Political Climate
Dec 19, 2009
Pelosi’s ‘angry mobs’

By Jane Jamison, American Thinker

Pick your hypocrisy at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen.

Examples are everywhere:

--"Climate-gate" in the two weeks leading up to the conference, has shown the entire basis for the meeting, anthropogenic global warming, is fraudulent science. 

--16,500 delegates and reporters, 152 world leaders, and approximately 150,000 protestors, celebrities and other climate clingers have dieseled in on jets from all over the world to ride in limousines, scarf scallops and caviar, and preach to the rest of us working stiffs about wasting energy and eating too much meat.

--U.S. taxpayers are the biggest supporters of the United Nations ($4.3B in 2005) and pay the salaries of the President, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Senator Kerry and the 20-odd members of Congress who are attending the U.N. climate conference. 

So, American taxpayers (who are back home struggling to stay employed, or are still having to pay taxes even if they are unemployed) are paying for the political elite and enviro-effete to do Denmark.  Every other speech at the conference is critical of capitalism and stingy Americans.

-- American taxpayers are being told by Third World countries and the Obama administration they must be “punished” for polluting the world.  Secretary Clinton has just told the conference the U.S. might help raise $100 billion a YEAR to developing nations for the “damages” the poor countries have suffered or will suffer from global warming. 

--This summer, House Speakeress Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) attacked the Tea Party protestors who were criticizing the proposed health care reform bill. “They’re carrying swastikas and symbols like that to a town meeting on health care.” The speaker inferred the senior citizens, war veterans and taxpayers were “Astro-turf” protestors paid by the Republican party to attend town hall meetings, not a “grassroots” movement.

While Tea Party activists did pack meetings all summer long, carried signs and were loud at times, the only violence that occurred is when SEIU security guards hired by a congressman assaulted a Tea Party spokesman.

Madame Speaker Pelosi has arrived in Copenhagen with her entourage and has said absolutely nothing about the ruckus and the law-breaking going on just outside the conference center. 

Crowds of “global warming” gooney-tunes, perhaps as many as 100,000 of them, have been stopping traffic and destroying property all week in Copenhagen.  They have thrown bricks, broken windows, and assaulted a news reporter who is not sympathetic to “their” climate cause.  They launched fireworks at police officers.  Approximately 2,000 arrests have been made. 

The GreenPeace environ-nutsy organization is funding many aspects of the protest.

Though the mainstream media steer cameras away from the images, there are large groups carrying Communist party flags, swastikas images, and signs supporting worldwide socialism.

We must assume that by her silence, that Speaker Nancy Pelosi approves of the communist, socialist, Marxist violent eco-thugs in Copenhagen because these angry mobs are on “her” side.

See more here.



Dec 18, 2009
Lord Monckton barred from Copenhagen conference - pushed to the ground by security

By Anthony Watts, Watts Up With That

This was the scene yesterday in Copenhagen. As you can see the scene is rather agitated with lots of police action, including use of billy clubs. As of this writing, no pictures or video is available of Lord Monckton’s account below. Hopefully somebody in the crowd will post some. I wish him well. I’ll also be glad when this conference is over. It has shown government at its worst.

From The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley in Copenhagen at the SPPI blog:

Today the gloves came off and the true purpose of the “global warming” scare became nakedly visible. Hugo Chavez, the Socialist president of Venezuela, blamed “global warming” on capitalism - and received a standing ovation from very nearly all of the delegates, lamentably including those from those of the capitalist nations of the West that are on the far Left - and that means too many of them.

Previously Robert Mugabe, dictator of Rhodesia, who had refused to leave office when he had been soundly defeated in a recent election, had also won plaudits at the conference for saying that the West ought to pay him plenty of money in reparation of our supposed “climate debt”.

Inside the conference center, “world leader” after “world leader” got up and postured about the need to Save The Planet, the imperative to do a deal, the necessity to save the small island nations from drowning, etc., etc., etc.

Outside, in the real world, it was snowing, and a foretaste of the Brave New World being cooked up by “world leaders” in their fantasy-land was already evident. Some 20,000 observers from non-governmental organizations - nearly all of them true-believing Green groups funded by taxpayers - had been accredited to the conference.

However, without warning the UN had capriciously decided that all but 300 of them were to be excluded from the conference today, and all but 90 would be excluded on the final day.

Of course, this being the inept UN, no one had bothered to notify those of the NGOs that were not true-believers in the UN’s camp. So Senator Steve Fielding of Australia and I turned up with a few dozen other delegates, to be left standing in the cold for a couple of hours while the UN laboriously worked out what to do with us.

In the end, they decided to turn us away, which they did with an ill grace and in a bad-tempered manner. As soon as the decision was final, the Danish police moved in. One of them began the now familiar technique of manhandling me, in the same fashion as one of his colleagues had done the previous day.

Once again, conscious that a police helicopter with a high-resolution camera was hovering overhead, I thrust my hands into my pockets in accordance with the St. John Ambulance crowd-control training, looked my assailant in the eye and told him, quietly but firmly, to take his hands off me.

He complied, but then decided to have another go. I told him a second time, and he let go a second time. I turned to go and, after I had turned my back, he gave me a mighty shove that flung me to the ground and knocked me out.

I came to some time later (not sure exactly how long), to find my head being cradled by my friends, some of whom were doing their best to keep the police thugs at bay while the volunteer ambulance-men attended to me.

I was picked up and dusted me off. I could not remember where I had left my telephone, which had been in my hand at the time when I was assaulted. I rather fuzzily asked where it was, and one of the police goons shouted, “He alleges he had a mobile phone.”

In fact, the phone was in my coat pocket, where my hand had been at the time of the assault. The ambulance crew led me away and laid me down under a blanket for 20 minutes to get warm, plying me with water and keeping me amused with some colorfully colloquial English that they had learned.

I thanked them for their kindness, left them a donation for their splendid service, and rejoined my friends. A very senior police officer then came up and asked if I was all right. Yes, I said, but no thanks to one of his officers, who had pushed me hard from behind when my back was turned and had sent me flying.

The police chief said that none of his officers would have done such a thing. I said that several witnesses had seen the incident, which I intended to report. I said I had hoped to receive an apology but had not received one, and would include that in my report. The policeman went off looking glum, and with good reason.

To assault an accredited representative of a conference your nation is hosting, and to do it while your own police cameramen are filming from above, and to do it without any provocation except my polite, non-threatening request that I should not be manhandled, is not a career-enhancing move, as that police chief is about to discover to his cost.

Nor does this incident, and far too many like it, reflect the slightest credit on Denmark. We must make reasonable allowance for the fact that the unspeakable security service of the UN, which is universally detested by those at this conference, was ordering the Danish police about. The tension between the alien force and the indigenous men on the ground had grown throughout the conference.

However, the Danish police were far too free with their hands when pushing us around, and that is not acceptable in a free society. But then, Europe is no longer a free society. It is, in effect, a tyranny ruled by the unelected Kommissars of the European Union. That is perhaps one reason why police forces throughout Europe, including that in the UK, have become far more brutal than was once acceptable in their treatment of the citizens they are sworn to serve.

It is exactly this species of tyranny that the UN would like to impose upon the entire planet, in the name of saving us from ourselves – or, as Ugo Chavez would put it, saving us from Western capitalist democracy.

A few weeks ago, at a major conference in New York, I spoke about this tendency towards tyranny with Dr. Vaclav Klaus, the distinguished economist and doughty fighter for freedom and democracy who is President of the Czech Republic.

While we still have one or two statesmen of his caliber, there is hope for Europe and the world. Unfortunately, he refused to come to Copenhagen, telling me that there was no point, now that the lunatics were firmly in control of the asylum.

However, I asked him whether the draft Copenhagen Treaty’s proposal for what amounted to a communistic world government reminded him of the Communism under which he and his country had suffered for so long.

He thought for a moment - as statesmen always do before answering an unusual question - and said, “Maybe it is not brutal. But in all other respects, what it proposes is far too close to Communism for comfort.”

Today, as I lay in the snow with a cut knee, a bruised back, a banged head, a ruined suit, and a written-off coat, I wondered whether the brutality of the New World Order was moving closer than President Klaus - or any of us - had realized. See post and comments here.

See Lord Monckton and Australia’s Senator Fielding’s hard-hitting “Open Letter to IPCC Chairman Pachauri” here.
-----------------------

BREAKING NEWS: Sydney Morning Herald reports 11th hour Copenhagen deal forged

Just in time for Obama to announce it, and it only cost the USA 100 billion dollars. Thanks Hillary.

UPDATE: Statistician William Briggs points out in an email to me that he mentioned in an essay here that Lord Monckton had predicted this sort of outcome a month ago:

“The forces of darkness will realize that some deal is better than no deal. Lord Monckton, on a guest appearance on the Glenn Beck program a month ago, had it right. He predicted the early stalemate, but said it would end at the last possible minute, after an all-hours marathon session: From which the bureaucrats would emerge, their ties over their heads, where they will announce, “We’ve done it. We’ve come to an agreement.”

----------------------

Meanwhile the Washington Post shows ”On Environment, Obama and Scientists Take Hit in Poll”.

See the SPPI November CO2 Report here compiled by Lord Monckton and Bob Ferguson.  See Monckton videos here.



Dec 18, 2009
How to Manufacture a Climate Consensus

By Patrick J. Michaels

Few people understand the real significance of Climategate, the now-famous hacking of emails from the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit (CRU). Most see the contents as demonstrating some arbitrary manipulating of various climate data sources in order to fit preconceived hypotheses (true), or as stonewalling and requesting colleagues to destroy emails to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in the face of potential or actual Freedom of Information requests (also true).

But there’s something much, much worse going on - a silencing of climate scientists, akin to filtering what goes in the bible, that will have consequences for public policy, including the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) recent categorization of carbon dioxide as a “pollutant.”

The bible I’m referring to, of course, is the refereed scientific literature. It’s our canon, and it’s all we have really had to go on in climate science (until the Internet has so rudely interrupted). When scientists make putative compendia of that literature, such as is done by the U.N. climate change panel every six years, the writers assume that the peer-reviewed literature is a true and unbiased sample of the state of climate science.

That can no longer be the case. The alliance of scientists at East Anglia, Penn State and the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (in Boulder, Colo.) has done its best to bias it.

A refereed journal, Climate Research, published two particular papers that offended Michael Mann of Penn State and Tom Wigley of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research. One of the papers, published in 2003 by Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas (of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics), was a meta-analysis of dozens of “paleoclimate” studies that extended back 1,000 years. They concluded that 20th-century temperatures could not confidently be considered to be warmer than those indicated at the beginning of the last millennium. In fact, that period, known as the “Medieval Warm Period” (MWP), was generally considered warmer than the 20th century in climate textbooks and climate compendia, including those in the 1990s from the IPCC.

Then, in 1999, Mr. Mann published his famous “hockey stick” article in Geophysical Research Letters (GRL), which, through the magic of multivariate statistics and questionable data weighting, wiped out both the Medieval Warm Period and the subsequent “Little Ice Age” (a cold period from the late 16th century to the mid-19th century), leaving only the 20th-century warming as an anomaly of note.

Messrs. Mann and Wigley also didn’t like a paper I published in Climate Research in 2002. It said human activity was warming surface temperatures, and that this was consistent with the mathematical form (but not the size) of projections from computer models. Why? The magnitude of the warming in CRU’s own data was not as great as in the models, so therefore the models merely were a bit enthusiastic about the effects of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Mr. Mann called upon his colleagues to try and put Climate Research out of business. “Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal,” he wrote in one of the emails. “We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board.”

After Messrs. Jones and Mann threatened a boycott of publications and reviews, half the editorial board of Climate Research resigned. People who didn’t toe Messrs. Wigley, Mann and Jones’s line began to experience increasing difficulty in publishing their results.

This happened to me and to the University of Alabama’s Roy Spencer, who also hypothesized that global warming is likely to be modest. Others surely stopped trying, tiring of summary rejections of good work by editors scared of the mob. Sallie Baliunas, for example, has disappeared from the scientific scene.

GRL is a very popular refereed journal. Mr. Wigley was concerned that one of the editors was “in the skeptics camp.” He emailed Michael Mann to say that “if we can find documentary evidence of this, we could go through official . . . channels to get him ousted.”

Mr. Mann wrote to Mr. Wigley on Nov. 20, 2005 that “It’s one thing to lose ‘Climate Research.’ We can’t afford to lose GRL.” In this context, “losing” obviously means the publication of anything that they did not approve of on global warming.

Soon the suspect editor, Yale’s James Saiers, was gone. Mr. Mann wrote to the CRU’s Phil Jones that “the GRL leak may have been plugged up now w/ new editorial leadership there.”

It didn’t stop there. Ben Santer of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory complained that the Royal Meteorological Society (RMS) was now requiring authors to provide actual copies of the actual data that was used in published papers. He wrote to Phil Jones on March 19, 2009, that “If the RMS is going to require authors to make ALL data available - raw data PLUS results from all intermediate calculations - I will not submit any further papers to RMS journals.”

Messrs. Jones and Santer were Ph.D. students of Mr. Wigley. Mr. Santer is the same fellow who, in an email to Phil Jones on Oct. 9, 2009, wrote that he was “very tempted” to “beat the crap” out of me at a scientific meeting. He was angry that I published “The Dog Ate Global Warming” in National Review, about CRU’s claim that it had lost primary warming data.

The result of all this is that our refereed literature has been inestimably damaged, and reputations have been trashed. Mr. Wigley repeatedly tells news reporters not to listen to “skeptics” (or even nonskeptics like me), because they didn’t publish enough in the peer-reviewed literature—even as he and his friends sought to make it difficult or impossible to do so.

Ironically, with the release of the Climategate emails, the Climatic Research Unit, Michael Mann, Phil Jones and Tom Wigley have dramatically weakened the case for emissions reductions. The EPA claimed to rely solely upon compendia of the refereed literature such as the IPCC reports, in order to make its finding of endangerment from carbon dioxide. Now that we know that literature was biased by the heavy-handed tactics of the East Anglia mob, the EPA has lost the basis for its finding. See post here.



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