UPDATE: Lord Christopher Monckton reports from Cancun that the Obama administration has quietly committed 1.5% of our GDP to the world climate crusade. Please contact your senators and congressmen/women and protest this misguided and even “illegal” action. The senate has to ratify any such agreements according to our constitution and congress has to approve funding.

Thanks to Wikileaks, everyone here in the Manana Republic of Mexico now knows just how much bullying and arm-twisting the administration of Barack Obama in the United States applied to various countries around the world so that they would (and did) sign up to the Copenhagen climate accord.

Without that pressure, nothing at all would have happened at Copenhagen this time last year, and “the Process” - the interminable round of flatulent annual climate conferences in exotic locations at taxpayers’ expense - would have tipped into the gulch forever.

The hard Left has learned the hard way that democracies do not welcome it and, in the end, will reject it. So the climate extremists have abandoned last year’s attempt, in the now-defunct September 15 Copenhagen Treaty draft, to install overnight an unelected world government consisting only of themselves, with unlimited powers of taxation, economic and environmental regulation without representation, as well as control of all formerly free markets worldwide, all in the name of Saving The Planet (which, of course, was triumphantly Saved 2000 years ago and does not need to be Saved again).

Instead, the Martini Marxists dancing the night away doing the Cancun Can-Can with the 25 pneumatic bunny girls in the newly-opened Playboy Casino on the ocean-front strip in Cancun have decided to copy the bureaucrats of the European Union, whose crafty, crabwise coup d’etat over the last three or four decades has transferred all real political power, little by little, treaty by treaty, to the dismal dictatorship of Brussels.

Though there is a toothless democratic fig-leaf in the shape of the European “Parliament”, all decisions in the EU are in fact taken by a couple of dozen faceless, overpaid Kommissars (that is the official German mot juste for them) - faceless because they meet behind closed doors and then emerge to promulgate their “Directives”: on average, one every three hours, day and night, Sundays and holidays included, 365 days a year, 366 days on leap-years.

In Europe, democracy has gone. Perma-Socialism has quietly supplanted it. If demolishing democracy worked there, the enviro-zombs’ reasoning goes, it will work on a worldwide scale, if only the crumbling pretext for global tyranny - the supposed need to prevent catastrophic “global warming” - can be kept going for long enough even though most ordinary voters (in those nations lucky enough to have them) have seen through the scam long since.

The Process works like this. A multitude of long, inspissate, obfuscatory, obnubilating, obscurantist draft agreements are circulated, always a day or two late for delegates to find out what they have actually agreed to. The daily timetables for the various “working” sessions of the conference are never available until breakfast-time on the day, allowing no scope for planning the day. By these means, most delegates are kept permanently and completely in the dark.

Here is a typical paragraph from one of these leaden documents:

“The SBSTA welcomed the report (FCCC/SBSTA/2010/INF.10) on the second workshop of the work programme on revising the “Guidelines for the preparation of national communications by Parties included in Annex I to the Convention Part I: UNFCCC reporting guidelines on annual inventories” (hereinafter referred to as the UNFCCC Annex I reporting guidelines), held in Bonn, Germany, from 3 to 4 November 2010, which was organized by the secretariat as requested by the SBSTA at its thirtieth session.”

Try to read several hundred pages of this stuff. It simply isn’t possible. And that, of course, is the idea. This is the Mushroom-Growers’ Management Method writ large: keep them in the dark and feed them plenty of sh*t.

What these ramblings conceal is the remarkably rapid rate at which dozens - no, hundreds - of new bureaucracies are being created as The Process grinds on. As anyone at the Playboy Casino will tell you, “somebody gotta pay for all those lights.” And that somebody is you, gentle taxpayer. No one has yet managed to discover just how much these hundreds of new supranational climate-change bureaucracies are costing us. That is an international state secret - until Wikileaks gets hold of the figures, of course.

Follow the Cancun carnival here.

AFTER nearly two weeks of snow and sub zero temperatures rivaling those of Siberia, the old joke about global warming being a good thing has had a new lease of life. So what has happened to doom-laden predictions of the world heating up as glaciers melt?

FIRST the good news. These bitter winters aren’t going to last forever. The bad news is that they will go on for the next 30 years as we have entered a mini ice age.

So says author Gavin Cooke in his book Frozen Britain. He began writing it in 2008 and it was published last year when experts were scratching their heads at the cause of the bitter winter of 2009/10 which brought England to a standstill. Some said it was a one-off event, with experts predicting snowfall becoming increasingly rare.

Now, 12 months on, the current sub zero spell makes last year look just a bit chilly. Just like kids enjoying ‘snow days’ off school, Gavin ought to be delighted with the cold snap. After all, he can justifiably say ‘I told you so. But he’s as glum as the rest of us.

“I’m getting sick of it myself,” he said.

When Gavin, 48, of Monkseaton, North Tyneside, began writing the book the acclaimed documentary ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ by former US Vice President Al Gore about global warming, was still fresh in the memory. It detailed how carbon emissions were contributing towards the melting of the polar ice caps causing the world to heat up.

Like Gore, Gavin’s interest in climate change went back to college when he studied energy and environment at what was then Newcastle Polytechnic.

He said: “The more I’ve looked into it the more fascinating it has become.”

He is quick to admit that he hasn’t got the scientific background of those who have spent a lifetime studying climate change. What he has brought to the table is his enthusiasm for the subject, his tracking of the arguments and a desire to make sense of a blizzard of information, so to speak.

To simplify, the basis of his theory seems to be sunspot activity, or rather the lack of it. Sunspots are dark, cooler patches on the sun’s surface that come and go in cycles.

They were absent in the 17th century - a period called the “Maunder Minimum” named after the scientist, Edward Maunder, who spotted it. Crucially, it has been observed that the periods when the sun’s activity is high and low are related to warm and cool climatic periods. The weak sun in the 17th century coincided with the so-called Little Ice Age. The Sun took a dip between 1790 and 1830 and the earth also cooled a little. It was weak during the cold Iron Age, and active during the warm Bronze Age.

Throughout the 20th century the sun was unusually active, peaking in the 1950s and the late 1980s. Recently sunspot activity has all but disappeared.

Gavin said: “It is the sun’s energy which keeps the earth warm and the amount of energy the earth receives isn’t always the same. I’ve looked at the evidence for global warming and while I understand and agree with a lot of it, there has been a lot missed out. A major factor is the activity of the sun.”

There is also solar wind - streams of particles from the sun - which are at their weakest since records began. In addition, the Sun’s magnetic axis is tilted at an unusual degree. This is not just a scientific curiosity. It could affect everyone on earth and force what for many is unthinkable - a reappraisal of the science behind global warming.

It was thought that carbon dioxide emissions rather than the sun was the bigger effect on climate change. Now a major re-think is taking place.

The upshot is that Gavin is not alone in predicting we face another 30 frozen years, each getting progressively colder than the last.

Particularly hard hit will be Britain and Northern Europe and it is only after the 30-year period that the effects of man-made global warming will kick in. He said: “When I was writing this it was new. To be honest I was kind of winging it, piecing it together. But recently there has been a sea change among some pretty significant figures.”

Glascow Scotland - the best way to travel this year once again

They include renowned international climatologist Mike Lockwood of the University of Reading. In 2007 he said the cyclical change in the Sun’s energy was not responsible for climate change. In April this year, writing in the New Scientist Magazine, he did a U-turn and said it was. After a study, he and his team concluded that recent cold British winters have coincided neatly with the biggest fall off in the sun’s activity for a century, contradicting the accepted view that carbon dioxide emissions and other greenhouse gases are likely to warm our climate.

Gavin laughed: “Looking at the weather outside, sometimes I really wish I was wrong. But we had better get used to it.”

Frozen Britain: How the Big Freeze of 2010 is the Beginning of Britain’s New Mini Ice Age by Gavin Cooke is published by John Blake Publishing Ltd and is out now priced at 7.99 pounds. Also available on Amazon. See post here.

In Cancun, the activists have traded their sackcloth and ashes for sun-wear and tropical breezes

This global-warming/climate change stuff is a great racket. Over in England right now, they’re locked in the jaws of a very early freeze-up. The roads are iced, the plows overworked, and people are angry. But there’s a precious subset of the English population that are not enduring the frigid and premature torments of a northern winter. They’re the climate-change activists, bureaucrats, politicians, puppeteers and NGOs - the class of professional alarmists who’ve been banging on about global warming for close on two decades now. This bunch has exempted itself from the rigors of English November, traded their sackcloth and ashes for sun-wear and tropical breezes.

They’re toasting their pasty, righteous, caterwauling epidermi on the golden hot sands of Cancun, Mexico, flopped out amid the bikinis and barbeques while they attempt to spell out a future of rationing and want for all the rest of us. Flown there on taxpayer or foundation money, meeting up with all their buddies from the bust that was Copenhagen, the grim, grey priesthood of “sustainable” living are convening in one of the great sybaritic strips of the entire Western world. The monks are in the cathouse.

But hey, if you’re going to do Armageddon - do it in Cancun. The apocalypse at the all-you-can-eat buffet. Parasailing to Armageddon.

Does not one of the great minds decoding next century’s weather see the brain-splitting contradiction of holding a conference warning of the imminent threat of global warming in a venue that mainly exists because people fly there to get warmer? That’s right, people spend money to fly to Cancun mainly because it’s warmer there than where they live. In essence, Cancun is what the global warming crowd are, otherwise, warning us about.

Perhaps at some level of instinct they do know. Perhaps they know that this show of theirs is on its last legs, the jig is up, the great game is over. After the unsuccessful 2009 Copenhagen conference, they had to have realized that even Al Gore and all Al Gore’s grim little men would never be able to put the whole rickety, tendentious machine back together again. After Copenhagen, and especially after Climategate, even the true believers must have lost heart. Witness this year’s confabulation. Notice who’s not there?

Last year, even the Golden One, Barack Obama, swept dramatically into Denmark. It was the venue for all the A-list politicians. Prime ministers and presidents were everywhere. This year, the world’s leaders have stayed away. Even the press, whose Cancun presence is down considerably compared to Copenhagen, smells the decay of a cause.

Some countries have made it clear that they no longer are even pretending to play the global-warming abatement game. “Japan will not inscribe its target under the Kyoto protocol on any conditions or under any circumstances,” declared Jun Arima, deputy director-general for environmental affairs at Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry. Given that his was the country where the Kyoto Protocol was signed, it’s a powerful blow to the Gore-ish forces. Perhaps Japan will get one of those cute Fossil of the Day Awards that Canada so excels at collecting.

Could this be the last global warming conference? It’s possible. The environmentalists and the activists have had a tin ear and a surplus of righteousness from the beginning. But there’s something extravagantly out of key, even for them, in holding their great “Save the Planet” revival at Cancun - up to now famous for Spring Break and as a hangout for louche Hollywood types and cleavage researchers. It signals they’ve lost the will to pretend. And with Japan having walked away from the whole idea of Kyoto, it’s hard to see how they’ll work up the steam for another holiday next year.

Rex Murphy offers commentary weekly on CBC TV’s The National, and is host of CBC Radio’s Cross Country Checkup.

See post here.

Average temperatures or temperature ranges are often used as a simple proxy for climate. In combination with some description of rainfall, they encapsulate the essentials: in the Mediterranean it is typically hot and dry in summer and cooler and wetter in winter, and a continental climate is hot and dry in summer and cold with snow in winter, for example. But quantifying climate more precisely is fraught with difficulty.

Records kept over the years give us historical figures to make comparisons between average temperatures then and now. This sounds simple, but the very concept of an average temperature has no simple definition. First, we have to realise that temperature is what is known as an intensive property of matter. This simply means that it does not depend on the nature or size of the material for which it is measured.

So, for example, air and a body of water may have the same measured temperature at a particular moment, but their behaviour is very different. Air has a low thermal capacity (it take little heat to change its temperature), while water has a high thermal capacity and its temperature changes relatively slowly. In the present long cold spell in western Europe, ponds and lakes need a period of consistently sub-zero temperatures before they begin to freeze. Equally, as air temperatures rise, the ice may take many days to melt. A given volume of water has a very different thermal energy content than the same volume of water. This can be easily quantified and, in contrast to temperature, is an extensive property.

When trying to average temperatures, the first obvious rule is that the measurements must all be of the same material: you cannot average air and water temperatures, for example, and get a meaningful answer. This in itself is pretty obvious and, in discussing climate change, air and water temperatures are considered separately. However, the difficulties with averaging do not stop there.

Even if temperatures are measured under carefully controlled conditions as expected for official records, they will fluctuate quite rapidly depending on wind direction and strength, cloud cover, time of day etc. The convention is to measure a maximum and minimum shade temperature each day. These readings can then be used to provide average maxima and minima per month or year, or combined to give an overall ‘average temperature’. And the figures for individual stations can themselves be combined to give national, regional and global averages.

These figures tell us something, of course, but the desire to quantify also obscures the detail. Say, for example, that place X has an average maximum temperature of +15C and an average minimum of +5 and place Y registers +25 and -5. Both have an overall average of +10, but the actual climate experienced would be quite different. In a similar way, measured air temperatures in the shade bear little relationship to the apparent temperature in the sun. Although the measured shade air temperature might be the same whether or not the sun is shining, the effect on the Earth’s surface of the sunlight is significant and, once the ground has been warmed, it will release its heat at night to keep the air somewhat warmer, at least temporarily.

Simple averaging can be deceptive in other ways as well. Depending on the weather conditions or time of year, either the maximum or minimum temperature might be more typical of the day as a whole, yet both are implicitly given equal weight. Nevertheless, it is arguable that such issues are not important when comparing time series of measured temperatures. For example, the Central England Temperature record (CET) is the longest continual record available, with monthly means being recorded from 1659 and daily means logged from 1722. Looking at this it is easy to see the recorded range and note that temperatures do indeed appear to have been higher in the latter part of the 20th Century, although they have dipped again since 2000. It is the changes which are significant rather than the absolute values, provided that all measurements are strictly comparable.

This, of course, introduces yet another concern. The same instruments would not have been used in the 17th Century as 300 years later and, with the best will in the world, it is difficult to guarantee that no artefacts have been introduced. Equally, it is hardly conceivable that the surroundings of the measuring stations will be unchanged over this period (although hopefully none of the weather stations is now in an urban area, on tarmac or near heat sources as some have been found to be in other countries).

A final problem to bring up with averages is that, to avoid giving a misleading picture, data should be taken from stations spread evenly over the Earth’s surface. This is certainly not the case. In particular, there are large areas of the Arctic and Antarctic with no data being collected. The same is true for the open oceans, where collecting surface water temperatures reliably is enough of a challenge, without trying to measure air temperatures.

What we are left with then is an incomplete record of imperfect data, from which conclusions about climate change are drawn. This is the basis of the ‘global warming’ message. But actually the concept of global average temperature is again a little misleading, since the summary of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report shows that the warming pattern is regional rather than global. Warming over the 20th Century was recorded on all continents apart from Antarctica, but was considerably greater in the northern than the southern hemisphere. Given the greater proportion of ocean in the south, this is not surprising.

But global averages are still the main measure and this is the time of year when preliminary conclusions are drawn about the current year, as the annual meeting of the UN Convention on Climate Change takes place. So far, the message being put out by the World Meteorological Organization is that 2010 is likely to be among the warmest three on record. Based on the temperature record, this is doubtless correct, but how meaningful is this?

The WMO points towards record high temperatures in Russia, China and Greenland to support its case. Meanwhile anyone mentioning record lows and pointing out that new records are set nearly every day somewhere in the world is told that this means nothing. In practical terms, life has to go on and adapt to whatever climatic conditions turn out to be. Measuring temperatures remains a useful thing to do, but we must be careful not to read too much into the average figures. And we should never forget that, whatever the temperature is, we still have only a hazy idea about what controls it. Read more here.

Icecap Note: See here how even James Hansen agrees.

The annual climate summit opened in Cancun, Mexico, this week. A few days earlier, while releasing a new report, Climate Change and India: A sectoral and regional analysis for the 2030s, environment and forests minister Jairam Ramesh emphasised, “It is imperative” that India has “sound, evidence-based assessments on the impacts of climate change”. The report claims that India will soon be able to forecast the timing and intensity of future monsoons that are so critical to its agricultural base.

Could 250 of India’s top scientists be wrong when they say their computers will soon be able to predict summer monsoon rainfall during the 2030s, based on projected CO2 trends? Do scenarios generated by climate models really constitute “sound, evidence-based assessments”? We do not believe it is yet possible to forecast future monsoons, despite more than two centuries of scientific research, or the claims and efforts of these excellent scientists. The Indian summer monsoonal rainfall remains notoriously unpredictable, because it is determined by the interaction of numerous changing and competing factors, including: ocean currents and temperatures, sea surface temperature and wind conditions in the vast Indian and Western Pacific Ocean, phases of the El Nino Southern Oscillation in the equatorial Pacific, the Eurasian and Himalayan winter snow covers, solar energy output, and even wind direction and speed in the equatorial stratosphere some 30-50 km aloft.

Relying on computer climate models has one well-known side effect: Garbage in, gospel out. Current gospel certainly says CO2 rules the climate, but any role played by CO2 in monsoon activity is almost certainly dwarfed by other, major influences. Computer climate models have simply failed to confirm current climate observations, or project future climatic changes and impacts.

Both Indian and global monsoons have declined in strength and intensity over the last 50 years, and this reality largely contradicts climate model forecasts that say monsoonal rainfalls will increase. It is equally well known that climate models have been unable to replicate the decadal to multi-decadal variations of monsoonal rainfalls. Fred Kucharski and 21 other climate modellers challenge the alleged CO2-monsoon linkage. Using World Climate Research Programme climate model analyses, they conclude that “the increase of greenhouse gases concentrations has had little impact on the [observed] decadal Indian monsoonal rainfall variability in the twentieth century.” Perhaps the Indian scientists missed their report.

No climate models predicted the severe drought conditions for the 2009 Indian monsoon season - followed by the extended wetness of the 2010 season. The inability to foresee this 30-50% precipitation swing in most regions underscores how far we really are from being able to forecast monsoons, for next year, 2030 or the end of the century. Another recent analysis, by scientists from National Technical University in Athens, found that computer model projections did not agree with actual observations at 55 locations around the world. Computer forecasts for large spatial areas, like the contiguous US, were even more out of sync with actual observations than is the case with specific locations!

Ramesh says India hopes to offer a middle ground and present a less “petulant and obstructionist” perception during climate negotiations in Cancun. But if he believes the new report and claims of imminent forecasting ability will make this happen, we fear he is mistaken. “What-if” scenarios based on CO2-driven computer models are hardly a sound basis for negotiations, energy policies, agricultural planning or changed perceptions.

The impotence of current climate models is not surprising. As climate scientists, we know computer climate models are very useful for analysing how Earth’s complex climate system works. But models available today are simply not ready for prime time, when it comes to predicting future climate, monsoons or droughts. Our understanding of how weather and climate vary from year to year is still very immature, and it will be years (if not decades) before we resolve fundamental questions of how various forces interact to cause those changes.

Computer models still cannot accurately simulate or predict regional phenomena like the Indian summer monsoon rainfall. Even when model outputs agree with certain observations, we cannot be certain that the models did so for the right reasons. Considering the myriad factors that influence and alter weather and climate regimes, it is clear that climate models cannot make meaningful projections about future events, especially if they focus on the single factor of rising atmospheric CO2 levels.

Science and society will pay a very dear price, if political agendas continue to generate and legitimise false and pretentious computer outputs that have no basis in reality. How much better it would be if researchers focused on improving our ability to accurately forecast monsoons, droughts and other events just a few weeks or months in advance. That would really give farmers and others a chance to adapt, minimise damages and actually benefit from being better prepared.

Willie Soon is a solar physicist and climate scientist at Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics. Madhav Khandekar is a former research scientist from Environment Canada and served as an expert reviewer for IPCC’s 2007 reports.