Hot air in Copenhagen, if nowhere else

The climate deal reached between U.S, China and other great powers on Friday night is so vague, hastily hatched and non-binding President Obama isn’t even sure he’ll be required to sign it. “You know, it raises an interesting question as to whether technically there's actually a signature… It's not a legally binding agreement, I don't know what the protocols are,” said a bleary-eyed Obama, before hopping in Air Force One for the trip back to Washington.

Even as he left, it wasn’t clear that the pact Obama described as “meaningful” would even pass muster with the European Union – or attract enough votes with the 193-nation COP 15 conference to become an official declaration. "It’s a catastrophe," said Dan Joergensen, a member of the European delegation. "We’re so far away from the criteria that was set up in order to call it a success, and those weren’t really that ambitious to start with."

Obama told reporters he was able to extract a first-ever commitment by India and China to subject their internal monitoring of emissions to international scrutiny, a move he had earlier tied to American participation in a $100 billion-per-year fund for poor nations. “Those commitments will be subject to international consultation and analysis” similar to World Trade Organization rules but “will not be legally binding,” said Obama. “It will allow each country to show to the world what [they] are doing.”

But the agreement – reached in Friday night talks with leaders of China, India, South Africa and Brazil – was more notable for what it doesn’t accomplish than what it does, an inconvenient truth Obama ruefully acknowledged to reporters. “This is going to be hard,” Obama said. “This is hard within countries; it's going to be even harder between countries. And one of the things that I've felt very strongly about during the course of this year is that hard stuff requires not paralysis, but it requires going ahead and making the best of the situation that you're in.”

He conceded that no more specific deal – much less a legally binding one – was possible until the issue of “trust” between industrialized and developing nations was resolved.

The agreement contained none of the specific emissions targets European and African negotiators had hoped to nail down, simply a broad-brush promise by the countries in the room to cap the overall global temperature rise to two degrees Celsius and provide a written record of their planned reductions.

It's unclear how many nations, particularly poorer countries who felt shut out of the process, were included in the final deal or how they will vote if the deal is put to one. It’s also unclear how the president’s half-a-loaf approach will sit with a deadlocked Senate or the Africans, Europeans and Asians who view him as the quintessential 21st Century leader.

"Squarely the blame is on President Obama. When you look very carefully and dig into what happened, you find that there is no difference whatsoever between President Obama and President Bush, except one of them tells it as it is," said Lumumba Di-Aping, the chief negotiator of the G77 bloc of developing countries, in an interview with POLITICO. He added: "This deal confirms what we have said about the lack not only of transparency but the undemocratic bent of developed nations' leaders… “It is a mockery."

But administration officials painted a different picture, claiming Obama playing an extraordinarily direct – even tactile – diplomatic role, with the president demanding to be admitted to a closed meeting of other countries over the objections of a Chinese protocol officer.

More HERE





The Real Melt-Down in Copenhagen

By Alan Caruba



If the United Nations cannot run a conference in Copenhagen without riots in the streets, why would anyone want to turn over the governance of the world to these people? For old “skeptics” like myself, watching the chaos in Copenhagen was sheer joy. It’s always a mistake for liars to gather in one place to trumpet their lies because it always attracts people who believe that the truth is the best antidote.

And for believers in the universal God of mankind and the universe, how lovely to see four inches of snow fall on Copenhagen in the midst of speeches and panels claiming that the Earth is warming. Even atheists who understand that global warming was and is a fraud could take some pleasure in that. In German, it’s called “schadenfreude.”

What became abundantly clear was that the Climate Change Conference was not about climate at all. It was about getting the developed nations to send billions to the undeveloped nations that have, as in the case of Africa, lived off of this largess while loudly criticizing the donors for being horrid capitalists.

The other aspect of the conference was the way the handful of global warming entrepreneurs like Al Gore (a) journeyed there in their private jets, (b) drove around town in their rented limousines, and (c) desperately repeated all the worn-out and discredited global warming claptrap about melting glaciers and ice caps, the die-off of every species known to man, including man, and the fact that this would occur in five, ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty or fifty years. Take your pick.

Who do you think is heavily invested in and dependent on the sale of bogus “carbon credits” for the use of “dirty” fuel such as coal, oil, and natural gas? Answer: Al Gore and the other scoundrels who have spent years creating the mechanisms to cash in on this. When the Russians sold their oil or natural gas in Europe, they were delighted to also sell the carbon credits necessary to use it under European Union (Kyoto Protocol) rules.

The other melt-down involved the totally specious “science” that carbon dioxide has anything to do with the Earth’s climate. Or that man-made CO2 can or does change the climate. The carefully constructed spider’s web of lies put forth by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were destroyed by the release of thousands of emails by the “scientists” who, it turns out, were deliberately falsifying the data.

The new addition to the Big Lie of global warming is that the Climate Research Unit of East Anglia University had its computers “hacked” when it is abundantly obvious all the emails and other data were on a CD in the event that it was demanded under Britain’s Freedom of Information Act. It was leaked, not hacked. Similarly, the U.S. Act is being used to secure the data behind NASA’s claims supporting global warming.

Naturally, Al Gore claimed that the CRU emails were at least ten years old. NOT! He also managed to claim that all the ice at the polar caps was melting. NOT! And that the center of the Earth is millions of degrees hot. NOT!

And, of course, like a moth drawn to a candle, President Obama had to make an appearance and repeat all the global warming lies that no one believes any more except for the 20% of the U.S. population that thinks he is the Second Coming. NOT! Take note, Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, was also there telling lies.

In the weeks, months and years ahead is the slow unraveling of the past twenty years of unrelenting lies about global warming. It will be slow because the mainstream media will be the last to acknowledge that they were wrong. What lessons can we draw from this huge fraud?

* Given control or the collusion of the mass media, it is possible to fool a lot of people a lot of the time.

* Given the backing of the government, billions in taxpayer’s money can be given to organizations and individuals who are delighted to cash in on the fraud.

* Those entrusted with teaching our children the truth about the real world betrayed them.

* Those perpetrating the global warming fraud are among the worst liars and hypocrites to walk the Earth.

* There is no end to the evil of Marxist socialism. It must be fought every day and all through the night. It takes many forms, but it is always about enriching an elite few at the expense of freedom for the rest.

SOURCE





Carbon-Spewing Climate Conference Attenders Offered "Hypocrisy Offsets"

The National Center for Public Policy Research is showcasing the hypocrisy of the carbon-emitting travels of global warming activists at COP-15 in Copenhagen by offering conscience-clearing "hypocrisy offsets" to attendees. The hypocrisy offsets parody carbon offsets sold and traded allegedly to allow people to live carbon-neutral lives. The hypocrisy offsets also highlight the insincerity of world-traveling, energy-guzzling COP-15 delegates.



"Many of those in attendance to press for additional commitments for carbon reductions traveled thousands of miles and used substantial amounts of carbon-emitting jet-fuel just to get to the conference," said David Ridenour, vice president of the National Center for Public Policy Research. "We are exposing the hypocrisy by offering them 'hypocrisy offsets' to alleviate their green guilt. As one who is skeptical of the necessity of draconian carbon cuts, I plan to do my part to ensure plenty of hypocrisy offsets are available. I'll refrain from reducing my own personal carbon footprint."

"Environmentalists are in Copenhagen demanding global limits on emissions, but they don't want to follow the very rules they are proposing for the rest of the world," said Amy Ridenour, president of the National Center for Public Policy Research. "Their participation may earn them some media coverage, but it is having no effect on an agreement. In fact, the United Nations mostly banned them from even entering the conference, so their voluntary contribution to carbon emissions -- emissions they insist imperil the planet -- from this unnecessary travel is a stunning act of hypocrisy. Because we know they must be feeling very guilty about what they've done, and in most cases intend to continue doing indefinitely, we invented hypocrisy offsets as a humanitarian act."

SOURCE






New Zealand climate crooks ducking and weaving too

NIWA have published misleading material on their web site and seem to have advised the Minister for Climate Change Issues to give evasive answers to questions in the Parliament.

For those unfamiliar with the story: NIWA keeps raw data for the national NZ temperature record and makes it available on their web site. The Climate Conversation Group and the NZ Climate Science Coalition conducted a joint study of the temperature record, researched by a science team and published on 25 November under the title: "Are we feeling warmer yet?".

That study demonstrated that the official graph does not represent the raw temperature data. NIWA told us that adjustments have been applied so we’ve asked for the details. So far they obfuscate. We don’t know why they refuse to disclose what the weather has been. We conclude that NIWA’s response to our enquiries has been defensive, obstructive and oddly disparaging.

The Hon Rodney Hide became concerned about deteriorating standards in public science and asked in the Parliament whether the Hon Dr Nick Smith would require NIWA to release the full data for the official NZ temperature record. On the last possible day for answering, Nick finally replied: “You must ask Wayne Mapp; he’s the responsible minister (for Research, Science and Technology, the portfolio that covers NIWA).” We won’t get any Parliamentary questions answered now until well into the New Year, so Nick Smith has caused a considerable delay in getting this information to the public.

Gratuitously, he added: “I would note however that the NZCSC have had this information since 2003.” He hoped that little factoid would hurt the Coalition’s reputation, but it won’t, although it might hurt his own — because the Coalition didn’t exist until 2006.

NIWA say that the Coalition have had all the information needed to reproduce the official graph since 19 July, 2006, when, they say, “NIWA advised NZ Climate Science Coalition member Dr Vincent Gray” of the need for adjustments and gave him a couple of examples. Dr Gray has located an email of that date and we can now reveal that it was from Dr Jim Salinger, not NIWA, it was not addressed to the Coalition and did not mention the Coalition.

It was sent just a few weeks after the Coalition was created, before they ever discussed the national temperature record. Dr Gray tells us that and other emails before and since were not official communications on either side — they were letters between two scientists who had known each other for years.

But most significantly the email does not give details of the adjustments made to the temperatures, nor does it give the information required to derive the adjustments. Dr Salinger just discusses the changes in a general way and gives a few examples and that’s all. NIWA’s assertion that that email contains the requested information is not supported by reading the email.

If Dr Gray had received the information he asked for in 2006, it would have made no sense to ask for it again last October, so the fact that he did ask again is further evidence that NIWA have never supplied the information and they are misinforming us and misleading the public. Even now, Dr James Renwick has not answered Dr Gray, neither has Dr David Wratt, despite a further plea from Dr Gray only three weeks ago.

We are asking valid, reasonable questions of a public body, the very same questions which Dr Gray has been asking for many years. Why don’t they answer? It is unprofessional of them to refer to private emails and give replies that are readily shown to be unfounded. Their refusal betrays a deep reluctance to assist

More HERE





How to Manufacture a Climate Consensus

The East Anglia emails are just the tip of the iceberg. I should know

By PATRICK J. MICHAELS (Michaels was formerly professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia)

Few people understand the real significance of Climategate, the now-famous hacking of emails from the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit (CRU). Most see the contents as demonstrating some arbitrary manipulating of various climate data sources in order to fit preconceived hypotheses (true), or as stonewalling and requesting colleagues to destroy emails to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in the face of potential or actual Freedom of Information requests (also true).

But there's something much, much worse going on —a silencing of climate scientists, akin to filtering what goes in the bible, that will have consequences for public policy, including the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) recent categorization of carbon dioxide as a "pollutant."

The bible I'm referring to, of course, is the refereed scientific literature. It's our canon, and it's all we have really had to go on in climate science (until the Internet has so rudely interrupted). When scientists make putative compendia of that literature, such as is done by the U.N. climate change panel every six years, the writers assume that the peer-reviewed literature is a true and unbiased sample of the state of climate science.

That can no longer be the case. The alliance of scientists at East Anglia, Penn State and the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (in Boulder, Colo.) has done its best to bias it.

A refereed journal, Climate Research, published two particular papers that offended Michael Mann of Penn State and Tom Wigley of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research. One of the papers, published in 2003 by Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas (of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics), was a meta-analysis of dozens of "paleoclimate" studies that extended back 1,000 years. They concluded that 20th-century temperatures could not confidently be considered to be warmer than those indicated at the beginning of the last millennium.

In fact, that period, known as the "Medieval Warm Period" (MWP), was generally considered warmer than the 20th century in climate textbooks and climate compendia, including those in the 1990s from the IPCC.

Then, in 1999, Mr. Mann published his famous "hockey stick" article in Geophysical Research Letters (GRL), which, through the magic of multivariate statistics and questionable data weighting, wiped out both the Medieval Warm Period and the subsequent "Little Ice Age" (a cold period from the late 16th century to the mid-19th century), leaving only the 20th-century warming as an anomaly of note.

Messrs. Mann and Wigley also didn't like a paper I published in Climate Research in 2002. It said human activity was warming surface temperatures, and that this was consistent with the mathematical form (but not the size) of projections from computer models. Why? The magnitude of the warming in CRU's own data was not as great as in the models, so therefore the models merely were a bit enthusiastic about the effects of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Mr. Mann called upon his colleagues to try and put Climate Research out of business. "Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal," he wrote in one of the emails. "We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board."

After Messrs. Jones and Mann threatened a boycott of publications and reviews, half the editorial board of Climate Research resigned. People who didn't toe Messrs. Wigley, Mann and Jones's line began to experience increasing difficulty in publishing their results. This happened to me and to the University of Alabama's Roy Spencer, who also hypothesized that global warming is likely to be modest. Others surely stopped trying, tiring of summary rejections of good work by editors scared of the mob. Sallie Baliunas, for example, has disappeared from the scientific scene.

GRL is a very popular refereed journal. Mr. Wigley was concerned that one of the editors was "in the skeptics camp." He emailed Michael Mann to say that "if we can find documentary evidence of this, we could go through official . . . channels to get him ousted." Mr. Mann wrote to Mr. Wigley on Nov. 20, 2005 that "It's one thing to lose 'Climate Research.' We can't afford to lose GRL." In this context, "losing" obviously means the publication of anything that they did not approve of on global warming.

Soon the suspect editor, Yale's James Saiers, was gone. Mr. Mann wrote to the CRU's Phil Jones that "the GRL leak may have been plugged up now w/ new editorial leadership there."

It didn't stop there. Ben Santer of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory complained that the Royal Meteorological Society (RMS) was now requiring authors to provide actual copies of the actual data that was used in published papers. He wrote to Phil Jones on March 19, 2009, that "If the RMS is going to require authors to make ALL data available —raw data PLUS results from all intermediate calculations— I will not submit any further papers to RMS journals."

Messrs. Jones and Santer were Ph.D. students of Mr. Wigley. Mr. Santer is the same fellow who, in an email to Phil Jones on Oct. 9, 2009, wrote that he was "very tempted" to "beat the crap" out of me at a scientific meeting. He was angry that I published "The Dog Ate Global Warming" in National Review, about CRU's claim that it had lost primary warming data.

The result of all this is that our refereed literature has been inestimably damaged, and reputations have been trashed. Mr. Wigley repeatedly tells news reporters not to listen to "skeptics" (or even nonskeptics like me), because they didn't publish enough in the peer-reviewed literature —even as he and his friends sought to make it difficult or impossible to do so.

Ironically, with the release of the Climategate emails, the Climatic Research Unit, Michael Mann, Phil Jones and Tom Wigley have dramatically weakened the case for emissions reductions. The EPA claimed to rely solely upon compendia of the refereed literature such as the IPCC reports, in order to make its finding of endangerment from carbon dioxide. Now that we know that literature was biased by the heavy-handed tactics of the East Anglia mob, the EPA has lost the basis for its finding.

SOURCE






Britain: What’s liberal about booing off Johnny Ball?

The jeering of a climate sceptic by supposedly liberal atheists confirms that questioning manmade climate change is the new blasphemy

Everyone hates the tabloid phrase ‘You couldn’t make it up’, I know, but there are times when no other form of words will do. On Tuesday night Johnny Ball, the veteran children’s TV presenter who introduced my generation (thirtysomethings) to the wonders of science and maths, was booed and slow-handclapped off stage in London for daring to express scepticism about manmade climate change. And who was in the audience, doing the booing, the jeering, the hissing and the chanting of ‘shame, shame, shame’ until a ‘shaken-looking’ Ball agreed to ‘leave the stage’? (1) Liberal atheists who claim to be allergic to orthodox beliefs, and campaigning scientists who have defended ‘free speech for scientists’. As I said, you couldn’t make it up.

Ball was invited to speak at ‘Nine Lessons and Carols for Godless People’, one of an increasing number of religious right-style get-togethers at which hundreds of individuals mock and pour scorn on the deluded masses - except the gathered individuals are self-styled rationalists rather than Bible-bashers, and their targets are the thickos who believe in God or receive chiropractic treatment rather than drunks or single mums. Ball, who presented the BBC kids’ science show Think of a Number from 1977 to 1984, decided to devote his stint on stage to singing a George Formby-style ditty about the English physicist John Dalton, before making a speech in which he criticised the ‘bad science’ of global warming and said that natural emissions from insects and spiders (‘spiders farting’) are more damaging to the climate than fossil fuels (2).

Bad move. The new collective of liberal atheists, of agitated ‘rationalists’, of Keepers Of The Scientific Truth As Revealed Unto Them By Richard Dawkins, can tolerate nothing so intolerable as someone taking the piss out of scientific theories about climate change. According to one report there were ‘slow handclaps, whistles and jeers’ (3). A blogger who attended the event said ‘a cry of “shame” from the audience broke the dam, the boos started, and a perplexed and shaken-looking Ball was finally forced from the stage’ (4). No wonder Ball looked perplexed: he thought he had been invited to a free, open-minded, rationalist ideas-knockabout and then found himself being ‘forced from the stage’ as if he were a tattooed Satanist who had gatecrashed a bishops’ tea party down Lambeth way.

Ball says ‘the reaction of the audience [depressed] me’, as well it might. He also says that he just wants to poke holes in the idea that the world is spinning towards some kind of bad behaviour-induced hellfire (global warming): ‘We are depressing children by saying the world is coming to an end through climate change. This is simply wrong’, he said in an interview. Whatever about ‘farting spiders’, on that point he is absolutely right: the warping of scientific facts to tell a story about an imminent End of Days that is being somehow caused by cheap flights and hamburgers is one of the worst aspects of the politics of climate change. (Someone being booed by atheists for challenging the notion of End of Days? Once again, and hopefully for the last time, you couldn’t make it up.) But Ball now says he realises his speech was ‘a mistake’ and he won’t be repeating it at future atheist-scientist gatherings. Reader, he has been re-educated, or at least silenced, his ranting consigned to the Sin Bin of History by the illiberal liberals, or maybe intolerant toleraters, who make up contemporary ‘rationalist’ circles.

There are more ironies to this story than even Alanis Morissette could handle. First there is the irony of liberal atheists, gathered together by the liberal-atheist comedians Robin Ince and Chris Addison (‘Liberal-atheist comedians’? Come back, Jimmy Tarbuck, all is forgiven), booing someone for questioning what has become a debate-strangling, genuflect-demanding orthodoxy: that man caused global warming through his wicked behaviour, that he now must repent for it, and that if he doesn’t we are Doomed with a capital D. In fact, how’s this for ironic: Tuesday night’s Ball incident confirms that the real religiosity that governs society today - far more successfully and suffocatingly than the Catholic Church (collapsing) or the CofE (collapsed) or the religious right (bogeyman) - is the religiosity of climate change, attended and promoted not by smock-wearing God-squadders but by corduroy-sporting God-doubters.

In so many ways, climate-change alarmism, that ugly mish-mash of scientific findings, political hysteria and industry-demonising greenery, resembles traditional religious outlooks. The Science has replaced The Gospels as the container of truth about mankind’s downfallen condition and what he must do to rectify it and save himself. Green activists now march behind banners saying ‘The Scientists Have Spoken’ and give interviews in which they say ‘The Science demands that we [insert some miserabilist policy idea here]’ in the same way that priests once said ‘God demands that we [insert something about not having sex here]’. Carbon-offsetting, where you pay to plant a tree to make up for your eco-sins, smells a lot like Catholic penance. Talk about the ‘heat death of the universe’ (atheist hero Christopher Hitchens’ words) sounds a lot like Armageddon. And most importantly, the labelling of anyone who questions the politics, the science or the consequences (less development, more mud huts) of climate-change alarmism as a ‘DENIER’ springs straight from The Inquisition, when those who questioned the Bible were similarly branded with the D-word. It’s a very weird atheistic rationalism which borrows so liberally from the illiberalism of religious tyranny.

But the key thing here is that climate-change alarmism only ‘resembles’ traditional religions - it’s not the exact same thing, of course! No, because, if anything, it’s actually kind of worse. At least the old religions encouraged us to bend the knee, to live in a state of bread-and-butter self-denial and to censor our inner doubts in the interests of finally getting to some heavenly place in which we would meet Jesus Christ, live in the clouds and eat Philadelphia cheese all day. The dogma of environmentalism, by contrast, wants us to partake in all those backward things - especially self-denial and self-censorship - merely as a way of keeping the planet clean and tidy and not leaving behind an ‘eco-footprint’ when we leave. There’s no transcendence of everyday tedium, no final reward for goodness, no pearly gates… it’s just self-punishment for the sake of self-punishment. Life’s a bitch and then you die.

The second, and most notable, irony of this week’s Ball debacle is that many of those who attended the atheist shebang are defenders of ‘free speech for scientists’. They support Simon Singh’s campaign to reform the English libel laws after he was sued by the British Chiropractic Association for questioning their claims and practices. Indeed, Singh was in the audience that seems to have momentarily forgotten about, er, free speech, as it forced the shaken-looking Ball to leave the stage. The comedian Dara O Briain, who was on telly the other day slagging off the libel laws for curtailing scientific debate and ‘quashing dissent’ (5), compered the atheist get-together at which scientific debate was curtailed and dissent was quashed, announcing ‘I am shell-shocked’ - no, not by the treatment of Ball, but by Ball’s sinful words. ‘I’m discombobulated by a childhood hero doing that’, O Briain announced (6).

This reveals a high level of hypocrisy and double standards amongst today’s defenders of free speech for some (respectable scientists) but not for others (evil deniers). But it also reveals something very important about free speech itself - namely that it is threatened by laws, yes, but is often more urgently and thoroughly threatened by conformism, by a generally accepted way of viewing things, by what that great warrior for liberty John Stuart Mill described as ‘custom’. Indeed, Mill said that of the three major threats to liberty, the ‘tyranny of custom and tradition’ - that is, a non-statute based sense of correct wisdom - was the worst. These binding rules are enforced not by coercion, said Mill, but by the notion of unquestionable ‘right and proper ideas’ held by all respectable members of society. Or as the Ancient Greek leader Pericles described it: ‘that code which, although unwritten, cannot be broken without acknowledged disgrace.’ (7)

Climate-change alarmism has become just such a code. The ‘despotism of custom’, accepting the general and apparently correct view of things, is a ‘hindrance to human advancement’ and the ‘sprit of liberty’, said Mill. It discourages inquisitiveness and eccentricity of thought and action: ‘[T]he mind itself is bowed to the yoke… peculiarity of taste, eccentricity of conduct, are shunned equally with crimes, until by dint of not following their own nature, these [followers of custom] have no nature to follow: their human capacities are withered and starved; they become generally incapable of any strong wishes or native pleasures, and are generally without either opinions or feelings of home growth, or properly their own.’ (8) If there is a better description of the robotic adherents to the scientific-political dogma of climate-change alarmism, I have yet to read it.

And now another eccentric, with his nonsense about ‘spider farting’ and his common sense about this not being the end of the world, has been publicly humiliated and intellectually cowed. Yes, the use of libel laws against scientists (responsible or otherwise) and against anyone else is a disgrace, as spiked has been arguing for considerably longer than many of today’s libel reformers. But the use of unwritten codes to make a public example of disobedient thinkers, and to discourage serious, critical, eccentric or, yes, sometimes bizarre question-asking, is in many ways more frightening still. And the fact that those unwritten codes are being wielded precisely by the ‘free speech for science’ lobby… well, I’m going to have to say it one more time, aren’t I? You couldn’t make it up.

SOURCE

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