Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Resolutions you can live by. Happy New Year!

A Libertarian's New Year's Resolutions

by Harry Browne

1. I resolve to sell liberty by appealing to the self-interest of each prospect, rather than preaching to people and expecting them to suddenly adopt my ideas of right and wrong.
2. I resolve to keep from being drawn into arguments or debates. My purpose is to inspire people to want liberty -- not to prove that they're wrong.
3. I resolve to listen when people tell me of their wants and needs, so I can help them see how a free society will satisfy those needs.
4. I resolve to identify myself, when appropriate, with the social goals someone may seek -- a cleaner environment, more help for the poor, a less divisive society -- and try to show him that those goals can never be achieved by government, but will be well served in a free society.
5. I resolve to be compassionate and respectful of the beliefs and needs that lead people to seek government help. I don't have to approve of their subsidies or policies -- but if I don't acknowledge their needs, I have no hope of helping them find a better way to solve their problems.
6. No matter what the issue, I resolve to keep returning to the central point: how much better off the individual will be in a free society.
7. I resolve to acknowledge my good fortune in having been born an American. Any plan for improvement must begin with a recognition of the good things we have. To speak only of America's defects will make me a tiresome crank.
8. I resolve to focus on the ways America could be so much better with a very small government -- not to dwell on all the wrongs that exist today.
9. I resolve to cleanse myself of hate, resentment, and bitterness. Such things steal time and attention from the work that must be done.
10. I resolve to speak, dress, and act in a respectable manner. I may be the first libertarian someone has encountered, and it's important that he get a good first impression. No one will hear the message if the messenger is unattractive.
11. I resolve to remind myself that someone's "stupid" opinion may be an opinion I once held. If Ican grow, why can't I help himgrow?
12. I resolve not to raise my voice in any discussion. In a shouting match, no one wins, no one changes his mind, and no one will be inspired to join our quest for a free society.
13. I resolve not to adopt the tactics of Republicans and Democrats. They use character assassination, evasions, and intimidation because they have no real benefits to offer Americans. We, on the other hand, are offering to set people free -- and so we can win simply by focusing on the better life our proposals will bring.
14. I resolve to be civil to my opponents and treat them with respect. However anyone chooses to treat me, it's important that I be a better person than my enemies.

* * *
Harry passed away in March of 2006

Worst Decade ever? Maybe

Tuesday, December 29, 2009

A Fast, Cheap Way to Cool the Planet

Many hoped that Copenhagen was really about reducing man's negative impact on our existence. Unfortunately solutions that would improve our quality of life are not to be considered – since only the pain and suffering caused by vast cash transfers are of interest.
This month's Copenhagen talks focused on the leading climate change culprit: carbon dioxide. But reversing global temperature increases by reducing carbon emissions will take many decades, if not centuries. Even if the largest cuts in CO2 contemplated in Copenhagen are implemented, it simply will not reverse the melting of ice already occurring in the most sensitive areas, including the rapid disappearance of glaciers in Tibet, the Arctic and Latin America.

So what can we do to effectively buffer global warming? The most obvious strategy is to make an all-out effort to reduce emissions of methane.
Sometimes called the "other greenhouse gas," methane is responsible for 75% as much warming as carbon dioxide measured over any given 20 years. Unlike carbon dioxide, which remains in the atmosphere for hundreds of years, methane lasts only a decade but packs a powerful punch while it's there.
Methane's short life makes it especially interesting in the short run, given the pace of climate change. If we need to suppress temperature quickly in order to preserve glaciers, reducing methane can make an immediate impact. Compared to the massive requirements necessary to reduce CO2, cutting methane requires only modest investment. Where we stop methane emissions, cooling follows within a decade, not centuries. That could make the difference for many fragile systems on the brink.
Yet global discussions about climate and policies to date have not focused on methane. Methane is formally in the "basket" of six gases targeted by the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. But its value is counted as if it has the same lifetime as carbon dioxide. Read more.

Christmas: when the sacred becomes real

In Pietro Orioli's painting of the Nativity, says Vincent Nichols, we are reminded that neither love nor freedom can flourish without sacrifice and self-restraint for the sake of others.
Looks like God is in favour of trying to do something about climate change. How can you argue against that?

It's not only Christmas that has nearly arrived, but the end of the year, too. No one can pretend that 2009 has been an easy year. The financial crisis and recession have caused such hardship; we're still engaged in armed conflicts with no resolution in sight; confidence in MPs – many good and hard-working – has been shaken by the expenses scandal. Then there's the urgency of climate change, perhaps the most difficult problem to solve because it requires a new way of thinking and acting.

Under the normal stress of preparing for Christmas, I sense a deeper tiredness with our public life and institutions; the promises quickly made yet impossible to keep; expectations inflated for short-term lift but resulting only in long-term disappointment. Where does a weary society go for refreshment? Let me make two suggestions: art and faith. They're not exclusive and one can often lead to the other. Read more.

The Year in Energy

Liquid batteries, giant lasers, and vast new reserves of natural gas highlight the fundamental energy advances of the past 12 months.
With many renewable energy companies facing hard financial times ("Weeding Out Solar Companies"), a lot of the big energy news this year was coming out of Washington, DC, with massive federal stimulus funding for batteries and renewable energy and programs such as Energy Frontier Research Centers and Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy ("A Year of Stimulus for High Tech").

But there was still plenty of action outside the beltway, both in the United States and around the world. One of the most dramatic developments ("Natural Gas Changes the Energy Map") was the rush to exploit a vast new resource; new drilling technologies have made it possible to economically recover natural gas from shale deposits scattered throughout the country, including in Texas and parts of New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. Advances in drilling technology have increased available natural gas by 39 percent, according to an estimate released in June. The relatively clean-burning fuel could cut greenhouse gas emissions by becoming a substitute for coal. Natural gas might even provide an alternative to petroleum in transportation, especially for buses and taxis--if only policymakers could take advantage of the new opportunity.

Meanwhile a number of technologies promise to cut down on emissions from coal plants. Feeding heat from the sun into coal plants could at once increase the amount of power that can be generated from a given amount of coal and reduce the cost of solar power ("Mixing Solar with Coal to Cut Costs"). And technology for capturing carbon dioxide ("Scrubbing CO2 Cheaply") and storing it ("An Ocean Trap for Carbon Dioxide") is finally emerging from the lab and small-scale projects into larger demonstrations at power plants, even while researchers explore potentially cheaper carbon-capture techniques ("Using Rust to Capture CO2 from Coal Plants"). Read more.

Accept Defeat: The Neuroscience of Screwing Up

Climategate Explained!


It all started with the sound of static. In May 1964, two astronomers at Bell Labs, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, were using a radio telescope in suburban New Jersey to search the far reaches of space. Their aim was to make a detailed survey of radiation in the Milky Way, which would allow them to map those vast tracts of the universe devoid of bright stars. This meant that Penzias and Wilson needed a receiver that was exquisitely sensitive, able to eavesdrop on all the emptiness. And so they had retrofitted an old radio telescope, installing amplifiers and a calibration system to make the signals coming from space just a little bit louder.

But they made the scope too sensitive. Whenever Penzias and Wilson aimed their dish at the sky, they picked up a persistent background noise, a static that interfered with all of their observations. It was an incredibly annoying technical problem, like listening to a radio station that keeps cutting out.
At first, they assumed the noise was man-made, an emanation from nearby New York City. But when they pointed their telescope straight at Manhattan, the static didn’t increase. Another possibility was that the sound was due to fallout from recent nuclear bomb tests in the upper atmosphere. But that didn’t make sense either, since the level of interference remained constant, even as the fallout dissipated. And then there were the pigeons: A pair of birds were roosting in the narrow part of the receiver, leaving a trail of what they later described as “white dielectric material.” The scientists evicted the pigeons and scrubbed away their mess, but the static remained, as loud as ever.


For the next year, Penzias and Wilson tried to ignore the noise, concentrating on observations that didn’t require cosmic silence or perfect precision. They put aluminum tape over the metal joints, kept the receiver as clean as possible, and hoped that a shift in the weather might clear up the interference. They waited for the seasons to change, and then change again, but the noise always remained, making it impossible to find the faint radio echoes they were looking for. Their telescope was a failure. Read more.

Thursday, December 24, 2009

Innovation did not sit still in 2009 - Top 100 at Popular Science

Security Grand Award Winner: X-Flex Blast Protection System

X-Flex is a new kind of wallpaper: one that’s quite possibly stronger than the wall it’s on. Invented by Berry Plastics in partnership with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, this lifesaving adhesive is designed for use anyplace that’s prone to blasts and other lethal forces, like in war or natural-disaster zones, chemical plants or airports. To keep a shelter’s walls from collapsing in an explosion and to contain all the flying debris, you simply peel off the wallpaper’s sticky backing, apply the rollable sheets to the inside of brick or cinder-block walls, and reinforce it with fasteners at the edges. Covering an entire room can take less than an hour.


X-Flex bonds so tightly, it helps walls keep their shape after blast waves. Two layers are strong enough to stop a blunt object, like a flying 2x4, from knocking down drywall. During our tests, just a single layer kept a wrecking ball from smashing through a brick wall. The wallpaper’s strength and ductility is derived from a layer of Kevlar-like material sandwiched by sheets of elastic polymer wrap. The combination works so well that the Army is now considering wallpapering bases in Iraq and Afghanistan. Civilians could soon start remodeling too—Berry Plastics plans to develop a commercial version next year.
Read about the other 99 innovations.

Rep. Sensenbrenner: Obama's Climate Agenda Is a Jobs Killer

Roger L. Simon interviews Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner in Copenhagen who argues that U.S. climate legislation would cost jobs. Comment and watch here.

Tuesday, December 22, 2009

If no one is there to see it - Desert Vistas vs. Solar Power

This will be the manner of attack that will be launched against the Dominion Frontier Project to harness power from the northern rivers in Canada. It always puts the interests of the majority behind the sensitivities of the elite.

The solar developer BrightSource Energy has canceled one solar-energy project in the Mojave Desert, above, but is proceeding with several others.

AMBOY, Calif. — Senator Dianne Feinstein introduced legislation in Congress on Monday to protect a million acres of the Mojave Desert in California by scuttling some 13 big solar plants and wind farms planned for the region.
But before the bill to create two new Mojave national monuments has even had its first hearing, the California Democrat has largely achieved her aim. Regardless of the legislation’s fate, her opposition means that few if any power plants are likely to be built in the monument area, a complication in California’s effort to achieve its aggressive goals for renewable energy.

Developers of the projects have already postponed several proposals or abandoned them entirely. The California agency charged with planning a renewable energy transmission grid has rerouted proposed power lines to avoid the monument.
“The very existence of the monument proposal has certainly chilled development within its boundaries,” said Karen Douglas, chairwoman of the California Energy Commission. Read more.

Obama's dubious 'wins' in Copenhagen and Congress

It was serendipitous to have almost simultaneous climaxes in Copenhagen and Congress. The former's accomplishment was indiscernible, the latter's was unsightly.

It would have been unprecedented had the president not described the outcome of the Copenhagen climate change summit as "unprecedented," that being the most overworked word in his hardworking vocabulary of self-celebration. Actually, the mountain beneath the summit -- a mountain of manufactured hysteria, predictable cupidity, antic demagoguery and dubious science -- labored mightily and gave birth to a mouselet, a 12-paragraph document committing the signatories to . . . make a list.
A list of the goals they have no serious intention of trying to meet. The document even dropped the words "as soon as possible" from its call for a binding agreement on emissions.
The 1992 Rio climate summit begat Kyoto. It, like Copenhagen, which Kyoto begat, was "saved," as Copenhagen was, by a last-minute American intervention (Vice President Al Gore's) that midwifed an agreement that most signatories evaded for 12 years. The Clinton-Gore administration never submitted Kyoto's accomplishment for ratification, the Senate having denounced its terms 95 to 0.
Copenhagen will beget Mexico City next November. Before then, Congress will give "the international community" other reasons to pout. Congress will refuse to burden the economy with cap-and-trade carbon-reduction requirements and will spurn calls for sending billions in "climate reparations" to China and other countries. Representatives of those nations, when they did not have their hands out in Copenhagen grasping for America's wealth, clapped their hands in ovations for Hugo Chávez and other kleptocrats who denounced capitalism while clamoring for its fruits. Read more.

Monday, December 21, 2009

Copenhagen Wrap-up: “I have seen the future and it stinks!”

I am only just back last night from the Copenhagen UN climate change conference, yet am convinced of the accuracy of my headline – an obvious parody of Lincoln Steffens’ famous 1921 declaration about the Soviet Union, “I have seen the future and it works. ” In this case, however, the future concerns (supposedly democratic) “global governance” and not the workers’ state. For make no mistake about it, Kenneth Andersen is correct. COP15 was only peripherally about “climate change” and almost entirely about UN hegemony.

I know. I saw it with my own eyes. And it wasn’t for the first time. This was my second international UN conference in less than one year – the first being the so-called Durban Review Conference in Geneva that purported to review the “World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance in Durban, South Africa” of 2001. The latter was as much about real racism as the former was about real climate change. It was also – as will be recalled – something of a farce, with the appearance Mahmoud Ahmadinejad dominating the event as he spewed vitriolic anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial. Nevertheless, the UN declared the conference a success.
Read more.

Sunday, December 20, 2009

Climate summit ends in chaos and 'toothless' deal


Yvo de Boer, the UN's chief climate negotiator, feeling the strain Photo: REUTERS

After intense overnight wrangling, delegates from 192 countries on Saturday passed a motion simply "noting" a loose deal aimed at limiting temperature rises to less than 2C, which was agreed by the US and four other large-scale polluting nations.

However, critics warned the "Copenhagen Accord", the result of two weeks of negotiations in the Danish capital, was full of holes and lacked a timetable – and environment agencies branded it toothless and a failure. One African delegation likened the deal to the Holocaust.
An exhausted Gordon Brown, who arrived back in Britain at 3am on Saturday, admitted that much more had to be done to achieve a legally binding, properly funded agreement.

A new United Nations-backed conference could be held in Mexico in the first half of 2010, several months earlier than planned, sources suggested.
As Britain and the US both tried to claim credit for reaching any form of agreement at Copenhagen, the blame game for the overall failure began. Ed Miliband, the Climate Change Secretary, said that "developing countries didn't want to sign up to legally binding targets".
Other sources close to the talks blamed the Chinese government for obstructing progress throughout – while countries from Central and South America, including Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Bolivia, opposed the Copenhagen Accord as "undemocratic". Read more.

Saturday, December 19, 2009

Vowing to stop speaking and downsize his house…. Gore confesses: “I am a hypocrite”

Usually the world’s most trusted name in journalism, Hugh Betcha, Chief of the World News Desk of the Stoos Views media empire in Wynstone, South Dakota—where the air is clean, the crime rate low, the folks vote red, and the centre still holds—is the go to guy when politicians want to disseminate breaking national and international news.

A man who walks with equal ease on both sides of the aisle in Washington, who moves seamlessly between the Arabs and Jews, and who has been known to get ‘faced with the President on cheap wine, Hugh has the trust of politicians, and movers and shakers of all stripes. But the call from Al Gore this week took him by surprise.
While sitting beside his fireplace on a cold South Dakota night, reading “No, Really, It Is Global Warming….” © 2009 Al Gore Hugh was startled by a call on his cell phone. What he heard, touched him deeply.
“I need to see you this week,” the caller pleaded. “Gotta get some things off my chest.” Read more.

Climate talks end taking 'note' of accord

COPENHAGEN -- After two weeks of rancor and uncertainty, the U.N.-sponsored climate talks ended Saturday morning with negotiators choosing to "take note" of an agreement brokered by the United States but failing to adopt it as an official decision of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change.

The anti-climactic ending to an intense final round of negotiations underscored the incomplete nature of the accord, which provided for monitoring emission cuts in individual countries but set no overall global target for cutting greenhouse gases and no deadline for reaching a formal international treaty.

The United Nations' top climate official, Yvo de Boer, acknowledged that the agreement, known as the Copenhagen accord, has yet to bind large and small nations to either definitive emission reductions or financial commitments.
"The challenge for the coming year will be to capture that, and to turn it into something real, measurable and verifiable, in every sense of those three words, a year from now in Mexico City," he told reporters.
Describing what it means "to take note" of the accord, de Boer added, "That is a way of recognizing that something is there, but not going so far as to associate yourself with it."  Read more.

Shakedown in Copenhagen - by Patrick J. Buchanan

If you would know what Copenhagen is all about, hearken to this nugget in The Washington Post's report from the Danish capital.

"Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenari -- who is representing all of Africa here -- unveiled his proposal Wednesday for a system in which rich countries would provide money to poor ones to help deal with the effects of climate change. ...
"Zenawi said he would accept $30 billion in the short term, rising to $100 billion by 2020. ... This was seen as a key concession by developing countries, which had previously spurned that figure ... as too low."
There was a time when a U.S. diplomat would have burst out laughing after listening to a Third World con artist like this.

But not the Obamaites. They are already ponying up.
Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack just pledged $1 billion at Copenhagen to developing countries who preserve their forests. Thus, America, $12 trillion in debt and facing a second straight $1.4 trillion deficit, will borrow another $1 billion from China to send to Brazil to bribe them to stop cutting down their trees.
When you slice through the blather about marooned bears and melting ice caps, oceans rising and cities sinking, global warming is a racket and a crock. It is all about money and power.
Copenhagen has always been about an endless transfer of wealth from America, Europe and Japan and creation of a global bureaucracy to control the pace of world economic and industrial development. Read more.

Copenhagen's Lesson in Limits

Whatever led President Obama to believe that his personal intercession at the climate-change summit would achieve something major, his very presence in Copenhagen made "a significant breakthrough" a political imperative, no matter how flimsy. And that's exactly what a senior Administration official called a last-ditch deal—details to come—in a media leak as we went to press last evening and the conference headed into overtime.

Mr. Obama's inexplicable injunction yesterday that "the time for talk is over" appears to have produced an agreement to continue talking. The previous 12 days of frantic sound and pointless fury showed that there isn't anything approaching an international consensus on carbon control. What Copenhagen offered instead was a lesson in limits for a White House partial to symbolic gestures and routinely disappointed by reality.
Apparently, the agreement provides "the foundation for an eventual legally binding treaty," but that same "foundation" has been laid many times before. Copenhagen was supposed to deliver "legally binding" limits. However, the successor to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol became a pre-emptive dead letter because countries like China, Brazil and India said they were unwilling to accept anything that depressed their economic growth. Read more.

Parturient montes: nascetur ridiculus mus - The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley

Words from one of the few sane men among us

The mountains shall labor, and what will be born? A stupid little mouse. Thanks to hundreds of thousands of US citizens who contacted their elected representatives to protest about the unelected, communistic world government with near-infinite powers of taxation, regulation and intervention that was proposed in early drafts of the Copenhagen Treaty, there is no Copenhagen Treaty. There is not even a Copenhagen Agreement. There is a “Copenhagen Accord”.

The White House spinmeisters spun, and their official press release proclaimed, with more than usual fatuity, that President Obama had “salvaged” a deal at Copenhagen in bilateral talks with China, India, Brazil, and South Africa, which had established a negotiating bloc.
The plainly-declared common position of these four developing nations had been the one beacon of clarity and common sense at the foggy fortnight of posturing and gibbering in the ghastly Copenhagen conference center.
This is what the Forthright Four asked for:
Point 1. No compulsory limits on carbon emissions.
Point 2. No emissions reductions at all unless the West paid for them.
Point 3. No international monitoring of any emissions reductions not paid for by the West.
Point 4. No use of “global warming” as an excuse to impose protectionist trade restrictions on countries that did not cut their carbon emissions.
After President Obama’s dramatic intervention to save the deal, this is what the Forthright Four got:
Point 1. No compulsory limits on carbon emissions.
Point 2. No emissions reductions at all unless the West paid for them.
Point 3. No international monitoring of any emissions reductions not paid for by the West.
Point 4. No use of “global warming” as an excuse to impose protectionist trade restrictions on countries that did not cut their carbon emissions.
Here, in a nutshell – for fortunately nothing larger is needed – are the main points of the ”Copenhagen Accord”:
Read more.

Copenhagen climate summit: 'meaningful agreement' hailed by leaders

This is BS, but its very good BS. These guys are masters. Can't wait to see the details on how they will spread all this self-inflicted damage. They obviously did not have the courage to do nothing.

World leaders have hailed an “historic” deal on climate change after two weeks of difficult negotiations in Copenhagen.


(From Left) European Commission President Barroso, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, US President Barack Obama and British PM Gordon Brown Photo: STEFFEN KUGLER/AFP/Getty Images

US President Barack Obama reached a “meaningful” agreement with the leaders of China, India and South Africa at the Copenhagen climate conference.


The shift was described as an “historic step forward” but US officials made clear that it was not enough to stop the world warming up. Read more.

Friday, December 18, 2009

The Green Jobs Delusion - Ronald Bailey

Copenhagen, December 17—“It’s all about the jobs,” declared U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in her remarks at the Copenhagen climate change conference today. To hear Pelosi talk, saving the planet from climate doom is incidental to making sure Americans are employed making windmills, solar panels, electric cars, and weatherizing houses. Speaker Pelosi is heading up a 20-person congressional delegation here in Denmark, including such luminaries as Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.), Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), and Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.). The monikers of the latter two solons—Waxman-Markey—are shorthand for the American Clean Energy and Security Act cap-and-trade bill that passed the House last June. The bill would require the U.S. to cut its emissions of carbon dioxide by 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020.

Joining in the jobs theme, Rep. Markey also declared that the Waxman-Markey bill “is something that is going to create a technological revolution.” At his press conference the day before, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), who is a co-sponsor of an energy and climate change bill in the Senate, similarly asserted, “Our bill is essentially a jobs bill.” Markey predicted that the scale of the changes sparked by congressional climate change legislation would exceed the telecommunications and Internet booms of the 1990s. So will new climate change policy spark a clean energy revolution? Read more.

Global Wealth Can Heal the Planet

As the Copenhagen climate summit comes to a close, it seems fair to say that rarely has a gathering of so many doing so little gotten so much attention. But Copenhagen does have its uses. For starters, it reminds us that environmentalism continues to be a cover for uglier agendas.

Bolivian president Evo Morales was interviewed by Al Jazeera television while in Copenhagen. “The principal obstacle to combating climate change is capitalism,” he explained. “Until we put an end to capitalism, it will continue to be a big obstacle for life and humanity.”
Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe proclaimed in a speech: “When these capitalist gods of carbon burp and belch their dangerous emissions, it’s we, the lesser mortals of the developing sphere, who gasp and sink and eventually die.”
Right. That is, unless Mugabe kills them first. Read more.

Venezuela's Chavez 'Still' Smells Sulfur After Obama Speech

Behold the face of our enemies.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said he "still" smelled sulfur after President Obama made a keynote speech at the Copenhagen climate conference Friday, accusing the American president of carrying same satanic Chavez believes followed Obama's predecessor, George W. Bush.

Chavez, who was not included on the original list of speakers for the final day of the summit, ended the proceedings with bitter references to the Peace Prize-winning Obama as the "Nobel Prize of War."
"The Nobel Prize of War just finished saying here that he is here to act. Well, show it sir. Don't leave by the back door," he said. Read more.

The Long March From California to Copenhagen

The Great Debate Oddly Is Not Over

We are still in a great public debate between capitalism and socialism, and individual freedom versus statism — odd since hundreds of millions worldwide have escaped poverty the last 30 years due to the spread of Western-inspired free markets.
Many choose sides in the debate based on their own predicaments. Sometimes the more independent and secure who have thrived under capitalism promote it, the more dependent who have not detest it.
At other times the realist mind is opposed to the idealist. And we can also envision the split as an age-old dichotomy between the tragic view and the therapeutic: either man is born pretty awful and must toughen himself through denial of the appetites, or he is by nature wonderful but corrupted and hurt through the burdens placed on him by society. Read more.

Final Copenhagen Text Includes Global Transaction Tax

Obama set to bypass Congress and approve massive transfer of wealth to world government

The final Copenhagen draft agreement which was hammered out in the early hours of Friday morning includes provisions for a global tax on financial transactions that will be paid directly to the World Bank, as President Obama prepares to bypass Congress by approving a massive transfer of wealth from America into globalist hands.

As Lord Monckton, Alex Jones and others warned, the notion that the globalists would achieve nothing at Copenhagen has likely been a ruse all along. The elite look set to ram through the lion’s share of their agenda, which would include a massive global government tax at a cost of at least $3,000 a year for American families already laboring under a devastating recession, double digit unemployment and a reduction in living standards.
The final agreement may not force countries to meet CO2 emission targets, but it will grease the skids for the biggest tax hike in human history, a fact that establishment media outlets have completely failed to emphasize.

Monckton told the Alex Jones Show last week that the initial secretive draft version of the Copenhagen agreement represented a global government power grab on an “unimaginable scale,” and mandated the creation of 700 new bureaucracies as well as a colossal raft of new taxes including 2 percent levies on both GDP and every international financial transaction.
Monckton said that the new world government outlined in the treaty would be handed powers to, “Tax the American economy to the extent of 2 percent GDP, to impose a further tax of 2 percent on every financial transaction….and to close down effectively the economies of the west, transfer your jobs to third world countries.”  Read more.

New climate draft would forgo treaty in 2010

Most of this is hot air coming from politicians - but there is always the danger that someone might try to take this seriously. Hopefully any agreement is only a face saving operation and will be ignored.
COPENHAGEN -- With time running out to forge a comprehensive climate agreement, negotiators at the U.N.-sponsored talks are considering a new draft agreement that would not require a binding treaty by 2010 but would lay the groundwork for a more ambitious target in limiting the rise of temperatures around the globe.

The decision to remove the 2010 deadline is significant, because scientists have warned that the longer nations wait to make deep greenhouse gas emission cuts, the harder it will be to avert dangerous climate change. Read more.

Obama trying to save Copenhagen Summit – what comes afterwards?

And here’s the stagecraft coming.

...The best news of all are the rumors that “progress has been halting [4]” in Copenhagen. The word stalemate is showing up with increasing frequency in news reports.

Government ministers can’t agree on the best way to take money from their own citizens, give it to an opaque, above-the-law organization, and yet still control it; because, of course, with all that money comes power. Negotiators are skittish about how they can ensure that the money pledged will actually be paid into the pot, and if it does, who gets to dole out the funds. Everybody wants a piece of it, but nobody trusts anybody.
However, I believe this is only a spate of temporary sanity. Read more.

Michael Man would rather debate with Sarah Palin than Lord Monckton

The political nature of global warming alarmism is fully apparent in Michael Mann’s response to Climategate. He avoids talking about the science, which he still thinks is settled, and goes after a soft target for the left: Sarah Palin.
E-mail furor doesn't alter evidence for climate change

I cannot condone some things that colleagues of mine wrote or requested in the e-mails recently stolen from a climate research unit at a British university. But the messages do not undermine the scientific case that human-caused climate change is real. Read more.

OK - But when will this happen? I want to mark my calendar.

How convenient, and a novel approach at that. I suspect that this is just another puff piece to add to the massive lobbying effort pushing for wealth transfers. Copenhagen will be over by the time anyone is able to check this out.

Earth's Polar Ice Sheets Vulnerable to Even Moderate Global Warming; New Orleans, Much of Southern Florida, Expected to Be Permanently Submerged

A new analysis of the geological record of the Earth's sea level, carried out by scientists at Princeton and Harvard universities and published in the Dec. 16 issue of Nature, employs a novel statistical approach that reveals the planet's polar ice sheets are vulnerable to large-scale melting even under moderate global warming scenarios. Such melting would lead to a large and relatively rapid rise in global sea level. Read more.

The emperor’s new carbon credits - by Mark Steyn

Hans Christian Andersen would surely have been inspired by the ‘science’ of Copenhagen

For a small country, Denmark sure attracts a lot of attention. A Chicago Muslim, David Headley, was recently arrested at O’Hare International Airport en route to Copenhagen to kill the commissioning editor and artists of the Danish Muhammad cartoons. Alas, a far bigger group flying in to Copenhagen for a massive suicide bombing were permitted to board their flights: these were the jet-setting bigwigs of the climate-change circuit en route to Denmark to blow up the global economy and individual liberty in order to get back to paradise and enjoy their reward of 72 virgin-growth forests.

Both the radical Islam of David Headley and the Church of Settled Science of David Suzuki seem almost parodic responses to the hollowness of the modern multicultural West and the search for alternative, globalized identities. Indeed, it is hard to say which is wackier. Take Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the Prince of Wales. One’s a millenarian apocalyptic loon, and the other’s president of Iran. On balance, widening the streets of Tehran for the imminent return of the Twelfth Imam seems marginally less deranged than insisting the planet is doomed in 96 months unless humanity abandons the evils of capitalism and “the age of convenience.” (This from a man who has never drawn his own curtains.)
Ah, well. When I compare the eco-cultists to the humourless fanatics of the jihad, I get barraged by stern emails denouncing me as a “denier.” Apostate! And Mr. Suzuki wants deniers jailed. Call the Inquisition!

The spectacular discovery no one is talking about

The sad thing is that since climategate, I wonder if these scientists are exaggerating their claims and manipulating the data in order to secure funding.

One month ago, the US space agency NASA announced an astounding discovery: water on the moon.

We didn’t just find a little bit; we found a significant amount’, said an ‘ecstatic’ Anthony Colaprete, the leader of NASA’s project. Twenty-six gallons of water were found after the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) mission exploded a rocket and a probe into a large crater at the moon’s south pole – and there could be lots more water elsewhere on the moon. All of a sudden, a place hitherto thought of as desolate, harsh and inhospitable has become full of potential for humans. It is not an exaggeration to say that this finding could prove to be one of the most important space discoveries in our lifetimes, a turning point in our understanding of the moon and the solar system. Read more.

Copenhagen climate summit: global warming deal on knife-edge as President Barack Obama arrives

A new leaked document has cast doubt over the Copenhagen climate change conference just as President Barack Obama arrived.



U.S. President Barack Obama addresses the session of United Nations Climate Change Conference 2009 in Copenhagen Photo: REUTERS

However, as the talks draw to a close, there was growing anger at failure to reach an agreement. Differences between rich and poor countries are still so great that Mr Obama was forced to delay his schedule and hold further talks with 19 other world leaders to try and work out the agreement.
At the same time a draft document was leaked that would ask the world to keep temperature rise below 2C (3.6F).

It would ask rich countries to cut greenhouse gases, but does not yet have legally-binding numerical targets. It would also ask developing countries to take action to reduce emissions for the first time.
The leaked text caused anger among delegates just as President Obama arrived at the conference to “save the Earth”.
A source, who is close to the negotiations, said the world will be unable to keep dangerous global warming within safe limits without legally-binding targets for the rich countries.
“What is on the table is not enough to save the Earth. The Earth is going to burn with what is on the offer here. We have one chance to get it right. We have a decade to get emissions under control. If we do not get it right now it is not just a catastrophe in terms of the negotiations, it is a catastrophe in terms of people’s lives.”
It is understood the leaked document was circulating last night as negotiators struggle to draw up an agreement that world leaders can sign by the end of today. Read more.

On environment, Obama and scientists take hit in poll


As President Obama arrives in Copenhagen hoping to seal an elusive deal on climate change, his approval rating on dealing with global warming has crumbled at home and there is broad opposition to spending taxpayer money to encourage developing nations to curtail their energy use, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.
 There's also rising public doubt and growing political polarization about what scientists have to say on the environment, and a widespread perception that there is a lot of disagreement among scientists about whether global warming is happening.


But for all the challenges American policymakers have to overcome, nearly two-thirds of people surveyed say the federal government should regulate the release of greenhouse gases from sources like power plants, cars and factories in an effort to curb global warming. Last week the Environmental Protection Agency said it is putting together plans to control the emissions of six gases deemed dangerous to the environment and public.
Support for such a regulation is down 10 percentage points from June, but majorities of Americans remain supportive of such regulations even if they increased monthly bills, so long as they lower greenhouse gas levels. If energy bills jumped $10 a month, 60 percent back new limits; at $25 a month, it's 55 percent.
Most, however, oppose a widely floated proposal in which the United States and other industrialized countries would contribute $10 billion a year to help developing countries pay for reducing the amount of greenhouse gases they release. Overall, 57 percent of those polled oppose this idea; 39 percent support it. Most Republicans (74 percent) and independents (58 percent) are against this proposal, while a small majority of Democrats (54 percent) are supportive.
....Scientists themselves also come in for more negative assessments in the poll, with four in 10 Americans now saying that they place little or no trust in what scientists have to say about the environment. That's up significantly in recent years. About 58 percent of Republicans now put little or no faith in scientists on the subject, double the number saying so in April 2007. Over this time frame, distrust among independents bumped up from 24 to 40 percent, while Democrats changed only marginally. Among seniors, the number of skeptics more than doubled, to 51 percent. Read more.

Copenhagen climate summit: Barack Obama arrives

Barack Obama has arrived in Denmark to join fellow world leaders on the final day of an international climate conference.

The White House hopes the U.S. president's last-hours involvement on Friday will help seal a broad agreement to combat global warming. So far, the 193-nation meeting is running into serious problems reaching an agreement to be presented to the leaders.

Arriving after an overnight flight from Washington, Mr Obama is bringing little new beyond pleas for other nations to step up and earnest promises of U.S. seriousness. Read more.

Thursday, December 17, 2009

Climategate: Faster and Faster, the Dominos Fall

The Climategate files were made public just a month ago, and the email messages that were revealed have already had real impact. The emails show us scientists being petty and political, even corrupt. Suppressing dissenting science and perhaps even violating the law to prevent data from being shared with the rest of the world. They show us people with failings, egos against egos. But the emails themselves aren’t enough to call the overall science of CO2-driven, human-caused climate change into question.

The Climategate emails, however, make up only five percent of the Climategate files. The other 95 percent, the programs and data and documents, are where the real story is hiding. That story has begun to come out, in several independent analyses of the data we have, using hints from the emails and from other files and raw data that is available from other sources.
A story is beginning to take shape. This story broke into the world media Wednesday. An article in RIA Novosti, the Russian state-owned news service, states:
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 inExeter (Devon, England) had probably tampered with Russian-climate data.
The article reports that the IEA had taken a new look at the data used in the Intergovernmental Panel for Climatic Change (IPCC) reports. These reports, which became the basis for warnings of dramatic human-caused global warming that led to calls for extensive regulation and to the current climate change conference in Copenhagen, are based on world temperature estimates using measurements from thousands of reporting sites throughout the world.
Novosti reported that the data used for temperature measurements in Russia appeared to have been carefully chosen from the warmest reporting sites. If an average were taken over all Russian reporting sites, then there was little or no warming to report. Read more.

D’Aleo: … And Just Like That, the Warming’s Gone

As James Delingpole, in the Telegraph, noted Wednesday:

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.
On Tuesday, we heard via the Ria Novosti agency that the Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) issued a report claiming that the Hadley Center for Climate Change 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. They concluded climatologists use the incomplete findings of meteorological stations far more often than those providing complete observations and data from stations located in large populated centers that are influenced by the urban-warming effect more frequently than the correct data of remote stations.
Paint-by-Numbers Science
Imagine a paint-by-numbers kit with 12 colors of the spectrum — from purple and blue, green to yellow, orange and red, each numbered. When you finish coloring the areas in the coloring book or canvas with the appropriate color number, you have a color painting for the fridge.
Suppose you got a version with only the number 1 and 2 colors marked. You have the colors — but what you end up with is a patchwork of two colors on a white background, with lines defining other areas. You could guess about the other colors, but the end result may not be what the original creator had in mind.
Believe it or not, this very simple analogy applies to the claims of global warming.
In the climate change map of the world, where the Earth is depicted as flat (and skeptics are called flat-earthers, naturally) and with a latitude/longitude grid as the “to be colored” areas, the purples and blues represent cold temperatures and yellows, oranges, and reds represent warm. It appears the stations chosen in Russia were those that were likely to be warmer — reds and oranges. Further, with no information on what color to use for the areas where stations were ignored, guesses were made to fill in the empty grid boxes by extrapolating only from the warmer subset of stations.

More reds and oranges. Read more.

Just in case you didn't know... From Stephen Taylor


The victory of Greenthink on campus

James Howell thought university life would be filled with junk food, non-conformism and critical thinking. He was wrong.

I had thought that in joining an institution like Goldsmiths, University of London, which is known for being a progressive university – this is where the BritArt explosion happened in the 1990s and many famous writers, musicians and academics have studied and taught here – I would be immersing myself in a free-thinking, non-conformist, alternative atmosphere. I was wrong.

The Goldsmiths Students’ Union has signed on to the 10:10 campaign, which means it has pledged to cut the college’s carbon emissions by 10 per cent in 2010. A string of celebs, as well as sports clubs, big companies and schools have signed up to this rather fashionable campaign, which is supported by the UK Guardian. In fact, the campaign is backed by everyone from Number 10 to various local councils and MPs (1).
So perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised that Goldsmiths, too, had jumped on the bandwagon. Yet universities – or at least student bodies – are supposed to be different. They are supposed to be havens of non-conformism and plurality of thought. Right?
What was truly surprising to me is just how little questioning and challenging of orthodoxies happens on student campuses these days. That was once the staple of student life, but, today, when it comes to the effects of climate change, any student who chooses not to recycle their lecture notes is treated as deranged.
Around the UK, various green student societies have sprung up. At Goldsmiths, for instance, there’s the ‘Enviro-club’, which is ‘passionate about environmental issues’. At an event last year, the club put a sofa on the street and handed out free tea and cake to anyone willing to participate in ‘inspiring conversations about fruit, veg and gardening’ (2). Which is possibly the most inappropriate use of the word ‘inspiring’ ever. Read more.

Cap-and-fraud fiasco - By LORRIE GOLDSTEIN

Massive scams threaten 'credibility' of carbon trading and could cost us billions

Forget the freak show in Copenhagen to embarrass Canada, led by radical greens with their tiresome "Fossil" awards, shamefully promoted by grandstanding Toronto Mayor David Miller, who "accepted" one claiming he, too, was embarrassed.

Ignore the destructive attacks by Ontario and Quebec on Alberta, proving premiers Dalton McGuinty, Jean Charest and their environmental mouthpieces, are the small men of Confederation.
Ignore the freaks who cut down our flag from Canada's High Commission in London, threatening to smear it with oil, the American "Yes Men" with their juvenile antics and European warmists comparing Canada to Saudi Arabia.
They're all buffoons.
Focus instead on the real scandal as 192 world leaders, including Prime Minister Stephen Harper, gather in Copenhagen for their final, self-laudatory communique on climate change, which will declare victory and propose more UN meetings to save the planet.
The real scandal is that Europol, the European law enforcement agency, has uncovered a massive fraud by large-scale, organized crime in Europe's carbon trading markets.
Rob Wainwright, director of Europol's serious crime squad, told the Telegraph it has "endangered the credibility" of carbon trading.
Police estimate over $7 billion was stolen in just 18 months and say criminals may next target Europe's electricity and gas markets.
Up to 90% of all carbon trading in some European countries -- supposedly to help lower global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions -- may have been fraudulent.
The U.K., France, Spain, Holland and Denmark were hit. Denmark, according to the Guardian, passed emergency legislation related to the fraud just as the UN climate change meeting in its capital of Copenhagen was getting underway.
Fraudsters would set up in one country, buy tax-free carbon credits from other nations and then sell them domestically, adding on the value-added tax. But instead of forwarding those taxes to the government, they would disappear with the cash and set up somewhere else. Read more.

World leaders remain far from a deal in Copenhagen

THE COPENHAGEN climate conference set to wrap up Friday was supposed to produce a landmark accord on climate change. It won't. Hopes for a binding treaty died weeks before the meeting. And with some observers terming the proceedings "Constipagen," it's all too easy to wonder whether the conferees will even be able to conclude a less ambitious political agreement. Negotiators have gone in procedural circles for nearly two weeks, and, on some issues, consensus looks even more distant than before. With heads of state arriving as you read this editorial, what can the conference produce in its final stage?

The big fissures generally lie between rich and poor. Developing nations variously want rich countries to commit to emissions cuts on the order of 25 to 40 percent of 1990 levels by 2020; to provide at least $100 billion a year by 2020 to help poorer countries adapt to climate change, curb deforestation and decrease the carbon intensity of their development; and to preserve the Kyoto Protocol, as of now the only binding treaty on climate change, even though it obliges neither the United States nor China -- nor, for that matter, any developing nation -- to curb greenhouse pollution.
Developed countries appear ready to provide about $10 billion annually for the next few years to help poor nations adapt to climate change, among other things. But they shouldn't commit to much more without some critical concessions, particularly from the big emitters that will account for so much future emissions growth, notably China. Such developing nations should not be expected to deliver the same reduction in emissions as rich nations do, but the promises they do make should be just as binding. They, along with industrialized nations, must be required to report their emissions and be subject to robust international monitoring and verification. That also goes for those countries participating in any international anti-deforestation scheme. Otherwise, the system will be far too easy to game.
These concessions are necessary not only on logical grounds. They are essential for the United States to even come close to meeting one of the developing world's primary demands: That it cut its emissions significantly by 2020. Global-warming legislation doesn't have a chance in the Senate unless President Obama comes home with believable commitments from China, India and others. Read more.

What would Ayn Rand Say?

We don't need the government to protect the environment?

[Playboy 23] My position is fully consistent. [Obj 977] In the Middle Ages, man's life expectancy was 30 years. If it were true that industry is destructive to human life, one would find life expectancy declining in the more advanced countries. But it has been rising steadily. Anyone over 30 years of age today, give a silent "Thank you" to the nearest, sootiest smokestacks you can find.

What about the other species?

[Obj 966] Contrary to the ecologists, nature does not stand still and does not maintain the kind of "equilibrium" that guarantees the survival of any particular species - least of all her greatest and most fragile product, man. [Cult Update 12] Man cannot survive in the state of nature ecologists envision. Man has to discover and produce everything he needs, which means that he has to alter his background. Man has to manufacture things. The lowest tribe cannot survive without that alleged source of pollution: fire. It is not merely symbolic that fire was the property of the gods which Prometheus brought to man.

Don't you enjoy the world's biological diversity? Doesn't the natural world fill you with wonder?

[Donahue #2 26:18] No. You know when I'm filled with wonder? When I look up at skyscrapers, at the manmade, at what men were able to achieve on their own, without the help of faith or any sort of mysticism.

But you do acknowledge that pollution can cause problems for people?

[Obj 789] Pollution is primarily a scientific, not a political problem. In regard to the political problem: if a man creates a physical danger or harm to others which extends beyond the line of his own property, the law can hold him responsible. If the condition is collective, such as in an overcrowded city, appropriate and objective laws can be defined, protecting the rights of all involved - as in the case of oil rights, air-space rights, etc.

How about laws based on "True Cost," like pollution-credit systems, which incent industry to compete on finding environmental solutions?

[Obj 790] Such laws must not be aimed at a single scapegoat, i.e. the industrialists. [Obj 981] Industry is not the only culprit. The handling of sewage and garbage disposal problems, so frequently denounced, has been the province of local governments. [ARL 21] Americans will enthusiastically clean their streets, their rivers, their backyards, but when it comes to giving up progress, technology, the automobile, and their standard of living, Americans will prove that the man-haters "ain't seen nothing yet."

You must despise alternative transportation protests like London's annual "Reclaim the Streets" action or the "Critical Mass" bicycle demonstrations.

[Obj News v4 56] It can be rationally proved that the airplane is objectively of immeasurably greater value to man, to man at his best, than the bicycle. But if a given man's transportation needs do not extend beyond the range of a bicycle, [there is no] reason why the rest of mankind should be held down.

So, mass transit and roads themselves should all be private. No more departments of transportation or motor vehicles.

[Column 24] The only way a government can be of service to national prosperity is by keeping its hands off. [Margin 143] By their very natures, bureaucrats are neither intelligent nor competent, but parasites. The competent do not go in for government service.

And of course, any government power opens the door to corruption.

[Obj News v1 40] Cases of actual corruption are not a major motivating factor in today's situation. The motive power is the manipulations of little lawyers and public relations men pulling strings. These lobbyists are profiteers on America's self-immolation.
Read more.

ClimateGate Carbon-Koolaid Collusion

Green is the New Red: Crackpots in Copenhagen

Why is the Left so invested in selling the climate change catastrophe? Joe Hicks examines the Marxist tones permeating the Copenhagen climate talks in the latest Hicks File. ("Hicks File") Watch and comment here.

Lord Christopher Monckton questions IPPC chairman

Monckton asks difficult questions of Dr. Pachauri after a speech at the University of Copenhagen


CFACT delegate and former Margaret Thatcher advisor Lord Christopher Monckton attended a speech by Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) chairman Dr. Rajendra Pachauri to ask the chairman several difficult questions. ClimateDepot.com executive editor Marc Morano also asked difficult questions.

When Lord Monckton's questions about a conflict of interest between Dr. Pachauri's financial interest and position on the IPCC were not adequately answered he stood up and demanded an adequate response
Dr. Pachauri appeared totally unprepared to appropriately answer the questions and ran out of the building immediately after the Q&A session closed without talking to anybody.

Climategate: European Carbon Credit Trading System Plagued by Fraud

A main aim of the Copenhagen climate conference is to expand the EU’s fraud- and corruption-plagued carbon trading scheme into a global system for trading carbon.
The European Union’s flagship cap-and-trade carbon credit trading system is plagued by massive fraud and is effectively under the control of organized crime, according to a December 9 statement issued by European police. Europol, an EU-wide criminal intelligence agency similar to the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, says bogus trading at the EU’s Emission Trading Scheme (ETS) has exceeded €5 billion (U.S.$7 billion) over the past 18 months alone. Europol says that in some EU countries, up to 90 percent of the entire market volume is fraudulent.

News of the scale of the fraud, which comes just weeks after hundreds of hacked emails suggest that scientists have manipulated and exaggerated global warming data, will cast further doubt over the effectiveness of carbon trading as a way to curb emissions. It may also provide fresh ammunition to critics of the Obama administration’s plans to implement a cap-and-trade system in the United States that is largely based on the European model. Read more.

The Copenhagen PR scam

As for those who are stressed by the possibility that negotiators will reach a last-minute agreement containing bona fide emission caps that will beggar industrialized nations for the benefit of developing ones, we also say stop worrying. While delegates might sign away the moon amid the giddy glitter of Copenhagen, the realities of domestic politics they face when they return home — recession, unemployment, budget deficits — mean their pledges will quickly fade to nothingness.
Prospects of a deal have looked bleak all week. First, developing nations scoffed at a European Union offer of a $11-billion fund to help them tackle climate change over the next three years. Lumumba Stanislaus Dia-Ping of Sudan, who has become a sort of de facto leader of developing and underdeveloped nations at the conference, said the EU offer was the equivalent of “providing no finance whatsoever.”
...The irony is that, amid all this chaos, the environmental ends of the Earth summit have been largely abandoned. Instead, both sides seem focused on negotiating what amounts essentially to a straight-out inter-regional transfer of wealth. Read more.

Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide and Interglacial Warmth: Does more of the former lead to more of the latter?

Hundreds arrested as climate talks sour

Witness the face of our enemies.
With world leaders arriving for final talks, police clash with protesters

An activist reacts as police pushes back a group during a protest
 in Copenhagen on December 16, 2009.



COPENHAGEN – Gloom has started turning to doom here at a climate change summit where failure is becoming the expectation and breakthrough would be the surprise outcome.

At a grand opening ceremony, UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon, Britain's Prince Charles and Danish Prime Minister Lars Rokke Rasmussen warned countries that compromise must pave their path if a climate agreement is to be signed by Friday.
Outside the conference centre, Danish police fired pepper spray and beat protesters with batons as hundreds of protesters tried to disrupt the conference. Police said 230 protesters were detained.

Connie Hedegaard, the former Danish climate minister, resigned the conference presidency to allow Rasmussen to take the reins of the meeting as world leaders began arriving. Hedegaard was to continue overseeing closed-door negotiations.
Meanwhile, officials from a select group of 48 countries were still waiting Wednesday for a draft text for them to negotiate – leaving little time for officials to reach agreement for world leaders, including Prime Minister Stephen Harper, to sign when they arrive. Read more.

Cope Notes #2: So Many Despots, So Little Time!

I felt like I was in a time-warp yesterday, running alongside the demonstrators, shooting video, as the protestors shouted “The whole world is watching!” (yes, that oldie!), challenging the police who were blocking their way. But this time it wasn’t the DC but the Copenhagen cops and the building to be stormed was not the Pentagon, but the Bella Center – a gussied-up seventies edifice where the UN Climate Conference (Cop 15) is taking place. “The whole word is watching!” soon gave in to “Ho, ho, ho, ho – Bella Center here we go!” that reminded me rather much of “Ho, Ho, Ho Chih Minh – Viet Cong is gonna win!” There was a bit too of “The People United will never be defeated” (El pueblo unido jamas sera vencido) from the Hispanic contingent.

The demonstrators never made the Center. The cops blocked them, shortly after I saw a couple of protestors climbing power poles. Someone ran past me, his face contorted from pepper spray. I heard screaming and now everyone was running backwards. Me too.
But nothing much happened. The Danish cops were pretty tame and the protestors, retreads that they were, weren’t especially good at playing the old game of bait-the-police. I kept thinking of Marx’s famous rewrite of Hegel – the one about history being replayed the first time as tragedy and the second time as farce. I don’t know about tragedy, but there certainly was plenty of farce to go around – demonstrators dressed as clowns, middle-aged Brazilian ladies in tiger suits and Amazonian false breasts promising to save the rain forests, an old guy from Estonia pushing a model elephant he had constructed entirely of recycled trash. These were Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night gone globalist and, boy, did they appear useless. What will they all do when it’s over and they have to go home?
Inside the Bella Center things were scarcely better. Cop 15 is a bifurcated event. Outside are the noisy demonstrators who think – or say they think – capitalism is the root of all evil. Inside are mixed bags of socialist and capitalist poo-bahs negotiating the extension of an agreement – the Kyoto Protocol – that no one ever adhered to in the first place. It’s the UN at its purest. Grown-up (jacket and tie) versions of the outside demonstrators and self-serving bureaucrats manipulating large amounts of cash, under the rubric of “climate debt” – the money supposedly owed by energy-belching developed nations to the less fortunate. (Many of the “less fortunate” seem to be staying in my hotel replete with large entourages, security, luxury limousines, etc.)
The number on the table they are jousting over at the moment is a 100 billion dollar international fund through 2020, no small sum for an unproven theory (AGW). The US now appears to be behind it, although there is an element of charade in all this. (The Chinese won’t accede to the transparency demands and everyone else knows it.) Meanwhile, several of the delegates I’ve talked to worry that all this talk of global warming Armageddon is distracting the world from genuine existing and varifiable problems, such as potable water, malaria, etc. Read more.

Climate Cultists Assault Global Warming Skeptic During Live Interview


Aghast that someone dared challenge the sanctity of Al Gore’s holy climate empire, global warming loons pelted journalist Phelim McAleer with objects during a live television interview, proving once again the extreme left’s constant preaching of tolerance doesn’t extend to tolerating the free speech of anyone who disagrees with them.

McAleer has been hounded, assaulted and silenced at every turn during the Copenhagen summit by free-speech hating thugs and their ever enthusiastic supporters – the climate cultists who recoil in horror every time their belief system is questioned.
During a press conference on Monday, McAleer committed the dastardly offense of asking Professor Stephen Schneider a question about the Climategate scandal, an action that was met with an armed response from a UN thug who bandied around threats before kicking McAleer and his cameraman out of the event.
Later in the week, McAleer had the temerity to ask Al Gore a similar question. UN gestapo reacted by yanking his microphone from his hand and disconnecting the wire. Read more.

Lord Monckton reports on Pachauri’s eye opening Copenhagen presentation


The official party shambled in and perched on the blue plastic chairs next to me. Pachauri was just a couple of seats away, so I gave him a letter from me and Senator Fielding of Australia, pointing out that the headline graph in the IPCC’s 2007 report, purporting to show that the rate of warming over the past 150 years had itself accelerated, was fraudulent.

Would he use the bogus graph in his lecture? I had seen him do so when he received an honorary doctorate from the University of New South Wales. I watched and waited.
Sure enough, he used the bogus graph. I decided to wait until he had finished, and ask a question then.
Pachauri then produced the now wearisome list of lies, fibs, fabrications and exaggerations that comprise the entire case for alarm about “global warming”. He delivered it in a tired, unenthusiastic voice, knowing that a growing majority of the world’s peoples – particularly in those countries where comment is free – no longer believe a word the IPCC says.
They are right not to believe. Science is not a belief system. But here is what Pachauri invited the audience in Copenhagen to believe: Read more.

PRINCE CHARLES: EXECUTIVE JET WITH BIG CARBON FOOTPRINT GETS HIM TO CLIMATE CHANGE TALKS

Prince Gore?


Prince Charles travelled to Copenhagen on an executive jet to make a speech on climate change

PRINCE Charles used up seven months’ worth of the average British person’s “carbon footprint” yesterday flying to Copenhagen on an executive jet to make a speech on climate change.

The heir to the throne, who prides himself on his green credentials, cost taxpayers an estimated £12,000 and racked up a 6.486-ton carbon footprint in one day by taking a seven-seater RAF Royal Flight HS125 jet to the summit in the Danish capital.
Charles, who made an impassioned speech to world leaders on the need to agree drastic cuts in carbon emissions, decided against taking a more environmentally-friendly train or scheduled airliner, arguing it was impractical.
“We looked at the possibility of flying scheduled but due to the usual considerations of security, punctuality – we could not afford a delayed or cancelled flight – and practicality, using the Royal Flight was seen as the best option,” his spokesman said.
Similar trips in the last couple of years have cost £12,000. Read more.

Copenhagen climate conference: ministers plan new summit

This pressure group is relentless and determined to move ahead in the face of scandal and lies.
World leaders could put off major decisions on global warming for another six months time amid a warning from Gordon Brown that at the Copenhagen climate conference is threatened with “deadlock”.

The prospect of bringing forward the Mexico meeting was first made by Al Gore, and may present an alternative to deadlock. Photo: REUTERS

The Prime Minister spoke as Governments meeting in Denmark failed to resolve their disputes over how much to cut their emissions, how to prove that those cuts are actually made, and who should pay for the move to a low-carbon economy.

As British officials admitted that the talks remain “ very difficult”, Ed Miliband, the climate change secretary, signalled Britain is prepared to back a move to hold another international climate summit in Mexico City next summer, several months ahead of schedule.
The prospect of bringing forward the Mexico meeting was first made by Al Gore, the former US vice president and environmentalist.

Mr Miliband said bureaucratic wrangling was threatening to exhaust the time available to secure a deal at the Danish meeting.
"We have to find ways of unblocking this procedural wrangling because if we exhaust ourselves and run the clock down we will not get an agreement," he said, adding that he was frustrated at "talking about talks rather than talking."
Achim Steiner, the head of the UN Environment Programme, said that without a real deal, it could be better to defer big decisions until the next summit.
Mr Steiner said: “A meaningless deal in Copenhagen cannot be in anyone’s interests because it locks us into another decade of inadequate action and co-operation so if time runs out there is always the option of stopping the clock and reconvening to get it right. “But the risk is that that the momentum that is so characteristic of these 10 days in Copenhagen might be lost and then the world will struggle to take this further in the next six to 12 months.”  Read more.

At Copenhagen, both rich and developing nations offer concessions


Rriot police push back protesters during a rally outside the venue of the climate talks in Copenhagen. (Thibault Camus/associated Press)

COPENHAGEN -- As President Obama prepared to visit the historic climate conference here, there were signs Wednesday of a break in the impasse between rich and developing nations.

The United States and Japan agreed to make major contributions to the developing world to keep prospects of a deal alive. And the leader of a bloc of African nations said they would accept a smaller -- though still sizable -- package of financial aid, in return for going along with an agreement.
But tear gas hung in the air outside the conference center, as protesters demanding faster and more stringent cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions clashed with police. And, inside, talks were slowed by disagreements within the developing world -- which has proved a more powerful, and more fractious, force than expected.
Some environmentalists expressed hope that Obama's appearance Friday, the final day of the 12-day talks, could help end the two chaotic weeks on a successful note.
"If the pieces are here, President Obama is the only person who can pull them together into an agreement," said Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund. "We expect him to do so."  Read more.