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Mark Steyn writes about the global warming hypocrites in Copenhagen.
The best summation of the UN climate circus in Denmark comes from Andrew Bolt of Australia’s Herald Sun: “Nothing is real in Copenhagen – not the temperature record, not the predictions, not the agenda, not the ‘solution’.”
Just so. Reuters, for example, carried a moving account of the speech by Ian Fry, lead negotiator for Tuvalu, the beleaguered Pacific island nation soon to be under water because of a planet-devastating combination of your SUV and unsustainable bovine flatulence from Vermont farms. “The fate of my country rests in your hands,” Fry told the meeting. “I make this as a strong and impassioned plea … I woke this morning and I was crying and that was not easy for a grown man to admit,” he continued, “his voice choking with emotion,” in the Reuters reporter’s words. Who could fail to be moved?
…As to whether the emotion-choked lachrymose pleader has ever lived in “his” endangered country of Tuvalu, his wife told Samantha Maiden of The Australian that she would “rather not comment.” Like his fellow Copenhagen delegate Brad Pitt, Ian Fry is an actor: He’s not a Tuvaluan, but he plays one on the world stage. …
…So just to recap: The Prince of Wales, a man who has never drawn his own curtains, ramps up a carbon footprint of 2,601 tons while telling us that western capitalist excess is destroying the planet. Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, the railroad engineer who heads the International Panel on Climate Change and has demanded that “hefty aviation taxes should be introduced to deter people from flying,” flew 443,226 miles on “IPCC business” in the year and a half before the Copenhagen summit. And Al Gore is a carbon billionaire: He makes more money buying offsets from himself than his dad did from investing in Occidental Petroleum. …
Charles Krauthammer reflects on the 25 years he has been writing columns.
…Looking back on the quarter-century, the most remarkable period, strangely enough, was the ’90s. They began on Dec. 26, 1991 (just as the ’60s, as many have observed, ended with Nixon’s resignation on Aug. 9, 1974) with a deliverance of biblical proportions — the disappearance of the Soviet Union. It marked the end of 60 years of existential conflict, the collapse of a deeply evil empire, and the death of one of the most perverse political ideas in history. This miracle, in major part wrought by Ronald Reagan, bequeathed the ultimate peace dividend: a golden age of the most profound peace and prosperity.
“I recently told an assembly at my son’s high school,” I wrote in 1997, “that they were living through a time so blessed they would tell their grandchildren about it. They looked at me uncomprehendingly . . . because it is hard for anyone to apprehend the sheer felicity of one’s own time until it is gone.”
I concluded with “golden ages never last.” Throughout the decade, and most especially as it began to wane, I returned to this theme of the wondrous oddity, the sheer impossibility of an age of such post-historical tranquility. …
…Of course, it didn’t keep up. It never does. History is tragic, not redemptive. Our holiday from history ended in fire, giving birth to a post-9/11 decade of turbulence and disorientation as we were faced with the unexpected resurgence of radical eschatological evil. …
David Harsanyi reviews the fire and brimstone preachings of the president.
President Barack Obama grimly warned America this week that if his health care plans fail, the nation will go “bankrupt.”
Sure, adding another trillion-dollar entitlement program to our $12 trillion debt may seem like a counterintuitive way to stave off economic ruin, but who are we to argue? The president’s got smarts.
And like with so many issues, Obama adorned his rhetoric with sharp warnings of calamity should he fail, fabricated consensus to buttress his case and a promise of rapture should he succeed.
You’ll remember it was Obama who cautioned that failure to pass the stimulus boondoggle would “turn a crisis into a catastrophe.” He claimed that a failure to act on cap and trade will lead us to “irreversible catastrophe” and a failure to pass a government-run health care system will mean “more Americans dying every day.”
It’s like living the Old Testament. Scary. …
Karl Rove gives some reasons why Obama has received the lowest ratings for a president’s first year in office.
…This kind of attack gives Mr. Obama’s words a slippery quality. For example, he voted for the bank rescue plan in September 2008 and praised it during the campaign. Yet on Dec. 8 at the Brookings Institution, Mr. Obama called it “flawed” and blamed “the last administration” for launching it “hastily.”
Really? Bush Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and New York Fed President Timothy Geithner designed it. If it was “flawed,” why did Mr. Obama later nominate Mr. Bernanke to a second term as Fed chairman and make Mr. Geithner his Treasury secretary?
Mr. Obama also claimed at Brookings that he prevented “a second Great Depression” by confronting the financial crisis “largely without the help” of Republicans. Yet his own Treasury secretary suggests otherwise. In a Dec. 9 letter, Mr. Geithner admitted that since taking office, the Obama administration had “committed about $7 billion to banks, much of which went to small institutions.” That compares to $240 billion the Bush administration lent banks. Does Mr. Obama really believe his additional $7 billion forestalled “the potential collapse of our financial system”?
Mr. Obama continued distorting the record in his “60 Minutes” interview Sunday when he blamed bankers for the financial crisis. They “caused the problem,” he insisted before complaining, “I haven’t seen a lot of shame on their part” and pledging to put “a regulatory system in place that prevents them from putting us in this kind of pickle again.”
But as a freshman senator, Mr. Obama supported a threatened 2005 filibuster of a bill regulating Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. He doesn’t show “a lot of shame” that he and other Fannie and Freddie defenders blocked “a regulatory system” that might have kept America from getting in such a bad pickle in the first place. …
John Whitehead interviews writer and libertarian Nat Hentoff in the Rutherford Institute.
John W. Whitehead: When Barack Obama was a U.S. Senator in 2005, he introduced a bill to limit the Patriot Act. Now that he is president, he has endorsed the Patriot Act as is. What do you think happened with Obama?
Nat Hentoff: I try to avoid hyperbole, but I think Obama is possibly the most dangerous and destructive president we have ever had. An example is ObamaCare, which is now embattled in the Senate. If that goes through the way Obama wants, we will have something very much like the British system. If the American people have their health care paid for by the government, depending on their age and their condition, they will be subject to a health commission just like in England which will decide if their lives are worth living much longer.
In terms of the Patriot Act, and all the other things he has pledged he would do, such as transparency in government, Obama has reneged on his promises. He pledged to end torture, but he has continued the CIA renditions where you kidnap people and send them to another country to be interrogated. Why is Obama doing that if he doesn’t want torture anymore? Throughout Obama’s career, he promised to limit the state secrets doctrine which the Bush-Cheney administration had abused enormously. The Bush administration would go into court on any kind of a case that they thought might embarrass them and would argue that it was a state secret and the case should not be continued. Obama is doing the same thing, even though he promised not to. …
JW: Is the so-called health commission that you referred to earlier what some people are referring to as death panels? Is that too strong a word?
NH: …In England, you have what I would call government-imposed euthanasia. Under the British healthcare system, there is a commission that decides whether or not, based on your age and physical condition, the government should continue to pay for your health. That leads to the government not doing it and you gradually or suddenly die. The present Stimulus Bill sets up the equivalent commission in the United States similar to that which is in England. The tipoff was months ago on the ABC network. President Obama was given a full hour to describe and endorse his health plan. A woman in the audience asked Obama about her mother. Her mother was, I believe, 101 years old and was in need of a certain kind of procedure. Her doctor didn’t want to do it because of her age. However, another doctor did and told this woman there is a joy of life in this person. The woman asked President Obama how he would deal with this sort of thing, and Obama said we cannot consider the joy of life in this situation. He said I would advise her to take a pain killer. That is the essence of the President of the United States. …
James Delingpole blogs in the Telegraph, UK, about the Russians confirming that the data used from Russia was cherry-picked by CRU scientists, and significantly distorts the CRU climate data.
Climategate just got much, much bigger. And all thanks to the Russians who, with perfect timing, dropped this bombshell just as the world’s leaders are gathering in Copenhagen to discuss ways of carbon-taxing us all back to the dark ages.
Feast your eyes on this news release from Rionovosta, via the Ria Novosti agency, posted on Icecap. (Hat Tip: Richard North)
…Climategate has already affected Russia. On Tuesday, the Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) issued a report claiming that the Hadley Center for Climate Change based at the headquarters of the British Meteorological Office in Exeter (Devon, England) had probably tampered with Russian-climate data.
The IEA believes that Russian meteorological-station data did not substantiate the anthropogenic global-warming theory. Analysts say Russian meteorological stations cover most of the country’s territory, and that the Hadley Center had used data submitted by only 25% of such stations in its reports. Over 40% of Russian territory was not included in global-temperature calculations for some other reasons, rather than the lack of meteorological stations and observations.
The data of stations located in areas not listed in the Hadley Climate Research Unit Temperature UK (HadCRUT) survey often does not show any substantial warming in the late 20th century and the early 21st century.
The HadCRUT database includes specific stations providing incomplete data and highlighting the global-warming process, rather than stations facilitating uninterrupted observations.
On the whole, climatologists use the incomplete findings of meteorological stations far more often than those providing complete observations.
IEA analysts say climatologists use the data of stations located in large populated centers that are influenced by the urban-warming effect more frequently than the correct data of remote stations.
The scale of global warming was exaggerated due to temperature distortions for Russia accounting for 12.5% of the world’s land mass. The IEA said it was necessary to recalculate all global-temperature data in order to assess the scale of such exaggeration. …
In the WSJ, Patrick Michaels writes about the global warming conspirators who have been bullying their colleagues. Michaels was on the receiving end of some of the conspirators’ tactics.
…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. …
In Bloomberg News, Christian Wienberg writes that God has a sense of humor.
Dec. 17 (Bloomberg) — World leaders flying into Copenhagen today to discuss a solution to global warming will first face freezing weather as a blizzard dumped 10 centimeters (4 inches) of snow on the Danish capital overnight.
“Temperatures will stay low at least the next three days,” Henning Gisseloe, an official at Denmark’s Meteorological Institute, said today by telephone, forecasting more snow in coming days. “There’s a good chance of a white Christmas.”
Delegates from 193 countries have been in Copenhagen since Dec. 7 to discuss how to fund global greenhouse gas emission cuts. U.S. President Barack Obama will arrive before the summit is scheduled to end tomorrow.
Denmark has a maritime climate and milder winters than its Scandinavian neighbors. It hasn’t had a white Christmas for 14 years, under the DMI’s definition, and only had seven last century. Temperatures today fell as low as minus 4 Celsius (25 Fahrenheit). …
The Copenhagen Post also reports on the snow and frigid temperatures the global warming crowd dealing with.
Bitter cold and steady snowfall has paralyzed the country’s roads and public transport since yesterday, and the icy cold weather is expected to get even worse over the next couple days.
On the island of Funen up to a metre of snow fell in some places, while in mid-Jutland several snow plows were reported to be stuck.
National train service DSB had delays on nearly all its lines, with delays of up to an hour on some routes. The S-train system and Metro trains serving the Greater Copenhagen area have also experienced considerable delays.
No serious injuries or deaths have been reported so far as a result of the icy weather, however.
National weather centre DMI has forecast temperatures to drop to a chilly minus 6 by tomorrow evening, along with more snow possibly on the way.