President Obama flies to Copenhagen later this month for a fresh round of taxes and spending. To slay an imaginary beast called “global warming,” Obama and other leaders will discuss a treaty that forces industrialized nations to shake themselves down and enrich the developing world. Even worse, Copenhagen occurs as climatic computer models misfire and climatologists substitute science with deception.
The draft Copenhagen Framework Convention on Climate Change establishes an international oversight body simply called “the government.” As the Convention draft states: “The government will be ruled by the COP [Conference of the Parties],” which will execute “public policies . . . to which the market rules and related dynamics should be subordinate.”
Like most big-government schemes, the Copenhagen Convention unleashes new agencies, panels, and other bureaucracies bearing such acronyms as EBFTA, TPRDA, TPRDM, and UNFCCC. The treaty even invokes “the NAMAs and the NAPAs” — sadly, not a reference to a nearly homonymous ’60s pop group. The Executive Body on Finance and Technology for Mitigation (EBFTM) pursues this riveting mission: “To organize, coordinate, monitor, and evaluate the implementation of the comprehensive framework for mitigation, including the enabling means of financing, technology, and capacity-building.”
The Convention arranges the “transfer of technical and financial resources from developed countries to developing countries.” Such international economic redistribution would occur via “a multilateral climate change fund,” “a Mitigation Fund,” “a Capacity-building Fund,” and other schemes. By 2020, these disbursements are supposed to “meet the full costs incurred by developing country Parties” — an anticipated $50 billion to $140 billion.
Regarding revenues, the draft Convention offers options that negotiators will narrow into a final agreement. These include penalties and fines, a 2 percent tax on international financial-market transactions, a global carbon tax from which “the LDCs [Less Developed Countries] shall be exempt,” “an international adaptation levy on airfares, except on journeys originating from or destined to LDCs,” and “mandatory contributions” of 0.5 to 1 percent of GDP. Today, this tax alone would equal $72 billion to $144 billion in brand-new, annual, compulsory U.S. foreign-aid payments.
More maddening, this tax-and-spend treaty is a costly solution to an imaginary problem. So-called “global warming” threatens Earth about as urgently as does the Loch Ness Monster. Like the Oracle at Delphi, computer models of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (essentially the Vatican of so-called “global warming”) issue frightful visions of a boiling planet in the year 2100. Too bad they so inaccurately foresaw Earth’s conditions just before 2010.
Expressing century-long trends, the IPCC has predicted that CO2 concentrations would reach 838 parts per million in the year 2100. In fact, the Science & Public Policy Institute (S&PPI) examined actual meteorological measurements between January 2001 and September 2009 and found CO2 on a glidepath toward just 572 parts per million in the year 2100. Thus, IPCC’s computers say that by century’s end, there will be 46.5 percent more CO2 on Earth than actual climate readings indicated through last September.
Similarly, IPCC models warned that by 2100, Earth’s temperature would increase by 7 degrees Fahrenheit. In fact, S&PPI reports, satellite and surface data between January 1980 and September 2009 point to a long-term warming tendency of just 2.7 degrees F. IPCC prophesies century-end temperatures 160 percent higher than what actual measurements reflected last September.
Climate observations from January 2001 to September 2009 alone demonstrate a cooling trend of 1.98 degrees F by the year 2100, rather than the IPCC’s 7 degrees F of model-inspired “warming.”
“Not one of the U.N.’s models had predicted the long stasis in global temperatures, which have shown no statistically significant trend since 1995 — i.e., for almost 15 years — notwithstanding continuing increases in CO2 concentration,” the Viscount Monckton of Brenchley tells me from London. The S&PPI’s Lord Monckton is a member of the House of Lords and a leading critic of the entire “global warming” charade.
Of course, U.N. computers are no better than the data on which they dine. These data look quite dodgy considering e-mails from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU), which the Sunday Times of London calls “the world’s leading center for reconstructing past climate and temperatures.” These hacked messages show influential British climatologists and their American counterparts distorting and concealing facts that contradict their faith in so-called “global warming.” Read on:
‐“The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty we can’t.”
‐“The rest of the [CRU] databases seems [sic] to be in nearly as poor a state as Australia was. . . . We can have a proper result, but only by including a load of garbage.”
‐“I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”
‐“I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie, from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline” in temperatures, Prof. Philip Jones, CRU’s chief, wrote in a Nov. 16, 1999, e-mail to Prof. Michael Mann, director of Penn State University’s Earth System Science Center.
‐As Jones e-mailed Mann: “If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone. . . . We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind.”
‐“We need to cover our behinds on what was done here,” Mann wrote Jones on June 20, 2003.
‐“Mike, can you delete any e-mails you may have with Keith re: AR4 [IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report]. Keith will do likewise,” Jones wrote Mann on May 29, 2008. “Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.”
‐Mann wrote back: “I’ll contact Gene about this ASAP.”
‐“I did get an email from the [Freedom of Information] person here early yesterday to tell me I shouldn’t be deleting emails,” Jones wrote on Dec. 10, 2008. Under British law, it is a crime to destroy materials sought in Freedom of Information requests.
CRU still wants scientists to trust its conclusions — on which even more climatology is based — although it now admits that during an office move, it discarded computer tapes and paper records containing years of original weather-station observations. This is like telling an IRS auditor, “Just read my tax return; I chucked my receipts.” Proper science relies on generating reproducible results. Since these climate data now likely are locked in a landfill, CRU’s results are, by definition, irreproducible. This means, ipso facto, they are non-scientific.
Meanwhile, Professor Jones has stepped aside while he and his unit are under investigation. Also, Penn State is probing Professor Mann. “The University is looking into this matter further,” according to a November 30 statement.
In the wake of Climategate, the Met Office (Britain’s equivalent of the U.S. National Weather Service) announced Friday that it would release meteorological observations from 1,000 surface-measurement stations worldwide. It also will analyze 160 years’ worth of raw data to reconstruct the global climate record that has been compromised by CRU’s disposal of data that undergird its conclusions.
The Times of London reports that “the new analysis of the data will take three years, meaning that the Met Office will not be able to state with absolute confidence the extent of the warming trend until the end of 2012.” The Met Office (which relies heavily on CRU’s data), the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies are the three sources for data that flow into the IPCC’s computer models. The Met Office’s announcement constitutes a flat tire on the three-wheel All-Terrain Vehicle that pulls the global-warming issue around the world. And three years will pass until this flat is fixed.
“Although the CRU in Great Britain has been ground zero for the initial investigation because of its role in the IPCC, other national weather centers, universities, and the U.S. global data centers at NOAA and NASA will be shown in upcoming weeks to be complicit in the misrepresentation or manipulation of data to support the supposed consensus,” says Joseph D’Aleo of ICECAP, the International Climate and Environmental Change Assessment Project, and the Weather Channel’s first director of meteorology.
Notwithstanding this “maze of skullduggery,” as author Christopher Booker calls Climategate, America’s broadcast networks moved glacially to cover this global-warming scandal. Two weeks after the story emerged, NBC Nightly News finally covered it last Friday. Until then, reports the Media Research Center, ABC, CBS, and NBC ignored Climategate on their morning and nightly news programs. In fact, Comedy Central’s Daily Show with Jon Stewart scooped the three networks by three days with a December 1 segment that presented key facts and generated big laughs. “Why would you throw out raw data from the ’80s?” Stewart incredulously asked. “I still have Penthouses from the ’70s — laminated.”
The Copenhagen Convention codifies world government fueled by fraud, justified by faulty data, and financed with massive, new global taxes. Rather than jet to Denmark to embrace such rubbish, Obama should stay here, toss a log into the Oval Office fireplace, and focus on resuscitating America’s economy.
— Deroy Murdock is a New York-based columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution.