Climategate, Copenhagen and what it all means

There hasn’t been much about Climategate in the news, certainly not enough to understand exactly what the global warming alarmists were trying to hide. Yes, they were trying to silence dissenting opinion. No, they didn’t want contradictory evidence published. You’ve probably heard talk about how they “hid the decline” but you may not be aware of what decline in particular they were trying to hide.

Marc Sheppard wrote a very informative piece for American Thinker explaining it in terms non-scientists can understand. The period in question that’s been buried isn’t recent, but to include it would have cast serious doubt on the theory that the earth warmed due to human activity and increased CO2 emissions. And when you hear the Left’s talking heads dismissing Climategate, keep in mind that most “independent” research relied on the data supplied by East Anglia’s CRU.

Truth be told — even reasonably reliable instrumental readings are a relatively modern convenience, limiting CRU’s global measured temperature database to a start date somewhere in the mid-19th century. That’s why global temperature charts based on actual readings typically use a base year of 1850 or somewhere thereabouts.

And yet — most historical temperature charts, including the one Al Gore preached before in An Inconvenient Truth, go way back to 1000 AD. That’s where proxies come in.

While historical documents (e,g, ship’s logs, diaries, court and church records, tax rolls, and even classic literature) certainly provide a glimpse into past temperature trends, such information is far too limited and generalized to be of any statistical value. So climate scientists have devised means to measure variations in such ubiquitous materials as lake sediments, boreholes, ice cores, and tree rings to evaluate past temperature trends.

They then employ complex computer programs to combine such “proxy” data sampled throughout a region to plot that area’s annual relative changes in temperature hundreds or even thousands of years prior. By then combining the datasets, they believe they can accurately reproduce hemispheric and global temperature trends of the previous millennia.

And while reconstructions — as past temperature interpretations from proxy data are called — can differ greatly from one source to another, those generated by the CRU have often been accepted as the de facto temperatures of the past.

Largely because the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) proclaims them to be.

Warmist Public Enemy Number One: The Medieval Warming Period

It’s important to understand that early analyses of these “proxies” clearly demonstrated that three radical temperature shifts occurred within the past millennium, as do many contemporary studies. Indeed, the years 900-1300 AD were labeled the Medieval Warming Period (MWP), as global temperatures rose precipitously from the bitter cold of the previous Dark Ages to levels several degrees warmer than today. The Little Ice Age, a sudden period of cooling, then followed and lasted until the year 1850. And then began the modern warming period, which was by no means unique and appears to have ended with the millennium itself.

Originally, even the IPCC accepted that pre-20th century analysis. In fact, the 1990 First Assessment Report used this schematic IPCC 1990 Figure 7c (courtesy of Climate Audit) to represent last millennium’s dramatic temperature swings. …..

Hmmm. That’s a lot different than the charts we see today. The article provides more charts and graphs, including the now infamous “hockey stick graph,” as well as details of the tricks and outright fraud committed by these crooks in the name of “science.”

No wonder the alarmists are so unconcerned about CO2 they’re willing to fly to Copenhagen on private planes, and once in town travel in style in limousines. They know the truth, they just don’t want you to know it.

Christopher Booker wrote more on the subject for the Telegraph - how the researchers ignored the forest for one influential Siberian tree. You know, the only tree in Siberia that had the rings to match their bogus story.

I will only add two footnotes to this real-life new version of the old story. One is that, as we can see from the CRU’s website, the largest single source of funding for all its projects has been the European Union, which at Copenhagen will be more insistent than anyone that the world should sign up to what amounts to the most costly economic suicide note in history. …

I can’t pretend to know what’s going through the heads of everyone involved at Copenhagen. What I do know is that President Obama should go there with the sole intention of looking out for America’s interests. All evidence suggests he is not. Indeed, he seems intent on signing the economic suicide pact along with the EU and most of the rest of the West.

Not everyone in the West is on board. According to this piece by Richard Fernandez, Canada’s Stephen Harper has been lampooned for not drinking the climate Kool Aid. He should be cheered. But that’s not the point of Fernandez’s article. The point is to show who the biggest beneficiaries of climate credits would be. (Besides Al Gore.)

In a news report late last month, the Washington Post noted that under the formula reached under the Kyoto Protocol, “Russia is expected to post the largest absolute drop in emissions from 1990 levels of any of the countries that signed the treaty. But the decline is almost entirely the result of the 1991 collapse of the Soviet economy rather than environmental measures by the government. Critics say Moscow doesn’t deserve to keep its carbon credits because it didn’t earn them with any special effort. ” The West could retrospectively compensate the Russians for the collapse of the Soviet economy.

“You’ve got an elephant in the room that nobody is paying attention to,” said Samuel Charap, a Russia scholar at the Center for American Progress in Washington, arguing that the Obama administration needs to take up the issue with Russia’s leaders.

The Investors Business Daily says that this vast pile of computational credits would make Russia “the Saudi Arabia of carbon credits.” “Russia’s greenhouse gas emissions plunged in the 1990s as its economy collapsed. Moscow now sits on a potential treasure trove of unused carbon emission permits it could sell to other countries.” Where on earth is the poor Western taxpayer going to get the money to pay for this act of poetic justice?  A British peer believes he has has the answer. Just borrow the money.

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The assumption that Copenhagan serves the interests of Mali and that is somehow better than serving the interests of the Great White North seems self-evident to some. But it’s unclear that the Third World countries are any keener on cutting emissions than Harper. The New York Times reported that “China, India, Brazil and South Africa this week rejected a Danish suggestion to set a goal of halving world emissions by 2050, saying rich nations which have burned fossil fuels since the Industrial Revolution must first slash their own emissions. Many developing nations at preliminary meetings in Copenhagen on Saturday were lining up with the four in opposing the Danish proposals, delegation sources said. China is the top world emitter ahead of the United States, Russia and India.”  Which means of course that in the interests of cutting emissions, the US must lead the way.

The logic behind China’s pollution pass may not be immediately self-evident until the concept of Climate Justice is understood. It’s a movement to make First World countries morally and possibly legally responsible for centuries of defiling the Earth.  Former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said, “Climate justice demands that the industrialized countries meet their historic responsibility for the accumulation of greenhouse gases. They must lead in ensuring that global emissions peak by 2020 -and fall by at least 50 percent from 1990 levels by 2050″. They’re coming after your wallet and you are going to admit that you deserve it.

This is about so much more than control. It’s about redistribution of wealth on a scale the likes of which none of us can imagine. And don’t think the poor in America will be off the hook. America’s poor are far better off than the poor in, say, Africa, and won’t be spared the higher energy prices this will cause. Not to mention the inflation that will impact every single American, regardless of income. 

This is about punishing the wealthy nations for producing and accumulating wealth. No wonder President Obama is on board. After his world apology tour, it isn’t a much of a stretch to think he believes Americans deserve to be punished. All the better if he has the excuse of “saving the planet” to fall back on. And if the checking accounts of corrupt democrats and their donors get fatter, all the better. They’re going to need all the money they can get their grubby paws on for the next campaign.