Going cool on cool futures or one last, desperate effort?

Earlier today Andy Skuce asked how things were going with the Cool Futures Fund, set up by a bunch of skallywags associated with the dubious and little known Lord Monckton Foundation. Things are not going very well, from the look of things. In 15 months the backers have managed to raise  $57,605 of the $375,000 it wants to pay for the costs of setting up the fund. None of that money is going into the fund itself, it's just to pay the setup or launch costs, or so they say. (They say different things in different places.)

James Delingpole claimed to have contributed, but I couldn't find his donation on the GoFundMe list of 285 donors. (Yes, I looked through the whole list. Maybe he was so humble, for a change, that he donated anonymously.)

If you don't know what the Lord Monckton Foundation is, it's based in Melbourne Australia. A chap by the name of Chris Dawson is the CEO. An article on the Lord Monckton Foundation website said the fund was set up by "friends" of the foundation, including some board members. Not that the foundation seems willing to admit who is on its board.

The Cool Futures Fund isn't based in Melbourne. It says it's being set up in the Cayman Islands, which is where Australia's Prime Minister and other people like to put their extra cash. The project has a number of people associated with it:

• Dr David Evans - who is touted as having six degrees, though he only lists two on his LinkedIn profile. From his resume the only "proper" jobs he's managed to have is when he "consulted full-time for the Australian Greenhouse Office (later the Department of Climate Change) from 1999 to 2005, and part-time 2008 to 2010, modelling carbon in Australia’s biosphere for Kyoto accounting purposes". It's not clear if he was an external consultant or an employee over that time. Other than that, his wife, Jo Nova (Joanne Codling) has supported him through donations she's raised through her blog, while he writes his never-finished books and works on his never-fathomed Force X's and Notches. (David promised two papers, to be published last October, but they haven't yet seen the light of day.)
• Dr Stephen Farish - who is the tame statistician used by Christopher Monckton when he tries to claim that global warming has stopped or "paused". Stephen is an Associate Professor at Melbourne Medical School, apparently. He has authored the (very) occasional paper, and I'm not sure what else he's done in the forty years since he first graduated with a B Sc (Hons).
• Jo Nova, is another one who began with a lot of promise, but went downhill. She is now nothing more than a conspiracy-theorising blogger with a dismal if large following of dismissives (the bottom 8%). Since taking on the carer role for David Evans, she's had to beg and blog for a living. However they say they've accumulated some gold over the years, and they've tried related ventures. (See below, also.)
• Chris Dawson is the CEO of the Lord Monckton Foundation, based in Melbourne. It looks as if he's another one who, like David Evans, once had promise but never managed to fulfil it, and stumbled and bumbled from one grand idea to the next.
• Andrew Vallner is the only one of the crowd who has been able to hold down a job, from the look of his LinkedIn profile. (Neither he nor his employees are very particular when it comes to LinkedIn entries, with lots of typos. His firm isn't crash hot at spelling either.) 

Both Jo and her hubby David are gold bugs and, like many authoritarian followers, distrustful of fiat currency. (Gold hit a high in 2011 and has since fallen 30%. It would probably go up if the market were to drop in the next few months. It's regarded as a market hedge by more canny investors.)

So there you have this sad and sorry lot, who are still keen to take your money. Last month they posted a "confidential draft" on their website, hoping that 1% of the world's sophisticated investors (usually meaning those people rich enough and dumb enough to throw good money after bad), will hear about the Cool Futures Fund. They figure if 1% of these mugs learn of it, then they'll manage to scrape together enough to get the fund off the ground. (The draft has Andrew Vallner listed as the author.)

The so-called plan is devoid of any investment information of any substance. About the most specific thing in it is this intention to get "further Seed Investment" (sic) so they can complete preparations for a "formal launch" by the end of March this year:

Having defined and designed the product, built the structure and vehicle, and researched the methods and applications, the Fund Manager is now ready to fuel the vehicle with further Seed Investment to complete our preparations for formal launch–Q1 2017–and to secure the first two years of operations where we begin to take positions and earn performance fees.

It's more of "promises, promises". The formal launch doesn't signify that a hedge fund is imminent as far as I can tell. What they are wishing for is to get enough money to cover two years' operating expenses. From the look of it, in fifteen months they haven't raised enough to launch the launch, so it seems to me they are going to find it an uphill battle to raise two years' operating funds. They are going to try denier blogs again and perhaps try to gee up more people to give their money away through GoFundMe. From the "confidential" publicly advertised  (fourth panel down) and downloadable draft there is this bit of gobbledegook:

A managed multi-channel information campaign (including through hedge fund journals and the financial press) coupled with climate skeptic blogs read by scientists and engineers, crowdfunding and other alternate approaches, is envisaged. This approach will enable our unique investment proposition ultimately, to be heard by that one percent of high net worth ‘sophisticated investor’ individuals or groups that can qualify as sophisticated investors.

In our view, the Fund needs to be able to launch with the above in place and the Fund Manager needs to be able to cover expenses for the first two fully operational years. This therefore means we will very soon be seeking further ‘Seed Investment’ to fuel the professional launch and first two years of the Cool Futures Hedge Fund LP and the rapid growth anticipated, of Cool Futures Funds Management. 

The Cool Futures people have a long way to go yet. If the most recent rate of donations to their GoFundMe fund-raising effort continues, they'll get enough to set up the fund in about 22 years time. That's making some big assumptions, such as:

• The cost of setting up a hedge fund doesn't increase between now and 2038. 
• They can interest anyone in putting money into coal in 2038. (Will there be any coal mines left in 2038?)
• Anyone in 2038 still thinks that global warming is nothing but a hoax, let alone anyone with money to burn.

Here's how the GoFundMe donations effort has gone since it was started in November 2015:

Figure 1 | Donations from dim deniers to Jo Nova and the Lord Monckton fan club. Data Source: GoFundMe archived

There are still people willing to donate (for no return or benefit except for a meaningless feel-good certificate). The latest donation of $75 was made yesterday. I don't know who gets to keep the money if/when the venture is pronounced dead as a dodo.

Some of the people donating may be thinking that this trend is about to reverse. After all that's what it is claimed that the fake experts of the Cool Futures Fund Investment Management Advisory Committee Team have concluded (he he - not just a committee, a committee team! They've even got an acronym - IMAC team). The evidence isn't on their side:

Figure 2 | Global surface temperature in ten year averages, from 1887 to 2016. The baseline is the 1881-1910 average. Data source: NASA GISS.

Other donors may think that the thousands and thousands of people who record the weather, who live all around the world, have been fudging their reports for decades. Those "others" are extreme conspiracy nutters.

The latest publicly released "confidential" draft update for sophisticated investors and other interested parties, which is linked on their home page, states:

Dr David Evans⁶, found an interesting pattern in the sun. His work strongly suggests that the next major climate shift is cooling, significant and soon – suggesting the beginning of a sustained and significant cooling around 2017 or shortly thereafter⁷, with the 2020s cooler than the previous three decades⁸. As it is now 2017, with better data and more research we believe we are better able to further refine the timing and scale of the cooling.

If they did refine it, they weren't saying how, or not in the confidential draft. If you want to know about David's "interesting pattern" - it's not. (See the HotWhopper links below.)

The Cool Futures mob said they are going to have a booster launch by the end of March this year. That promise may be fulfilled, or it may be as empty as Jo's promise of David publishing not one but two papers last October, and their promise that their latest "plan" is detailed and comprehensive. (It's neither.)

References and further reading

• Stoat was reminded of primates' posteriors when he found the words "hedge fund" and "Jo Nova" in close proximity. His article goes into some detail.
• Climate Denier Roundup has an article about this at DailyKos. Reading between the lines, they think it's for mugs:)
• ATTP thinks "they" can't be this stupid
• Eli Rabett noticed Jo Nova's aspirations to become a hedge fund manager and talked about it in these terms: "in which said something or other will do something in some undisclosed way to slay the sky dragons"

From the HotWhopper archives

• Buyer Beware: Cool Futures global cooling fund and crowd sourcing - June 2016
• Another cool prediction from the Force X duo from downunder: David Evans and Jo Nova - February 2016, including a table of different predictions
• Jo Nova's Solar Force be With You - if you're a wacko science denier - May 2015, with a list of solar acronyms and description of various sources of solar data.
• Denier Weirdness: Magical mysterious Force X and the Notch - June 2014
• Nova and Evans present ForceX: "It would be better if there was a known mechanism of course..." - June 2014
• Quote of the Day from David Evans, the Rocket Scientist from Luna Park - July 2014
• A memorial to "The Notch" - RIP - August 2014