By Anthony Watts
All six parts of the hour-long special aired during prime time Sunday night on Fox News featuring Steve McIntyre and Ross McKittrick are now online below. Both Phil Jones and Michael Mann ducked requests for interviews. I can perhaps understand Jones’ situation, since he has not been giving other interviews, but in Mann’s case he’s been on a media blitz writing op-eds for the Washington Post and giving interviews to dozens more. His bias, (or perhaps cowardice) is showing. If his work is so “robust”, why not defend himself in this venue?
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Parturient montes: nascetur ridiculus mus
From The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley in Copenhagen in the SPPI blog
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”:
Main points: In the Copenhagen Accord, which is operational immediately, the parties “underline that climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our time”; emphasize their “strong political will to urgently combat climate change”; recognize “the scientific view that the increase in global temperature should be below 2 C” and perhaps below 1.5 C; aspire to “cooperate in achieving the peaking of global and national emissions as soon as possible”; acknowledge that eradicating poverty is the “overriding priority of developing countries”; and accept the need to help vulnerable countries - especially the least developed nations, small-island states, and Africa - to adapt to climate change.
Self-imposed emissions targets: All parties will set for themselves, and comply with, emissions targets for 2020, to be submitted to the secretariat by 31 January 2010. Where developing countries are paid to cut their emissions, their compliance will be monitored. Developed countries will financially support less-developed countries to prevent deforestation. Carbon trading may be used. New bureaucracies and funding: Under the supervision of a “High-Level Panel”, developed countries will give up to $30 billion for 2010-12, aiming for $100 billion by 2020, in “scaled up, new and additional, predictable and adequate funding” to developing countries via a “Copenhagen Green Fund”. A “Technology Mechanism” will “accelerate technology development and transfer” to developing countries.
And that’s it. Expensive, yes. Unnecessary, yes. But earth-shaking? No.
The disconnect between the gaseous halations of various grandstanding “world leaders” about the supposedly urgent need to “Save The Planet Now” and the puny outcome of the Copenhagen Non-Event is dazzling. And it is welcome.
For all the rhetoric - or the flatulence that passes for rhetoric these days - it has begun to dawn on the “leaders” of those nations that subject them to regular recall and re-election that the people no longer believe the mad scientists are telling them the truth. And the people are right.
What is more, after the failure of the mainstream news media to report what the malevolent and unpleasant scientists involved in the Climategate affair had written to one another about those with whom they disagreed, or about what they had done to invent, fabricate, contrive, fiddle, tweak, alter, massage, conceal, hide or even destroy scientific data for the sake of protecting and peddling the pseudo-science in which environment correspondents had so readily and so ignorantly believed, the people no longer trust the media.
And that is bad news for a governing class that has come to develop a far-too-cosy relationship with the mainstream media. It is also very bad news for the mainstream media themselves, which are now rapidly losing circulation and ad revenue as the people rightly desert them for the Internet, where - notwithstanding various expensive attempts by the over-funded international Left to interfere with Google and Yahoo searches - the truth is still available if you know where to look.
Copenhagen was the last-chance saloon not for the planet, which does not need saving, but for the UN’s world-government wannabes. They blew it, big-time, by believing their own overspun propaganda about planetary peril and thinking they had “world leaders” where they wanted them. They overreached themselves, and have paid the price.
Even though next year is an el Nino year accompanied by fast-recovering solar activity, 2010 may not, after all, set a new global-temperature record to overtop that which was set in 1998, the year of the Great El Nino. By the time the next yackfest takes place in Mexico City in December 2010, the steam will have gone out of the “global warming” scare. We should not let our guard down, but Copenhagen is more than the end of the beginning for Green fascism: it is the beginning of the end. The eco-Nazis’ attempt at global bureaucratic coup d’etat has failed, and no such attempt is likely to succeed again. Too many of you are watching. Read the blog here.
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Copenhagen: the sweet sound of exploding watermelons
By James Delingpole, UK Telegraph
I take it all back. Copenhagen was worth it, after all - if only for the sphincter-bursting rage its supposed failure has caused among our libtard watermelon chums. (That’s watermelon, as in: green on the outside, red on the inside).
As Damian reports, on Twitter they’re all planning to cleanse Mother Gaia of their polluting presence Jonestown-style.
The Great Moonbat is sounding more unhinged than ever:
Goodbye Africa, goodbye south Asia; goodbye glaciers and sea ice, coral reefs and rainforest. It was nice knowing you. Not that we really cared. The governments which moved so swiftly to save the banks have bickered and filibustered while the biosphere burns.
And Polly Toynbee is blaming the whole fiasco on false consciousness.
Most leaders in Copenhagen were out ahead of their people. Most understand the crisis better than those they represent, promising more sacrifice than their citizens are yet ready to accept - while no doubt praying for some miraculous technological escape.
Sometimes we’re inclined to dismiss Polly as a loveable comedy figure, what with her lovely house in Tuscany contrasting so amusingly with her prolier-than-thou politics, and the never ending japesomeness of her deft, lighter-than-air prose. But you know what? When she reveals her true colours, as she does here, I think she’s really, really scary. Her whole article teeters on the brink of demanding an eco-fascist world government to save us all from ourselves.
She yearns, like a woman wailing for her demon lover, for the righteous apocalypse which will teach us the error of our ways:
What would it take? A tidal wave destroying New York maybe - New Orleans was the wrong people - with London, St Petersburg and Shanghai wiped out all at once.
What she really wants, though, as you see from the plaintive, yearning tone of this sentence is global dictatorship:
As things stand, politics has not enough heft nor authority.
One day, Polly dear. One day.
UPDATE: Christ on a bike! You thought Moonbat and Pol-Pot were barking. Wait till you read Johann Hari’s tearful summation in the Independent.
Throughout the negotiations here, the world’s low-lying island states have clung to the real ideas as a life raft, because they are the only way to save their countries from a swelling sea. It has been extraordinary to watch their representatives - quiet, sombre people with sad eyes - as they were forced to plead for their own existence. They tried persuasion and hard science and lyrical hymns of love for their lands, and all were ignored.
Does he mean the man in the bow-tie from Tuvalu who wept openly for his island’s fate but on closer cross-examination - as Andrew Bolt reported - turned out to live nowhere near Tuvalu (whose sea-levels, in any case, have not risen in several decades)? Read more here.
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After news broke that the US had brokered a non-binding climate deal with Brazil, India, China, and South Africa, activists flocked to the Bella Center in the middle of the night to express their disgust.
Renowned American environmentalist Bill McKibben, founder of the climate action group 350.org, joined the crowds. He wondered if the US was right to elect Obama in 2008.
By Rich Apuzzo, Cincinnati Weather Examiner
If you’re wondering why the national political news focus has been on health care and not on the aftermath of the historic conference in Copenhagen, Denmark which ended less than a week ago...it’s because nothing productive happened there. Even worse, more lies have been exposed from the IPCC report, more agendas uncovered about leaders at the United Nations and the “accord” that was supposedly reached at the 11th hour in Denmark is already falling apart. In addition, the planet continues to cool and we’ll likely see that cooling accelerate in the coming years. I touch on these topics and more in a podcast interview you can listen to here.
Here are just a few of the stories developing since the Copenhagen conference, which cost the United States millions of dollars in travel and accommodations alone and left a huge carbon footprint from 1,200 limousines and hundreds of private jets.
First, it was fitting that President Obama returned to Washington D.C. in a snowstorm. However, aside from Air Force One, he brought little else back from the conference. Here is a story from the UK Guardian.
The accord is already in trouble and may fall apart soon. Just days after the conference ended we have this story from the Financial Times. For what it’s worth, there wasn’t much of an agreement anyway since it was all about the United States and other “wealthy” (and cleaner) countries sending billions of dollars to developing (third-world and more polluted) nations. That’s it, nothing more. There was no science discussed, no sharing of ideas from both sides and certainly no acknowledgement of reality from the leaders of more than 100 countries. Instead, there was an agreement to transfer our hard-earned money to other countries and to meet again in the near future. I want to personally thank every leader involved for this fantastic failure...the best possible outcome of this conference.
But wait, there is much more. It turns out that the head of the UN’s Climate Change panel has some conflicts of interest and stands to make millions of dollars because of the global warming fraud. Here’s the story from the UK Telegraph. Apparently, Dr Rajendra Pachauri has vested interests in a number of companies that benefit greatly from carbon trading...and this is the supposedly unbiased head of a panel on climate change, which I have known all along was a fraud consisting of hand-picked scientists (only 50 to 60, not the 2,500 or more you heard about) who support the global warming (GW) religion.
And it continues with revelations that Wikipedia has (or had) an administrator with a warming bias who routinely edited articles to his world view and rejected editing by those who know the truth. You can read more about this huge Wikipedia scam here and here. There is an additional update here.
I also just read a lengthy but interesting article about the abuse of the “peer-review” process in which climate skeptics had research put on the shelf for months before being approved while research that supported global warming was fast-tracked for publication. Read that scary account here.
One journalist who was a big GW believer has now seen the light and discusses it in this article. Remember, all of the above have happened since the end of the Copenhagen conference, and we’re not finished yet.
A new study indicates that CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) and Cosmic Rays may be the real culprit in any warming and cooling we have seen in recent decades, and you can read that here. No matter what the cause or causes, one thing is clear. We really don’t know how or why our climate changes the way it does. This is something that scientists are still trying to figure out...but nothing is “settled” except the fact that we just don’t know.
You think that’s enough? Well...there’s more. The State Climatologist in Texas found a HUGE error in the IPCC’s latest report concerning the melting of glaciers. You have been hearing that most glaciers will disappear by 2050, right? Did you know that the original report listed a date that was 200 to 300 years later and that the study quoted by the IPCC was never peer-reviewed? The shocking details here.
Remember that arctic ice which was supposedly melting away? Well, we know Al Gore got that horribly wrong, but since I am highlighting new articles just in the past few days as the Copenhagen conference collapsed, I won’t go over that again, but I need to let you know that a new study shows that we had much less ice thousands of years ago and what we’re seeing now (ice levels have returned to normal levels) is nothing unusual in earth’s history. Read the highlights of that breaking news here.
Finally, the sick scare tactics of the GW alarmists and worshipers continue with this from a company that should fold up its tent and go home...Build-A-Bear. Check out their pathetic attempt to frighten children here.
The party is over for Al Gore and all the corrupt scientists involved in Climate Gate, the IPCC, the Hadley Climatic Research Unit, and in some departments at NASA, NOAA / NCDC and Penn State University.
This may be the Merriam-Webster definition of Failure, but I think we can shorten that to: Copenhagen!
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From Global Warming Believer To Skeptic
By Bradley Fikes, NC Times
A few years ago, I accepted global warming theory with few doubts. I wrote several columns for this paper condemning what I thought were unfair attacks by skeptics and defending the climate scientists.
Boy, was I naive.
Since the Climategate emails and documents revealed active collusion to thwart skeptics and even outright fraud, I’ve been trying to correct the record of my earlier foolishness. In one of those columns, I even wrote: ‘And see Real Climate (www.realclimate.org) for global warming science without the political spin.”
In fact, Real Climate was and is nothing more than the house organ of global warming activists, concerned more with politics than with science.
My mistake was assuming only the purest of motives of the global warming alarmists, while assuming the worst of the skeptics. In fact, the soi-disant moralists of the global warming movement can also exploit their agenda for profit.
Climategate jolted me into confronting the massive fraud and deception by top global warming scientists, who were in a position to twist the peer-review process in their favor, and did so shamelessly.
Yet still most media reports desperately minimize Climategate, saying that it doesn’t taint the massive research supporting global warming theory. To them I say, how do you know that? Have you investigated how much of that research was published due to the manipulation of these unethical and fraudulent scientists? Do you know how much research that goes against the global warming activist claims was unfairly suppressed?
Until all this is known, it’s not possible to say with any confidence how much of global warming theory will remain after all the fraud and deceit has been removed. And until climate science is cleaned up, it doesn’t deserve the worship so many in the media unthinkingly give its tainted practitioners.
Read more and comments here.
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Update: Who is Climategate’s Deep Throat?
By Mark S. Zablocki, Homeland Securiy Newswire
Climategate Outside hacker, internal mole or whistle-blower ?
New information reveals that the now-famous break-in of the computers at the University of East Anglia - which revealed that in a few instances leading climatologists seemingly massaged data to show more global warming and discussed excluding contradictory research - in fact, may not have been the act of an intruder. A detailed analysis of the East Anglia’s files by Canadian network engineer discloses that the emails and documents were likely leaked by an internal source, spotlighting a perennial but often neglected threat - old-fashioned espionage or whistle-blowing.
The current controversy, over the validity of scientific global warming modeling and the legitimacy of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW), has been amplified by the recent release of hundreds of e-mails and other documents allegedly purloined from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, in England. The common accusation has been that the e-mails and documents were accessed by a hacker from outside the organization.
Countless hours of broadcasting time have filled the airwaves with talk, not only of the contents of the e-mails, but also with questions about how the intruder was able to gain access to the university’s supposedly secure computer system. All this chatter, however may well be misdirected. Canadian network engineer Lance Levsen, the UNIX systems administrator for the PW Group, a major Canadian publishing firm, has generated a detailed forensic analysis of the released e-mails and files.
The Saskatoon, Saskatchewan-based Levsen re-created the e-mail distribution system at UAE over the last ten years, capturing system changes by the university’s e-mail administrators during that time. Using information contained within the files that constitute the e-mails, as well as the filenames themselves, his modeling concludes and identifies the source for the leaked documents as an internal source within the University of East Anglia. The alleged hacker, Levson conludes, must have been someone with administrative, or root privileges, to UEA’s secure computer systems.
Levsen writes that the email files were stored on a single server, as indicated by their respective filenames. The sequential, but not consecutive, numbering is actually not random, as first appears, and has been reported. The filenames are actually UNIX epoch timestamps, which create a filename based on the number of seconds since midnight, 1 January, 1970. What this means is that the files were originally saved on an archiving UNIX e-mail server, at East Anglia.
Additionally, since the protocol in use for these e-mails was POP3 (Post Office Protocol v.3), these emails were later assembled onto another, second computer for archiving and storage. One of the features of POP3 is that the emails themselves are downloaded to the client machine, and then expunged from the original server. This means that the e-mails and documents were archived on the second server, and this second server, where the e-mails would have received the filenames they bear now.
The file structure of the original FOI2009.zip file that was released via the Internet also gives clues to the origin of the leak. The copy obtained by the Homeland Security News Wire shows a directory structure which is consistent with the archiving of important documents.This system of archiving the e-mails and documents on the second server, is, according to Levsen, fully consistent with the normal data storage compliance practices that would be conducted by a Freedom of Information (FOI) compliance officer, at a public corporation (like the University of East Anglia) in the United Kingdom.
This being the case, Levsen concludes:
For the hacker to have collected all of this information s/he would have required extraordinary capabilities. The hacker would have to crack an Administrative file server to get to the emails and crack numerous workstations, desktops, and servers to get the documents. The hacker would have to map the complete UEA network to find out who was at what station and what services that station offered. S/he would have had to develop or implement exploits for each machine and operating system without knowing beforehand whether there was anything good on the machine worth collecting.
In short, Levsen’s conclusion is that the e-mail and data leaks were not the result of an intrusion, they were an internal leak. Climategate was not precipitated by a hacker, but by a whistle-blower.
All this illustrates what is probably the most difficult and overlooked part of a network security that is the people within the organization, and their trustworthiness.
An old Jewish proverb relates that Locks keep out only the honest, often supplemented by a more recent wit who related There is not a lock made that can’t be picked. There is always someone who has the key, but exactly who is that person, and have copies been made ? Computer security is often only as good as the personnel and human procedures designed to protect its integrity. The evolving East Angliasaga highlights this recurring challenge.
Mark S. Zablocki is the Managing Editor of Homeland Security News Wire
By Gerald Warner
When your attempt at recreating the Congress of Vienna with a third-rate cast of extras turns into a shambles, when the data with which you have tried to terrify the world is daily exposed as ever more phoney, when the blatant greed and self-interest of the participants has become obvious to all beholders, when those pesky polar bears just keep increasing and multiplying - what do you do?
No contest: stop issuing three rainforests of press releases every day, change the heading to James Bond-style “Do not distribute” and “leak” a single copy, in the knowledge that human nature is programmed to interest itself in anything it imagines it is not supposed to see, whereas it would bin the same document unread if it were distributed openly.
After that, get some unbiased, neutral observer, such as the executive director of Greenpeace, to say: “This is the single most important piece of paper in the world today.” Unfortunately, the response of all intelligent people will be to fall about laughing; but it was worth a try ‘ everybody loves a tryer - and the climate alarmists are no longer in a position to pick and choose their tactics.
But boy! Was this crass, or what? The apocalyptic document revealing that even if the Western leaders hand over all the climate Danegeld demanded of them, appropriately at the venue of Copenhagen, the earth will still fry on a 3C temperature rise is the latest transparent scare tactic to extort more cash from taxpayers. The danger of this ploy, of course, is that people might say “If we are going to be chargrilled anyway, what is the point of handing over billions - better to get some serious conspicuous consumption in before the ski slopes turn into saunas.”
This “single most important piece of paper in the world” comes, presumably, from an authoritative and totally neutral source? Yes, of course. It’s from the - er - UN Framework Committee on Climate Change that is - er - running the Danegeld Summit. Some people might be small-minded enough to suggest this paper has as much authority as a “leaked” document from Number 10 revealing that life would be hell under the Tories.
This week has been truly historic. It has marked the beginning of the landslide that is collapsing the whole AGW imposture. The pseudo-science of global warming is a global laughing stock and Copenhagen is a farce. In the warmist camp the Main Man is a railway engineer with huge investments in the carbon industry. That says it all. The world’s boiler being heroically damped down by the Fat Controller. Al Gore, occupant of the only private house that can be seen from space, so huge is its energy consumption, wanted to charge punters $1,200 to be photographed with him at Copenhagen. There is a man who is really worried about the planet’s future.
If there were not $45 trillion of Western citizens’ money at stake, this would be the funniest moment in world history. What a bunch of buffoons. Not since Neville Chamberlain tugged a Claridge’s luncheon bill from his pocket and flourished it on the steps of the aircraft that brought him back from Munich has a worthless scrap of paper been so audaciously hyped. There was one good moment at Copenhagen, though: some seriously professional truncheon work by Danish Plod on the smellies. Otherwise, this event is strictly for Hans Christian Andersen. See post here.
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Climate deal falls short of expectations
By Glenn Thrush and Loise Roug, Politico
The climate deal reached between U.S, China and other great powers on Friday night is so vague, hastily hatched and non-binding President Obama isn’t even sure he’ll be required to sign it. “You know, it raises an interesting question as to whether technically there’s actually a signature. It’s not a legally binding agreement, I don’t know what the protocols are,” said a bleary-eyed Obama, before hopping in Air Force One for the trip back to Washington.
Even as he left, it wasn’t clear that the pact Obama described as “meaningful” would even pass muster with the European Union - or attract enough votes with the 193-nation COP 15 conference to become an official declaration.
“It’s a catastrophe,” said Dan Joergensen, a member of the European delegation. “We’re so far away from the criteria that was set up in order to call it a success, and those weren’t really that ambitious to start with.”
Obama told reporters he was able to extract a first-ever commitment by India and China to subject their internal monitoring of emissions to international scrutiny, a move he had earlier tied to American participation in a $100 billion-per-year fund for poor nations.
“Those commitments will be subject to international consultation and analysis” similar to World Trade Organization rules but “will not be legally binding,” said Obama. “It will allow each country to show to the world what [they] are doing.”
But the agreement - reached in Friday night talks with leaders of China, India, South Africa and Brazil - was more notable for what it doesn’t accomplish than what it does, an inconvenient truth Obama ruefully acknowledged to reporters.
“This is going to be hard,” Obama said. “This is hard within countries; it’s going to be even harder between countries. And one of the things that I’ve felt very strongly about during the course of this year is that hard stuff requires not paralysis, but it requires going ahead and making the best of the situation that you’re in.”
He conceded that no more specific deal - much less a legally binding one - was possible until the issue of “trust” between industrialized and developing nations was resolved. The agreement contained none of the specific emissions targets European and African negotiators had hoped to nail down, simply a broad-brush promise by the countries in the room to cap the overall global temperature rise to two degrees Celsius and provide a written record of their planned reductions.
It’s unclear how many nations, particularly poorer countries who felt shut out of the process, were included in the final deal or how they will vote if the deal is put to one. It’s also unclear how the president’s half-a-loaf approach will sit with a deadlocked Senate or the Africans, Europeans and Asians who view him as the quintessential 21st Century leader.
“Squarely the blame is on President Obama. When you look very carefully and dig into what happened, you find that there is no difference whatsoever between President Obama and President Bush, except one of them tells it as it is,” said Lumumba Di-Aping, the chief negotiator of the G77 bloc of developing countries, in an interview with POLITICO. He added: “This deal confirms what we have said about the lack not only of transparency but the undemocratic bent of developed nations’ leaders. “It is a mockery.”
But administration officials painted a different picture, claiming Obama playing an extraordinarily direct - even tactile - diplomatic role, with the president demanding to be admitted to a closed meeting of other countries over the objections of a Chinese protocol officer. Read more here.