by Janet Daley, Telegraph

There is scope for debate – and innumerable newspaper quizzes – about who was the most influential public figure of the year, or which the most significant event. But there can be little doubt which word won the prize for most important adjective. 2009 was the year in which “global” swept the rest of the political lexicon into obscurity. There were “global crises” and “global challenges”, the only possible resolution to which lay in “global solutions” necessitating “global agreements”. Gordon Brown actually suggested something called a “global alliance” in response to climate change. (Would this be an alliance against the Axis of Extra-Terrestrials?)

Some of this was sheer hokum: when uttered by Gordon Brown, the word “global”, as in “global economic crisis”, meant: “It’s not my fault”. To the extent that the word had intelligible meaning, it also had political ramifications that were scarcely examined by those who bandied it about with such ponderous self-importance. The mere utterance of it was assumed to sweep away any consideration of what was once assumed to be the most basic principle of modern democracy: that elected national governments are responsible to their own people – that the right to govern derives from the consent of the electorate.

The dangerous idea that the democratic accountability of national governments should simply be dispensed with in favour of “global agreements” reached after closed negotiations between world leaders never, so far as I recall, entered into the arena of public discussion. Except in the United States, where it became a very contentious talking point, the US still holding firmly to the 18th-century idea that power should lie with the will of the people.

Nor was much consideration given to the logical conclusion of all this grandiose talk of global consensus as unquestionably desirable: if there was no popular choice about approving supranational “legally binding agreements”, what would happen to dissenters who did not accept their premises (on climate change, for example) when there was no possibility of fleeing to another country in protest? Was this to be regarded as the emergence of world government? And would it have powers of policing and enforcement that would supersede the authority of elected national governments? In effect, this was the infamous “democratic deficit” of the European Union elevated on to a planetary scale. And if the EU model is anything to go by, then the agencies of global authority will involve vast tracts of power being handed to unelected officials. Forget the relatively petty irritations of Euro?bureaucracy: welcome to the era of Earth-bureaucracy, when there will be literally nowhere to run.

But, you may say, however dire the political consequences, surely there is something in this obsession with global dilemmas. Economics is now based on a world market, and if the planet really is facing some sort of man-made climate crisis, then that too is a problem that transcends national boundaries. Surely, if our problems are universal the solutions must be as well.

Well, yes and no.

Read more at this link.

by Richard, EUReferendum

Despite the brave words Wednesday about holding out until the summer for a better deal, it looks as if the world’s leaders are going all-out for a headline-grabbing agreement at the slugfest, determined not to leave Copenhagen until “the deal is sealed” – in the current vernacular.

Twelve figure numbers were floating around all yesterday, either a hundred billion dollars or euros depending on who you listened to, with increasingly wild emission cut figures proffered.

The reality, however, was broken by the New York Times which “leaked” (no scruples here, unlike certain e-mails) a draft UN document which purported to show that even if all the highest promises on emission cuts were kept, the temperature would still go screaming up to 3°c above the baseline – whatever that is – risking, according to the warmists, “runaway global warming”.

You have to work very hard to find out why the world leaders seem so unconcerned about this prospect, the game being given away by the Zimbabwe Herald whose journalists obviously haven’t sussed the importance of what they are writing.

From this august journal, we learn that the negotiations were “rescued from the brink of collapse” when delegates agreed to compromise on the two contending positions by keeping the Kyoto Protocol and devising another agreement to encompass the United States and its allies who have refused to ratify Kyoto.

This is nothing to do with the headline billions and all the rest. Nope, the deal is that the Kyoto Protocol is saved – which is what all the fuss was really about. That safeguards the carbon market and opens the way for it to expand to the $2-trillion level by the year 2020. Against that, even €100 billion is chump-change – you can buy countries with that sort of money.

Their deal in place, the kleptocrats and the Corporatocracy can go away happy and plan how to spend all their ill-gotten gains, leaving the leaders to grandstand, make their deals, shake hands and strut through their photo-sessions before jetting off in olumes of “carbon” to be greeted as saviours by their underwhelmed peoples.

As for saving the planet, well no-one really believes that greenie shit anyway … except the greenies, and they don’t matter. There is plenty of pepper spray left and no shortage of temporary detention space. Now that the money men have got what they came for, all the rest is theatre.

The video I played a portion of on the air yesterday follows.  This is the infamous Lord Monckton having a short discourse with a Greenpeace activist regarding global warming.  He is decidedly full of facts, she is decidedly not.

This is video of how the global warming alarmists “totally pwned” Monckton in their own video:

Finally, Aaron Turpen called into the show towards the end with some information for skeptics who’d like to get some real, hard facts without a lot of political spin or skewed information about climate change and global warming.  He recommends reading the two booklets in the Skeptics Handbook series from Joanne Nova, which you can download for free from her site at JoanneNova.com.au (they are about 20 pages each).  Another of her booklets, Climate Money, is also good reading as it explains why there are so many pro-warming scientists.

by Paul Joseph Watson

Lord Christopher Monckton warns that the secretive draft version of the Copenhagen climate change treaty represents a global government power grab on an “unimaginable scale,” and mandates 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.

Speaking with The Alex Jones Show, Monckton, who is in Copenhagen attending the UN climate summit, said that when he attempted to obtain a copy of the current draft of the negotiating text agreement, he was initially rebuffed before he threatened an international diplomatic incident unless the document was forthcoming.

“I insisted and it took about 10 minutes and they consulted each other with three or four of them arguing over it – none of them would produce the document….I said I know this treaty exists because this is what the conference is all about,” said Monckton.

Only after Monckton threatened repercussions was he handed the the current draft of the treaty, and the details it contained are perhaps a clue as to why the UN officials were so keen to keep it under wraps.

“Once again they are desperately trying to conceal from everybody here the magnitude of what they’re attempting to do – they really are attempting to set up a world government,” said Monckton, adding that the word “government” was no longer used but the process of further centralization of power into global hands was clearly spelled out in the treaty.

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 – all of that is still in the treaty draft.”

As the leaked document out of Copenhagen reported on by the London Guardian revealed yesterday, this massive new system of global taxation will be paid not to the UN, but directly into the coffers of the World Bank.

“The draft hands effective control of climate change finance to the World Bank; would abandon the Kyoto protocol – the only legally binding treaty that the world has on emissions reductions; and would make any money to help poor countries adapt to climate change dependent on them taking a range of actions,” reported the Guardian.

Monckton illustrated the size of the new taxes being proposed by noting they amounted to at least half of the entire US defense budget.

“This is how they are going to fund this vast new government they’re setting up,” said Monckton, adding that he counted around 700 new bureaucracies that would be created as a result of the treaty, which would be bankrolled by taxpayers even outside of the raft of new taxes the treaty would create.

Monckton outlined how the new taxes would be enforced, stating, “They’re going to auction allowances to emit greenhouse gases and if you don’t buy an allowance to emit greenhouse gases, you won’t be allowed to emit them,” adding that the text contained a provision for a “uniform global levy of $2 dollars per ton of CO2 for all fossil fuel emissions,” as well as an additional tax on every commercial plane journey, except ones that go in or out of poorer countries.

There would also be a “global levy on international monetary transactions – that means every transfer of money across borders will be taxed,” said Monckton, adding that this would be on top of the GDP tax.

The treaty outlines, “Penalties or fines for non-compliance,” in developed countries and the creation of an international police force to “enforce its will by imposing unlimited financial penalties on any countries whose performance under this treaty they don’t like,” added Monckton, saying that it amounted to a total global government takeover on an “unimaginable scale”.

“We’re looking at a grab for absolute power and absolute financial control worldwide by the UN and its associated bureaucracies and 700 new bureaucratic bodies,” said Monckton.

Speaking about how such draconian measures were being forced through despite the recent scandal surrounding how key IPCC-affiliated scientists conspired to “hide the decline” in global warming, Monckton emphasized how the climate change establishment were still ludicrously attempting to downplay the significance of the climategate emails by merely repeating their already discredited propaganda about global warming.

“What has happened is that the mainstream media has done themselves terrible damage by signing up to this climate nonsense and then by servilely refusing to admit that climategate was happening, admit how serious it was and simply inform their readers of what was actually in these emails,” said Monckton, “Admissions that while they’re telling us, as the Met Office did just today, that today is the warmest decade since records began 150 years ago, privately what they’re saying in the climategate emails is ‘hey look we’ve got a temperature which has been falling and we can’t explain why and it’s a travesty that we can’t explain why’ – so they’re saying one thing to us publicly to maintain the scare that’s making them rich, and that’s what’s called fraud, it’s criminal fraud, and on the other hand they’re saying privately ‘oh dear oh dear we can’t account for the fact that there’s been no warming for the last 15 years’”.

Monckton said that the Copenhagen treaty meant America was in “immediate peril” of losing its freedom to a “sinister dictatorship” being formed under the contrived pretext of global warming.

Hat Tip to NationalExpositor

by Marc Sheppard

It seems that while scientists who accept fundingfrom oil companies are branded as bought-and-paid-for shills, those financed by renewable energy interests remain unchallenged authorities in their fields. Words can’t adequately express my astonishment.
Amid the thousands of files apparently lifted from Britain’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) last week sit two documents on the subject of the unit’s funding. One is a spreadsheet(pdj_grant_since1990.xls) logging the various grants CRU chief P.D. Jones has received since 1990. It lists 55 such endowments from agencies ranging from the U.S. Department of Energy to NATO, worth a total of £13,718,547, or approximately $22.6 million. I guess cooking climate data can be an expensive habit, particularly for an oft-quoted and highly exalted U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) chief climatologist.
But it’s actually the second document (potential-funding.doc) that tells the more compelling tale. In addition to four government sources of potential CRU funding, it lists an equal number of “energy agencies” they might put the bite on. Three — the Carbon Trust, the Northern Energy Initiative, and the Energy Saving Trust — are U.K.-based consultancy and funding specialists promoting “new energy” technologies with the goal of reducing carbon dioxide emissions. The fourth — Renewables North West — is an American company promoting the expansion of solar, wind, and geothermal energy in the Pacific Northwest.
Needless to say, all four of these CRU “potential funding sources” have an undeniably intrinsicfinancial interest in the promotion of the carbochondriacal reports CRU is ready, willing, and able to dish out ostensibly on demand. And equally obvious, Jones is all too aware that a renewable energy-funded CRU will remain the world’s premiere authority on the subject of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) despite any appearance of conflict.
And yet, no such latitude has ever been extended to scientists in the skeptical camp.
For instance, when MIT’s Richard Lindzen delivers one of his trademark brilliant presentations leading to the conclusion that climate sensitivity for a doubling of CO2 is about 0.5°C, not the 1.5°-5°C predicted by IPCC models, all we hear from alarmists and complicit media types is that the professor once charged oil and coal interests $2,500 a day for his consulting services and is therefore an unreliable big-oil hack.

Or when S. Fred Singer challenges the IPCC to explain whether water vapor and clouds represent positive or negative feedback, or stands before a graph depicting temperatures decreasing over the past ten years while CO2 climbed and declares that “the relationship is meaningless,” his words are similarly dismissed based solely on the fact that he has received funding from ExxonMobil.
Let’s set aside the fact that Lindzen had actually accepted a total of $10,000 in expenses and expert witness fees from such interests on the day he ceased such activities two decades ago. And that Singer has received only $20,000 from ExxonMobil. And that alarmists outfund climate by several orders of magnitude, which leads to the artificial expansion of the number of scientists who appear to support alarmist views. And even that monies paid to either side of the debate have zero impact on the science of whether or not 20^th-century warming was caused or is exacerbated by man-made CO2 emissions.   And don’t get me started on carbon-millionaire Al Gore.
The issue is this: Just how is it that funding from renewable energy interests evades charges of bias, yet subsidies from traditional power entities scream bloody conflict when each is equally friendly to the recipient’s cause?
As with all things AGW, the alarmist quick-draw canard that the science is settled but for a few outliers in the fossil fuel industry’s pockets is quickly losing whatever civic support it may have had. And the scientific subterfuge exposed last week by the CRU emails and documents represents but the latest of many recent outrages sure to accelerate the ongoing public awakening to the hoax that has been perpetrated upon them.
In the broader scheme, the credibility blow the IPCC will likely suffer from its top acolytes — senior authors and editors — bandying data-manipulation-revealing e-mails will weaken and perhaps ultimately break the AGW orthodoxy spine erected by its politically-charged assessments. And that can only serve to further declaw their fellow alarmists and media minions — which of course would be nothing short of stupendous.
For as Lord Christopher Monckton emphasized in his rousing speech to close the second International Conference on Climate Change in New York City last March:

There is no climate crisis. There was no climate crisis. There will be no climate crisis.

And it has become abundantly clear that it is not, nor was it ever, the AGW skeptics who were the liers. Or the cheaters.
Or the bought-and-paid-for hypocrites.