Tag: News

I just shoveled 6 inches of global warming off my driveway

By William D. Zeranski

The UN announced 2000-2009 to be the warmest decade as the country braces for a massive winter storm as reported by Weather Channel:

Winter Blast hauls blizzard, heavy snow, rain

The system that brought heavy snow and gusty winds across the West yesterday will impact much of the rest of the country today and tomorrow. Heavy snow and gusty winds are expected over much of the country.

As of 6 a.m. Eastern time this morning, 22 states were under some advisory, watch, or warning for wind, with 30 states under some sort of advisory, watch, or warning for wintry weather, both stretching from California to Maine.

There’s a list of other nasty weather stories, which include deep snow and low temperatures, and no immediate signs of improvement.

As the climate circus continues to parade through the streets of Copenhagen, we must ponder how we will answer our grandchildren when they ask “What did you do during the climate change conference?”

Our response just might be, “Oh, I missed it, because I was shoveling out the driveway while waiting for the electricity to be turned back on.”

Of course, we know the UN and the Obama Administration are using fraudulent, yet convenient, numbers. We also know, as we face thirty below in many states, that what’s going on in the real world just doesn’t matter.

Source

Washington Examiner: Copenhagen Climate Scam Conference

With delegates from 194 nations present, the Copenhagen Climate Conference in Denmark got off to a fitting start with a film focusing on the alleged apocalyptic consequences of not acting to stop global warming before it’s too late. The planet will be ravaged and millions of people will die horrifying deaths as increasing temperatures in the Earth’s atmosphere result in a monumentally devastating deluge of man-made floods, droughts, storms, and rising seas. At the end of the terrifying film, a sweet little girl plaintively begs the conference attendees to “please help save the world.” It’s a script right out of Hollywood, made to order for an Academy Award-winning spectacular produced by Cecil B. DeMille or George Lucas. There’s just one problem: It would have to be titled “Climate Scam” because of the ultimate inconvenient truth: The case for global warming is based on junk science. This reality became clear recently when thousands of e-mails were made public by an unknown person or persons who somehow gained access to the computers at ground zero for global warming data and research, the Climate Research Unit of East Anglia University in Britain. Among the e-mails were multiple messages in which many of global warming’s most respected advocates discussed how to suppress data that contradicts their view that the Earth’s atmosphere is being warmed to dangerous levels by the burning of fossil fuels like oil, natural gas and coal. There were also multiple e-mails in which they discussed how to prevent studies by global warming critics from being published in peer-reviewed scientific journals, and how to avoid answering or at least deflect freedom of information act inquiries about their data and research techniques. In the most disturbing of the e-mails, Phil Jones, the CRU’s director, asked colleagues to “hide the decline” in recent temperature data. Jones has since stepped aside, pending the outcome of an investigation. Instead of ignoring this science fraud, the Copenhagen delegates ought to be demanding that an independent investigation be undertaken as soon as possible of the CRU data used in the United Nations’ Report of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change. The IPCC report is the fulcrum upon which all global warming policymaking rests, both internationally and here in America. Experts from across the spectrum of opinion for and against global warming agree that suppressing CO2 emissions sufficiently to avoid the predicted calamities would be prohibitively expensive. Since the IPCC report is based on faulty data and the Copenhagen delegates refuse to acknowledge East Anglia’s climate scam, President Obama should challenge the United Nations to put the Denmark deliberations on hold. The one thing global warming advocates and skeptics ought to agree on is that policy must be based on credible data.Source

Climate hysteria just warming up

By Terry McCrann

No Hopenchangen in Nopenhagen

An illuminated globe with the writing ‘Hopenhagen’ stands in Copenhagen’s city center.

COPENHAGEN is going to be two weeks of insane hysteria. Just like the Olympics, but with lots of snow, courtesy of Al Gore and his ‘Gore Effect.’

There’ll be another major difference. This will be like the Olympics with only one country represented. All 40,000-plus attendees will be batting for the same side, so to speak.

We are going to be deluged with wall-to-wall coverage of hysterical end-of-the-world claims unless we hand over billions of dollars a year, every year, and close down our economy.

This really is the ultimate gift that keeps on taking. Give us the money to fight climate change; and as the climate changes every year, the funding has to be permanent.

Gets hotter? Climate change. Gets colder? Climate change. Stays pretty much the same? Now, that’s the really insidious climate change!

We’ve already had something of a minor deluge in the Antipodean paper of record for the First Church of Climate Apocalypse and Purportedly Pissed-Off Gaia, the Melbourne Age. [Climategate]

A series of them last week exactly and beautifully captured the mindless pap that passes for climate ‘science’ and the proselytising of the climate hysterics and true or ‘truther’ believers.

Beautifully, because the writers wouldn’t have had any awareness of the mush they were delivering.

Arguably our greatest national hysteric, certainly at least an archbishop in the First Church, Tim Flannery, angrily denied that he’d become a ‘climate sceptic.’

Such a claim was “outrageous.” He laid the blame for the outrage at the feet of our (the Herald Sun’s) Andrew Bolt.

How did Bolt “twist” the truth? Simply by quoting what Flannery had said on the ABC’s Lateline.

And I quote again: “So when the computer modelling and the real world data disagree you’ve got a very interesting problem … Sure for the last 10 years we’ve gone through a slight cooling trend.”

That was it. Bolt pretty much just recorded Flannery’s concession on temperature. He didn’t accuse him of being a sceptic. He wouldn’t have been that generous.

I’m not. Flannery revealed himself as a mathematical dunce. And I’m going to do the dastardly trick of quoting him directly again from his Age article.

The “overall increase (of the earth’s temperature) since the industrial revolution of 25 per cent – from 15 to 20 degrees … “

Actually Tim, that’s a 33.3 per cent increase. And these are the sort of people who ask us to take as gospel – that word is used advisedly – the accuracy of the most complex mathematical calculations.

Mathematical ineptitude aside, the utterly unqualified statement of the temperature increase self-announces Flannery as a fool or a fraud or most probably both.

So the world’s temperature around the time of the industrial revolution was 15 degrees? Not 14.5 or 15.5 or even 14-16? But 15, exactly and unqualified?

Presumably the global temperature came from readings from those 17th century satellites, with the data then fed through the computers at the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia university.

With exactly the same integrity of all the other data from the CRU, which is the single most important research driver of the Copenhagen dynamic.

Oh, and by the way, it’s not just the 15 degrees three hundred or so years ago that’s gospel certain for Flannery. But the 20 degrees – crucially, not now when we might be able to get close to a global measure of temperature, but at some unstated time in the future.

Then we had a strange piece from a character named Stephen Lewandowsky, described as the ‘Australian professorial fellow in the school of psychology at the UWA.’

A little bit of self-analysis wouldn’t have gone astray.

The piece consisted of simple denial of facts. The Arctic is melting faster than predicted. No it isn’t – it was predicted to have already melted right away.

Temperature increases over the past decade had conformed to predictions. No they haven’t – see inconvenient Flannery quote.

Ludicrous claims. The genocide in Darfur was “a climate war.”

A series of questions to which the answer is no, your premise is exactly wrong. And a defence of the thuggish behaviour of the climate believer-insiders at the CRU as an exercise in “quality control rather than censorship.”

In the process very neatly demonstrating why the scandal at CRU should be a matter of concern for all academics. As it brings all peer review across every discipline into serious disrepute.

Peer review? Oh you mean peer conspire.

Beautifully captured when someone like this character can defend it even after the disclosure of the sordid behaviour.

It’s going to be both a delicious and depressing fortnight as we get inundated with sludge and mush from Copenhagen, mediated through much of the lamestream media to borrow Bernie Goldberg’s apt description.

Via Email to ILoveCarbonDioxide.com, sourced from the HeraldSun

Breach in global-warming bunker rattles climate science at worst time

By Doug Saunders, The Globe and Mail
A short drive from the windswept North Sea coast of England, the Climatic Research Unit occupies a squat, weather-beaten grey concrete building on the campus of the University of East Anglia. This scientific bunker holds the world’s largest trove of climate-change data, gleaned from Siberian tree-ring counts, Greenland ice-layer measurements and centuries-old thermometer readings. Now the pirating of thousands of e-mail messages from within its walls has revealed a dangerous bunker mentality among the scientists who guarded those records and a data-fudging scandal that has created a crisis of confidence in global-warming science that is threatening to destroy the political consensus around next week’s carbon-policy summit in Copenhagen. Said one scientist working at the institute: “It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that this has set the climate-change debate back 20 years.” The crisis intensified yesterday as the head of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the main scientific and political authority on global warming, announced an investigation into the university’s practices and the reliability of the findings that have underpinned the UN’s climate-change conclusions. The university has launched its own inquiry and on Wednesday ordered the CRU’s embattled head, Phil Jones, to step down until it is complete. On a political level, coming on the eve of the Copenhagen summit, the controversy has been catastrophic: In the last few days, it has prompted opposition politicians in the United States, Britain and Australia to argue that human-caused global warming is a myth.

Saudi Arabian officials now say that they will argue in Copenhagen that carbon-emission controls are pointless because the CRU scandal has nullified any evidence of human-caused atmospheric temperature increase. The reports the CRU produced from its now-controversial data were the main source of the UN’s key global-warming document, the IPCC’s report of 2007, which concluded that “warming of the climate system is unequivocal” and that “most” of the global temperature increase since the mid-20th century has been caused by human activity – a conclusion, still supported by the majority of atmospheric scientists, that most governments adopted as the basis of their carbon-emissions policy. That consensus has been shaken by hundreds of pages of messages, apparently stolen from the lab’s servers, which have been interpreted as suggesting that the scientists at the CRU manipulated data to make it deliver a more dramatic message about the human contribution to global warming, destroyed data files that did not support their hypothesis, and tried to prevent critics within the scientific community from having access to their raw information and methods. Unusually, even sympathetic scientists and some activists have concluded that the credibility of climate science has been seriously harmed. “We should not underestimate the damage caused by what has happened, either for the science or for the politics of climate change, and potentially it could have some very far-reaching consequences,” said Mike Hulme, a climate scientist at East Anglia whose e-mails were among those included in the pirated files and who has been critical of the secrecy and lack of impartiality in his colleagues’ work. Independent scientists are quick to point out that the actions described in the e-mails do not describe anything like a fabrication of global-warming evidence, and that two other major sets of historical data drawn from the same sources, both held by NASA institutions in the United States, also show a historical warming trend. That has not stopped right-wing politicians in Western countries from using the scandal to dramatic effect: Yesterday, a group of Hollywood conservatives launched a campaign to revoke the Academy Award given to Al Gore, the former vice-president and a carbon-cap advocate, for his climate documentary An Inconvenient Truth. But perhaps more important than the ammunition the CRU affair has given to conspiracy theorists is what it has revealed about the awkward role scientists have come to play in the heated world of climate policy. “I think there is a serious problem with the way scientists are used, and the way they position themselves, in climate-policy debates,” Prof. Hulme said. “Wherever you look around climate change, people are bringing their ideologies, beliefs and values to bear on the science.” The CRU files, apparently hacked or leaked from the institute’s server, began appearing on websites on Nov. 17, and reached the attention of climate-skeptic groups and the media two days later. The most contentious e-mail was written by Prof. Jones, the director of the CRU, who wrote to colleagues in 1999, as they studied measurements of Siberian tree rings, which scientists have long realized do not reflect local temperature changes after 1961: “I’ve just completed Mike’s trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e. from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 to hide the decline.” While it seems clear that he is using “trick” to refer to a change in algorithm to remove the nonsensical data after 1961 and “decline” likely refers to the quality of the data, the phrase has led some of the more extreme critics to conclude that a data-shaping plot was at work. Referring to weather data from the last decade, another scientist wrote: “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.” While such insinuations of poor scientific practice have drawn the most attention, more damaging for climate scientists are e-mails which reveal the hostile, partisan, bunker-like atmosphere at the lab, which goes to ridiculous lengths to prevent even moderate critics from seeing any of the raw data. In one e-mail, Prof. Jones wrote that climate skeptics “have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send it to anyone.” As it happens, Prof. Jones admitted earlier this year that he “accidentally” deleted some of the CRU’s raw-data files, material that the centre says amounts to about 5 per cent of its collection. Prof. Jones wrote of efforts to deter skeptics from having access to data: “We will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!” In another, he asks that several of his colleagues “delete any e-mails” about their work on the IPCC’s 2007 report. That sort of language has led many people, including climate scientists, to worry that the scientific findings of the centre have been undermined by scientists who see themselves as activists trying to prove a case rather than impartial arbiters of scientific fact. As the political fallout escalated yesterday, it became apparent that it may take some time for climate scientists to repair their collective reputation. In Australia, 10 shadow ministers in the opposition Liberal Party resigned in the wake of the revelations, in protest against their party’s support for Australia’s carbon-reduction bill. In the United States, Republican Congressman James Sensenbrenner, leader of a climate-skeptic caucus, declared that the e-mails “call into question the whole science of climate change” and pledged to resist any climate bill. And Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil producer, announced that the e-mail leaks provide sufficient proof that climate change is not man-made that there should be no policy resulting from the Dec. 7-18 Copenhagen summit, in which the world’s nations will try to negotiate a successor to the Kyoto Protocol. “It appears from the details of the scandal that there is no relationship whatsoever between human activities and climate change,” said Mohammad al-Sabban, the head of the Saudi Arabian delegation. “Climate is changing for thousands of years, but for natural and not human-induced reasons.” While some climate scientists have taken a defensive posture, the crisis has led a number of others to conclude that their approach to the subject needs to change. Prof. Hulme leads a group of CRU scientists who believe that the extraordinary political importance placed on their research, and the activist, ideological way that research has been used by the IPCC, has put scientists in the position of being the authors of policy – a position that distorts the role of science in society. “If we simply believe that science dictates policy, then I’m afraid we’re living in an unreal world,” Prof. Hulme said. “If people are arguing that science policy should flow seamlessly from the science, then science becomes a battleground, where people start saying that we must get the science on our side. We have lost an openness and a transparency that leads to good science.” Prof. Hulme is one of several scientists calling for the raw data of climate-change research to be made available to everyone, including climate-change skeptics, on the Internet. That, he says, would allow genuine research to proceed unhindered. Some of his colleagues also say the IPCC now does more harm than good and should be disbanded. That position has led some of his colleagues to attack him. This week, several said in Internet posts that such transparency would be unworkable because the matter of climate is too urgent and the stakes too high to allow skeptics to have any influence on policy. That, Prof. Hulme said, is exactly the attitude that led to the sort of questionable practices chronicled in the CRU e-mails.
Source

CO2 Nominated for Nobel Peace Prize

On the same day that the EPA is set to falsely accuse the atmosphere’s CO2 molecules an “endangerment”, I hereby unofficially nominate the humble CO2 molecule for the Nobel Peace Prize. Hey, it makes more sense than calling this beneficial trace gas an “endangerment”. In his own Nobel acceptance/lecture, Al Gore has went so far as to call CO2 “global warming pollution”, and that emissions of it are akin to treating our atmosphere like an “open sewer”. He couldn’t be more wrong. When it comes to molecules that are necessary for life to exist on earth, with the possible exception of H20, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more beneficial molecule than good old carbon dioxide. CO2 is good for plants:

Literally thousands of laboratory and field experiments have conclusively demonstrated that enriching the air with carbon dioxide stimulates the growth and development of nearly all plants. They have also revealed that higher-than-normal CO2 concentrations dramatically enhance the efficiency with which plants utilize water, sometimes as much as doubling it in response to a doubling of the air’s CO2 content. These CO2-induced improvements typically lead to the development of more extensive and active root systems, enabling plants to more thoroughly explore larger volumes of soil in search of the things they need. Consequently, even in soils lacking sufficient water and nutrients for good growth at today’s CO2 concentrations, plants exposed to the elevated atmospheric CO2 levels expected in the future generally show remarkable increases in vegetative productivity, which should enable them to successfully colonize low-rainfall areas that are presently too dry to support more than isolated patches of desert vegetation. Elevated levels of atmospheric CO2 also enable plants to better withstand the growth-retarding effects of various environmental stresses, including soil salinity, air pollution, high and low air temperatures, and air-borne and soil-borne plant pathogens. In fact, atmospheric CO2 enrichment can actually mean the difference between life and death for vegetation growing in extremely stressful circumstances. In light of these facts, it is not surprising that Earth’s natural and managed ecosystems have already benefited immensely from the increase in atmospheric CO2 that has accompanied the progression of the Industrial Revolution; and they will further prosper from future CO2 increases. Join us as we explore these and other important benefits that rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations are bestowing on plants. Carbon dioxide emissions resulting from the burning of fossil fuels should not be feared; they are something to be celebrated!

CO2 is good for humans:

Far from being a pollutant, rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations will never directly harm human health, but will indirectly benefit humans in a number of ways. Chief among these benefits is global food security. People must have sufficient food, simply to sustain themselves; and the rise in the atmosphere’s CO2 concentration that has occurred since the inception of the Industrial Revolution (an increase of approximately 100 ppm) has done wonders for humanity in this regard. And, it will continue to work wonders in helping us meet the rising food consumption needs of a larger, future population. In addition to increasing the quantity of food available for human consumption, the rising atmospheric CO2 concentration is also increasing the quality of the foods we eat. It significantly increases the quantity and potency of the many beneficial substances found in their tissues (such as the vitamin C concentration of citrus fruit), which ultimately make their way onto our dinner tables and into many of the medicines we take, improving our health and helping us better contend with the multitude of diseases and other maladies that regularly afflict us. In just one species of spider lily, for example, enriching the air with CO2 has led to the production of higher concentrations of several substances that have been demonstrated to be effective in fighting a number of human maladies, including leukemia, ovary sarcoma, melanoma, and brain, colon, lung and renal cancers, as well as Japanese encephalitis and yellow, dengue, Punta Tora and Rift Valley fevers.

CO2 an “endangerment”? Hardly. Al Gore and the rest of the alarmists need to stop smearing the good name of this beneficial trace gas, and learn to embrace CO2. If they truly wanted a greener planet, they’d learn to love CO2! CO2 for the Nobel Peace Prize!
Thanks to GORELIED.

'Climategate' now surpasses 'Barack Obama' in Google search results!

First, Watts Up With That reported that the popular Google search term “global warming” had been passed by “Climategate” in the total number of search results. Next, GORE LIED reported that as the number of search results had continued to climb, “Climategate” had even passed former Vice President and man-made global warming huckster Al Gore in search results. Today, as the “Climategate” tsunami grows ever larger on the blogosphere, and the Internet in general, the Google search term “Climategate” has even left “Barack Obama” in its dust: Google_Climategate Google_BarackObama Is there anything search term even larger than “Barack Obama” that “Climategate” has to conquer? Yes, but I wouldn’t bet any money on it: Google_S Meantime, Watts Up With That has found something fishy about a related matter with Climategate search.
Source

Munk Debate: Skeptics score a win against alarmists

By Terence Corcoran

The audience shift at the Munk Debate followed a global trend

On Tuesday night about 1,100 people participated in a sold-out global warming debate that, in the end, turned downtown Toronto’s new concert hall at the Royal Conservatory of Music into a microcosm of a larger tranformation that is sweeping the world. The debate pitted two well known global warming activists of international repute against two well-known skeptics. The skeptics won, shifting the audience’s support away from the drastic global warming action demanded by activists and toward the moderate reponse of the skeptics, a move that is rapidly becoming a trend everywhere. If global warming is a problem — and many have growing doubts about that — it is not a crisis that warrants draconian policy intervention in Copenhagen or anywhere else.

In polls and in science debates, in political discourse and in the buildup to Copenhagen, the foundations of support for global warming action are in decline. A new Harris Poll yesterday found a big drop, from 71% to 51%, in Americans who believe that the release of carbon dioxide and other gases will lead to global warming. While many people are not sure, those who do not believe that carbon dioxide emissions will cause global warming have increased from 23% to 29% since 2007.

Australia is in political turmoil over carbon emissions policy. In the United Kingdom, the leading scientist charged with assembling temperature data has resigned pending an investigation. The recent leak of emails from Britain’s Climate Research Unit, at the University of East Anglia, where the words “trick” and “hide the decline” are found, is gradually snowballing from being a skeptical bloggers’ dream event into a mainstream political scandal. From Daily Show host Jon Stewart to Canadian Environment Minister Jim Prentice, there is a sense that all is not right with the global warming file. “I take from what’s happened at the East Anglia institution is that there were some serious allegations of impropriety and some serious questions about the quality of the scientific work that was done there,” said Mr. Prentice yesterday.

At the Munk Debate in Toronto Tuesday night, the email scandal was barely mentioned and so had little direct impact on the results. Before the debate, the 1,100 people in the audience cast ballots, with 61% supporting the resolution that “climate change is mankind’s defining crisis and demands a commensurate response.” At the end of the debate, support had fallen to 53%.

Had the email exchange among leading scientists been explored, the outcome might have been even more significant decline in support for extreme climate action. Support might have collapsed completely had there been a way to have a fact checker interrupt the debate to review the various clashes over science and the statistics.

On the activist side were two leading climate activists, Canadian Green Party Leader Elizabeth May and British author and columnist George Monbiot. The miracle is that these two grandstanding professional agitators held on to as much of the audience as they did after two hours of cheap theatrical tricks, ad hominem attacks, dubious science claims and frequent dips into Stephen Lewis’s tear-filled pool of emotive personal anecdotes of poverty and disease. They rarely got the science or the economics right.

Trying to bring rational argument to all this were Bjorn Lomborg, the Danish author of The Skeptical Environmentalist and Cool it: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide To Global Warming, and Lord Nigel Lawson, Margaret Thatcher’s former finance minister and also the author of An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming. They stuck to their core arguments and, for the most part, successfully defended their positions against exaggerated claims and counter arguments that were questionable or just plain wrong.

Too bad the audience had no way of knowing what was fact and fiction. A fact-checking referee would have helped verify Mr. Monbiot’s and Ms. May’s frequent stretches and exaggerations.

Peer reviewed economics: Mr. Lawson, for example, got into a slugging match with Mr. Monbiot over a British economic report, the Stern Review, which claimed that climate change would bring massive economic decline. The report, said Mr. Lawson, was politicially generated rubbish that had never been peer reviewed and had been dismissed by all serious economists. Mr. Monbiot then introduced the preposterous idea that while the Stern Review had not been peer reviewed, it was itself a summary of a lot of other peer reviewed papers, and therefore was above reproach, an “uber-peer reviewed” report.

Global water stress: The Lomborg argument is that while global warming is a real global issue, it is not one that should be allowed to divert attention and money away from more pressing and real crises. Mr. Monbiot claimed global warming would only make the plight of the world’s poor all the worse. He said — citing official United Nation’s science reports — that 2.3 billion people would be subject to new “water stress” as warming advanced, meaning they would not have access to minimum quantities of water. Mr. Monbiot reacted vehemently when Mr. Lomborg said the opposite was true — that studies showed that global warming would also relieve water stress on 3.3 billion people.

The audience had no way of knowing that Mr. Lomborg was right. The official UN report says that “using the per capita water availability indicator, climate change would appear to reduce global water stress.” The research paper supporting that finding shows, for example, that while as many as 2 billion people might experience more water stress by 2050, as many as 4.3 billion will experience reduced water stress.

Food production: The audience also had no way of knowing that Mr. Monbiot was also wrong when he clashed with Mr. Lawson over the theoretical impact of global warming on food production. Mr. Lawson said the UN reports that food production would increase if the global temperature rose by 3 degrees Celsius. Mr. Monbiot disputed the number, claiming that the world food production would begin a “net decline” if the temperature rose above 3 degrees. The actual report is far from categorical, although the general conclusion is that climate change is not a major driver of food production (relative to technology and economic and social factors).

The audience did see through Ms. May’s antics. Many groaned when she tried to link climate change with AIDS in Africa. At one point the moderator, Rudyard Griffiths, had to cut Ms. May’s sound off when she would not stop one of her many attacks on Mr. Lomborg, who is obviously still a thorn in the sides of green activists. For a while, it looked like Ms. May was going to do a page-by-page assault on Mr. Lomborg’s books, which she had piled up on a nearby table along with other material.

The declining alarmist case hit bottom in the dying minutes when Mr. Monbiot, in Stephen Lewis mode, brought in a personal story that linked climate change with the slaughter of 96 people in Kenya (see Mr. Monbiot’s closing statement). Nobody groaned.

The debate, on the whole, was a conceptual and disjointed mess, as are most global warming debates. Which may be why the activists lost the Munk event and are losing the global event.

To be published in tomorrow’s National Post.

Climategate – the news goes mainstream

By John Ingham

The scientific consensus that mankind has caused climate change was rocked yesterday as a leading academic called it a “load of hot air underpinned by fraud”.
Professor Ian Plimer condemned the climate change lobby as “climate comrades” keeping the “gravy train” going. In a controversial talk just days before the start of a climate summit attended by world leaders in Copenhagen, Prof Plimer said Governments were treating the public like “fools” and using climate change to increase taxes. He said carbon dioxide has had no impact on temperature and that recent warming was part of the natural cycle of climate stretching over ­billions of years.Prof Plimer told a London audience: “Climates always change. They always have and they always will. They are driven by a number of factors that are random and cyclical.” His comments came days after a scandal in climate-change research emerged through the leak of emails from the world-leading research unit at the University of East Anglia. They appeared to show that scientists had been massaging data to prove that global warming was taking place.

If you have to argue your science by using fraud, your science is not valid.
– Professor Pilmer

The Climate Research Unit also admitted getting rid of much of its raw climate data, which means other scientists cannot check the subsequent research. Last night the head of the CRU, Professor Phil Jones, said he would stand down while an independent review took place.Professor Plimer said climate change was caused by natural events such as volcanic eruptions, the shifting of the Earth’s orbit and cosmic radiation. He said: “Carbon dioxide levels have been up to 1,000 times higher in the past. CO2 cannot be driving global warming now. “In the past we have had rapid and significant climate change with temperature changes greater than anything we are measuring today. They are driven by processes that have been going on since the beginning of time.” He cited periods of warming during the Roman Empire and in the Middle Ages – when Vikings grew crops on Greenland – and cooler phases such as the Dark Ages and the Little Ice Age from 1300 to 1850. And he predicted that the next phase would cool the planet. Climate change is widely blamed on the burning of fossil fuels which release greenhouse gases such as CO2 into the atmosphere, where they trap the sun’s heat. The talks at Copenhagen are expected to find ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions globally. But Professor Plimer, of Adelaide and Melbourne Universities, said that to stop climate change Governments should find ways to prevent changes to the Earth’s orbit and ocean currents and avoid explosions of supernovae in space. Of the saga of the leaked emails, he said: “If you have to argue your science by using fraud, your science is not valid.” The CRU’s Professor Jones has admitted some of the emails may have had “poorly chosen words” and were sent in the “heat of the moment”. But he has categorically denied manipulating data and said he stood by the science. And yesterday he dismissed suggestions of a conspiracy to alter ­evidence to support a theory of man-made global warming as “complete rubbish”. But mining geology professor Plimer said there was a huge momentum behind the climate-change lobby.
He suggested many scientists had a vested interest in promoting climate change because it helped secure more funding for research. He said: “The climate comrades are trying to keep the gravy train going. Governments are also keen on putting their hands as deep as possible into our pockets. “The average person has been talked down to. He has been treated like a fool. Yet the average person has common sense.”Read rest here.