Global Warming Skeptics' Trifecta

Three setbacks befell global warming partisans last week. For skeptics, it was like winning the trifecta at the race track.

First, Phil Jones, erstwhile head of the Climate Research Unit at England’s East Anglia University and the man at the center of the “Climategate” scandal, admitted in a BBC interview that there has been no global warming since 1995.
Not only that, he also said he now accepts the view that the Medieval “Warm Period,” which covered much of Europe and North America was probably warmer than today’s temperatures in those areas. It’s pretty tough to say that was caused by man since the Industrial Revolution came nearly a millennium later.
In that interview, Professor Jones admitted to being a poor record keeper. It seems that much base data at the CRU, which was a clearing house on “climate change,” was now nowhere to be found.

Defenders of the global warming theory have developed a new party line, to wit: All those snowstorms this month are weather, whereas climate is made up of weather phenomena over a period of time. Ok. So, what does that make 15 years of no global warming, weather or climate?
The second setback for the warmists was the announcement by Yvo de Boer that on July 1 he will resign his post as executive secretary of the United Nations’ Framework Convention on Climate Change. For three years, the Dutch bureaucrat has headed this body which organized the failed Copenhagen convention last December. During that time he pushed and prodded member states to pledge to make deep reductions in emissions of “greenhouse gases,” in the belief that long-term global warming was a reality and was caused by industrial production.
In Copenhagen and previous such conferences, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) mixed science with politics. Many IPCC bureaucrats wanted to use the “settled science” argument to force industrialized countries to transfer huge amounts of money to less developed ones, with the UN overseeing it, a step toward world government. These dreams evaporated in Copenhagen.
While all this was going on, the Obama branch of the global warming party suffered the third global warming setback, a possible mortal blow to its cap-and-trade scheme, whereby limits would be set on how much carbon dioxide and other gasses could be emitted by business and industry. Those who went over the limit could buy “credits” from those who were under it. These would be brokered by companies such as the one in which Al Gore is an investor. The government would get a large new revenue pool and the brokers would get richer. Alas for it and them, last week, three prominent members of a business lobby for curbing greenhouse gas emissions, BP, Conoco Philips and Caterpillar, withdrew. Read more.