by Noel Sheppard

Has the emerging internationalClimateGate scandal changed President Obama’s global warming strategy?

After winning the Nobel Peace Prize last month, expectations were that Obama would not attend the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen due to it conflicting with the Nobel awards ceremony in Oslo.

This speculation was supported in the past couple of weeks when world leaders meeting in Singapore punted on reaching any firm agreements at the upcoming Copenhagen meeting, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (R-Nev.) delayed action on cap-and-trade legislation until next spring.

Yet, within days of the ClimateGate scandal breaking, Obama surprisingly announced that he’s going to Copenhagen with a pledge for serious carbon dioxide emissions cuts.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Chris Horner told FBN’s Charles Payne Wednesday that this is by no means a coincidence:

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.

by Lawrence Solomon

Australians are the latest citizenry to turn against climate change catastrophism. For the first time, according to a Lowy poll released this week, a majority of the population turned thumbs down to the proposition that “global warming is a serious and pressing problem. We should begin taking steps now even if this involves significant costs.” This rejection applied to younger segments of the population as well as old, especially disappointing to Australian decision makers, given their efforts to indoctrinate youths through the educational system.

Last year, 60% of the populace bought into global warming fears and in 2006, the figure was 68%.

Neither did Aussies view tackling global warming as particularly important. When compared to other foreign policy issues, such as illegal immigration, protecting jobs, combating terrorism, strengthening the United Nations, or protecting Australians living abroad, climate change fared miserably. In fact, of the 10 foreign policy issues the poll cited, only “promoting democracy in other countries” was deemed less of a priority.

The Australian results come the same week that the United Kingdom’s Department of Energy and Climate Change released a survey showing most Britons do not fear harm from climate change.  Until last week, the government had kept up a brave face, refusing to acknowledge that its relentless efforts over decades to convince the public of the need for action on climate change had failed.

With Copenhagen fast approaching, the government has decided to pull out all the stops with an unprecedented prime time TV ad campaign to turn public opinion around. “The survey results show that people don’t realize that climate change is already under way and could have severe consequences,” Joan Ruddock, the Energy and Climate Change Minister explained in justifying the need for her aggressive campaign. The £6-million ad campaign showing scenes of devastation through animation — flooding, drowning animals and humans, a sign that reads “The World’s End” — fittingly premiered on the night-time soap opera, Coronation Street, with an ad entitled “Bedtime stories.”

Read more: http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2009/10/15/lawrence-solomon-climate-change-dominoes-fall.aspx#ixzz0UJkOo3Xg

Geologist Ian Plimer takes a contrary view, arguing that man-made climate change is a con trick perpetuated by environmentalists

by Johnathan Manthorpe, Vancouver Sun

(Plimer, by the way, is also a vehement anti-creationist and has been hauled into court for disrupting meetings by religious leaders and evangelists who claim the Bible is literal truth.)

The Gore Homestead

Plimer gets especially upset about carbon dioxide, its role in Earth’s daily life and the supposed effects on climate of human manufacture of the gas. He says atmospheric carbon dioxide is now at the lowest levels it has been for 500 million years, and that atmospheric carbon dioxide is only 0.001 per cent of the total amount of the chemical held in the oceans, surface rocks, soils and various life forms. Indeed, Plimer says carbon dioxide is not a pollutant, but a plant food. Plants eat carbon dioxide and excrete oxygen. Human activity, he says, contributes only the tiniest fraction to even the atmospheric presence of carbon dioxide.

There is no problem with global warming, Plimer says repeatedly. He points out that for humans periods of global warming have been times of abundance when civilization made leaps forward. Ice ages, in contrast, have been times when human development slowed or even declined.

So global warming, says Plimer, is something humans should welcome and embrace as a harbinger of good times to come.