Yes, the same celebrated and internationally respected IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) that won the Nobel Prize in 2007.
The actual figures are unclear, but most likely the funding amounted to less than $10 million. To call that a drop in the proverbial US budget bucket is being excessively kind.
Predictably it was more or less a party line vote (244 to 179) with supporters primarily spewing forth claims, now mostly debunked, from ‘climategate’ saga of a few years ago. Here’s an unofficial manuscript of the ‘debate’. Things could still change in the Senate.
falls lake 1, originally uploaded by pirano.
The IPCC has the climate change of carbon dioxide backwards. Just like Al Gore did with his “Inconvenient Truth” documentary when he said about the Vostok Ice Core data, that a CO2 increase came first that made the earth temperature to rise. It was just the opposite, a temperature increase came first, the oceans got warmer followed by an increased release of CO2 from the oceans to the atmosphere due to decreased solubility.
Actually carbon dioxide causes a slight cooling effect. Its concentration in the atmosphere is only around 400 ppmv compared to water vapor that can be as high as 4%, at that level around 1% of that for water vapor. It was proved after 9-11 that contrails cause cooling. With grounded air traffic (no contrails) the temperature actually increased 1 degrees centigrade for the 3 days planes were grounded compared to the 3 day temperatures before and after the grounding.
It ain’t rocket science; all clouds of water vapor shade the earth and cool it during the day. At night a cloud covered sky keeps the earth from cooling off as fast (insulating effect). However, the cooling effect during the day dwarfs the slight warming at night.
With a slight increase of CO2 in the atmosphere the cooling effect is there but it is so small one could not measure it. When this truth becomes widely known, will people start another campaign to eliminate CO2 because it cools the earth ever so slightly?
This climate change crap was always only about the money; there is no real science associated with it. Al Gore and David Blood of Goldman Sachs started Generation Investment Management in 2004 and in 2008 had $5 billion dollars in investments. It is a shame what has gone on but the world is waking up to the “Big Lie”.