Copenhage: The Global Warming Circus

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Peter

It's settled; climate circus was a fairy tale

COPENHAGEN, DENMARK - DECEMBER 15: Environmental activists hold a demonstration in the centre of Copenhagen on December 15, 2009 in Denmark World leaders started arriving today to attend the Climate Summit where they hope to work towards a global agreement. (Photo by Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images)

FROM-OC Register

By MARK STEYN

The best summation of the UN climate circus in Denmark comes from Andrew Bolt of Australia's Herald Sun: "Nothing is real in Copenhagen – not the temperature record, not the predictions, not the agenda, not the 'solution'."

Just so. Reuters, for example, carried a moving account of the speech by Ian Fry, lead negotiator for Tuvalu, the beleaguered Pacific island nation soon to be under water because of a planet-devastating combination of your SUV and unsustainable bovine flatulence from Vermont farms. "The fate of my country rests in your hands," Fry told the meeting. "I make this as a strong and impassioned plea ... I woke this morning and I was crying and that was not easy for a grown man to admit," he continued, "his voice choking with emotion," in the Reuters reporter's words. Who could fail to be moved?

My country, 'tis of thee

Sweet land near rising sea

Of thee I choke!"

Alas, nowhere in this emotionally harrowing dispatch was there room to mention that Ian Fry's country is not Tuvalu but Australia, where he lives relatively safe from rising sea levels given that he's a hundred miles inland. A career doom-monger, he's resided in Queanbeyan, New South Wales for over a decade while working his way, in the revealing phrase of his neighbor Michelle Ormay, to being "very high up in climate change." As to whether the emotion-choked lachrymose pleader has ever lived in "his" endangered country of Tuvalu, his wife told Samantha Maiden of The Australian that she would "rather not comment." Like his fellow Copenhagen delegate Brad Pitt, Ian Fry is an actor: He's not a Tuvaluan, but he plays one on the world stage.

Whether he's an Aussie or a Tuvaluan, Fry's future king is Welsh, since under the British Commonwealth's environmentally responsible king-share program, the Prince of Wales is simultaneously heir to the thrones of Britain, Australian, Tuvalu and a bunch of other countries. His Royal Highness was also in Copenhagen last week, telling delegates that there were now only seven years left to save the planet. Prince Charles is so famously concerned about the environment that he's known as the Green Prince. Just for the record, his annual carbon footprint is 2,601 tons. The carbon footprint of an average Briton (i.e., all those wasteful, consumerist, environmentally unsustainable deadbeats) is 11 tons. To get him to Copenhagen to deliver his speech, His Highness was flown in by one of the Royal Air Force's fleet of VIP jets from the Royal Squadron. Total carbon emissions: 6.4 tons. In other words, the Green Prince used up seven months' of an average Brit's annual carbon footprint on one short flight to give one mediocre speech of alarmist boilerplate.

But relax, it's all cool, because he offsets! According to The Sydney Morning Herald, the Prince will be investing in exciting new green initiatives. "Investing" as in "using your own money", you mean? Not exactly. Apparently, it will be taxpayers' money. So he'll "offset" the cost of using up seven months of an average peasant's carbon footprint on one flight by taking the peasant's money and tossing it down some sinkhole. No wonder he feels so virtuous. Oh, don't worry, though. He does have to pay a personal penalty for the sin of flying by private jet: Seventy pounds. Which is the cost of about six new trees, or rather less than the bill for parking at Heathrow would have been.

So just to recap: The Prince of Wales, a man who has never drawn his own curtains, ramps up a carbon footprint of 2,601 tons while telling us that western capitalist excess is destroying the planet. Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, the railroad engineer who heads the International Panel on Climate Change and has demanded that "hefty aviation taxes should be introduced to deter people from flying," flew 443,226 miles on "IPCC business" in the year and a half before the Copenhagen summit. And Al Gore is a carbon billionaire: He makes more money buying offsets from himself than his dad did from investing in Occidental Petroleum.

All of the above are, as that ersatz Tuvaluan delegate's neighbor would say, "very high up in climate change". But what about all the non-high-ups? Not just the low-level toadies like Associated Press "science" reporter Seth Borenstein, who dutifully pooh-poohed the idea that the leaked Climategate e-mails were of any significance and for his pains was rewarded by having to stand in line with thousands of other no-name warm-mongers for seven hours in the freezing streets of Copenhagen. All because the IPCC accredited 45,000 delegates to a space that accommodates 15,000 – but don't worry, when it comes to recalibrating the planet's climate, I'm sure they'll run the numbers more carefully.

But forget Borenstein and other hangers-on. Even making allowances for the stupidity of youthful idealism, the protesters in the streets of Copenhagen seem especially obtuse. Far from sticking it to the Man, they're cheerleading for the biggest Man of all: they're supporting a new globalized feudalism in which Prince Charles, Prince Al, Prince Rajendra and others "very high up in climate change" jet around the world at public expense telling the rest of us we need to stay put. A British parliamentarian recently proposed that everyone be issued with an annual "carbon allowance" that would be drawn down every time he booked a flight, or filled up his car, or bought a washer and dryer instead of beating his laundry on the rocks down by the river with the village women every week. You think the Prince of Wales or any other member of the new global elite will be subject to that "allowance"?

If you're young and you fall for this, you're a sap. Indeed, you're oozing so much sap the settled scientists should be measuring your tree rings. Remember that story a couple of weeks ago about how Danish prostitutes were offering free sex to Copenhagen delegates for the duration of the conference? I initially assumed it was just an amusing marketing cash-in by savvy Nordic strumpets. But no, the local "sex workers' union" Sexarbejdernes Interesseorganisation was responding to the municipal government's campaign to discourage attendees from partaking of prostitutes. The City of Copenhagen distributed cards to every hotel room showing a lady of the evening at a seedy street corner over the slogan "BE SUSTAINABLE: Don't Buy Sex."

"Be sustainable"? Prostitution happens to be legal in Copenhagen, and the "sex workers" were understandably peeved at being lumped into the same category of planet-wreckers as Big Oil, car manufacturers, travel agents and other notorious pariahs. So Big Sex decided they weren't going to take it lying down. Yet, in an odd way, that municipal postcard gets to the heart of what's going on: Government can – and will – use a "sustainable" environment as a pretext for anything that tickles its fancy. All ambitious projects – Communism, the new Caliphate – have global ambitions, but, when the globe itself is the cover for those ambitions, freeborn citizens should beware. Nico Little, a Canadian leftie at the Rabble Web site, distilled the logic into a single headline:

"Hookers Are Killing Polar Bears And Now You Can't Water Your Lawn."

Write that down. And next time the Prince of Wales, Al Gore, Dr. Pachauri or the delegation from Tuvalu give an "impassioned" speech, keep it handy as a useful précis.


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The Truth From The Copenhagen Climate ConferenceT

The true story coming from Copenhagen, and which you will not read or hear from the mainstream media, (e.g. NBC, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, NY Times) is nothing was accomplished other than another huge waste of taxpayer money. Call it the Copenhagen circle jerk, lead by Obama, and attended by Al Gore, "Swift Boat" Kerry, and Arnold "Steroid" Swartzenegger. Obama's Nobel "Peace Prize" is beginning to look as tarnished and ridiculous as is Al Gore's. Sir(?) Monckton in the following article, says it well.
Peter

Parturient montes: nascetur ridiculus mus

From The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley in Copenhagen (source)

The mountains shall labor, and what will be born? A stupid little mouse. Thanks to hundreds of thousands of US citizens who contacted their elected representatives to protest about the unelected, communistic world government with near-infinite powers of taxation, regulation and intervention that was proposed in early drafts of the Copenhagen Treaty, there is no Copenhagen Treaty. There is not even a Copenhagen Agreement. There is a “Copenhagen Accord”.

The White House spinmeisters spun, and their official press release proclaimed, with more than usual fatuity, that President Obama had “salvaged” a deal at Copenhagen in bilateral talks with China, India, Brazil, and South Africa, which had established a negotiating bloc.

The plainly-declared common position of these four developing nations had been the one beacon of clarity and common sense at the foggy fortnight of posturing and gibbering in the ghastly Copenhagen conference center.

This is what the Forthright Four asked for:

Point 1. No compulsory limits on carbon emissions.

Point 2. No emissions reductions at all unless the West paid for them.

Point 3. No international monitoring of any emissions reductions not paid for by the West.

Point 4. No use of “global warming” as an excuse to impose protectionist trade restrictions on countries that did not cut their carbon emissions.

After President Obama’s dramatic intervention to save the deal, this is what the Forthright Four got:

Point 1. No compulsory limits on carbon emissions.

Point 2. No emissions reductions at all unless the West paid for them.

Point 3. No international monitoring of any emissions reductions not paid for by the West.

Point 4. No use of “global warming” as an excuse to impose protectionist trade restrictions on countries that did not cut their carbon emissions.

Here, in a nutshell – for fortunately nothing larger is needed – are the main points of the ”Copenhagen Accord”:

Main points: In the Copenhagen Accord, which is operational immediately, the parties“underline that climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our time”; emphasize their “strong political will to urgently combat climate change”; recognize “the scientific view that the increase in global temperature should be below 2 C°” and perhaps below 1.5 C°; aspire to “cooperate in achieving the peaking of global and national emissions as soon as possible”; acknowledge that eradicating poverty is the “overriding priority of developing countries”; and accept the need to help vulnerable countries – especially the least developed nations, small-island states, and Africa – to adapt to climate change.

Self-imposed emissions targets: All parties will set for themselves, and comply with, emissions targets for 2020, to be submitted to the secretariat by 31 January 2010. Where developing countries are paid to cut their emissions, their compliance will be monitored. Developed countries will financially support less-developed countries to prevent deforestation. Carbon trading may be used.

New bureaucracies and funding: Under the supervision of a “High-Level Panel”, developed countries will give up to $30 billion for 2010-12, aiming for $100 billion by 2020, in “scaled up, new and additional, predictable and adequate funding” to developing countries via a “Copenhagen Green Fund”. A “Technology Mechanism” will “accelerate technology development and transfer” to developing countries.

And that’s it. Expensive, yes. Unnecessary, yes. But earth-shaking? No.

The disconnect between the gaseous halations of various grandstanding “world leaders” about the supposedly urgent need to “Save The Planet Now” and the puny outcome of the Copenhagen Non-Event is dazzling. And it is welcome.

For all the rhetoric – or the flatulence that passes for rhetoric these days – it has begun to dawn on the “leaders” of those nations that subject them to regular recall and re-election that the people no longer believe the mad scientists are telling them the truth. And the people are right.

What is more, after the failure of the mainstream news media to report what the malevolent and unpleasant scientists involved in the Climategate affair had written to one another about those with whom they disagreed, or about what they had done to invent, fabricate, contrive, fiddle, tweak, alter, massage, conceal, hide or even destroy scientific data for the sake of protecting and peddling the pseudo-science in which environment correspondents had so readily and so ignorantly believed, the people no longer trust the media.

And that is bad news for a governing class that has come to develop a far-too-cosy relationship with the mainstream media. It is also very bad news for the mainstream media themselves, which are now rapidly losing circulation and ad revenue as the people rightly desert them for the Internet, where - notwithstanding various expensive attempts by the over-funded international Left to interfere with Google and Yahoo searches - the truth is still available if you know where to look.

Copenhagen was the last-chance saloon not for the planet, which does not need saving, but for the UN’s world-government wannabes. They blew it, big-time, by believing their own overspun propaganda about planetary peril and thinking they had “world leaders” where they wanted them. They overreached themselves, and have paid the price.

Even though next year is an el Nino year accompanied by fast-recovering solar activity, 2010 may not, after all, set a new global-temperature record to overtop that which was set in 1998, the year of the Great el Nino. By the time the next yackfest takes place in Mexico City in December 2010, the steam will have gone out of the “global warming” scare. We should not let our guard down, but Copenhagen is more than the end of the beginning for Green fascism: it is the beginning of the end. The eco-Nazis’ attempt at global bureaucratic coup d’etat has failed, and no such attempt is likely to succeed again. Too many of you are watching.

In Simple Terms: Why Man-Made Global Warming Is A Myth

The following article is a good summary of the basic, simple, logical failures underlying the concept of man-caused global warming. It is good that the email and data leak, now called Climategate, has surfaced in time for this joke of a climate change meeting in Copenhagen. I say people should educate themselves on the subject as much as possible so they ar not so gullible and accepting of the nonsense being issued by the United Nations and many (most?) of our politicians.
Peter

Four Colossal Holes in the Theory of Man-Made Global Warming
John Hawkins
Tuesday, December 08, 2009 (source)

Repeating the words "scientific consensus" over and over and telling sad stories about polar bears does not qualify as "science." So, why is it that the people who insist that Man-made global warming is based on science, not politics, always get shaky and defensive when people want to actually talk about the reasoning behind it?

When was the last time you heard a scientist get hysterical when you asked him to explain Einstein's theory of relativity? If you ask a scientist why nothing can move faster than the speed of light, he doesn't tell you a terrible story about how koala bears will die if you don't believe the theory is right, does he? Scientists who are confident and in command of the facts don't need to distort data and duck basic questions about the assumptions that are behind scientific theories.

So, why is it that the people who insist that man-made global warming is occurring right now can't come up with coherent answers to many of the most basic problems with the ideas that undergird their theory?

Climate change has been around as long as the earth: If you listen to global warming alarmists, you'd think the climate had been a flat line until mankind started industrializing, after which the temperature rocketed straight upwards. However, the reality is far different, as even the New York Times has been willing to admit:

In October, Dr. (Don) Easterbrook made similar points at the geological society meeting in Philadelphia. He hotly disputed Mr. Gore's claim that "our civilization has never experienced any environmental shift remotely similar to this" threatened change.

Nonsense, Dr. Easterbrook told the crowded session. He flashed a slide that showed temperature trends for the past 15,000 years. It highlighted 10 large swings, including the medieval warm period. These shifts, he said, were up to "20 times greater than the warming in the past century."

So, the planet has had bigger temperature shifts than the one we're experiencing now. It has also been warmer than it is today:

The...warming before our last ice age was much warmer than anything we've had since. We had a warming that peaked 9000 years ago, another warming that peaked 5000 years ago. Both were warmer than today. Probably the Roman warming and the medieval warming were both warmer than today -- and we've had 8 warmings of the earth since the last Ice Age.

So how can we, given our limited knowledge of how the climate works, attribute the extremely limited amount of warming we experienced over the last century to mankind? The honest answer is: We can't.

The earth was cooling from roughly 1940-1976: Despite the fact that widespread industrialization was occurring during that 30 year time period, temperatures dropped so much that there were claims we were going into a dangerous period of "global cooling." If global temperatures are tightly bound to man-made greenhouse gasses and those gasses were being rapidly introduced to the atmosphere, then the earth should have been warming, not cooling during that period. The obvious conclusion is that global temperatures are not nearly as closely associated with man-made greenhouse gasses as some people would have us believe.

So, if it's global warming, why isn't there any warming occurring now? One of the many revelations from Climategate is that behind-the-scenes, scientists who buy into man-made global warming are admitting what skeptics have been saying publicly for years now: The globe has been cooling since 1998. Again, if global warming has its bootlaces hitched to the amount of man-made greenhouse gasses that are being produced and those numbers are increasing, why hasn't the temperature gone up as well? There's a simple answer: Man-made greenhouse gasses are not a decisive factor in raising or lowering the temperature of the earth.

Climate models can't accurately project the weather 100 years in the future: The truth is that we don't fully understand how our planet's climate works and thus, our climate models don't work very well. Since the climate models can't explain the climate over the last 25 years and they can't explain the leveling off of temperature since 1998, why would anyone believe they can predict conditions in 100 years? As computer programmers say, "garbage in, garbage out."

The Doomsday predictions from global warming alarmists are absolutely meaningless because they're based on climate models that don't work very well in the first place. As Dennis Avery, co-author of Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1500 Years has said:

I think they pull their predictions out of their hats and I don't think they have any validity whatsoever.

What the global warming alarmists are asking of people is no small thing. They want us to spend trillions of dollars, dramatically impact our economies, and change the way people across the world live for the worse. Those are not trivial changes and simply having scientists -- who've been put under enormous political pressure and make a living off global warming grants – say, "Trust us, it's real," isn't going to cut it for proof. If global warming alarmists can't even deliver plausible answers to the most obvious problems with their theory, then no one should take them seriously.

The Truth Is Out.....Man-Caused Global Warming Has Been A Fraud All Along

November 25, 2009

Green totalitarianism

FROM-UK Spectator

Melanie Phillips

Lord Lawson was right to call in today’s Times for an inquiry into the global warming scandal. As noted below, through a set of hacked emails a group of some of the most influential scientific proponents of anthropogenic global warming have been revealed to have been manipulating, suppressing and distorting scientific evidence in order to bolster their claim. They in turn have said the email messages have been taken out of context. And with so much material now in the public domain, it is possible that some of it has an innocent explanation. But in an awful lot of it it is hard to see such innocence. As Lawson observes:

There may be a perfectly innocent explanation. But what is clear is that the integrity of the scientific evidence on which not merely the British Government,but other countries, too, through the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, claim to base far-reaching and hugely expensive policy decisions, has been called into question. And the reputation of British science has been seriously tarnished. A high-level independent inquiry must be set up without delay.

This is the kind of thing these emails have revealed.
Here is lead IPCC scientist Keith Briffa admitting:

"I tried hard to balance the needs of the science and the IPCC, which were not always the same."

Here are Phil Jones, Director of the Hadley Centre’s Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia University and Michael Mann, creator of the infamous (and false) ‘hockey stick curve’ that underpinned AGW theory, discussing how to suppress the work of AGW sceptics, including changing the peer-review rules to do so:

In one e-mail, the center's director, Phil Jones, writes Pennsylvania State University's Michael E. Mann and questions whether the work of academics that question the link between human activities and global warming deserve to make it into the prestigious IPCC report, which represents the global consensus view on climate science.

"I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report," Jones writes. "Kevin and I will keep them out somehow -- even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!"

In another, Jones and Mann discuss how they can pressure an academic journal not to accept the work of climate skeptics with whom they disagree. "Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal," Mann writes. "I will be emailing the journal to tell them I'm having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor," Jones replies.

Here is Phil Jones proposing to delete data to avoid having to reveal it under a Freedom of Information request:

The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I'll delete the file rather than send to anyone.

And here is lead IPCC scientist Kevin Trenberth effectively acknowledging the sceptics’ case. On a thread fretting about the likely influence of the BBC’s ‘climate change reporter’ Richard Black in reporting that there had been no warming since 1998 and that Pacific oscillations would ‘force cooling for the next 20-30 years’, Trenberth wails:

Well I have my own article on where the heck is global warming? We are asking that here in Boulder where we have broken records the past two days forthe coldest days on record. We had 4 inches of snow. The high the last 2 days was below 30F and the normal is 69F, and it smashed the previous records for these days by 10F. The low was about 18F and also a record low, well below the previous record low. This is January weather (see the Rockies baseball playoff game was canceled on saturday and then played last night in below freezing weather)... The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't...The fact that we can not account for what is happening in the climate system makes any consideration of geoengineering quite hopeless as we will never be able to tell if it is successful or not! It is a travesty!

This material has revealed what has been described as ‘Nixonian-style paranoid plotting’ by these scientists to defraud the public. Actually, I think it reveals something even worse.

What appears to be the case is that these scientists did not set out to mislead the world so much as try to force data which did not correspond to their ideology of anthropogenic global warming to support that ideology. For me, one of the most telling emails was this one from Phil Jones on the Medieval Warm Period (MWP):

Bottom line - their is no way the MWP (whenever it was) was as warm globally as the last 20 years. There is also no way a whole decade in the LIA period was more than 1 deg C on a global basis cooler than the 1961-90 mean. This is all gut feeling, no science, but years of experience of dealing with global scales and varaibility.(My emphasis)

In other words, despite the fact that science (or history) tells us that the Medieval Warm Period was warmer than today, thus destroying the basis of the AGW myth that we are living through an unprecedented warming of the climate caused by carbon dioxide arising from industrialisation, it cannot be true – because the Hadley CRU Director’s ‘gut’ tells him so.

All the manipulation, distortion and suppression revealed by these emails took place because it would seem these scientists knew their belief was not only correct but unchallengeable; and so when faced with evidence that showed it was false, they tried every which way to make the data fit the prior agenda. And those who questioned that agenda themselves had to be airbrushed out of the record, because to question it was simply impossible. Only AGW zealots get to decide, apparently, what science is. Truth is what fits their ideological agenda. Anything else is to be expunged.

Which is the more terrifying and devastating: if people are bent and deliberately try to deceive others, or if they are so much in thrall to an ideology that they genuinely have lost the power to think objectively and rationally?

I think that the terrible history of mankind provides the answer to that question. Nixon was a crook. But what we are dealing with here is the totalitarian personality. One thing is now absolutely clear for all to see about the anthropogenic global warming scam: science this is not.