Posted: 15 Jan 2010 10:02 AM PST
“When we see what we did at the climate summit in Copenhagen, this is the response, this is what happens, you know what I’m sayin’?”
—Danny Glover, claiming the quake in Haiti is the earth's revenge for the failure of Copenhagen.
I take it all back. Copenhagen was worth it, after all – if only for the sphincter-bursting rage its supposed failure has caused among our libtard watermelon chums. (That’s watermelon, as in: green on the outside, red on the inside).
As Damian reports, on Twitter they’re all planning to
The Great Moonbat is sounding more unhinged than ever:
Goodbye Africa, goodbye south Asia; goodbye glaciers and sea ice, coral reefs and rainforest. It was nice knowing you. Not that we really cared. The governments which moved so swiftly to save the banks have bickered and filibustered while the biosphere burns.
And Polly Toynbee is blaming the whole fiasco on false consciousness.
Most leaders in Copenhagen were out ahead of their people. Most understand the crisis better than those they represent, promising more sacrifice than their citizens are yet ready to accept – while no doubt praying for some miraculous technological escape.
Sometimes we’re inclined to dismiss Polly as a loveable comedy figure, what with her lovely house in Tuscany contrasting so amusingly with her prolier-than-thou politics, and the never ending japesomeness of her deft, lighter-than-air prose.
But you know what? When she reveals her true colours, as she does here, I think she’s really, really scary. Her whole article teeters on the brink of demanding an eco-fascist world government to save us all from ourselves.
She yearns, like a woman wailing for her demon lover, for the righteous apocalypse which will teach us the error of our ways:
What would it take? A tidal wave destroying New York maybe – New Orleans was the wrong people – with London, St Petersburg and Shanghai wiped out all at once.
What she really wants, though, as you see from the plaintive, yearning tone of this sentence is global dictatorship:
As things stand, politics has not enough heft nor authority.
One day, Polly dear. One day.
UPDATE: Christ on a bike! You thought Moonbat and Pol-Pot were barking. Wait till you read Johann Hari’s tearful summation in the Independent.
Throughout the negotiations here, the world’s low-lying island states have clung to the real ideas as a life raft, because they are the only way to save their countries from a swelling sea. It has been extraordinary to watch their representatives – quiet, sombre people with sad eyes – as they were forced to plead for their own existence. They tried persuasion and hard science and lyrical hymns of love for their lands, and all were ignored.
Does he mean the man in the bow-tie from Tuvalu who wept openly for his island’s fate but on closer cross-examination – as Andrew Bolt reported – turned out to live nowhere near Tuvalu (whose sea-levels, in any case, have not risen in several decades)?
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
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°;
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.
December 18 2009
COPENHAGEN — Has Copenhagen collapsed?
That seems to be the growing sentiment inside the city's Bella Conference Center, where officials, environmentalists and even delegates to the international climate conference began streaming out Friday evening. What began with excitement and anticipation two weeks ago ended Friday night with disappointment and anger for thousands.
"This is a sad day for my country," said Mama Konate, chief delegate from the West African nation of Mali. "We have worked very hard to reach this agreement. And now it seems over. Without a deadline, I don't know if we will ever finish."
The conference, the largest of its kind, attracted scientists, activists and human rights supporters from every corner of the globe, who believe that without a climate accord limiting greenhouse gases, glaciers will melt, oceans will rise and the weather will go so warm it could wipe out 50 percent of the Earth's species. Until Friday, they saw Copenhagen as their last chance to stop it.
"You can scapegoat the process. That wasn't it. It was the unwillingness of people to move around big issues: China on verification, the U.S. on deeper emission cuts," said the head of an NGO that does relief work in Africa.
"Judging by the proceedings and the obvious gulf that remains, this is dead anything short of a miracle."
That was not the sentiment early in the day when 25 U.S. congressmen showed up at the summit, flying in on a Boeing 757 with Speaker Nancy Pelosi at considerable taxpayer expense. The delegation joined President Barack Obama and nearly 120 world leaders for the conference's final day.
"This president is very, very unusual," said Congressman Charlie Rangel. "His power of persuasion and his eloquence somehow brings together how the whole world feels. I think we are very close. I am optimistic."
But as the hours passed, hope turned to doubt.
What went wrong? To get more than 100 nations big and small, rich and poor, developed and not, all on the same page — over issues that go to the heart of their economies, their standards of living and that reach into the pocketbooks of the public — may have been a bridge too far.
The summit got underway with grand expectations. Many environmental groups said this was the last best chance to get a climate accord, while Obama still had considerable first-year clout in office and a Democratic majority in Congress. The upcoming 2010 congressional elections could swing the Senate to Republicans who are opposed to aggressive environmental legislation, they worried. And without the U.S., any climate treaty is meaningless.
Yet a deep lack of trust underscored the talks from the beginning. As rivals in business, neither the U.S. nor China wanted to agree to anything that would give the other a competitive edge.
"I am very skeptical anything here in Copenhagen is good for the average U.S. citizen," said Rep. Joe Barton, R-Tex. "The process is falling apart."
Barton said he was especially appalled by the requests for aid from Third World dictators like Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who said the U.S. owes the world for having raped the planet.
"I owe Hugo Chavez nothing. Nothing-zip-nada," said Barton. "The U.S. in the last 50 years has given trillions of dollars to the Third World. But to say they are going to be ravaged by climate change and deserve 'Greenmail' strains credibility."
The U.S. said China's planned cuts in "carbon intensity" (CO2 as a unit of GDP) were insufficient
Other developing nations pointed the same finger at the U.S. Obama proposed a 4 percent cut in U.S. emissions from their 1990 levels by 2020. That compares to much larger promised cuts in the EU of 20 to 30 percent. Climatologists say a cut of at least 25 to 40 percent is required if the world is to avert a climate disaster.
One of the problems, according to another NGO representative, is that the draft agreement is complicated and interconnected. When heads of state tinker with the text, they may be editing out a clause that was negotiated for months, in a compromise on an unrelated point. And typically only those who are intimate with the text understand what was compromised to get that language in the first place.
What set Copenhagen up for disaster? When heads of state arrive, an agreement is usually 99 percent complete. Not this time. Because of procedural delays, caused in large part by China, the document was far from finalized, leaving ministers and heads of state over their head on some issues.
"I'm leaving," said Yousef Diakite, a representative from the Pan-African Parliament. "I'm unhappy, disappointed, not glad. Everyone was waiting for Copenhagen. This was our chance. And today it is over."
LONDON - E-mails stolen from climate scientists show they stonewalled skeptics and discussed hiding data — but the messages don't support claims that the science of global warming was faked, according to an exhaustive review by The Associated Press. (laughing at the first lie)
The 1,073 e-mails examined by the AP show that scientists harbored private doubts, however slight and fleeting, even as they told the world they were certain about climate change. However, the exchanges don't undercut the vast body of evidence showing the world is warming because of man-made greenhouse gas emissions. (What "vast body of evidence"? It is all fake.)
The scientists were keenly aware of how their work would be viewed and used, and, just like politicians, (that says it all) went to great pains to shape their message. Sometimes, they sounded more like schoolyard taunts than scientific tenets.
The scientists were so convinced by their own science and so driven by a cause "that unless you're with them, you're against them," said Mark Frankel, director of scientific freedom, responsibility and law at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He also reviewed the communications.
Frankel saw "no evidence of falsification or fabrication of data, although concerns could be raised about some instances of very 'generous interpretations.'"
Some e-mails expressed doubts about the quality of individual temperature records or why models and data didn't quite match. Part of this is the normal give-and-take of research, but skeptics challenged how reliable certain data was.
The e-mails were stolen (leaked by a whistle-blower with a conscience) from the computer network server of the climate research unit at the University of East Anglia in southeast England, an influential source of climate science, and were posted online last month. The university shut down the server and contacted the police.
Million words reviewed
The AP studied all the e-mails for context, with five reporters (left-wing pawns) reading and rereading them — about 1 million words in total.
One of the most disturbing elements suggests an effort to avoid sharing scientific data with critics skeptical of global warming. It is not clear if any data was destroyed; two U.S. researchers denied it.
The e-mails show that several mainstream scientists repeatedly suggested keeping their research materials away from opponents who sought it under American and British public records law. It raises a science ethics question because free access to data is important so others can repeat experiments as part of the scientific method. The University of East Anglia is investigating the blocking of information requests. (Duh....this is serious folks! Not just some boys behaving badly.)
"I believe none of us should submit to these 'requests,'" declared the university's Keith Briffa in one e-mail. The center's chief, Phil Jones, e-mailed: "Data is covered by all the agreements we sign with people, so I will be hiding behind them."
When one skeptic kept filing Freedom of Information Act requests, Jones, who didn't return AP requests for comment, told another scientist, Michael Mann: "You can delete this attachment if you want. Keep this quiet also, but this is the person who is putting FOI requests for all e-mails Keith (Briffa) and Tim (Osborn) have written."
Mann, a researcher at Penn State University, told The Associated Press: "I didn't delete any e-mails as Phil asked me to. I don't believe anybody else did." (And we are supposed to believe the hockey hookey stick maker Mann?)
The e-mails also show how professional attacks turned very personal. When former London financial trader Douglas J. Keenan combed through the data used in a 1990 research paper Jones had co-authored, Keenan claimed to have found evidence of fakery by Jones' co-author. Keenan threatened to have the FBI arrest University at Albany scientist Wei-Chyung Wang for fraud. (A university investigation later cleared him of any wrongdoing.)
"I do now wish I'd never sent them the data after their FOIA request!" Jones wrote in June 2007.
In another case after initially balking on releasing data to a skeptic because it was already public, Lawrence Livermore National Lab scientist Ben Santer wrote that he then opted to release everything the skeptic wanted — and more. Santer said in a telephone interview that he and others are inundated by frivolous requests from skeptics that are designed to "tie-up government-funded scientists." (Oh, cry me a river you whiny sissy.)
Contempt for contrarians
The e-mails also showed a stunning disdain for global warming skeptics.
One scientist practically celebrates the news of the death of one critic, saying, "In an odd way this is cheering news!" Another bemoans that the only way to deal with skeptics is "continuing to publish quality work in quality journals (or calling in a Mafia hit.)" And a third scientist said the next time he sees a certain skeptic at a scientific meeting, "I'll be tempted to beat the crap out of him. Very tempted."
And they compared contrarians to communist-baiting Sen. Joseph McCarthy and Somali pirates. They also called them out-and-out frauds.
Santer, who received death threats after his work on climate change in 1996, said Thursday: "I'm not surprised that things are said in the heat of the moment between professional colleagues. These things are taken out of context."
When the journal, Climate Research, published a skeptical study that turned out to be partly funded by the American Petroleum Institute, Penn State scientist Mann discussed retribution this way: "Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal." (More whining from a sissy......sound science withstands challenges, lies and fraud has to hide and use bullying tactics.)
The most provocative e-mails are usually about one aspect of climate science: research from a decade ago that studied how warm or cold it was centuries ago through analysis of tree rings, ice cores and glacial melt. And most of those e-mails, which stretch from 1996 to last month, are from about a handful of scientists in dozens of e-mails.
Still, such research has been a key element in measuring climate change over long periods.
As part of the AP review, summaries of the e-mails that raised issues from the potential manipulation of data to intensely personal attacks were sent to seven experts in research ethics, climate science and science policy.
"This is normal science politics, but on the extreme end, though still within bounds," said Dan Sarewitz, a science policy professor at Arizona State University. "We talk about science as this pure ideal and the scientific method as if it is something out of a cookbook, but research is a social and human activity full of all the failings of society and humans, and this reality gets totally magnified by the high political stakes here." (More damaging than the silly Emails, is the computer code, proving they tweaked the data to suit their agenda. "Garbage in, Garbage Out")
In the past three weeks since the e-mails were posted, longtime opponents of mainstream climate science have repeatedly quoted excerpts of about a dozen e-mails. Republican congressmen and former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin have called for either independent investigations, a delay in U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regulation of greenhouse gases or outright boycotts of the Copenhagen international climate talks. They cited a "culture of corruption" that the e-mails appeared to show. (Where there is smoke, there is fire, man-caused global warming is a total myth, based on lies and fraud.)
'Trick' reference explained
That is not what the AP found. There were signs of trying to present the data as convincingly as possible.
One e-mail that skeptics have been citing often since the messages were posted online is from Jones. He says: "I've just completed Mike's (Mann) trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (from 1981 onward) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline."
Jones was referring to tree ring data that indicated temperatures after the 1950s weren't as warm as scientists had determined.
The "trick" that Jones said he was borrowing from Mann was to add the real temperatures, not what the tree rings showed. And the decline he talked of hiding was not in real temperatures, but in the tree ring data that was misleading, Mann explained.
Sometimes the data didn't line up as perfectly as scientists wanted. (So if the data doesn't match your pre-conceived notions, you delete, hide, or change the data? Is that what scientists do? Not this one, nor any scientist I know, or choose to know. Would you stay with a doctor who lied to you? Or would you prefer the truth?)
David Rind told colleagues about inconsistent figures in the work for a giant international report: "As this continuing exchange has clarified, what's in Chapter 6 is inconsistent with what is in Chapter 2 (and Chapter 9 is caught in the middle!). Worse yet, we've managed to make global warming go away! (Maybe it really is that easy...:)."
But in the end, global warming didn't go away, according to the vast body of research over the years. (Again, what "vast body of research"?)
None of the e-mails flagged by the AP and sent to three climate scientists viewed as moderates in the field changed their view that global warming is man-made and a threat. Nor did it alter their support of the conclusions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which some of the scientists helped write.
"My overall interpretation of the scientific basis for (man-made) global warming is unaltered by the contents of these e-mails," said Gabriel Vecchi, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientist. (Spoken like someone living off the government global warming gravy train.)
Gerald North, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University, headed a National Academy of Sciences study that looked at — and upheld as valid — Mann's earlier studies that found the 1990s were the hottest years in centuries. (How many centuries? More deception.)
"In my opinion the meaning is much more innocent than might be perceived by others taken out of context. Much of this is overblown," North said. (Another sheep following the herd.)
Mann contends he always has been upfront about uncertainties, pointing to the title of his 1999 study: "Northern Hemisphere Temperatures During the Past Millennium: Inferences, Uncertainties and Limitations."
Several scientists found themselves tailoring their figures or retooling their arguments to answer online arguments — even as they claimed not to care what was being posted online.
"I don't read the blogs that regularly," Jonathan Overpeck of the University of Arizona wrote in 2005. "But I guess the skeptics are making hay of their (sic) being a global warm (sic) event around 1450AD." (He should have read the "skeptics" blogs....he might have learned something.)
'Good faith,' says one critic
One person singled out for criticism in the e-mails is Steve McIntyre, who maintains Climate Audit. The blog focuses on statistical issues with scientists' attempts to recreate the climate in ancient times.
"We find that the authors are overreaching in the conclusions that they're trying to draw from the data that they have," McIntyre said in a telephone interview.
McIntyre, 62, of Toronto, was trained in math and economics and says he is "substantially retired" from the mineral exploration industry, which produces greenhouse gases. (What activity does not produce that "deadly" greenhouse gas carbon dioxide? We exhale it with every breath.)
Some e-mails said McIntyre's attempts to get original data from scientists are frivolous and meant more for harassment than doing good science. There are allegations that he would distort and misuse data given to him.
McIntyre disagreed with how he is portrayed. "Everything that I've done in this, I've done in good faith," he said.
He also said he has avoided editorializing on the leaked e-mails. "Anything I say," he said, "is liable to be piling on." (I say, pile on! Stomp the myth of man-caused global warming to dust.)
The skeptics started the name-calling, said Mann, who called McIntyre a "bozo," a "fraud" and a "moron" in various e-mails.
"We're human," Mann said. "We've been under attack unfairly by these people who have been attempting to dismiss us as frauds as liars."
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34392959/ns/us_news-environment/?GT1=43001
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