Beam me to Planet Gore !
Posted on 12/11/2009 7:30:06 AM PST by BradtotheBone
COPENHAGEN — “Climategate” has muddied the good green message that was supposed to come out of the United Nations climate change talks here, forcing leaders to spend time justifying the science behind global warming when they want to focus on ending it.
Former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin stirred the pot Wednesday with a Washington Post op-ed calling on President Barack Obama to boycott the Copenhagen talks over climategate and the “agenda-driven science” it exposed.
Obama will surely ignore the call. And the Environmental Defense Fund’s Peter Goldmark told POLITICO Wednesday that climategate isn’t coming up in private meetings among nongovernmental organizations in Copenhagen and is not an issue for negotiators.
But again and again this week, U.N. officials and government leaders have felt the need to defend climate science in public — something few of them would have thought necessary just a few weeks ago.
“Now, we know that skeptics have and will continue to try and sow doubts about the science of climate change,” U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson said in a briefing to an overflow crowd at the U.S. center here Wednesday. “These are the same tactics that have been used by defenders of the status quo for years. Those tactics only serve to delay and distract from the real work ahead, namely, growing our clean energy economy and finding innovative, cost-effective ways to reduce harmful” greenhouse gases.
U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon took a similar tack in New York Tuesday, telling journalists that nothing made public from the private e-mail accounts of prominent climate scientists casts doubt on the causes or effects of climate change. In fact, he said, climate change is occurring “much, much faster than we realized, and we human beings are the primary cause.”
And in Copenhagen Tuesday, the World Meteorological Organization and the British Meteorological Office teamed up on offense, releasing new figures showing that the current decade is the warmest on record.
“These figures highlight that the world continues to see global temperature rise, most of which is due to increasing emissions of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and [they] clearly show that the argument that global warming has stopped is flawed,” they said in a statement.
Robert Watt, the head of communications for the Stockholm EnvironmentInstitute and a former policy adviser in the British government, said environmental leaders should “relish the opportunity to explain the science” behind global warming.
Still, he acknowledged that all the climategate talk has created a “tricky” problem of public perception.
“People do come up and say, ‘I see so many different things in the media,’” Watt said. He blamed the press for creating a “fake equivalence” between climate change believers and climate change skeptics. “It’s not that sort of debateabout opinion but, rather, a debate about facts, about observations and science,” he said.
“I think this is a completely annoying distraction,” added Kim Carstensen, leader of the World Wildlife Fund’s Global Climate Initiative. “It’s very clear that this has been done to discredit climate research. ... It’s a bluff. There’s nothing in it; it’s just a huge distraction.”
But one person’s distraction is another person’s tool. And for those who oppose an international agreement or cap-and-trade legislation in the United States, climategate is a useful one. A group of House Republicans cited the controversy Tuesday as they outlined their plans for a Copenhagen trip, and the negotiator for Saudi Arabia — a country not exactly itching to end the world’s dependency on fossil fuels — raised it at the opening session of the U.N. conference Monday.
In her Washington Post op-ed, Palin said that climategate has taken the “radical environmental movement” to a “tipping point.”
Not so, said Goldmark.
“It’s another Internet frenzy thing,” Goldmark told POLITICO Wednesday. “These things get a life, and they reproduce themselves like little bacteria. ... Our attitude is, it’s the same old stuff from the same old people, and it doesn’t change the science at all. None of the NGOs pay a lot of attention to it.”
Goldmark added: “I don’t think it’s an issue in the conference for the people negotiating.”
But even he acknowledged that it’s too soon to tell whether climategate will have an effect on the politics of climate change — or on the prospects for getting a cap-and-trade bill through the U.S. Senate.
“I’m not saying it couldn’t have a political consequence, but it’s not attached to a real-world event yet,” he said. “We’ll see in a couple of months what it does.”
Clean up some pollution...sure it's a good idea. Put industries like coal "out of business"....stupid.
Politico sure is soft on crime. They do a fine job of reporting the phrases and talking points of the Climate Change Criminal Conspiracy. The piece was pitiful even if this were not the biggest financial and scientific frauds the world has ever seen.
Politico has always sucked and they just keep getting better it seems.
Yeah, the press sure did create a fake image - it elevated the AGW proponents to the level of wise sages and the skeptics were equated to Holocaust deniers.
But Climategate sure unspun that nonsense in a big hurry.
The Almighty blesses in mysterious ways — sometimes through hacked e-mails, apparently.
SnakeDoc
My congressman said there are only 23 YES votes for Crap and Trade in the senate.
Money, control, servitude, misanthropy.
Those are the goals. It never WAS about “climate change”. Ever.
I pray that’s true ... still Kyoto was voted down 95-0 in the Senate in 1997.
Get it right, Lisa:
“Now, we know that skeptics have and will continue to try and sow doubts truths about the so-called 'science' of climate change...”
See this thread for the discussion of that little known fact:
Smoking Guns Across Australia: Where’s the warming? Looking at 16 other locations.
A chart for one location ...at Darwin Station:
Figure 7. GHCN homogeneity adjustments to Darwin Airport combined record
From this thread:
Some of the “Homogenized” Temperature Data is False
*************************************************************************
And as we can see the Red line hides the decline as evidenced by the BLUE LINE.
See #11
Politico has some of the best sources and access in Washington. I disagree totally with their slant, but if you want to know the inside story and the spin, it is a good source. I read it in self-defense.
What warm dark orifice were these 'new' figures stored in?
Either they had the right data for the current decade, or they did not.
If not, why should this un-reviewed, new, improved, lemon scented, extra strength data be taken at face value?
The data are not the only thing at issue here, either, the way they were handled, the fudge factors, and other mathematical manipulations all need to be subjected to open and transparent review before public policies are based on them, especially policies which will cause tremendous economic harm to the very nations which are most capable of developing and implementing any technology (if there is any) capable of mitigating the effects or causes of any severe changes in climate, should those occur and should there be any mitigation of either cause or result possible.
Who will feed the world? People who cannot feed themselves?
The developed nations achieved that status in part because they had sufficient resources and technology to feed themselves with a surplus of specialized people to engage in other pursuits.
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