those not buying into the manmade global warming hysteria is that the United Nations -- whose Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a large part of the alarmism -- is an organization that has seen more than its share of malfeasance and corruption.

The recent scandal surrounding the U.N.'s Oil-for-Food program is one example, with problems that eventually plagued UNICEF another.

Now, it has been revealed that the U.N. has been exaggerating the AIDS epidemic for many years. As reported Tuesday by the Washington Post (emphasis added throughout):

Remember when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Cal.) traveled to Germany to discuss global warming with Chancellor Angela Merkel and was hysterically greeted with a late-season snowstorm that rocked Europe?

Well, as the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change met in Valencia, Spain, last week to contemplate the supposedly catastrophic warming of the planet, Switzerland to the east received the most snow for this early in the season since 1952.

You really can't make this stuff up.

As hysterically reported by Fast Track Ski News Thursday (emphasis added):

The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is meeting this week in Valencia, Spain, to adopt and approve the contents of its Fourth Assessment Report first released in February.

If expectations for the proceedings pan out, it seems quite likely that media will change their view of this organization, and begin attacking it as too conservative. In fact, in anticipation of this gathering, Agence France-Presse has already done so (emphasis added throughout):

Some voices, including from within the IPCC itself, fear the panel's grand report will be badly out of date before it is even printed. Others quietly criticize the organization as being too conservative in its appreciation of the climate threat.

Though AFP didn't admit it, the fear is that the final version of AR4 isn't nearly as alarmist as recent press reports and claims by Hollywoodans like Nobel Laureate Al Gore, Leonardo DiCaprio, Laurie David, and Sheryl Crow:

If you thought doing your part in waging the war against global warming was as simple as attending one of Al Gore’s mid-summer “Live Earth” concerts, think again.

One of the authors of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report on Carbon Capture and Storage, Dr. Ken Caldeira, said on September 5 at the annual conference of the Society of Environmental Journalists there “would be an annual expense of perhaps $800 billion to capture carbon from centralized power plant,” as reported by Bud Ward, editor of The Yale Forum on Climate Change & The Media.

Caldeira said his 2005 IPCC Report estimated a cost of about $100 per ton of carbon (not just carbon dioxide) for carbon capture and storage costs in ideal locations.

If you’re on the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), you might be thinking Al Gore is hogging all the glory after they split the Nobel Peace Prize. But that could be a good thing because all the skepticism will be drawn to him also.

According to David Henderson, a former chief economist of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the panel’s worthiness of the Nobel Prize is in question.

“From the outset, leading figures within the IPCC process have shared the conviction that anthropogenic [human-caused] global warming presents a threat which demands prompt and far-reaching action,” Henderson wrote in the October 11 Wall Street Journal. “Indeed, had they not held this belief, they would not have been appointed to their positions of influence.”

For several years as the manmade global warming myth has taken center stage, the media have led people to believe that reports published by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were written by thousands of scientists around the world all sharing a consensus view regarding this controversial issue.

In reality, nothing could be further from the truth.

On Thursday, climate data analyst John McLean wrote a fabulous analysis of the most recent IPCC Assessment Report released in April, and in so doing, obliterated many of the press assertions that have become prominent fixtures in climate change lore.

Published by the Science and Public Policy Institute, this paper should be must reading for all media members and global warming alarmists. It began with a rather harsh review of the important Summary for Policy Makers (emphasis added throughout):

NASA's James Hansen, whose work is continually exposed as shoddy while he refuses to share data gathering techniques and computer codes used for such things with others, has been criticized by a contributing scientist to the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as moving "dangerously away from scientific discourse to advocacy."

What has drawn the ire of Andrew Weaver, a physicist at the University of Victoria who works on the dynamics of the polar ice caps, are recent statements by the Goddard Institute for Space Studies chief that oceans could rise as much as 82 feet in the next hundred years due to global warming.

Bear in mind that the IPCC's most recent report downgraded its expectations for such sea level increases to less than two feet.

However, according to Canada's Globe and Mail, Hansen believes the IPCC is dramatically underestimating the imminent doom (emphasis added throughout, h/t to Marc Morano and James Lewis):