It is now widely recognised that the misguided Copenhagen Conference was a complete failure. Those political leaders and policy makers who refuse to accept this reality are merely burying their heads in the sand and are forfeiting the trust of the public.

–The Global Warming Policy Foundation, 20 December 2009

 

The world’s political leaders, not least President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Gordon Brown, are in a state of severe, almost clinical, denial. They insist that what has been achieved in Copenhagen is a breakthrough and a decisive step forward. Just one more heave, just one more venue for the great climate-change traveling circus – Mexico City next year – and the job will be done. Or so we are told. It is, of course, the purest nonsense. The time has come to abandon the Kyoto-style folly that reached its apotheosis in Copenhagen last week, and move to plan B.

–Nigel Lawson, The Wall Street Journal, 22 December 2009

 

The biggest losers of the Copenhagen fiasco appear to be climate science and the scientific establishment who, with a very few distinguished exceptions, have promoted unmitigated climate alarm and hysteria. It confirms beyond doubt that most governments have lost trust in the advice given by climate alarmists and the IPCC. The Copenhagen accord symbolises the loss of political power by Europe whose climate policies have been rendered obsolete.

–Benny Peiser, The Observer, 20 December 2009

 

India hailed Tuesday the lack of targets and legally binding measures in the Copenhagen climate accord and vaunted the united front presented by major emerging countries at the chaotic talks. Facing parliament for the first time since the UN talks last weekend in the Danish capital, Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh said India had “come out quite well in Copenhagen”. The Copenhagen accord “bears in mind that the social and economic development and poverty eradication are the first and overriding priorities of developing countries,” Ramesh said.

–AFP, 22 December 2009

From the Weekly Standard

The climate campaigners play their trump card, but it may turn out to be a joker.

By Steven F. Hayward — The climate campaign, built step-by-step over the last 20 years, has reached its Waterloo. The Copenhagen conference that ended Friday was an exercise in political theater. It not only failed to produce a binding agreement, but the potential emissions curbs it endorsed fall far below what climate orthodoxy demands, while the proposed wealth transfer from rich nations to poor nations is a political nonstarter. Back home, cap and trade legislation remains on life support, even though it has been significantly watered down so as to postpone real costs to consumers for a decade or more. In the midst of this gloom, the climate campaign has played its trump card in the United States: The Environmental Protection Agency formally announced on December 7 its intention to regulate greenhouse gases through the Clean Air Act.

That trump card, however, may turn out to be a joker.

The Clean Air Act (CAA), enacted in 1970 and last updated in 1990, is an abysmal policy mechanism for controlling greenhouse gases, and was never intended for this kind of problem. But the EPA’s gambit is not about policy–it is all about politics. The EPA’s grasp for dominion over greenhouse gases has been a long time in coming, starting as an effort to bring pressure on the Bush administration to relent in its opposition to a U.N.-led international climate treaty, and continuing under Obama as a means of pressuring Congress and the business community to support cap and trade.

The key antecedent to this gambit was a botched Supreme Court decision in 2007, Massachusetts v. EPA, in which a 5-4 majority (Justice Anthony Kennedy sided with the Court’s four liberals) ruled that greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide were indeed “pollutants” under the capacious definitions of the Clean Air Act, thereby giving the EPA jurisdiction to regulate them without any legislative mandate from Congress.

Environmental groups had petitioned the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act and had encouraged several states to ask for federal authority to impose their own regulations on automobile emissions. The Bush EPA took the position that it did not have the authority to regulate greenhouse gases, and would decline to regulate them even if it did have the legal authority. Once the Supreme Court ruled, however, the slippery slope logic of environmental law took over, making it inevitable that the EPA would eventually move to regulate greenhouse gases. In a nutshell, environmental statutes and case law have evolved so as to make federal judges into the sock puppets of environmentalists, and greens have become highly skilled in bringing lawsuits to compel federal agencies to do their bidding. (This explains, for example, the Bush administration’s decision to list the polar bear as an endangered species.)

The EPA gambit has business groups in an uproar, but is this a case of crying wolf, in a mirror image of environmental alarms? Industry protested every version of the Clean Air Act (a Ford executive named Lee Iacocca predicted in 1970 that the CAA would shut down the entire American auto industry), and although the cost of reducing air pollution was not trivial (over $500 billion according to the EPA’s likely underestimate), it has not decimated the American economy. In fact, on the surface the Clean Air Act appears to be the largest public policy success story of the last generation: The dramatic reduction in air pollution is greater in magnitude than the reduction in the crime rate in the 1990s or the fall in welfare rolls since welfare reform. You’d never know this from the media or the greens, who hate good environmental news as much as vampires hate garlic.

Read the rest of the column.

From SPPI

By Lord Christopher Monckton — 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: 

From the UK Telegraph

By Gerald Warner — When your attempt at recreating the Congress of Vienna with a third-rate cast of extras turns into a shambles, when the data with which you have tried to terrify the world is daily exposed as ever more phoney, when the blatant greed and self-interest of the participants has become obvious to all beholders, when those pesky polar bears just keep increasing and multiplying – what do you do?

No contest: stop issuing three rainforests of press releases every day, change the heading to James Bond-style “Do not distribute” and “leak” a single copy, in the knowledge that human nature is programmed to interest itself in anything it imagines it is not supposed to see, whereas it would bin the same document unread if it were distributed openly.

After that, get some unbiased, neutral observer, such as the executive director of Greenpeace, to say: “This is the single most important piece of paper in the world today.” Unfortunately, the response of all intelligent people will be to fall about laughing; but it was worth a try – everybody loves a tryer – and the climate alarmists are no longer in a position to pick and choose their tactics.

But boy! Was this crass, or what? The apocalyptic document revealing that even if the Western leaders hand over all the climate Danegeld demanded of them, appropriately at the venue of Copenhagen, the earth will still fry on a 3C temperature rise is the latest transparent scare tactic to extort more cash from taxpayers. The danger of this ploy, of course, is that people might say “If we are going to be chargrilled anyway, what is the point of handing over billions – better to get some serious conspicuous consumption in before the ski slopes turn into saunas.”

This “single most important piece of paper in the world” comes, presumably, from an authoritative and totally neutral source? Yes, of course. It’s from the – er – UN Framework Committee on Climate Change that is – er – running the Danegeld Summit. Some people might be small-minded enough to suggest this paper has as much authority as a “leaked” document from Number 10 revealing that life would be hell under the Tories.

This week has been truly historic. It has marked the beginning of the landslide that is collapsing the whole AGW imposture. The pseudo-science of global warming is a global laughing stock and Copenhagen is a farce. In the warmist camp the Main Man is a railway engineer with huge investments in the carbon industry. That says it all. The world’s boiler being heroically damped down by the Fat Controller. Al Gore, occupant of the only private house that can be seen from space, so huge is its energy consumption, wanted to charge punters $1,200 to be photographed with him at Copenhagen. There is a man who is really worried about the planet’s future.

If there were not $45trillion of Western citizens’ money at stake, this would be the funniest moment in world history. What a bunch of buffoons. Not since Neville Chamberlain tugged a Claridge’s luncheon bill from his pocket and flourished it on the steps of the aircraft that brought him back from Munich has a worthless scrap of paper been so audaciously hyped. There was one good moment at Copenhagen, though: some seriously professional truncheon work by Danish Plod on the smellies. Otherwise, this event is strictly for Hans Christian Andersen

Presenting at the Copenhagen Climate Conference on December 14, 2009, Al Gore told attendees at that Arctic ice would be gone in five years. Gore cited Dr. Wieslav Maslowski as his source. Dr. Maslowski later responded that “Its unclear to me how this figure was arrived at. I would never try to estimate likelihood at anything as exact as this.” Gore was later forced to acknowledge he fudged the data. Sounds a lot like ClimateGate.

From MyWay News

COPENHAGEN (AP) – Danish police fired pepper spray and beat protesters with batons outside the U.N. climate conference on Wednesday, as disputes inside left major issues unresolved just two days before world leaders hope to sign a historic agreement to fight global warming.

With the talks clearly deadlocked, Connie Hedegaard, former Danish climate minister, resigned from the conference presidency to allow her boss, Danish Prime Minister Lars Loekke Rasmussen to preside as world leaders from 115 nations streamed into Copenhagen. She was to continue overseeing the closed-door negotiations.

Hundreds of protesters were trying to disrupt the 193-nation conference, the latest action in days of demonstrations to demand “climate justice” – firm action to combat global warming. Police said 230 protesters were detained.

Inside the cavernous Bella Center convention hall, negotiators dealing with core issues debated until just before dawn without setting new goals for reducing greenhouse gas emissions or for financing poorer countries’ efforts to cope with coming climate change, key elements of any deal.

“I regret to report we have been unable to reach agreement,” John Ashe of Antigua, chairman of one negotiating group, reported to conference Wednesday morning.

Read the rest of the story.

From the UK Telegraph

Carbon trading fraudsters may have accounted for up to 90% of all market activity in some European countries, with criminals pocketing an estimated €5bn (£4.5bn) mainly in Britain, France, Spain, Denmark and Holland, according to Europol, the European law enforcement agency.

The revelation caused embarrassment for European Union negotiators at the Copenhagen climate change summit yesterday, where they have been pushing for an expansion of their system across the globe to penalise heavy emitters of carbon dioxide.

Rob Wainwright, the director of serious crime squad, said large-scale organised criminal activity had “endangered the credibility” of the current carbon trading system.
Yesterday, the UK delegation released a paper calling for the “expansion of carbon markets”, in order to use the profits for a fund to help developing nations tackle climate change.

Suspicions about an unprecedented level of carbon crime over the last 18 months have led investigators to believe criminals are using “missing trader” techniques to buy up carbon credits elsewhere in Europe where there is a cheaper rate of VAT.

Then they sell on the credits in the UK, charging the domestic rate, and pocket the difference. This has been commonplace among trading of very mobile commodities across European borders, such as phones, computer chips and cigarettes.

British investigators made seven arrests earlier this year over a suspected £38m VAT scam.

Read the rest of the column

From NewsMax

By: David A. Patten — Climategate may be just the tip of the global-warming iceberg according to the Washington, D.C.-based Competitive Enterprise Institute, which says the next weather-science scandal may erupt right here in the United States.

For nearly three years CEI, a free-market, public-interest organization, has pursued a series of Freedom of Information Act Requests intended to force NASA’s climate-science division to hand over e-mails it says could reflect the same sort of pro-warming bias seen in the recent e-mails from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of East Anglia University.

One reason NASA’s unresponsiveness is drawing attention: For years, the CRU stonewalled a request filed through the British information-act process, before information was “hacked” and posted on the Internet in November.

“They have resisted and haven’t wanted to turn anything over,” CEI Energy and Global Warming Policy Director Myron Ebell says of NASA. “. . . So this looks like climategate all over again to us.”

CEI senior fellow Chris Horner, author of Red Hot Lies: How Global Warming Alarmists Use Threats, Fraud, and Deception to Keep You Misinformed, has led the fight for the information.

Horner is requesting internal e-mails and other information from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS).

That institute, directed by controversial global-warming advocate James Hansen, has played an influential role in stoking concern that massive climate changes endanger the planet.

Horner tells Newsmax that he fully expects the GISS data will echo the U.K.-based CRU e-mails.

“The information is, [based on] all indications from what we can tell from available data and past manipulations and modifications of their claims, likely to be damning on a scale similar to the CRU ‘climategate’ documents, computer code, and annotations,” Horner states.

Before Horner and CEI can prove that cooking the climate books is a transatlantic phenomenon, they have to get their hands on the e-mails. And that apparently won’t be easy.

Read the rest of the story.

From American Thinker

By Larrey Anderson – It is fascinating to watch the mainstream media in America duck (and/or make excuses for) the greatest scam in modern history: the “science” behind man-made global warming. Even more entertaining, and far more enlightening, is to follow the analyses by the experts in computer programming of the recently disclosed methods used by the Climate Research Unit (CRU) from the University of East Anglia.

Most commentators in the media have been talking about the “REM” statements in the purloined e-mails and computer codes from the CRU [i]. True believers in anthropogenic global warming (AGW), especially those in the mainstream and “scientific” media, are pooh-poohing such words as “tricks” or “hide the decline” as interoffice slang that had no real impact on how the science was conducted.

But the real action (and the evidence for chicanery) is in the computer code obtained from the CRU. Our own computer guru Marc Sheppard, writing for American Thinker here and here, was one of the first to offer an accurate diagnosis of this fraudulent method of computer programming. Analyzing the code, as Marc has indicated in his work, is a complex business. As he pleads in one article, “please bear with me while I get a tad techie on you.”

 

For the layman readers of American Thinker, I want to explain in a simple manner what went on in the construction of one piece of the controversial programming.

A bit of background: The cornerstone of the evidence for global warming presented by Al Gore and the AGW crowd was a notorious graph that became known as “the hockey stick graph.” The graph is based on computer models that supposedly prove our planet has heated exponentially in the last half-century due to increasing amounts of man-made CO2 released into the atmosphere. Proponents further claim (and the computer models purport to show) that temperatures will continue to increase exponentially. The implication is that unless we drastically curtail human output of CO2, the “escalation” in temperature is going to get even worse even faster.

 

Turns out that these claims are absolutely false, and the computer models have been rigged.

Here is one version of the famous “hockey stick” graph:

 

 

Now that is scary [ii]! According to the now-debunked myth, global temperatures started going through the roof about sixty years ago. They will to continue to rise and bring unimaginable disaster. Except they haven’t, and they probably won’t.

Now to the CRU code that maintains these fictional monstrosities. Pay particular attention to the black line at the far right of the “hockey stick” in Graph 1. The black line starts at about 1900. (This is the same period of time addressed by the code we will examine.) The black line looks something like this very simplified version:

The x-axis (horizontal) shows time. The y-axis (vertical) shows temperature. In the last few decades, the temperature, according to AGW enthusiasts, has been climbing off the charts.

Marc Sheppard discovered and showed us this bit of programming taken from the CRU documents:

yrloc=[1400,findgen(19)*5.+1904]

valadj=[0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,-0.1,-0.25,-0.3,0.,-0.1,0.3,0.8,1.2,1.7,2.5,2.6,2.6,2.6,2.6,2.6]*0.75         ; fudge factor

The long string of bold numbers in the second set of brackets is the “fudge factor” applied (supposedly) to the raw data [iii]. This string of numbers “adjusts” the raw data from 1904 to 1994 in five-year increments. Here is what these nineteen numbers roughly look like on a simple graph (each bar below represents a number in bold above):

 

 

I have left a space between the bars that represent each number so the reader can compare the temperature line to the numbers from the program. Time is once again indicated by the x-axis (horizontal). Temperature is portrayed on the y-axis (vertical).

 

The numbers in the code indicate a degree of cheating that is actually much larger than I was able to show with the bars in Graph 3 [iv].

We can now prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the hockey stick is an absolute ruse. The hockey stick graph cannot possibly be based on the actual data. (…Wherever and whatever that data might have been, that is. The CRU has admitted destroying the raw data.)

 

Even if the numbers in the program were not added to the aggregate temperatures (of each preceding period [v]), the numbers in the code plot like this:

 

 

 

Graph 4 this still looks an awful lot like the “hockey stick.” In short, no matter how you read the code, it was designed to create a phony outcome.

 

But don’t take my word for it. Computer experts everywhere are all over this particular con game, and many other deceptions, that came out of the CRU files.

 

Read the rest of the column

From the Washington Post

By Sarah Palin — With the publication of damaging e-mails from a climate research center in Britain, the radical environmental movement appears to face a tipping point. The revelation of appalling actions by so-called climate change experts allows the American public to finally understand the concerns so many of us have articulated on this issue.  “Climate-gate,” as the e-mails and other documents from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia have become known, exposes a highly politicized scientific circle — the same circle whose work underlies efforts at the Copenhagen climate change conference. The agenda-driven policies being pushed in Copenhagen won’t change the weather, but they would change our economy for the worse.

The e-mails reveal that leading climate “experts” deliberately destroyed records, manipulated data to “hide the decline” in global temperatures, and tried to silence their critics by preventing them from publishing in peer-reviewed journals. What’s more, the documents show that there was no real consensus even within the CRU crowd. Some scientists had strong doubts about the accuracy of estimates of temperatures from centuries ago, estimates used to back claims that more recent temperatures are rising at an alarming rate.

This scandal obviously calls into question the proposals being pushed in Copenhagen. I’ve always believed that policy should be based on sound science, not politics.

Read the rest of the column.

Since President Obama cannot get a formal climate treaty ratified by the US Senate, he instead plans to sign an “executive agreement” which will commit the United States to most of the same terms included in the original draft of the treaty but will not be called a “treaty”.

Representative F. James Sensenbrenner (R – WI) questions Dr. John Holdren, President Obama’s Science and Technology advisor regarding ClimateGate, calling the tactics used by some climate experts as “scientific fascism.”

From ClimateDepot.com

A professor who is accusing global warming skeptics of engaging in tabloid-style character assassination of scientists, called an American climate skeptic “an assh*le” on the December 4, 2009 live broadcast of BBC’s Newsnight program.  “What an assh*le!” declared Professor Watson at the end of the contentious debate with Climate Depot’s executive editor Marc Morano. A clearly agitated Watson had earlier shouted to Morano “will you shut up.” Video of BBC “Asshole” clip is here.

Full one-on-one BBC debate segment between Prof. Watson and Climate Depot’s Morano is in two parts here.  The remark was broadcast live on BBC and prompted an on-air apology to viewers from the BBC later in the program for the offensive language.  Watson (Email: a.watson@uea.ac.uk) professor at the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia, which was the source of the disclosed files. Watson’s emails appear in the hacked Climategate files.

Read the rest of the post here.