Brief history: EDF was founded on October 6, 1967 by a group of lawyers and scientists as a single-purpose organization to ban the insecticide DDT.1 It was the first environmental group established exclusively to "defend the environment in the nation’s courts." The founding motto of this charming Economy Trasher was "Sue the bastards!" Bastards suing bastards?

It was the era of Rachel Carson’s 1962 milestone antipesticide masterpiece, Silent Spring. Carson’s alarm that Earth had reached the limits of its capacity to absorb the harmful activities of man was dramatized in her concern over the ecological impact of DDT. In particular, the insect killer was alleged to cause thinning of eggshells in wild bird populations which had ingested DDT-polluted water or food, especially raptors that ate contaminated prey species down the food chain.

Several of EDF’s founding trustees worked in New York with the Brookhaven Town Natural Resources Committee, a group of students, teachers, conservation officers, laymen, scientists, and lawyers. Five members of BTNRC, Charles Wurster, Dennis Puleston, George Woodwell, Robert Smolker, and Arthur Cooley became the scientific core of the Environmental Defense Fund after struggling to ban DDT in Suffolk County. They warned the county of potential dangers in using DDT for mosquito control, but without success.

By their own account, the group was "busy trying to discover new strategies to influence the political system. They concluded that conservationists were good but meek people. Greater clout was needed to save the environment."

With Long Island attorney Victor Yannacone, the little gaggle of scientists took their battle to court, where they discovered "they had finally found an effective means not only to get action but to focus attention on their scientific evidence...’By suing, we had the tiger by the tail, in court, where he couldn’t ignore us.’"

Dissension in the ranks

Yannacone has since left and denounced today's Environmental Defense Incorporated as a perversion of its original purpose. On October 23, 2008, he emailed The Librarian a fascinating message:

Attached is a pdf scan of the original Statement of Organization and Purpose for the Environmental Defense Fund approved in October 1987, just before we left for Michigan and the dieldrin-Japanese beetle litigation on All Hallows Eve. It was edited and approved by all of the Trustees and typeset by me personally on an IBM MTSC (Composer) in IBM Times Roman. This is a true reproduction of the original and you may circulate and use it as any of you wish. I approved the statements therein then and I would approve them now. I deeply regret that my former colleagues chose to repudiate these principles at their 15 September 1969 special meeting when Carol and I were removed as Trustees and I ceased to be the attorney for EDF.

Read the Statement here.

In 2008, Yannacone presented a controversial argument against ED's prime money-makers, man-made global warming. The original is posted at http://www.redcounty.com/sarasota/2008/11/an-open-letter-to-honorable-jo/

It is incomprehensible to me that the print media continues to splash global warming across its pages inextricably linked to the mantra that human activity is responsible.  It is obvious that the media believes that greenhouse gases coming from energy production and consumption change climate. But...

There is no excuse for reporters who refuse to conduct elementary fact-checking.

The fact is, it is getting colder. Forecasts by objective scientists (those whose incomes or tenure aren't dominated by adherence to social policy) are nearly unanimous that the next twenty or more years could be nasty cold. The Russians are even forecasting sixty years of global cooling, and even the NSF is publicizing papers that argue that the next ice age could be soon upon us. Which isn't necessarily true either.

Anti-science in the United Nations is rampant. Its IPCC of Nobel Prize fame has a simple charge: to document human impact on climate. That's not a scientific mandate! Real rational science tests ideas and theories about how climate changes, it does not pre-ordain the result and ignore any information that is contrary to the received dogma. Real scientists change or modify their earlier conclusions when data negates their hypotheses and invalidates their models, requiring new hypotheses and construction of new models. Measurements dominate, not algorithms.

Simple tests reveal the fallacy:  today's climate is well within parameters of the last 1000 years, and is cooler than the 1930's.  Computer models fail in "back tests".  Rates of change are well within historical ranges.  There is absolute nothing in the temperature records that is inconsistent with recent history. Exclamations of "the hottest year ever" and "least ice ever" cry out for some definition of "ever".  For temperature, it means warmest since 1934, for ice, least as measured since 1979.  How long is "ever"? Not very long to those who accept as an article of faith the hypothesis that human industrial activity and the carbon dioxide it emits to the atmosphere are responsible for "global warming". Climate change is best measured in centuries.

We are starting the down-hill slide from the apex of the 1935-2000 Gleissberg solar cycle. The Russians may be correct in their concern that the cold will last for many decades.  

The real climate change "deniers" are those who refuse to acknowledge the correlation of earth temperature with solar activity. This correlation can be back modeled and is a useful forecasting tool.  There is no correlation between carbon dioxide and earth temperature. Current computer models cannot back-model temperature history and thus are useless for forecasting. Yet the mass media and many concerned citizens who should know better continue to prattle on about human industrial activity causing global climate change?

In the coming colder earth, we are going to need all the energy we can muster to keep poor nations and poor people from starving and freezing.  The only solution to global warming, according to those seeking quick profits from mass hysteria is to reduce the supply of energy in the developed world. If, as the same pundits predict, we will have to accommodate a nine-billion-person world in less than fifty years, how will we feed all those people?

Media now sells entertainment rather than truth. Are you happy being part of that?

Victor John Yannacone, Jr.
vyannacone@YannaLaw.com

Environmental Defense Incorporated has a $122 million budget, which trumps anyone with less money.