September 30, 2011

Timeline

Global War on Disinformation



13.8 Ga BANG!
~13.2 Ga Stars.
4.5 Ga Earth.
3.8 Ga Life.
65 Ma Asteroid wipes out the dinosaurs.
56 Ma Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM).
7 Ma Last common ancestor with chimpanzees.
200 Ka Homo Sapiens.
10 Ka Holocene.
c 270 BCE Aristarchus of Samos (310 ~ 230 BCE) proposes the heliocentric hypothesis.
1543 Nicolaus Copernicus (1473 – 1543) publishes his heliocentric model based on circular orbits.
1609-19 Johannes Kepler (1571 – 1630) publishes his laws of planetary motion using the observations of Tycho Brahe (1546 – 1601) based on elliptical orbits.
1610 Galileo Galilei (1564 – 1642) in publishes his observations of the Jovian moons.
1687 Kepler's laws are subsumed within Isaac Newton's (1642 – 1726) laws of motion and universal gravitation.
1750 Fossil fuel era.
1807 Slave trade abolished in the British Empire.
1827 Jean-Baptiste Fourier (1768 – 1830) calculates that without the greenhouse effect the temperature of the earth's surface would average −15°C.
1833 Factory Act in England forbids employment of children under nine in factories.
Slavery abolished in the British colonies.
1834 'Tolpuddle Martyrs': 6 Dorset labourers transported to Australia for conspiracy to form a trade union.
1887 Victoria, Queen of Britain (to 1901).
1839 Britain and Afghanistran at war.
1846 Potato famine peaks in Ireland — around a million die by 1851.
Corn Laws repealed in Britain.
1859Charles Darwin (1809 – 82) publishes the On The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection.
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1860 John Tyndall (1820 – 93) measures the absorption of infrared radiation by carbon dioxide and speculates that a decrease in the greenhouse effect might cause the Ice Ages.
1863 The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is founded in Geneva by Jean Henry Dunant (1828 – 1910).
1896 Svante Arrhenius (1859 – 1927) estimates that a doubling of atmospheric CO2 by the burning of fossil fuels would result in a 5 to 6 °C increase in global temperatures (Arrhenius, 1896).
1916 Newton's laws are subsumed within Albert Einstein's (1879 – 1955) theory of general relativity.
1919 Treaty of Versailles sets events in motion which lead to the Second World War.
(16 June)
1940 Guy Callendar (1898 – 1964) calculates the warming due to the increasing carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.
1943 The Institute of Public Affairs is established by a group of Melbourne businessmen led by G J Coles.
It is closely linked with Australian conservative political parties principally the Liberal Party of Australia.
1948 The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is adopted in Paris.
(December)
1949 The Geneva Convention is ratified fully or with reservations by 194 countries.
1950 Bertrand Russell (1872 – 1970) awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
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1954 American intervention at the Geneva peace conference following the defeat of the French in Indochina prolongs the Vietnamese conflict for a further 21 years and leads to the destabilization of Laos and the Cambodian genocide.
Menzies government signs the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (Singer and Gregg, 2004, p 40).
1957 Roger Revelle and Hans Suess (Scripps Institute of Oceanography, California) point out that humans are carrying out a large-scale geophysical experiment with the build-up of atmospheric carbon dioxide.
1958 Charles Keeling (1928 – 2005) begins making routine measurements of carbon dioxide levels at the Mauna Kea observatory in Hawaii.
1961 Amnesty International founded in London by Peter Benenson (1921–2005).
1965 Lyndon Johnson (1908 – 73):
This generation has altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale through a steady increase in carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.
(Oreskes, 2011).
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1969
Doubt is our product … since it is the best means of competing with the body of fact that exists in the minds of the general public.
(Tobacco industry memo, 1969)
1970's Richard Nixon (1913 – 94) enacts the Clean Air Act Extension, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act and establishes the Environment Protection Agency (Oreskes, 2011).
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1971 Greenpeace founded in Vancouver.

 Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) founded.
1977 The Cato Institute established by Edward H Crane and Charles Koch.
The institute has been active in opposing action on climate change.

 Amnesty International is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for its "campaign against torture"
1978 Human Rights Watch is founded in New York.
1979 Frederick Seitz (1911 – 2008) joins the R J Reynolds Tobacco company as a consultant and disperses $45 million to scientists whose research disputes the adverse effects of smoking (Oreskes, 2011).
1981 "Ploughshares Fund founded by San Francisco philanthropist, artist and activist Sally Lilienthal."
1983 The High Court rules in favor of the Commonwealth in Commonwealth vs Tasmania thus preventing the damming of the Franklin river.
(1 July)
1984 The George C Marshall Institute is established by physicists Robert Jastrow, William Nierenberg (1919–2000) and Fred Seitz to support the Strategic Defence Initiative and subsequently to undermine environmental science.
1985 "Rainbow Warrior … sunk whilst in harbour in New Zealand by operatives of the French intelligence service (DGSE) … killing one of the activists."
(10 July)
1987 Hansen and Lebedeff publish the first ‘unequivocal’ evidence of a climate signal indicating that anthropogenic warming is predominating over cooling (Hansen and Lebedeff, 1987).
1988 The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel Climate Change (IPCC) is established by the World Meteorological Association and the United Nations Environment Fund.
Current membership is 194 countries (IPCC, 2011).
1990 The Discovery Institute is founded:
[Best] known for its advocacy of intelligent design.
IPCC First Assessment Report (FAR) forms the basis of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
1992 George H W Bush (1924 – 2018) signs the UNFCCC at the UN Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro and calls for:
concrete action to protect the planet
(Oreskes, 2011).
(June)
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UNFCCC comes into force after being signed by 192 countries.
(March)
1996 IPCC Second Assessment Report (SAR).
1997 Byrd-Hagel resolution passed by the US Senate by a vote of 97-0 blocks ratification of the Kyoto Protocol.
(25 July)
Kyoto Protocol adopted.
(11 December)
1988 Climategate:
Six committees investigated the allegations and published reports [found] no evidence of fraud or scientific misconduct.
1999 Final provisions of the Glass-Steagall Act repealed.
2001 Al Qaeda attacks in New York and Virginia.
(11 September)
IPCC Third Assessment Report (TAR).
(29 September)
2002Australia declines to ratify the Optional Protocol on the Convention against Torture (Singer and Gregg, 2004, p 40).
2003 Iraq is invaded by the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and Poland on the pretext of non-existent weapons of mass destruction.
(19 March)
2005 Kyoto Protocol came into effect.
(16 February)
The Australian Environment Foundation, a front organization for the IPA is established.
(World Environment Day, 5 June)
2006 Davis Guggenheim's An Inconvenient Truth featuring Al Gore is released.
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2007 Jeremy Rifkin's concept for a Third Industrial Revolution is endorsed by the European Parliament (EP, 2007).

 Al Gore and the IPCC awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
(10 December)

 Howard government adopts recommendation to introduce an emission trading scheme ahead of any global agreement (Turnbull, 2010).
Wikileaks launched by The Sunshine Press.
IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (AR4).
2008New Zealand Emissions Trading Scheme is legislated.
(September)
2009 COP15/CMP5 at Copenhagen.
The United States, Brazil, South Africa, India and China sign the Copenhagen Accord.
2010 Inside Job awarded Oscar for Best Documentary Feature (2011)
COP16/CMP6 at Cancun.
(29 November to 10 December)
2011 The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) begins regulating greenhouse gases (GHGs) under the Clean Air Act.
(2 January)

 David Cameron (1966) closes the Sustainable Development Commission.
(31 March)

 Greenpeace activists break into a CSIRO research farm near Canberra and destroy a field trial of genetically modified wheat (Preston, 2011).
(14 July)

 Australian House of Representatives passes carbon tax legislation.
(12 October)

 Australian Senate passes carbon tax legislation.
(8 November)

 COP17/CMP7 at Durban.
(28 November — 11 December)

 Stephen Harper (1959) withdraws Canada from the Kyoto Treaty (Ljunggren and Palmer, 2011).
(11 December)
2013 The Australian Climate Commission is closed by the Abbott government the day after assuming office.
(19 September)
2014 Tony Abbott (1957) abolishes the carbon price.
(17 July)
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IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (AR5).
(1 November)
2017 Donald Trump (1946) ceases all participation in the Paris Climate Accord pending formal withdrawal on 4 November 2020.
(1 June)
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References

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