Copenhagen climate summit: activists who contributed nothing but obstruction

If I ever see another singing, dancing, sloganising polar bear, I shall do my best to melt its ice-floe, says Geoffrey Lean. 

Oxfam has made a useful contribution - but the bears are unbearable

Just how dumb – and self-indulgent – is this? On Wednesday morning the Copenhagen summit, widely seen as the last chance to stop global warming running out of control, stood – in boy wonder Ed Miliband's words – at "four minutes to midnight". Ministers from around the world had just arrived at the deadlocked talks in a last-minute attempt to rescue them. And green activists chose the moment to try to shut everything down.
Thousands of protesters, organised by Climate Justice Action – a worldwide coalition of grass-roots groups – stormed the conference centre, blocking its entrance as they tussled with police and stopping delegates from entering. Gordon Brown, trapped inside, was prevented from starting his shuttle diplomacy with other heads of government to try to negotiate a deal.

 

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Environmental groups inside the centre, meanwhile, shouted and banged drums to try to drown out proceedings. Indeed, many did their best to disrupt things throughout: staging sit-downs in the cavernous, crowded Bella Centre, in which the talks have been held – hindering negotiators from getting to key meetings – and holding noisy protests.
Now, don't get me wrong. Many green groups played really important parts both in the run-up to Copenhagen and at the conference itself. The World Wildlife Fund and Oxfam remained constructively on top of the proceedings. Greenpeace characteristically carried out its gadfly role, while the even more radical, virally spreading 350 campaign did much to mobilise pressure for tougher emissions reductions. And other, less well-known organisations – such as the unappetisingly named Stakeholder Forum and Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development – did patient, valuable work to try to get important issues that might otherwise have been neglected into the agreement.
But they were outweighed by thousands of activists who contributed nothing but obstruction. They were dubbed "policy tourists" by the more engaged groups, but that seems over-generous: they seemed mainly interested in having a good time and staging stunts for the cameras. If I ever see another singing, dancing, sloganising polar bear, I shall do my best to melt its ice-floe. And that goes for the climate-sceptic Ursus maritimus that turned up at one point, megaphone in paw, howling imprecations about the scientists who wrote the hacked and much-hyped emails.
In fairness, much of the blame lies with the Danish government and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which organised the summit. In an attempt to be inclusive, they accredited 46,000 people in a centre that holds 15,000. Most came from non-governmental organisations (NGOs), ranging from serious institutes to industry lobbyists, as well as the policy tourists.
The rationale was that they would not all turn up at once – but enough did to create chaos. Huge queues snaked around the centre, with people waiting up to 10 hours to get in. Substantial figures such as John Prescott and Lord Stern, of the eponymous report, were among those left in the cold for hours.
Do them good to suffer like anyone else, you might say – but they had something to contribute, unlike the demonstrators inside. Ian Johnson – a former vice-president of the World Bank in charge of environmental issues, with vast experience of making difficult negotiations work – also queued for hours, only to be frogmarched out of the centre by security guards because the policy tourists had filled the place up.
Those who did get in found a centre so jammed up that it became dysfunctional, contributing to the bad-tempered atmosphere that bogged the talks down in fractious manoeuvring and points of order. Busy delegates had to wait for half an hour to get cold and indifferent food, progress was difficult, and the sheer press of people inhibited the chance corridor encounters that traditionally lubricate such negotiations.
But when the organisers tried to cut the number of NGO representatives to a far from ungenerous 1,000, you'd have thought from the outrage that they were sending tanks into Tiananmen Square. Fifty organisations – including Friends of the Earth, the World Development Movement, Cafod and Christian Aid – fumed at the "undemocratic"` and "draconian" measure.
The irritated authorities responded by cutting the numbers to just 300 … and suddenly the policy tourists were gone and the blessedly polar-bear-free centre started functioning. It may be no coincidence that that was also the first day – even closer to midnight – when any progress was made in the negotiations.
Canada is visited by an unwelcome jest
Danes are much the jolliest of the Scandinavians (which, admittedly, is not saying much) but, even so, there have not been many laughs in Copenhagen over the past two weeks. There has, though, been one successful hoax – and no, before you ask, I am not referring to the constant claims by extreme climate sceptics that the 200-year volume of science behind global warming adds up to the greatest con ever perpetrated.
The victims were the Canadians, widely excoriated as the most climate-unfriendly government in the industrialised world since the departure of George W Bush – not least for allowing their carbon dioxide emissions to rise by more than 20 per cent instead of cutting them as they agreed to do under the Kyoto Protocol; and for developing their vast tar sands to make the world’s dirtiest fuel.
Activists put out a hoax press release, supposedly from the Canadian government, announcing that it was reversing its position and taking on one of the world’s toughest reduction targets because “taking full responsibility for our emissions is just Canadian good sense”.
For good measure, it followed up with a fake video of a supposed Ugandan delegate welcoming the U-turn. The media was duly fooled, to everyone’s embarrassment.
The official response, when it came, was even stranger than the hoax. Canada’s environment minister Jim Prentice called the prank a “moral misfire” and denounced its “cruelty, hypocrisy and immorality”.
Poor lamb – your heart bleeds for him, doesn’t it?

 

The New Climate Litigation

How about if we sue you for breathing?

Fresh from the fiasco in Copenhagen and with a failure in the U.S. Senate looming this coming year, the climate-change lobby is already shifting to Plan B, or is it already Plan D? Meet the carbon tort.
Across the country, trial lawyers and green pressure groups—if that's not redundant—are teaming up to sue electric utilities for carbon emissions under "nuisance" laws.
A group of 12 Gulf Coast residents whose homes were damaged by Katrina are suing 33 energy companies for greenhouse gas emissions that allegedly contributed to the global warming that allegedly made the hurricane worse. Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal and seven state AG allies plus New York City are suing American Electric Power and other utilities for a host of supposed eco-maladies. A native village in Alaska is suing Exxon and 23 oil and energy companies for coastal erosion.
What unites these cases is the creativity of their legal chain of causation and their naked attempts at political intimidation. "My hope is that the court case will provide a powerful incentive for polluters to be reasonable and come to the table and seek affordable and reasonable reductions," Mr. Blumenthal told the trade publication Carbon Control News. "We're trying to compel measures that will stem global warming regardless of what happens in the legislature."
Mull over that one for a moment. Mr. Blumenthal isn't suing to right a wrong. He admits that he's suing to coerce a change in policy no matter what the public's elected representatives choose.
Cap and trade or a global treaty like the one that collapsed in Copenhagen would be destructive—but at least either would need the assent of a politically accountable Congress. The Obama Administration's antidemocratic decision to impose carbon regulation via the Environmental Protection Agency would be even more destructive—but at least it would be grounded in an existing law, the 1977 Clean Air Act, however misinterpreted. The nuisance suits ask the courts to make such fundamentally political decisions themselves, with judges substituting their views for those of the elected branches.
And now that you mention it, the U.S. appeals courts seem more than ready to arrogate to themselves this power. In September, the Second Circuit allowed Mr. Blumenthal's suit to proceed, while a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit reversed a lower court's dismissal of the Katrina case in October. An en banc hearing is now under consideration.
But global warming is, well, global: It doesn't matter whether ubiquitous CO2 emissions come from American Electric Power or Exxon—or China. "There is no logical reason to draw the line at 30 defendants as opposed to 150, or 500, or even 10,000 defendants," says David Rivkin, an attorney at Baker Hostetler and a contributor to our pages, in an amicus brief in the Katrina case. "These plaintiffs—and any others alleging injury by climatic phenomena—would have standing to assert a damages claim against virtually every entity and individual on the planet, since each 'contributes' to global concentrations of carbon dioxide."
In other words, the courts would become a venue for a carbon war of all against all. Not only might businesses sue to shackle their competitors—could we sue the New York Times for deforestation?—but judges would decide the remedies against specific defendants. In practice this would mean ad hoc command-and-control regulation against any industries that happen to catch the green lobby's eye.
Carbon litigation without legislation is one more way to harm the economy, and the rule of law. We hope the Fifth Circuit will have the good sense to deflect this damaging legal theory before it crash-lands at the Supreme Court.

 

Time for a Climate Change Plan B

The U.S. president is in deep denial.

By NIGEL LAWSON

The world's political leaders, not least President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Gordon Brown, are in a state of severe, almost clinical, denial. While acknowledging that the outcome of the United Nations climate-change conference in Copenhagen fell short of their demand for a legally binding, enforceable and verifiable global agreement on emissions reductions by developed and developing countries alike, they insist that what has been achieved 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 only breakthrough was the political coup for China and India in concluding the anodyne communiqué with the United States behind closed doors, with Brazil and South Africa allowed in the room and Europe left to languish in the cold outside.
Far from achieving a major step forward, Copenhagen—predictably—achieved precisely nothing. The nearest thing to a commitment was the promise by the developed world to pay the developing world $30 billion of "climate aid" over the next three years, rising to $100 billion a year from 2020. Not only is that (perhaps fortunately) not legally binding, but there is no agreement whatsoever about which countries it will go to, in which amounts, and on what conditions.
The reasons for the complete and utter failure of Copenhagen are both fundamental and irresolvable. The first is that the economic cost of decarbonizing the world's economies is massive, and of at least the same order of magnitude as any benefits it may conceivably bring in terms of a cooler world in the next century.
The reason we use carbon-based energy is not the political power of the oil lobby or the coal industry. It is because it is far and away the cheapest source of energy at the present time and is likely to remain so, not forever, but for the foreseeable future.
Switching to much more expensive energy may be acceptable to us in the developed world (although I see no present evidence of this). But in the developing world, including the rapidly developing nations such as China and India, there are still tens if not hundreds of millions of people suffering from acute poverty, and from the consequences of such poverty, in the shape of malnutrition, preventable disease and premature death.
The overriding priority for the developing world has to be the fastest feasible rate of economic development, which means, inter alia, using the cheapest available source of energy: carbon energy.

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Corbis 

 

Moreover, the argument that they should make this economic and human sacrifice to benefit future generations 100 years and more hence is all the less compelling, given that these future generations will, despite any problems caused by warming, be many times better off than the people of the developing world are today.

Or, at least, that is the assumption on which the climate scientists' warming projections are based. It is projected economic growth that determines projected carbon emissions, and projected carbon emissions that (according to the somewhat conjectural computer models on which they rely) determine projected warming (according to the same models).
All this overlaps with the second of the two fundamental reasons why Copenhagen failed, and why Mexico City (if our leaders insist on continuing this futile charade) will fail, too. That is the problem of burden-sharing, and in particular how much of the economic cost of decarbonization should be borne by the developed world, which accounts for the bulk of past emissions, and how much by the faster-growing developing world, which will account for the bulk of future emissions.
The 2006 Stern Review, quite the shoddiest pseudo-scientific and pseudo-economic document any British Government has ever produced, claims the overall burden is very small. If that were so, the problem of how to share the burden would be readily overcome—as indeed occurred with the phasing out of chorofluorocarbons (CFCs) under the 1987 Montreal Protocol. But the true cost of decarbonization is massive, and the distribution of the burden an insoluble problem.
Moreover, any assessment of the impact of any future warming that may occur is inevitably highly conjectural, depending as it does not only on the uncertainties of climate science but also on the uncertainties of future technological development. So what we are talking about is risk.

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Not that the risk is all one way. The risk of a 1930s-style outbreak of protectionism—if the developed world were to abjure cheap energy and faced enhanced competition from China and other rapidly industrializing countries that declined to do so—is probably greater than any risk from warming.
But even without that, there is not even a theoretical (let alone a practical) basis for a global agreement on burden-sharing, since, so far as the risk of global warming is concerned (and probably in other areas too) risk aversion is not uniform throughout the world. Not only do different cultures embody very different degrees of risk aversion, but in general the richer countries will tend to be more risk-averse than the poorer countries, if only because we have more to lose.
The time has come to abandon the Kyoto-style folly that reached its apotheosis in Copenhagen last week, and move to plan B.
And the outlines of a credible plan B are clear. First and foremost, we must do what mankind has always done, and adapt to whatever changes in temperature may in the future arise.
This enables us to pocket the benefits of any warming (and there are many) while reducing the costs. None of the projected costs are new phenomena, but the possible exacerbation of problems our climate already throws at us. Addressing these problems directly is many times more cost-effective than anything discussed at Copenhagen. And adaptation does not require a global agreement, although we may well need to help the very poorest countries (not China) to adapt.
Beyond adaptation, plan B should involve a relatively modest, increased government investment in technological research and development—in energy, in adaptation and in geoengineering.
Despite the overwhelming evidence of the Copenhagen debacle, it is not going to be easy to get our leaders to move to plan B. There is no doubt that calling a halt to the high-profile climate-change traveling circus risks causing a severe conference-deprivation trauma among the participants. If there has to be a small public investment in counseling, it would be money well spent.
Lord Lawson was U.K. chancellor of the exchequer in the Thatcher government from 1983 to 1989. He is the author of "An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming" (Overlook Duckworth, paperback 2009), and is chairman of the recently formed Global Warming Policy Foundation (www.thegwpf.org).

 

How to Manufacture a Climate Consensus

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

By PATRICK J. MICHAELS

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.

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Martin Kozlowsk

 

 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.
Mr. Michaels, formerly professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia (1980-2007), is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute.

 

Copenhagen climate summit: Al Gore condemned over Arctic ice melting prediction

Al Gore, the former US Vice-President, has become embroiled in a climate change spin row after claiming that the Arctic could be completely ice-free within five years. 

Al Gore Photo: AP

Speaking at the Copenhagen climate change summit, Mr Gore said new computer modelling suggests there is a 75 per cent chance of the entire polar ice cap melting during the summertime by 2014.
However, he faced embarrassment last night after Dr Wieslav Maslowski, the climatologist whose work the prediction was based on, refuted his claims.

 

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Dr Maslowski, of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, told The Times: “It’s unclear to me how this figure was arrived at.
“I would never try to estimate likelihood at anything as exact as this.”
The blunder follows the controversy over hacked emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, which sceptics claim suggest scientists manipulated data to strengthen their argument that global warming is man-made.
Mr Gore, who narrated the Oscar-winning climate change documentary An Inconvenient Truth, told the conference that record melting of Polar and Himalayan ice could deprive more than a billion people of access to clean water.
Alluding to Dr Maslowski’s work, he said: “These figures are fresh, I just got them yesterday.
"Some of the models suggest to Dr Maslowski that there is a 75 per cent chance that the entire polar ice cap during some of summer months could be completely ice free within five to seven years.
"There are more than a billion people on the planet who get more than half of their drinking water – many of them all of their drinking water – from the seasonal melting of snow melt and glacier ice."
His projection strongly contradicted forecasts made eight months ago by the US government agency that the ice cap may nearly vanish in the summer by 2030.
Dr Maslowki said that his latest results give a six-year projection for the melting of 80 per cent of the ice, but he said he expects some ice to remain beyond 2020.
He added: “I was very explicit that we were talking about near-ice-free conditions and not completely ice-free conditions in the northern ocean.”
Following Dr Maslowski’s comments, Mr Gore’s office later said the 75 per cent figure was one used by Dr Maslowksi as a “ballpark figure” several years ago in a conversation with Mr Gore.
Mr Gore’s speech also provoked criticism from leading members of the climate science community, who described the projection as “aggressive”.
Professor Jim Overland, a leading oceanographer at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told The Times: “This is an exaggeration that opens the science up to criticism from sceptics.
“You really don’t need to exaggerate the changes in the Arctic.”
Mark Serreze, of the US National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, said: “It's possible but not likely. We're sticking with 2030."
Average global temperatures have increased by 1.3F (0.74C) in the past century, but the mercury has risen at least twice as quickly in the Arctic.
Scientists say the make up of the frozen north polar sea has shifted significantly in recent years as much of the thick year-round ice has given way to thin seasonal ice.
In the summer of 2007, the Arctic ice cap dwindled to a record low minimum extent of 1.7 million square miles in September. The melting in 2008 and 2009 was not as extensive, but still ranked as the second and third greatest decreases on record.

 

Copenhagen summit veering towards farce, warns Ed Miliband

Climate talks at least 18 hours behind schedule as world leaders set to arrive in Copenhagen

Ed Miliband gestures during a press briefing at the UN climate summit in Copenhagen. Photograph: Anja Niedringhaus/AP

The climate change summit in Copenhagen was in jeopardy tonight with the complex negotiations falling far behind schedule as the climate secretary, Ed Miliband, warned of a "farce".
With just two days remaining, the inability to overcome disagreements about the shape of a deal to combat global warming led to hours of inaction today , while outside the negotiations police clashed with protesters who broke through a security cordon but failed in an attempt to storm the conference centre.
"We have made no progress" said a source close to the talks. "What people don't realise is that we are now not really ready for the leaders. These talks are now 18 hours late."
More than 115 world leaders arrive tomorrow and on Friday and had expected only to bargain over the final details in a prepared draft agreement but the earlier impasse could condemn the talks to failure.
For the first time frustrated negotiators spoke openly of – at best – reaching a weak political agreement that would leave no clear way forward to tackle rising greenhouse gas emissions.
That would mean the negotiations staying in limbo well into next year, increasing the damage caused by global warming.
The day saw thousands of protesters take to the streets to demand a strong deal by Friday but, while they clashed with police, they failed in their objective to enter the conference centre.
A key meeting of 25 government ministers from different countries, chosen to streamline the negotiations, was 18 hours behind track tonight , having failed to meet for the entire day. The group, along with another 25 "shadow" ministers, had been scheduled for its first meeting in the early hours of Wednesday but it was delayed. Ministers from developing countries were shocked to find that, instead of making progress on producing the slimmed-down draft agreement for the leaders, talks starting at 5.45am had seen the document increase in complexity.
Miliband said people around the world would be rightly furious if negotiators failed to get a deal because the talks were delayed not over substance, but over the process. "It would be a tragedy if we failed to agree because of the substance. It would be a farce if we failed to reach agreement because of the process," he said.
"People will find it extraordinary that this conference that has been two years in the planning and involves 192 countries, which is such an important thing, such important stakes, is at the moment being stalled on points of order."
There was, however, some progress on other important issues. The US and China appeared to resolve some of their differences and a proposal from the Ethiopian prime minister on climate funding closed the gap between rich and poor countries. At the heart of the impasse is the fate of the Kyoto protocol, signed in 1997. It is the only legally binding agreement on climate change and requires industrialised nations – but not developing nations – to cut their emissions. Rich nations want a fresh treaty, arguing the world has changed and the major emerging economies such and China and India must commit to curbing their huge and fast growing national emissions. But the developing nations argue that rich nations grew wealthy by polluting the atmosphere and must take primary responsibility for it, which can only be guaranteed by Kyoto.
China, India, South Africa and Brazil brought one half of the talks to a halt in expectation that the Danish presidency was going to introduce a new text which would effectively kill Kyoto. "Things are getting held up by procedural wrangling," said Miliband. "People can kill this agreement with process arguments. It will be tragedy if we cannot reach an agreement on substance, but it will be a farce if we cannot agree on process."

The Copenhagen Shakedown

Developing countries understand the real costs of climate change.

The U.N. climate-change conference in Copenhagen was supposed to be the moment when the world came together to save us from an excess of carbon dioxide. Like all such confabs, it's coming down instead to cold, hard cash.
On Monday, the so-called G-77—in effect, the Third World—walked out of the talks for several hours in protest of the unwillingness, as they saw it, of rich countries to foot the bill for averting or mitigating climate catastrophe in the developing world. The negotiations have since resumed, but with the most difficult questions set aside and expectations lower than ever.
More than anything else, Monday's walkout revealed the real reason that the developing world is in Copenhagen in the first place: They see climate change as a potential foreign-aid bonanza, and they are at the table to leverage the West's environmental angst into massive transfers of wealth.

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In theory, the money is supposed to help poor countries pay for their transition to a carbon-neutral future. But the developed world has been pouring trillions of dollars into development aid in various forms for decades, with little to show for it. The reasons are well-known: Corruption, political oppression, government control of the economy and the absence of rule of law combine to keep poor countries poor. And those factors also ensure that most aid is squandered or skimmed off the top.Recasting foreign aid as "climate mitigation" won't change any of that.
Still, Copenhagen's fixation on who pays for these huge wealth transfers is instructive because it lays bare the myth that greening the global economy is a cost-free exercise. The G-77 scoffed at a European offer of €7.2 billion ($10 billion) over three years. Instead, the Sudanese chairman of the group, Lumumba Stanislaus Di-Aping, suggested in an interview with Mother Jones magazine that something on the order of a trillion dollars, or more, would be appropriate.
"The world's scientists and policy decision makers have publicly stated that this is the greatest risk humanity has ever faced," says Mr. Di-Aping. "Now if that's the case, it's very strange that $10 billion is considered adequate financing." Mr. Di-Aping deserves credit for taking the climate alarmists on their own terms and drawing consistent conclusions.
Dennis Meadows, one of the authors of the Malthusian 1972 classic "The Limits to Growth," also served up some climate honesty in a recent interview with Der Spiegel. "I lived long enough in a country like Afghanistan to know that I don't want us to have to live like that in the future. But we have to learn to live a life that allows for fulfillment and development, with the CO2 emissions of Afghanistan." Mr. Meadows's chilling corollary: "If you want everyone to have the full potential of mobility, adequate food and self-development, then . . . one or two billion" people is about all the population the planet can sustain.
Given that the world's population is now about 6.8 billion people, that's not likely to happen. Nor is the developed world about to reinvent itself as a greener version of Afghanistan, much less fork over trillions of dollars to avert the supposed catastrophe it has done so much to trumpet. If the summit at Copenhagen achieves nothing else but to expose the disconnect between climate alarm and climate "solutions," it may even be worth it.

 

Inconvenient truth for Al Gore as his North Pole sums don't add up

Al Gore's office admitted that the percentage he quoted in his speech was from an old, ballpark figure

There are many kinds of truth. Al Gore was poleaxed by an inconvenient one yesterday.
The former US Vice-President, who became an unlikely figurehead for the green movement after narrating the Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth, became entangled in a new climate change “spin” row.
Mr Gore, speaking at the Copenhagen climate change summit, stated the latest research showed that the Arctic could be completely ice-free in five years.
In his speech, Mr Gore told the conference: “These figures are fresh. Some of the models suggest to Dr [Wieslav] Maslowski that there is a 75 per cent chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during the summer months, could be completely ice-free within five to seven years.”

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However, the climatologist whose work Mr Gore was relying upon dropped the former Vice-President in the water with an icy blast.
“It’s unclear to me how this figure was arrived at,” Dr Maslowski said. “I would never try to estimate likelihood at anything as exact as this.”
Mr Gore’s office later admitted that the 75 per cent figure was one used by Dr Maslowksi as a “ballpark figure” several years ago in a conversation with Mr Gore.
The embarrassing error cast another shadow over the conference after the controversy over the hacked e-mails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, which appeared to suggest that scientists had manipulated data to strengthen their argument that human activities were causing global warming.
Mr Gore is not the only titan of the world stage finding Copenhagen to be a tricky deal.
World leaders — with Gordon Brown arriving tonight in the vanguard — are facing the humiliating prospect of having little of substance to sign on Friday, when they are supposed to be clinching an historic deal.
Meanwhile, five hours of negotiating time were lost yesterday when developing countries walked out in protest over the lack of progress on their demand for legally binding emissions targets from rich nations. The move underlined the distrust between rich and poor countries over the proposed legal framework for the deal.
Last night key elements of the proposed deal were unravelling. British officials said they were no longer confident that it would contain specific commitments from individual countries on payments to a global fund to help poor nations to adapt to climate change while the draft text on protecting rainforests has also been weakened.
Even the long-term target of ending net deforestation by 2030 has been placed in square brackets, meaning that the date could be deferred. An international monitoring system to identify illegal logging is now described in the text as optional, where before it was compulsory. Negotiators are also unable to agree on a date for a global peak in greenhouse emissions.
Perhaps Mr Gore had felt the need to gild the lily to buttress resolve. But his speech was roundly criticised by members of the climate science community. “This is an exaggeration that opens the science up to criticism from sceptics,” Professor Jim Overland, a leading oceanographer at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said.
“You really don’t need to exaggerate the changes in the Arctic.”
Others said that, even if quoted correctly, Dr Maslowski’s six-year projection for near-ice-free conditions is at the extreme end of the scale. Most climate scientists agree that a 20 to 30-year timescale is more likely for the near-disappearance of sea ice.
“Maslowski’s work is very well respected, but he’s a bit out on a limb,” said Professor Peter Wadhams, a specialist in ocean physics at the University of Cambridge.
Dr Maslowki, who works at the US Naval Postgraduate School in California, said that his latest results give a six-year projection for the melting of 80 per cent of the ice, but he said he expects some ice to remain beyond 2020.
He added: “I was very explicit that we were talking about near-ice-free conditions and not completely ice-free conditions in the northern ocean. I would never try to estimate likelihood at anything as exact as this,” he said. “It’s unclear to me how this figure was arrived at, based on the information I provided to Al Gore’s office.”
Richard Lindzen, a climate scientist at the Massachusets Institute of Technology who does not believe that global warming is largely caused by man, said: “He’s just extrapolated from 2007, when there was a big retreat, and got zero.”

Copenhagen summit carbon footprint biggest ever: report

COPENHAGEN (Reuters) - The Copenhagen climate talks will generate more carbon emissions than any previous climate conference, equivalent to the annual output of over half a million Ethiopians, figures commissioned by hosts Denmark show.

Green Business  |  COP15

Delegates, journalists, activists and observers from almost 200 countries have gathered at the Dec 7-18 summit and their travel and work will create 46,200 tonnes of carbon dioxide, most of it from their flights.
This would fill nearly 10,000 Olympic swimming pools, and is the same amount produced each year by 2,300 Americans or 660,000 Ethiopians -- the vast difference is due to the huge gap in consumption patterns in the two countries -- according to U.S. government statistics about per person emissions in 2006.
Despite efforts by the Danish government to reduce the conference's carbon footprint, around 5,700 tonnes of carbon dioxide will be created by the summit and a further 40,500 tonnes created by attendees' flights to Copenhagen.
The figure for the flights was calculated by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), while the domestic carbon footprint from the summit was calculated by accountants Deloitte, said Deloitte consultant Stine Balslev.
"This is much bigger than the last talks because there are many more people here," she said, adding that 18,000 people were expected to pass through the conference center every day.
"These are preliminary figures but we expect that when we do the final calculations after the conference is over, the carbon footprint will be about the same."
Deloitte included in their calculations emissions caused by accommodation, local transport, electricity and heating of the conference center, paper, security, transport of goods and services as well as energy used by computers, kitchens, photocopiers and printers inside the conference center.
Accommodation accounted for 23 percent of the summit's greenhouse gas emissions in Copenhagen, while transport caused 7 percent. Seventy percent came from activities inside the conference center, she said.
"We have been forced to put up some temporary buildings in order to provide the delegation rooms because the number of participants is so much larger than expected," said Balslev.
"For instance the U.S. delegation has ordered an area that's five times as big as last year."
The temporary buildings housing delegation offices are not well insulated and are warmed by oil heaters, so this area is the most energy-wasteful, she said.
The researchers assumed that 60 percent of conference participants would catch public transport to and from the conference but Balslev said that was probably optimistic.
Balslev said most of the energy used by the conference was from coal fired power stations that power the electricity grid, but some was from wind power.

Developing Countries Walk Out of U.N. Climate Talks

By ALESSANDRO TORELLO and SPENCER SWARTZ

COPENHAGEN -- Tensions flared Monday at the United Nations climate summit, as representatives from a group of poor nations briefly walked out of the conference to protest the slow pace of negotiations, and European Union officials expressed exasperation with the U.S. and China.

 

News Hub: Political Showdowns in Copenhagen

7:29

Environmental reporter Jeffrey Ball reports from Copenhagen, where political clashes are taking place outside and delegates are staging walkouts inside the COP15 Climate Conference.

The Group of 77, which represents developing countries as well as large emerging economies such as Brazil, India and China, walked out of the negotiations in the morning, a Brazilian diplomat said. The delegates returned to the conference later Monday, but the underlying issues remained unsolved, Swedish Minister Andreas Carlgren said. Sweden represents the European Union, as it holds the six-month rotating presidency of the 27-country bloc until the end of the year.
The turbulence inside the Copenhagen conference was matched by disturbances and disorganization outside, as hundreds of people waited in line for hours in chilly weather to gain access to the conference center. Meanwhile, Danish police arrested and detained more than 1,000 protestors who staged demonstrations outside the climate conference Saturday and Sunday. Danish lawmakers passed new legislation ahead of the climate conference allowing preventative detention, under which people can be held by police for up to 12 hours.

Getty Images

Participants at the conference walked past a globe on Thursday, when a walkout by developing countries stalled negotiations.

The official proceedings of the climate conference are heading into their second week. World leaders, including President Barack Obama, are expected to arrive late this week ostensibly to clinch a deal to curb worldwide greenhouse gas emissions and establish new mechanisms for subsidizing efforts by poor countries to adopt low-carbon energy technology or adapt to the effects of rising global temperatures. Among the more high profile groups demanding action are representatives of island nations who have warned their low-lying countries could be swamped if melting polar ice caps raise ocean levels.
At the heart of the disputes in Copenhagen are sharp disagreements over money, which came to the fore again Monday.
Mamadou Honadia, who is part of the negotiating team for the African nation of Burkina Faso, said the G-77 had resumed talks with rich-nations, but was still unhappy that industrialized countries weren't giving longer-term financial commitments to poorer states.
"We need to see developed nations give us a plan of what (financial) transfers will come in five years, ten years and how much over the years ahead, and we aren't seeing that," he said.
The EU has pledged €7.2 billion ($10.5 billion) in financing between next year and 2012 to jump-start the fight against climate change in developing countries.
A Nigerian delegation official said earlier Monday that a key reason for the walkout was under funding from rich nations. He said the E.U. offer for just over €7 billion in short-term funding was "pathetic."

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• Vote: Should developed nations finance the efforts of developing nations to reduce greenhouse gases?

At a press conference late Monday, European officials expressed indignation that some developing countries had criticized the EU's offer.
"We are the only part of the world that has put money on the table, and we're criticized for it," said Stavros Dimas, the EU environment commissioner.
Another official -- Jo Leinen, a member of the European Parliament from Germany -- called on the U.S. and China to set more aggressive targets for controlling their emissions, saying the two countries' offers aren't sufficient to stabilize the climate.
"There is a lot of mistrust between the countries -- you could see that it was a frozen atmosphere outside [the Bella Center] and a frozen atmosphere inside," Mr. Leinen said. Referring to China and the U.S., he added, "It would be helpful if two of the main stakeholders could come out of their very reserved and defensive positions."
The Copenhagen summit seeks to find a new agreement on international rules to limit global warming after 2012. Developing countries want to keep the structure of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol --which mandates rich nations, but not poorer countries nor the U.S.--to cut greenhouse gas emissions, with a new document to supplement it.
A member of the Chinese delegation said the country stands by the position that provisions under the Kyoto Protocol must be respected in any new pact. But U.S. negotiators have said they won't support subsidies for China. The U.S. also never ratified the Kyoto Protocol, in part because U.S. lawmakers objected to the proposal that rich nations should accept steady cuts in their use of fossil fuels, while China, India and other developing nations wouldn't face such restrictions and could, in theory, continue to expand their manufacturing at the expense of U.S. rivals.
Another sensitive issue in the Copenhagen talks surfaced Monday as China lashed out at the U.N. office in charge
of approving carbon credits after it rejected 10 Chinese wind farm projects earlier this month and accused China of fudging the numbers to make them eligible for international subsidies.
"If you reject wind power, what else is there?" said Sun Cuihua, an official at the National Reform and Development Commission which overseas the U.N.-sanctioned clean development mechanism that creates carbon credits.
Under the CDM mechanism, rich countries can invest in carbon-abatement projects in poor countries and get carbon credits that can be traded.
"They say that we made up the electricity prices; that is not a responsible thing to say," Ms. Sun told reporters at a meeting where Chinese windfarm owners and developers issued a statement protesting the U.N. decision.
—Shai Oster contributed to this article. Write to Alessandro Torello at alessandro.torello@dowjones.com and Spencer Swartz at spencer.swartz@dowjones.com

Developing countries boycott UN climate talks

By MICHAEL CASEY

 

COPENHAGEN (AP) - China, India and other developing nations boycotted U.N. climate talks on Monday, bringing negotiations to a halt with their demand that rich countries discuss much deeper cuts in their greenhouse gas emissions.
Representatives from developing countries - a bloc of 135 nations - said they refused to participate in any formal working groups at the 192-nation summit until the issue was resolved.
The African-led move was a setback for the Copenhagen talks, which were already faltering over long-running disputes between rich and poor nations over emissions cuts and financing for developing countries to deal with climate change.
However, the move Monday was largely seen as a ploy to shift the agenda to the responsibilities of the industrial countries and make emissions reductions the first item for discussion when world leaders begin arriving Tuesday.
"I don't think the talks are falling apart, but we're losing time," said Kim Carstensen, of the World Wildlife Fund. The developing countries "are making a point."
The dispute came as the conference entered its second week, and only days before over 100 world leaders including President Barack Obama were scheduled to arrive in Copenhagen.
"Nothing is happening at this moment," Zia Hoque Mukta, a delegate from Bangladesh, told The Associated Press. He said developing countries have demanded that conference president Connie Hedegaard of Denmark bring the industrial nations' emissions targets to the top of the agenda before talks can resume.
Poor countries, supported by China, say Hedegaard had raised suspicion that the conference was likely to kill the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which limited carbon emissions by wealthy countries and imposed penalties for failing to meet those targets.
Poor countries want to extend that treaty because it commits rich nations to emissions cuts and imposes penalties if they fall short. The United States withdrew from Kyoto over concerns that it would harm the U.S. economy and that China, India and other major greenhouse gas emitters were not required to take action.
"We are seeing the death of the Kyoto Protocol," said Djemouai Kamel of Algeria, the head of the 50-nation Africa group.
It was the second time the Africans have disrupted the climate talks. At the last round of negotiations in November, the African bloc forced a one-day suspension until wealthy countries agreed to spell out what steps they will take to reduce emissions.
An African delegate said developing countries decided to block the negotiations at a meeting hours before the conference was to resume. He was speaking on condition of anonymity because the meeting was held behind closed doors. He said applause broke out every time China, India or another country supported the proposal to stall the talks.
U.N. climate chief Yvo De Boer said Hedegaard was holding informal consultations with delegates "to get things going."
In Washington, The White House on Monday announced a new program drawing funds from international partners to spend $350 million over five years to give developing nations clean energy technology to curb greenhouse gas emissions and reduce global warming.
The program will distribute solar power alternatives for homes, including sun-powered lanterns, supply cleaner equipment and appliances and work to develop renewable energy systems in the world's poorer nations.
The funding plan grew out of the Major Economies Forum (MEF) established among the world's top economies earlier this year.
The U.S. share of the program will amount to $85 million with the remainder coming from Australia, Britain, Netherlands, Norway and Switzerland, the White House said in a statement.
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said Energy Secretary Steven Chu is to coordinate with partners in the group to insure immediate action on the program.
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown's office said he would arrive in Copenhagen on Tuesday - two days earlier than previously planned - in an attempt to inject momentum into the climate talks.
"His view is that these negotiations can't wait until the last minute. He believes that we have learnt the lessons from the G-20, that it takes leadership to get involved and try to pull together what is required as soon as possible," Brown's spokesman Simon Lewis told reporters in London.
Lewis denied that Brown - facing a national election by June - was seeking to personal credit if a deal is struck. "He is not seeking to push himself forward, but he has taken a personal view that it is important that, if world leaders can, they should get there early," the spokesman said.
Earlier Monday, British Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband said it's up to him and his counterparts in Copenhagen to help bridge that gap between rich and poor countries and "not to leave everything" to the world leaders.
"There are still difficult issues of process and substance that we have to overcome in the coming days," Miliband said. "Can we get the emission cuts we need? We need higher ambition from others and we will be pushing for that."
---_
Associated Press Writer Arthur Max contributed to this report.

Category 17 Winter Storm "Al Gore" Leaves Behind Shivering Nation

By CAROLYN THOMPSON

BUFFALO, N.Y. (AP) - A deadly, windy storm that has paralyzed a wide swath of the nation for days left bitter cold behind as it finally made its exit Thursday, with temperatures below freezing in several states and gusts that made it feel as cold as minus 25.
Power failures in the Midwest, dozens of lost hunters in the West and howling winds that helped blow over a bus in New York provided just a few lingering miseries from the first major storm of the season.
Emergency rooms took in people who had slipped and fallen, overdone shoveling or reached their hands into clogged snowblowers, while tow trucks freed drivers from the sides of icy roads and everyday residents simply struggled to get around in the frigid winds.
"Like I stuck my face in the freezer," was how Bincy Mathew described the feeling in Chicago on Thursday, complaining about his watering eyes: "I think they are going to freeze up."
Aileen Azares, 42, of Dallas, spent part of the day taking photos in Chicago's Millennium Park, where sculptures sported snow hats and icicle beards. Azares wore a pink scarf but was still cold.
"Right now my ears are hurting," Azares said.
The days-old storm made its first punch in the West before plowing across two-thirds of the country with heavy snow, icy winds, and even lightning and thunder before preparing to blow out to sea off Maine.
In northern Arizona, 25 to 30 elk hunters remained stranded for a fourth day in below-freezing weather, and searchers feared the parties would run out of food and heating fuel before the next storm hit, possibly over the weekend.
The Coconino County Sheriff's Office said the hunters were trapped by the 2 to 3 feet of snow that fell Monday. Authorities received several reports of stranded or overdue hunting parties but expected to get more calls as the elk hunting season drew to an end Thursday.
"The storm just hit when everyone was out in the field," said sheriff's spokesman Gerry Blair.
Michigan residents hunkered down under a blizzard warning as the coldest air of the season crossed Lake Michigan. More than 120,000 people lost power in the state, in the middle of a swath from Iowa to West Virginia and up to Maine where residents were in the dark at some point.
High snow totals, fueled by winds blowing over lakes Erie and Ontario, were possible for parts of New York through Saturday, including south of Buffalo and north of Syracuse.
While less than three inches of snow fell on Buffalo, winds gusting between 50 mph and 60 mph blinded drivers, grounded flights and forced most schools to close. Frequent thunder and lightning lit up the sky before dawn.
A double-decker bus carrying 12 passengers from New York City to Toronto overturned on the New York State Thruway near Buffalo when the driver made an unsafe lane change during the worst of the storm early Thursday, state police said. Nine on board were taken to hospitals with injuries not considered life threatening.
"The winds were just whipping the snow back across the road, and you couldn't get a lane or two cleared or kept cleared," State Police Capt. Michael Nigrelli said.
In Rochester, where a blustery 28-degree day finally dispatched an unseasonably mild fall in upstate New York, Mike Hartman said he was getting in shape for ski season with a lunchtime jog around Cobbs Hill Park with his Chinese shar-pei dog and a friend.
"I did enjoy the mild weather, but I'd rather have snow than sleet and rain and a temperature in between freezing and not freezing," he said.
At least 17 people have died in the meandering storm, including a man found Wednesday outside his pickup truck in central Iowa and a North Carolina driver killed when a tree was blown onto his pickup.
Wisconsin hospitals dealt with an influx of patients, including Lloyd Gleason, who lost a finger and fractured two others in a snowblower. He was one of six victims of snowblower accidents who went to St. Mary's Hospital in Madison on Wednesday.
"I just didn't think the thing was working, and it was," he told WISC-TV.
The Upper Midwest was left under a dome of arctic air that forecasters said would linger into the weekend. As often, the coldest spot was International Falls, a small city along the Canadian border that has proclaimed itself the "Icebox of the Nation."
Jake Haney, who fuels planes at the International Falls Airport, said it was 13 below zero with a steady wind when he got to work at 6:30 Thursday morning. He expected to spend about four hours of his 10-hour shift outside but said he'd be fine as long as he left no exposed skin.
"I enjoy it, kind of," Haney said. "I've lived here my whole life, so I'm used to it at least. It's fresh air. It's better than being trapped inside."
---

The real inconvenient truth

The whole world needs to adopt China's one-child policy

Diane Francis, Financial Post 

Read more: http://www.financialpost.com/story.html?id=2314438#ixzz0ZLpjPI4w
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Liu Jin/AFP/Getty Images Ironically, China, despite its dirty coal plants, is the world's leader in terms of fashioning policy to combat environmental degradation, thanks to its one-child-only edict.

The "inconvenient truth" overhanging the UN's Copenhagen conference is not that the climate is warming or cooling, but that humans are overpopulating the world.
A planetary law, such as China's one-child policy, is the only way to reverse the disastrous global birthrate currently, which is one million births every four days.
The world's other species, vegetation, resources, oceans, arable land, water supplies and atmosphere are being destroyed and pushed out of existence as a result of humanity's soaring reproduction rate.
Ironically, China, despite its dirty coal plants, is the world's leader in terms of fashioning policy to combat environmental degradation, thanks to its one-child-only edict.
The intelligence behind this is the following:
-If only one child per female was born as of now, the world's population would drop from its current 6.5 billion to 5.5 billion by 2050, according to a study done for scientific academy Vienna Institute of Demography.
-By 2075, there would be 3.43 billion humans on the planet. This would have immediate positive effects on the world's forests, other species, the oceans, atmospheric quality and living standards.
-Doing nothing, by contrast, will result in an unsustainable population of nine billion by 2050.
Humans are the only rational animals but have yet to prove it. Medical and other scientific advances have benefited by delivering lower infant mortality rates as well as longevity. Both are welcome, but humankind has not yet recalibrated its behavior to account for the fact that the world can only accommodate so many people, especially if billions get indoor plumbing and cars.
The fix is simple. It's dramatic. And yet the world's leaders don't even have this on their agenda in Copenhagen. Instead there will be photo ops, posturing, optics, blah-blah-blah about climate science and climate fraud, announcements of giant wind farms, then cap-and-trade subsidies.
None will work unless a China one-child policy is imposed. Unfortunately, there are powerful opponents. Leaders of the world's big fundamentalist religions preach in favor of procreation and fiercely oppose birth control. And most political leaders in emerging economies perpetuate a disastrous Catch-22: Many children (i. e. sons) stave off hardship in the absence of a social safety net or economic development, which, in turn, prevents protections or development.
China has proven that birth restriction is smart policy. Its middle class grows, all its citizens have housing, health care, education and food, and the one out of five human beings who live there are not overpopulating the planet.
For those who balk at the notion that governments should control family sizes, just wait until the growing human population turns twice as much pastureland into desert as is now the case, or when the Amazon is gone, the elephants disappear for good and wars erupt over water, scarce resources and spatial needs.
The point is that Copenhagen's talking points are beside the point.
The only fix is if all countries drastically reduce their populations, clean up their messes and impose mandatory conservation measures.
dfrancis@nationalpost.com

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Copenhagen climate summit: Blindfolds are hiding the crucial issues at Copenhagen

It is now obvious that the science behind rising CO2 levels is far from settled, writes Christopher Booker. 

An iceberg is pictured in Ilulissat fjord in Greenland Photo: Reuters

As we are engulfed from all sides by suffocatingly one-sided coverage of the Copenhagen conference on climate change, three hugely important issues have been largely stuffed away from sight.
The first of these is the matter of cost: the scarcely believable bill our politicians wish to land us with as the price of their proposals to meet the supposed threat of global warming. Few people have even begun to take on board the astronomic scale of the sums involved – the International Energy Agency talks blithely of $45 trillion - because on this politicians and media have in recent days remained more than ever silent.

 

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• Can Barack Obama save us from hell?

Already under last year’s Climate Change Act - on the Government’s own figures – we in Britain alone are committed to shell out £18 billion every year from now until 2050. That is £725 for every household in the land, which we will all have to pay in rocketing energy bills and regulatory costs, crippling ‘green’ taxes on everything from cars to airline tickets, subsidies to windfarms and heaven knows what else.
But even this may look like a gross underestimate when we realise that it is now the law of the land that, over the same 40 years, Britain must cut its emissions of carbon dioxide by a staggering 80 percent or more. Not a single one of the 463 MPs who nodded through the Climate Change Act, with only three voting against, could have begun to explain in practical terms how this target could be met.
Short of an as-yet undreamed of technological revolution, this could not possibly be achieved without closing down not just most of our transport system and electricity supplies but virtually all of our current economic activity.
What is being proposed at Copenhagen is that not dissimilar measures should be imposed on every country in the developed world, threatening to transform our existing way of life out of all recognition.
The second very important question which has received nothing like enough attention over what is happening in Copenhagen is how the politicians can hope to get round the yawning gap between the richer nations of the West and those developing nations led by China, India, Brazil and South Africa, with some of the fastest-growing economies in the world.
It is this seemingly unbridgeable gulf, at the heart of the international debate since the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, which has led even the organisers of the conference publicly to voice doubts that they will get the universally binding treaty they are after.
The Western nations want everyone to sign up to crippling targets for reducing their CO2 emissions (China having already overtaken the US as the world’s biggest emitter). But the developing countries argue that, since the ‘CO2 problem’ is historically all our fault, as the countries which led the way to industrialisation, there is no way they can agree to any binding targets until they have been allowed to catch up economically with the West.
The best they can offer is that, in order to bribe them to make at least token gestures towards curbing their own carbon emissions, we in the developed countries should pay them hundreds of billions of dollars a year - at the very moment when we ourselves are accepting targets designed to make our own economies progressively very much less productive.
In other words, as we are faced with yet another colossal bill, their own economies will continue to forge ahead, pouring out so much CO2 that the global level will almost certainly continue to rise, All of which leads round to the third hugely important issue which those organising the Copenhagen conference are only too anxious to brush aside – the inescapable fact that the science on which all this frenzy of activity is based has recently begun to look considerably shakier than it did only a few years ago.
The first thing any of us in the West need to be sure of, as we face by far the largest bill in the history of the world, is that the science being used to justify this is 100 percent reliable.
Ultimately the whole case for a Copenhagen treaty rests on the projections of the computer models relied on by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC). These show that, as CO2 levels continue to rise, so temperatures must follow, leading inexorably to catastrophe - unless mankind takes the most drastic action to cut down on its emissions of CO2.
But as more and more eminent scientists have recently been pointing out, the only reason why the computer models predict that rising CO2 must cause temperatures to rise is that this is what they were programmed to show.
What world-ranking physicists such as Professor Richard Lindzen of MIT and Professor Will Happer of Princeton have been arguing is that the models are fatally flawed because they do not take proper account of all sorts of other factors which play a key part in shaping the world’s climate - such as shifts in ocean currents, the effects of magnetic activity on the sun and the ‘feedback’ from clouds and water vapour, far and away the most important greenhouse gas in our atmosphere, which counteracts any impact from the rise in CO2.
The greatest ally this growing army of ‘sceptical’ scientists can point to is what has actually been happening to the climate in recent years. No one can predict with certainty where temperatures will be in 100 years time, But the one thing that is indisputable is that, as CO2 levels continue to rise, the trend in global temperatures has not recently been rising as the computer models predicted, but has been flattening out and even dropping.
In other words, it becomes increasingly clear that the models were wrong - because their programming was biased according to a theory which now looks ever more questionable. Yet it is on their projections that the world is now faced with by far the most expensive set of measures ever proposed by politicians in history.
For months in the run-up to Copenhagen we have been subjected to an unremitting bombardment of scare stories: how the ice caps and glaciers are melting much faster than predicted, how sea levels will rise much higher than anyone imagined, how we face ever more hurricanes, droughts, floods and heatwaves.
Yet every time one of these scares is subjected to proper objective scientific examination it can be found either that these disasters are not happening as claimed or that they have been exaggerated far in advance of anything the evidence can justify.
The importance of Copenhagen is that we are at last arriving at the moment of truth. On one hand we are waking up to the scarcely imaginable cost of what our politicians are proposing, just when on the other the reliability of the evidence on which all this is based is being called into question more than ever before.
Despite our having for years been assured by politicians from Al Gore to President Obama that ‘the science is settled’, it is now obvious that it is nothing of the kind. Not least has this been confirmed by ‘Climategate’ and the leak of that ‘dodgy dossier’ from the East Anglia Climatic Research Unit, for years at the centre of driving the scare over global warming as the most influential source of temperature data in the world. Far from Copenhagen being the end of the debate, the real debate is only just beginning.
Christopher Booker’s The Real Global Warming Disaster: Is The Obsession With ‘Climate Change’ Turning Out To Be The Most Costly Scientific Blunder In History’ (Continuum, £16.99) is available from Telegraph Books for £14.99 plus £1.25 p&p. To order call 0844 871 1416 or go to books.telegraph.co.uk

 

Climategate: another smoking gun…

Despite the Al-Gore-Kool-Aid-drinkers’ best efforts to suppress it, the Climategate scandal continues to blossom and flourish. (Or should that be putresce and pullulate?)
I think my favourite comic detail this week just has to be the one about the amazing not-so-fast-shrinking glaciers. As you’ll know if you’ve been reading reports like this scare stories about glaciers retreating “faster than predicted” are a central plank of the IPCC’s case that we should carbon-tax ourselves back to the Dark Ages NOW. According to the IPCC, the Himalayan glaciers could be gone by 2035.
Or should that be 2350? Yep it seems those scientific experts who make the IPCC’s reports so famously reliable and trustworthy have a bad case of numerical dyslexia. The mistake was spotted by a Canadian academic:

J Graham Cogley, a professor at Ontario Trent University, says he believes the UN authors got the date from an earlier report wrong by more than 300 years.
He is astonished they “misread 2350 as 2035″.
In its 2007 report, the Nobel Prize-winning Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said: “Glaciers in the Himalayas are receding faster than in any other part of the world and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate.
“Its total area will likely shrink from the present 500,000 to 100,000 square kilometres by the year 2035,” the report said.
It suggested three quarters of a billion people who depend on glacier melt for water supplies in Asia could be affected.
But Professor Cogley has found a 1996 document by a leading hydrologist, VM Kotlyakov, that mentions 2350 as the year by which there will be massive and precipitate melting of glaciers.
“The extrapolar glaciation of the Earth will be decaying at rapid, catastrophic rates – its total area will shrink from 500,000 to 100,000 square kilometres by the year 2350,” Mr Kotlyakov’s report said.
Mr Cogley says it is astonishing that none of the 10 authors of the 2007 IPCC report could spot the error and “misread 2350 as 2035″.
“I do suggest that the glaciological community might consider advising the IPCC about ways to avoid such egregious errors as the 2035 versus 2350 confusion in the future,” says Mr Cogley.

Well quite.
But just when you think it can’t get any better, along comes this cracker of an expose at Watts Up With That, courtesy of scientist Willis Eschenbach.
Eschenbach has been looking more closely into one of the big unanswered questions of the great Climate Wars: how reliable is the climate data used by the IPCC?
He focuses on just one country, Australia, and on one weather station – at Darwin Airport – and compares the raw temperature data recorded at the station with the “adjusted” version of the data.
Here’s what he found:

Notice the anomaly? It’s not exactly difficult. The blue line is the trend on the raw data, showing a slight cooling. The red line is the data once it has been adjusted by scientists at the Global Historical Climate Network – which is one of the main sources of temperature data used by the IPCC. Eschenbach finds the extremity of this “homogenization” adjustment rather shocking:

YIKES! Before getting homogenized, temperatures in Darwin were falling at 0.7 Celcius per century … but after the homogenization, they were warming at 1.2 Celcius per century. And the adjustment that they made was over two degrees per century … when those guys “adjust”, they don’t mess around. And the adjustment is an odd shape, with the adjustment first going stepwise, then climbing roughly to stop at 2.4C.

But just how shocking is this discovery. We-e-ll – as Eschenbach reminds us, it is only one weather station. Also, he points out, it is quite normal for scientists to make these homogeneity adjustments, as he explains quoting the GHCN:

Most long-term climate stations have undergone changes that make a time series of their observations inhomogeneous. There are many causes for the discontinuities, including changes in instruments, shelters, the environment around the shelter, the location of the station, the time of observation, and the method used to calculate mean temperature. Often several of these occur at the same time, as is often the case with the introduction of automatic weather stations that is occurring in many parts of the world. Before one can reliably use such climate data for analysis of longterm climate change, adjustments are needed to compensate for the nonclimatic discontinuities.

What he can’t fathom at all, though, is the mind-boggling scale of these adjustments. They can only be explained in terms of scientists with a very particular agenda.

Those, dear friends, are the clumsy fingerprints of someone messing with the data Egyptian style … they are indisputable evidence that the “homogenized” data has been changed to fit someone’s preconceptions about whether the earth is warming.

Do read the full piece. Its wonderfully revealing of the dirty tricks used by the scientists pushing AGW to exaggerate their case. And what’s particularly damning is that it shows how the Climategate scandal extends far, far beyond those so far implicated at the Climatic Research Institute at the University of East Anglia.
Here is the GHCN in context:

There are three main global temperature datasets. One is at the CRU, Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, where we’ve been trying to get access to the raw numbers. One is at NOAA/GHCN, the Global Historical Climate Network. The final one is at NASA/GISS, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies. The three groups take raw data, and they “homogenize” it to remove things like when a station was moved to a warmer location and there’s a 2C jump in the temperature. The three global temperature records are usually called CRU, GISS, and GHCN. Both GISS and CRU, however, get almost all of their raw data from GHCN. All three produce very similar global historical temperature records from the raw data.

In other words the most important temperature data record in the world – even more important than CRU – has been found cheating. Here is Eschenbach’s conclusion:

Now, I want to be clear here. The blatantly bogus GHCN adjustment for this one station does NOT mean that the earth is not warming. It also does NOT mean that the three records (CRU, GISS, and GHCN) are generally wrong either. This may be an isolated incident, we don’t know. But every time the data gets revised and homogenized, the trends keep increasing. Now GISS does their own adjustments. However, as they keep telling us, they get the same answer as GHCN gets … which makes their numbers suspicious as well.
And CRU? Who knows what they use? We’re still waiting on that one, no data yet …
What this does show is that there is at least one temperature station where the trend has been artificially increased to give a false warming where the raw data shows cooling. In addition, the average raw data for Northern Australia is quite different from the adjusted, so there must be a number of … mmm … let me say “interesting” adjustments in Northern Australia other than just Darwin.
And with the Latin saying “Falsus in unum, falsus in omis” (false in one, false in all) as our guide, until all of the station “adjustments” are examined, adjustments of CRU, GHCN, and GISS alike, we can’t trust anyone using homogenized numbers.

Still feel confident, do you, all you warmists who’ve been gloating about all that data allegedly proving that we’re living through times of quite unprecedented hotness?

Climategate: Gore falsifies the record

Andrew Bolt

Wednesday, December 09, 2009 at 06:54pm

Al Gore has studied the Climategate emails with his typically rigorous eye and dismissed them as mere piffle:

Q: How damaging to your argument was the disclosure of e-mails from the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University?
A: To paraphrase Shakespeare, it’s sound and fury signifying nothing. I haven’t read all the e-mails, but the most recent one is more than 10 years old. These private exchanges between these scientists do not in any way cause any question about the scientific consensus.

And in case you think that was a mere slip of the tongue:

Q: There is a sense in these e-mails, though, that data was hidden and hoarded, which is the opposite of the case you make [in your book] about having an open and fair debate.
A: I think it’s been taken wildly out of context. The discussion you’re referring to was about two papers that two of these scientists felt shouldn’t be accepted as part of the IPCC report. Both of them, in fact, were included, referenced, and discussed. So an e-mail exchange more than 10 years ago including somebody’s opinion that a particular study isn’t any good is one thing, but the fact that the study ended up being included and discussed anyway is a more powerful comment on what the result of the scientific process really is.

In fact, thrice denied:

These people are examining what they can or should do to deal with the P.R. dimensions of this, but where the scientific consensus is concerned, it’s completely unchanged. What we’re seeing is a set of changes worldwide that just make this discussion over 10-year-old e-mails kind of silly.

In fact, as Watts Up With That shows, one Climategate email was from just two months ago. The most recent was sent on November 12 - just a month ago. The emails which have Tom Wigley seeming (to me) to choke on the deceit are all from this year. Phil Jones’ infamous email urging other Climategate scientists to delete emails is from last year.
How closely did Gore read these emails? Did he actually read any at all? Was he lying or just terribly mistaken? What else has he got wrong?
(Thanks to readers Sinclair and Peter.)