Copenhagen Falls Apart Under Obama’s Hollow Rhetoric

Hot Air swings for the bleachers, and sends a lot of liberal pitches soaring over the center field wall.  Here’s another home run:

Breaking: India, China walk out of Copenhagen
posted at 10:49 am on December 18, 2009 by Ed Morrissey

Barack Obama came, he spoke, and no one concurred:

India and China have taken a united stand and walked out of the climate summit as Copenhagen talks fail.

Tensions prevailed at the climate talks at Copenhagen today, as Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh and China premier Wen Jiabao walked out of the summit along with their respective delegations, as talks failed.

Obama feted Singh just this month, saying that they should be impressed that India got first crack at Obama’s state dinner agenda.  Apparently, Singh was less impressed than Obama presumed.

Meanwhile, Obama is getting some pretty bad reviews for his intervention in Copenhagen … from his once-adoring admirers.  Since this comes from the Left’s major newspaper in the UK, where political biases are openly acknowledged in the media, this may seem like good news for those worried that Barack Obama would give away the store in Copenhagen.  We needn’t have worried; Obama turned out to be just as effective on the world stage as he has been in finding compromises here at home.  The Right has no illusions about Obama, but the disillusionment from the Left is rather amusing:

Barack Obama stepped into the chaotic final hours of the Copenhagen summit today saying he was convinced the world could act “boldly and decisively” on climate change.

But his speech offered no indication America was ready to embrace bold measures, after world leaders had been working desperately against the clock to try to paper over an agreement to prevent two years of wasted effort — and a 10-day meeting — from ending in total collapse. …

Many reactions were strongly critical of Obama. Hugo Chávez, the president of Venezuela, described Obama’s speech as “ridiculous” and the US’s initial offer of a $10bn fund for poor countries in the draft text as “a joke”.

Tim Jones, a spokesman for the World Development Movement, said: “The president said he came to act, but showed little evidence of doing so. He showed no awareness of the inequality and injustice of climate change. If America has really made its choice, it is a choice that condemns hundreds of millions of people to climate change disaster.”

Friends of the Earth said in a statement, “Obama has deeply disappointed not only those listening to his speech at the UN talks, he has disappointed the whole world.”

The World Wildlife Fund said Obama had let down the international community by failing to commit to pushing for action in Congress: “The only way the world can be sure the US is standing behind its commitments is for the president to clearly state that climate change will be his next top legislative priority.”

Honestly, have these people paid no attention to Obama’s performance all year?  He doesn’t do the hard work.  Obama has spent all year outsourcing his work on domestic policy to Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, refusing to get involved in negotiations.  Even now, progressives on Capitol Hill wonder if Obama ever wanted a public option in his signature domestic policy priority at all — a rather strange gap, considering the high-profile cheerleading coming from Obama all year long.  That’s all he does: campaign.

The one issue that he could not outsource was Afghanistan.  As Commander in Chief, the decision on resourcing and strategy was his alone … and it took him almost four months to make it.

The truth is that Barack Obama would make a much better Secretary-General of the UN than an American President, and even the Left is beginning to see it.

As for Copenhagen, Obama was already redeploying over the event horizon before news of the walkout hit, according to ABC News, which had reported optimistically on Obama’s efforts for most of the morning:

“We’ve done what we can here,” a senior White House official in Copenhagen, Denmark, tells ABC News. “The Chinese are dug in on transparency and are refusing to let people know they’re living up to their end of the agreement.”

After landing in Denmark early this morning, President Obama met with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao during a bilateral at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen to press the case that China needs to allow for transparency.

“The President’s priority is to make our economy far more focused on a clean energy economy that creates jobs,” the official said. “He is here to work constructively and participate in hoping to get an international accord. But not getting one here won’t change wanting to transform our economy to create the new foundation he’s talked about.”

Well, he’s been there one whole day.  Who can argue with his commitment after giving one speech and holding one meeting?

As to Afghanistan, Obama boldly claimed he had the right strategy in place back in May, picked his own general to implement it, and then spent four months angsting over that general’s urgent recommendation.  When Obama finally made a decision after four months of what the Pentagon described as dithering, it was accompanied with a withdrawal date that left even his own supporters unable to explain his policy, in addition to grave uncertainty and fear in the minds of our allies.

Not to mention the ridiculous joke of Obama finally making the announcement to send more troops to fight in Afghanistan, then jetting off to pick up his Nobel Peace Prize.  “Ridiculous” because the only way he could reconcile the massive hypocrisy from the leftist prism was to invoke what was tantamount to the very Bush doctrine he had previously personally demonized (see also here).

We arrive at something that should have occurred to the left when they were decrying Sarah Palin’s lack of experience.  Namely, that she actually had far more leadership experience than Obama did.  Sarah Palin had been a chief executive of a state; Barry Hussein had led exactly squat.  And so when the left was pointing out Sarah Palin’s lack of substantial executive experience, they were literally pointing out the splinter in Palin’s eye, while refusing to see the giant redwood log in Obama’s.

Well, they’re seeing that great big giant log now, aren’t they?  On virtually every front (e.g., the economy, health care, global warming, Afghanistan, unemployment, soaring deficits, Iran’s nuclear program, Gitmo, cap-and-trade, the Olympics), Obama is an utterly failed leader even according to the left.

Conservatives were loudly declaring that Obama would be a failure all along.  Rush Limbaugh was demonized for his prediction, but now far leftists such as Howard Dean have joined him.

The left-leaning world swooned over Obama’s speeches.  Now they know that, rather than being an eloquent man expressing a great vision, Obama is merely an incoherent gibberer who needs to read the word-for-word sentences of others off of two teleprompter screens.

This was the man who actually had the unmitigated and arrogant gall to say:

The journey will be difficult. The road will be long. I face this challenge with profound humility, and knowledge of my own limitations. But I also face it with limitless faith in the capacity of the American people. Because if we are willing to work for it, and fight for it, and believe in it, then I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth. This was the moment – this was the time – when we came together to remake this great nation so that it may always reflect our very best selves, and our highest ideals.

Obama says here, “It’s not all about me; it’s about you under my inspired divine messiahship, too.”  I mean, why was “this” “the moment”?  Why wasn’t it the moment when either Bush was president, or when Clinton was president, etcetera?

Michelle Obama cut through the vain hypocrisy of Obama’s vain rhetoric at a UCLA speech delivered on February 18, 2008:

“Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.”

I think Spike Lee summed up Obama’s delusional mindset best:

“It means that this is a whole new world. I think…I’ve been saying this before. You can divide history. BB Before Barack. AB After Barack.”

It was always all about Obama.  And we, tiny little near-mindless proletariat ants that we were, would be stimulated into action by the exalted greatness of Obama’s wonderfulness.

And of course, it’s STILL all about Obama.  Only now it’s about what a colossal failure he is, rather than how he is somehow going to heal the planet.

Now because of America’s delusional foolishness, we’re going to have to suffer through the dismal malaise of three more years with a failed, dithering, appeasing, demagogic, pandering weakling in the White House.

But enough about the failure and fraud of Obama and his “hype and chains” movement.

Getting back to the abysmal failure and fraud of “Hopenhagen,” do read the absolutely blistering UK Telegraph piece by  Gerald Warner.

Evidence Mounting That Climate ‘Scientists’ Manipulated Data To Exaggerate Global Warming

Russia just dropped the bomb on the global warming frauds.

Climategate goes SERIAL: now the Russians confirm that UK climate scientists manipulated data to exaggerate global warming

By James Delingpole Politics Last updated: December 16th, 2009

Climategate just got much, much bigger. And all thanks to the Russians who, with perfect timing, dropped this bombshell just as the world’s leaders are gathering in Copenhagen to discuss ways of carbon-taxing us all back to the dark ages.

Feast your eyes on this news release from Rionovosta, via the Ria Novosti agency, posted on Icecap. (Hat Tip: Richard North)

A discussion of the November 2009 Climatic Research Unit e-mail hacking incident, referred to by some sources as “Climategate,” continues against the backdrop of the abortive UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen (COP15) discussing alternative agreements to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol that aimed to combat global warming.

The incident involved an e-mail server used by the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA) in Norwich, East England. Unknown persons stole and anonymously disseminated thousands of e-mails and other documents dealing with the global-warming issue made over the course of 13 years.

Controversy arose after various allegations were made including that climate scientists colluded to withhold scientific evidence and manipulated data to make the case for global warming appear stronger than it is.

Climategate has already affected Russia. On Tuesday, the Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) issued a report claiming that the Hadley Center for Climate Change based at the headquarters of the British Meteorological Office in Exeter (Devon, England) had probably tampered with Russian-climate data.

The IEA believes that Russian meteorological-station data did not substantiate the anthropogenic global-warming theory. Analysts say Russian meteorological stations cover most of the country’s territory, and that the Hadley Center had used data submitted by only 25% of such stations in its reports. Over 40% of Russian territory was not included in global-temperature calculations for some other reasons, rather than the lack of meteorological stations and observations.

The data of stations located in areas not listed in the Hadley Climate Research Unit Temperature UK (HadCRUT) survey often does not show any substantial warming in the late 20th century and the early 21st century.

The HadCRUT database includes specific stations providing incomplete data and highlighting the global-warming process, rather than stations facilitating uninterrupted observations.

On the whole, climatologists use the incomplete findings of meteorological stations far more often than those providing complete observations.

IEA analysts say climatologists use the data of stations located in large populated centers that are influenced by the urban-warming effect more frequently than the correct data of remote stations.

The scale of global warming was exaggerated due to temperature distortions for Russia accounting for 12.5% of the world’s land mass. The IEA said it was necessary to recalculate all global-temperature data in order to assess the scale of such exaggeration.

Global-temperature data will have to be modified if similar climate-date procedures have been used from other national data because the calculations used by COP15 analysts, including financial calculations, are based on HadCRUT research.

What the Russians are suggesting here, in other words, is that the entire global temperature record used by the IPCC to inform world government policy is a crock.

As Richard North says: This is serial.

UPDATE: As Steve McIntyre reports at ClimateAudit, it has long been suspected that the CRU had been playing especially fast and loose with Russian – more particularly Siberian – temperature records. Here from March 2004, is an email from Phil Jones to Michael Mann.

Recently rejected two papers (one for JGR and for GRL) from people saying CRU has it
wrong over Siberia. Went to town in both reviews, hopefully successfully. If either
appears
I will be very surprised, but you never know with GRL.
Cheers
Phil

And here at Watts Up With That is a guest post by Jeff Id of the Air Vent

And here is what one of the commenters has to say about the way the data has been cherry-picked and skewed for political ends:

The crux of the argument is that the CRU cherry picked data following the same methods that have been done everywhere else. They ignored data covering 40% of Russia and chose data that showed a warming trend over statistically preferable alternatives when available. They ignored completeness of data, preferred urban data, strongly preferred data from stations that relocated, ignored length of data set.

One the final page, there is a chart that shows that CRU’s selective use of 25% of the data created 0.64C more warming than simply using all of the raw data would have done. The complete set of data show 1.4C rise since 1860, the CRU set shows 2.06C rise over the same period.

Not, of course, dear readers that I’m in any way tempted to crow about these latest revelations. After all, so many of my colleagues, junior and senior, have been backing me on this one to the hilt….

Oh, if anyone speaks Russian, here’s the full report.

Keep in mind that we’re supposed to just swallow this gargantuan load of fraud and pay $10 trillion in indulgences to these fools for our sins.

Even thought it turns out that our “sins” were carefully constructed by ideologue scientists who stood to profit in huge sums of grant money.

Liberals are liars and demagogues.  And we’ve seen both in enormous abundance over this global warming garbage.

Al Gore And Artic Ice: Truth Is VERY Inconvenient

The gods in charge of exposing scientific liars and fraud must be working overtime these days.

In addition to the giant treasure trove of deceit known as “Climategate,” we now have Al Gore – last year’s recipient of the Nobel Prize for Science – revealing what a lying demagogue and fraud he is:

December 15, 2009
Inconvenient truth for Al Gore as his North Pole sums don’t add up

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.”

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.  […]

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. […]

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.”

First of all, the “developing countries” want “progress” toward a deal that would see TEN TRILLION DOLLARS in Western wealth flow to them.

And given the fact that the United States underwrites about a quarter of the U.N.’s budget, and given that most of the world has decided that the United States is mostly responsible for global warming, you can bet that America will be assessed a fair amount more than $2.5 trillion as “our share.”

Then you start to find out that the left really want a tax of $145 trillion to “fight” global warming.  And your head just starts spinning around on your neck.

You’d think we’d really want to have our science iron clad before agreeing to such a massive commitment.  But not so much.

What we have in place of science is “scientism,” science as a religious commitment, science exploited to serve the ideological cause of socialist redistributionism.  And socialism has been disguised as “saving the planet.”

Former prime minister and current global warming alarmist Tony Blair says that we need to destroy our economies so that developing nations might enjoy our wealth “even if the science is not correct.”

And the science that blames man as the cause of global warming is not even close to correct:

Logic and chemistry say all CO2 is the same, whether it blows out of a Porsche tailpipe or is exhaled from Al Gore’s lungs or wafts off my compost pile or the rotting of dead plants in the Atchafalaya swamp.

“Wrong,” say the greenhouse theorists. They maintain that man’s contribution to the greenhouse is different from nature’s, and that only man’s exhaustings count.

Let’s review the greenhouse theory of global warming. Our planet would be one more icy rock hurtling through space at an intolerable temperature were it not for our atmosphere. This thin layer of gases — about 95 percent of the molecules live within the lowest 15 miles — readily allows the sun’s heat in but resists its reradiation into space. Result: The earth is warmed.

The atmosphere is primarily composed of nitrogen (78 percent), oxygen (21 percent), argon (0.93 percent), and CO2 (0.04 percent). Many other gases are present in trace amounts. The lower atmosphere also contains varying amounts of water vapor, up to four percent by volume.

Nitrogen and oxygen are not greenhouse gases and have no warming influence. The greenhouse gases included in the Kyoto Protocol are each rated for warming potency. CO2, the warming gas that has activated Al Gore, has low warming potency, but its relatively high concentration makes it responsible for 72 percent of Kyoto warming. Methane (CH4, a.k.a. natural gas) is 21 times more potent than CO2, but because of its low concentration, it contributes only seven percent of that warming. Nitrous oxide (N2O), mostly of nature’s creation, is 310 times more potent than CO2. Again, low concentration keeps its warming effect down to 19 percent.

Now for an inconvenient truth about CO2 sources — nature generates about 30 times as much of it as does man. Yet the warming worriers are unconcerned about nature’s outpouring. They — and Al Gore — are alarmed only about anthropogenic CO2, that 3.2 percent caused by humans. […]

When water vapor is put in that perspective, then anthropogenic CO2 produces less than 0.1 of one percent of the greenhouse effect.

If everyone knows that water vapor is the dominant greenhouse gas, why do Al Gore and so many others focus on CO2? Call it the politics of the possible. Water vapor is almost entirely natural. It’s beyond the reach of man’s screwdriver. But when the delegates of 189 countries met at Kyoto in December 1997 to discuss global climate change, they could hardly vote to do nothing. So instead, they agreed that the developed countries of the world would reduce emissions of six man-made greenhouse gases. At the top of the list is CO2, a trivial influence on global warming compared with water vapor, but unquestionably man’s largest contribution.

Is it really “science” to completely ignore 97% of the CO2, and ignore 99.9% of the greenhouse gasses in general, and even ignore the sun itself as the cause of global warming?  Is it really “science” to ignore thousands of years of geologic history, not to mention the fact that “Greenland” was called Greenland because it used to be green during a previous warming period?  Is it really “science” to allow a scientist who was caught red-handed perpetuating scientific fraud years ago to continue to dominate the climate change debate?

Is it really “science” to simply relabel “global warming” to “climate change” when the actual science started to demonstrate – contrary to the global warming lobby’s shrill claims – that global warming hasn’t happened the last ten years?

And is it really anything even remotely close to “science” to claim that “the science is settled and the debate is over” when that is simply false?  If the science is so settled, then why on earth is it that these global warming alarmist feel the need to so routinely misrepresent the facts?  Why do they deliberately destroy data?  Why do they refuse to comply with Freedom of Information Act requests?  Why do they abuse the peer-review system to undermine fellow scientists?

Al Gore has been playing a hysterical alarmist game with bogus facts and figures for years now.  That alarmist propaganda was actually why he won the Nobel Prize.  In fact, Gore has been screaming that all our ice would melt for years.  Newsbusters’ Noel Sheppard writes a good article demonstrating how disgraceful and despicable Al Gore and many others have been in this regard.

Another good article details that the polar ice caps actually AREN’T melting.  Arctic ice is currently decreasing, but Antarctic ice is actually increasing.  And when you put the two ice caps on a chart, you see that the overall ice level is quite stable, just as it has been for the past 150 years.

The thing that most bothers me is that documented liars and frauds such as Al Gore and Michael Mann have been allowed to continue to be liars and frauds.  The postmodernist left does not even regard truth as a valid or meaningful category anymore, and all that remains is “the will to power.”  By any means necessary.

The inconvenient truth for the left is that “climate change” has been documented by their own scientists to be little more than a gang of thugs manipulating the data to suit their agenda while using their power to punish any would-be modern Galileo who disagrees with them.  The inconvenient truth for the rest of us is that “truth” doesn’t even matter to the left — which is why liars and frauds remain to perpetuate more lies and more fraud.  All that matters to them is raw political power. And nothing but nothing would perpetuate leftist power than imposing massive socialist redistributionism in the name of “saving the earth.”

Climate Change Hypocrites Arrive In Copenhagen

The limousine liberals who are of course superior to all the petty little human beings beneath them arrived in Copenhagen – like gods descending from Mt. Olympus of old – and of course they did not forget their limousines.

Copenhagen is one of the great moments when your ontological superiors get to pass measures for the petty human insects crawling about below them.  Should they be held accountable to the same standards they pass for everyone else?  Of course not!  That’s part of what it means to be a member of the ruling class of deity, after all.

Copenhagen climate summit: 1,200 limos, 140 private planes and caviar wedges

Copenhagen is preparing for the climate change summit that will produce as much carbon dioxide as a town the size of Middlesbrough.

By Andrew Gilligan
Published: 10:55PM GMT 05 Dec 2009

On a normal day, Majken Friss Jorgensen, managing director of Copenhagen’s biggest limousine company, says her firm has twelve vehicles on the road. During the “summit to save the world”, which opens here tomorrow, she will have 200.

“We thought they were not going to have many cars, due to it being a climate convention,” she says. “But it seems that somebody last week looked at the weather report.”

Ms Jorgensen reckons that between her and her rivals the total number of limos in Copenhagen next week has already broken the 1,200 barrier. The French alone rang up on Thursday and ordered another 42. “We haven’t got enough limos in the country to fulfil the demand,” she says. “We’re having to drive them in hundreds of miles from Germany and Sweden.”

And the total number of electric cars or hybrids among that number? “Five,” says Ms Jorgensen. “The government has some alternative fuel cars but the rest will be petrol or diesel. We don’t have any hybrids in Denmark, unfortunately, due to the extreme taxes on those cars. It makes no sense at all, but it’s very Danish.”

The airport says it is expecting up to 140 extra private jets during the peak period alone, so far over its capacity that the planes will have to fly off to regional airports – or to Sweden – to park, returning to Copenhagen to pick up their VIP passengers.

As well 15,000 delegates and officials, 5,000 journalists and 98 world leaders, the Danish capital will be blessed by the presence of Leonardo DiCaprio, Daryl Hannah, Helena Christensen, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Prince Charles. A Republican US senator, Jim Inhofe, is jetting in at the head of an anti-climate-change “Truth Squad.” The top hotels – all fully booked at £650 a night – are readying their Climate Convention menus of (no doubt sustainable) scallops, foie gras and sculpted caviar wedges.

At the takeaway pizza end of the spectrum, Copenhagen’s clean pavements are starting to fill with slightly less well-scrubbed protesters from all over Europe. In the city’s famous anarchist commune of Christiania this morning, among the hash dealers and heavily-graffitied walls, they started their two-week “Climate Bottom Meeting,” complete with a “storytelling yurt” and a “funeral of the day” for various corrupt, “heatist” concepts such as “economic growth”.

The Danish government is cunningly spending a million kroner (£120,000) to give the protesters KlimaForum, a “parallel conference” in the magnificent DGI-byen sports centre. The hope, officials admit, is that they will work off their youthful energies on the climbing wall, state-of-the-art swimming pools and bowling alley, Just in case, however, Denmark has taken delivery of its first-ever water-cannon – one of the newspapers is running a competition to suggest names for it – plus sweeping new police powers. The authorities have been proudly showing us their new temporary prison, 360 cages in a disused brewery, housing 4,000 detainees.

And this being Scandinavia, even the prostitutes are doing their bit for the planet. Outraged by a council postcard urging delegates to “be sustainable, don’t buy sex,” the local sex workers’ union – they have unions here – has announced that all its 1,400 members will give free intercourse to anyone with a climate conference delegate’s pass. The term “carbon dating” just took on an entirely new meaning.

At least the sex will be C02-neutral. According to the organisers, the eleven-day conference, including the participants’ travel, will create a total of 41,000 tonnes of “carbon dioxide equivalent”, equal to the amount produced over the same period by a city the size of Middlesbrough.

The temptation, then, is to dismiss the whole thing as a ridiculous circus. Many of the participants do not really need to be here. And far from “saving the world,” the world’s leaders have already agreed that this conference will not produce any kind of binding deal, merely an interim statement of intent.

Instead of swift and modest reductions in carbon – say, two per cent a year, starting next year – for which they could possibly be held accountable, the politicians will bandy around grandiose targets of 80-per-cent-plus by 2050, by which time few of the leaders at Copenhagen will even be alive, let alone still in office.

Even if they had agreed anything binding, past experience suggests that the participants would not, in fact, feel bound by it. Most countries – Britain excepted – are on course to break the modest pledges they made at the last major climate summit, in Kyoto.

And as the delegates meet, they do so under a shadow. For the first time, not just the methods but the entire purpose of the climate change agenda is being questioned. Leaked emails showing key scientists conspiring to fix data that undermined their case have boosted the sceptic lobby. Australia has voted down climate change laws. Last week’s unusually strident attack by the Energy Secretary, Ed Miliband, on climate change “saboteurs” reflected real fear in government that momentum is slipping away from the cause.

In Copenhagen there was a humbler note among some delegates. “If we fail, one reason could be our overconfidence,” said Simron Jit Singh, of the Institute of Social Ecology. “Because we are here, talking in a group of people who probably agree with each other, we can be blinded to the challenges of the other side. We feel that we are the good guys, the selfless saviours, and they are the bad guys.”

As Mr Singh suggests, the interesting question is perhaps not whether the climate changers have got the science right – they probably have – but whether they have got the pitch right. Some campaigners’ apocalyptic predictions and religious righteousness – funeral ceremonies for economic growth and the like – can be alienating, and may help explain why the wider public does not seem to share the urgency felt by those in Copenhagen this week.

In a rather perceptive recent comment, Mr Miliband said it was vital to give people a positive vision of a low-carbon future. “If Martin Luther King had come along and said ‘I have a nightmare,’ people would not have followed him,” he said.

Over the next two weeks, that positive vision may come not from the overheated rhetoric in the conference centre, but from Copenhagen itself. Limos apart, it is a city filled entirely with bicycles, stuffed with retrofitted, energy-efficient old buildings, and seems to embody the civilised pleasures of low-carbon living without any of the puritanism so beloved of British greens.

And inside the hall, not everything is looking bad. Even the sudden rush for limos may be a good sign. It means that more top people are coming, which means they scent something could be going right here.

The US, which rejected Kyoto, is on board now, albeit too tentatively for most delegates. President Obama’s decision to stay later in Copenhagen may signal some sort of agreement between America and China: a necessity for any real global action, and something that could be presented as a “victory” for the talks.

The hot air this week will be massive, the whole proceedings eminently mockable, but it would be far too early to write off this conference as a failure.

I’m sticking with the proceedings being eminently mockable.  The entire conference is a disgusting joke.  And the limousines and private jets – along with the profound absence of electric cars – is proof positive that none of these elitists either a) really much believes in their global warming load of hooey, or b) has any intention of changing their elites jet setting lifestyle as they oppress the little people.

The limousines and private jets are the equivalent of Marie Antoinette’s “let them eat cake” moment.

Meanwhile, even as the Olympian gods descend upon Copenhagen to shape the energy future of puny man and take back the fire they once gave him, we see the crisis of global warming:

Fierce snowstorm gains strength after hitting West

By FELICIA FONSECA, Associated Press Writer Felicia Fonseca, Associated Press Writer

FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. – A howling winter storm barreled through the West, hitting the mountain states with snow and fierce winds as it headed toward the country’s midsection on Tuesday.

The far-reaching storm system stretched from California to Indiana, gathering strength as it raced eastward.

Parts of Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa and Wisconsin were bracing for blizzard conditions and up to 10 inches of snow, according to the National Weather Service.

“The storm system is really strengthening as it goes, and that’s usually a recipe for some heavy snowfall and a lot of wind, and that’s what we’re watching for,” said Mike Welvaert of the National Weather Service in La Crosse, Wis.

The storm hit nearly all of the western mountain states on Monday, leaving places like Flagstaff and Reno, Nev., under a thick blanket of snow. Heavy rain raised fears of mudslides in wildfire-devastated Southern California, but no damage was reported. The weather system also snarled traffic and closed schools in Indiana, and crashes caused one death.

In the Phoenix area, fierce wind brought down power lines, left four hospitals temporarily without power and created wide outages. At one point, some 250,000 customers were without power; by early Tuesday, that number was down to about 58,000, a spokesman for Arizona Public Service Co. said.

The storm system lingered over the West on Tuesday.

On Monday, virtually the entire Western region was hit by wintry weather — from subzero wind chills in Washington state to heavy snow that closed schools and government offices in Reno, Nev. Big rigs were left jackknifed across highways in several states.

In New Mexico, two people were killed in traffic accidents blamed on slick conditions, and officials there told snow-clearing crews to prepare for 12-hour shifts as the storm swept south and east.

The National Weather Service said the upper elevations of the Sierra mountains could get up to 3 feet of snow, with up to 4 feet forecast for the mountains of southern Utah.

Reno schools closed, and many state government workers were told to stay home. Chains or snow tires were required across the region. Several flights into and out of Reno-Tahoe International Airport were delayed or canceled.

“Motorists are going to have to chain up,” Trooper Chuck Allen with the Nevada Highway Patrol said. “Otherwise, we end up with a parking lot.”

In northern Arizona, state officials closed parts of Interstate-17 and I-40, saying early Tuesday that some stretches of the highways were snow-packed and visibility levels were near zero.

The city school district let students out early Monday and canceled classes Tuesday. Northern Arizona University also released students and staff early Monday, in the midst of final exams.

Arizona Department of Transportation spokesman Rod Wigman vowed to keep northern Arizona roads plowed despite a $100 million budget deficit, but advised people to stay home if possible as the brunt of the storm sweeps through.

“When the sun goes down, people need to go home,” Wigman said.

Please, take back our fire and send us back into the caves from which we once emerged, o mighty Zeus and all yon deities.

Save us from all this warming, lest our flesh melt away from our wretched mortal bodies.

Meanwhile, even as we see just what a corrupt bunch of thugs and frauds these global warming mongers have been, we learn that Al Gore has so enriched himself with his part in the scam that may be the first climate billionaire.

Once upon a time, socialists and Marxists were able to confiscate other peoples’ wealth and dictate other peoples’ behavior on the bogus theory of socialist equality.  Now the same socialists and Marxists are doing the same things in the name of saving the planet.

And just like with Marxism, the gods of global warming can live lives that never come even remotely close to touching the fraudulent message that they preach to the unwashed and ignorant masses.

Global Warming ‘Scientists’ Admit Purging Their Raw Data

This is what a massive scientific hoax looks like.

November 29, 2009
Climate change data dumped
Jonathan Leake, Environment Editor

SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.

It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.

The UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was forced to reveal the loss following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation.

The data were gathered from weather stations around the world and then adjusted to take account of variables in the way they were collected. The revised figures were kept, but the originals — stored on paper and magnetic tape — were dumped to save space when the CRU moved to a new building.

The admission follows the leaking of a thousand private emails sent and received by Professor Phil Jones, the CRU’s director. In them he discusses thwarting climate sceptics seeking access to such data.

In a statement on its website, the CRU said: “We do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (quality controlled and homogenised) data.”

The CRU is the world’s leading centre for reconstructing past climate and temperatures. Climate change sceptics have long been keen to examine exactly how its data were compiled. That is now impossible.

Roger Pielke, professor of environmental studies at Colorado University, discovered data had been lost when he asked for original records. “The CRU is basically saying, ‘Trust us’. So much for settling questions and resolving debates with science,” he said.

Jones was not in charge of the CRU when the data were thrown away in the 1980s, a time when climate change was seen as a less pressing issue. The lost material was used to build the databases that have been his life’s work, showing how the world has warmed by 0.8C over the past 157 years.

He and his colleagues say this temperature rise is “unequivocally” linked to greenhouse gas emissions generated by humans. Their findings are one of the main pieces of evidence used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which says global warming is a threat to humanity.

“Trust us.”  That’s what it all boils down to.

Silly me, but I thought “science” was supposed to amount to something more than that.

Here’s your bottom line: global warming, climate change, or whatever you want to call it, is a load of nonsense.  And the only anthropogenic or “man-made” problem is the giant sack of lies that an elitist group of pseudo-scientific ideologues  sold us.

One of the emails simply demonstrates what patently bad “science” global warming has been in the first place.  At its core, science is an endeavor which predicts a certain measurable outcome, and then attempts to determine whether that prediction is verified in nature according to a fair, open, and repeatable process.  Global warming isn’t even close to being science by the very standards of science:

At the end of 2008, the scientists at East Anglia predicted that 2009 would be one of the warmest years on record:

On December 30, climate scientists from the UK Met Office and the University of East Anglia projected 2009 will be one of the top five warmest years on record. Average global temperatures for 2009 are predicted to be 0.4∞C above the 1961-1990 average of 14 ∫ C. A multiyear forecast using a Met Office climate model indicates a rapid return of global temperature to the long-term warming trend, with an increasing probability of record temperatures after 2009.

We know now that the alarmists’ prediction for 2009 didn’t come true.

But bad science wasn’t all these global warming alarmists were guilty of.  They were also guilty of making skeptics of their bogus man-caused global warming alarmism modern versions of Galileo (I’ve previously written about this chilling development in postmodernized academia to punish politically “incorrect” academics and scientists).  They used the peer-review process as an ideological club to attack and undermine fellow scientists rather than using it as a means to get at the truth:

Dating back to 1996, the emails show that both U.S. and U.K. based scientists referred to any research offering alternate viewpoints as “disinformation”,“misinformation” or “crap” that needs to be kept out of the public domain.

The emails include deliberations amongst the scientists regarding efforts to make sure that reports from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change include their own research and exclude that of dissenting scientists.

In one of the emails, Phil Jones, the director of the East Anglia climate center, suggested to climate scientist Michael Mann of Penn State University We “will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”

This is a startling quote, given that Jones and Mann as climate scientists have the authority to review papers and determine whether they are eligible to be published by scientific journals.

Mann even discussed how to destroy a journal that had published papers with contrary views, telling his colleagues that he believed it had been “hijacked by a few skeptics on the editorial board” who had “staged a coup”.

“Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal.” Mann wrote.

One article, entitled, how “The Alarmists Do “Science:” A Case Study,” describes just “one of many exchanges that shed light on the priority that the global warming alarmists give to politics and career advancement over science.”  The author provides a fairly lengthy segment of an email conversation that is frankly chilling.

Another article compiles emails under the title, “When In Doubt, Delete,” that documents a pattern of deceptive behavior by people who called themselves “scientists” and yet were more interested in destroying evidence than producing and preserving it.

There are so many emails to go over no single article can do so, but here’s a few tidbits:

From a Powerline article entitled, “Global Warming Bombshell“:

They also suggest that pro-global warming scientists fudge data to get the results they are looking for. Just over a month ago, on September 28, 2009, Tom Wigley wrote to Phil Jones of the Hadley Centre about his efforts to get the right-sized “blip” in temperatures of the 1940s:

Phil, Here are some speculations on correcting SSTs to partly explain the 1940s warming blip. If you look at the attached plot you will see that the land also shows the 1940s blip (as I’m sure you know). So, if we could reduce the ocean blip by, say, 0.15 degC, then this would be significant for the global mean — but we’d still have to explain the land blip.

I’ve chosen 0.15 here deliberately. This still leaves an ocean blip, and i think one needs to have some form of ocean blip to explain the land blip (via either some common forcing, or ocean forcing land, or vice versa, or all of these). When you look at other blips, the land blips are 1.5 to 2 times (roughly) the ocean blips — higher sensitivity plus thermal inertia effects. My 0.15 adjustment leaves things consistent with this, so you can see where I am coming from. Removing ENSO does not affect this.

It would be good to remove at least part of the 1940s blip, but we are still left with “why the blip”.

This and many other emails convey the impression that these theorists are making the “science” up as they go along, with data being manipulated until it yields the results that have been predetermined by political conviction.

One email from Phil Jones is particularly damning about “scientists” making up their own version of “science” in order to sell an ideology:

I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd [sic] from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.

A RealClearPolitics article entitled, “ClimateGate: The Fix Is In” explains what the “trick” is:

Anthony Watts provides an explanation of this case in technical detail; the “trick” consists of selectively mixing two different kinds of data-temperature “proxies” from tree rings and actual thermometer measurements-in a way designed to produce a graph of global temperatures that ends the way the global warming establishment wants it to: with an upward “hockey stick” slope.

A “trick” to “hide the decline.”  And these demagogues call US “deniers.”

As loathsome of a collection of frauds as our global warming “scientists” have proven to be, they don’t hold a candle to the mainstream media propagandists who made this colossal hoax possible in the first place – and who are still trying to conceal the fraud even now.

Barack Obama is going to go to Copenhagen to sign some pathologically insane economy-destroying accord because he is a true believer in the religion of liberalism.

And that is what global warming has now been proven to be: a religion.  It is an ideology advanced by religious fanatics.  This latest admission proves they have no raw data; they have no “science”; all they have is a rabid faith commitment that their own self-created narratives must be true because they believe it is true.

Copenhagen: Apparently The Only Way Obama Will Be Able To Lower The Oceans Is By Shutting Up

When someone said that no occupant of the White House had ever been able to walk on water, liberals rushed in to correct us: no previous occupant of the White House has been able to walk on water.

Barack Obama was going to be different.  He was going to be the Messiah who replaced God with Government, and would be anointed as the Savior of the world.

Obama told us:

“I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal… This was the moment — this was the time — when we came together to remake this great nation …”

I mean, wow.  It’s not like he didn’t promise the world, well, the world or anything.

Statements like that help you understand why liberals like Spike Lee went just a little bit beyond absolutely insane:

“It means that this is a whole new world. I think…I’ve been saying this before. You can divide history. BB Before Barack. AB After Barack.”

And why people like Nation of Islam racist demagogue Louis Farrakhan proclaimed Obama as The Messiah:

“You are the instruments that God is gonna use to bring about universal change, and that is why Barack has captured the youth. And he has involved young people in a political process that they didn’t care anything about. That’s a sign. When the Messiah speaks, the youth will hear, and the Messiah is absolutely speaking.”

But something happened to Captain Amazing after he actually took office: a fundamental inability to even begin to walk his talk.

We all remember Obama receiving the Nobel Peace Prize for his two signature accomplishments of Jack and Squat.  And that Nobel Prize for Accomplishing Nothing may be the symbol of the Obama administration.

We tend to forget about how he promised his stimulus would prevent unemployment from reaching 8% (it’s now 10.2% and rising), or how pathologically pathetic his administration has since been in fabricating statistics to show his $3.27 trillion porkulus has been anything other than an abject failure.

Obama can’t even pretend his useless policies work without spectacularly screwing up.  As ABC puts it:

Here’s a stimulus success story: In Arizona’s 15th congressional district, 30 jobs have been saved or created with just $761,420 in federal stimulus spending. At least that’s what the Web site set up by the Obama administration to track the $787 billion stimulus says.

There’s one problem, though: There is no 15th congressional district in Arizona; the state has only eight districts.  And ABC News has found many more entries for projects like this in places that are incorrectly identified.

Oh, there’s more “there” there.  A lot more.  More dishonest butchery of employment statistics than you could ever hope to shake a stick at.

It turned out that not only was he basically not able to do anything to create jobs, but he couldn’t even do nothing right.  As Charles Krauthammer put it:

“When they speak seriously about this and how precise all of this is – 640,329 jobs saved –  comical precision.  And then it turns out a lot of these are fictional jobs in fictional districts, what happens is an administration that has already been satirized by Saturday Night Live as “do-nothing,” is now going to be seen as an administration that cannot even do nothing competently.”

Conservatives predicted his partisan stimulus slush fund would fail to deliver jobs.  And now liberals are finally recognizing it too:

NAACP, La Raza, AFL-CIO Tell Obama Stimulus Failed

With unemployment among blacks at more than 15 percent, the N.A.A.C.P. will join several other groups on Tuesday to call on President Obama to do more to create jobs.

The organizations — including the A.F.L.-C.I.O. and the National Council of La Raza, a Hispanic advocacy group— will make clear that they believe the president’s $787 billion stimulus program has not gone far enough to fight unemployment.

They will call for increased spending for schools and roads, billions of dollars in fiscal relief to state and local governments to forestall more layoffs and a direct government jobs program, “especially in distressed communities facing severe unemployment.”

Reminds me of an article title I had way back in May: “Obama Stimulus Robin Hood In Reverse: Poor Get Poorer.”

Obama passed off a pretty clever (though blatantly fallacious) load of hooey onto an equally dishonest and ideological lamestream media when he ginned up the bogus “created or saved jobs” statistic.  As Allan Meltzer, professor at Carnegie Mellon University put it, “One can search economic textbooks forever without finding a concept called ‘jobs saved’.”

But since then, his self-justifying  fabrications have been increasingly absurd and asinine.

To those brainwashed liberals who insist that the economy would have been worse if Obama hadn’t passed the stimulus, let me put it this way: the economy would have been worse if George W. Bush hadn’t done everything he did, too.  I mean, one load of baloney deserves another.

Obama has watched the American death toll in Afghanistan double from George Bush’s last year in office.  And his dithering over making the obvious decision to send the troops his own general requested has turned any momentum we may have been able to create into abject failure.  Both friend and foe alike should question Obama’s commitment, along with his competence.

Then we’ve had the mindboggling exhibition of incompetence in the Obama administration’s bungling of the H1N1 vaccine.  Lower the level of the oceans?  Obama can’t even raise the level of the flu doses!

And now even the liberals in Europe are turning on Obama as a colossal fraud and impostor.  As the German der Spiegel put it:

Barack Obama cast himself as a “citizen of the world” when he delivered his well-received campaign speech in Berlin in the summer of 2008. But the US president has now betrayed this claim. In his Berlin speech, he was dishonest with Europe. Since then, Obama has neglected the single most important issue for an American president who likes to imagine himself as a world citizen, namely, his country’s addiction to fossil fuels and the risks of unchecked climate change. Health-care reform and other domestic issues were more important to him than global environmental threats. He was either unwilling or unable to convince skeptics in his own ranks and potential defectors from the ranks of the Republicans to support him, for example, by promising alternative investments as a compensation for states with large coal reserves.

The Democrat-controlled Senate put off Obama’s cap-growth-and-tax-prosperity climate agenda until Spring (and good luck passing that economy killing monstrosity then!); and world leaders just said, “Better luck next time” with their climate change treaty.

Personally I cannot for the life of me understand why Obama’s plan –

“Under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.”

– failed.  I mean, who wouldn’t want shockingly high energy prices? Who doesn’t want to freeze in the dark?

Sorry, Barry Hussein.  If you want to live up to your promise to lower the oceans and heal the planet, I guess you’ll just have to start doing a lot more shutting the hell up and saving the planet from all your useless hot air.  Because other than that, you did squat.