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As the world struggles to reach an agreement on global warming, the UK Environment Secretary said pollution is having a particularly damaging effect on the two thirds of the world covered by oceans. He explained that carbon dioxide is being absorbed at a faster rate than at any time in the previous 21 million years, causing ocean acidification. The process dissolves the shells and skeletons of key marine life and is in danger of destroying whole ecosystems. “Why should we worry about this?” he asked “Because there is marine life that is affected by that change. In particular animals and...

Environment ministers must ''get their act together'' to put international talks to tackle climate change back on track and deal with unresolved issues, Ed Miliband has said. Speaking in Copenhagen, the Climate Change Secretary urged delegates to make progress before national leaders arrive later this week. He said: ''We need to collectively get our act together and move on and find ways in which we can solve the difficult issues, because these issues that I've mentioned can't all be left to leaders. ''It may be the case that some final issues remain when leaders arrive. ''I've always said the leaders'...

The main session of the UN climate talks in Copenhagen stalled after African nations accused rich countries of trying to kill the existing Kyoto Protocol. Talks failed to start as planned at 1030 GMT due to the African protest. The session was to seek ways to end deadlock on core issues, four days before about 110 world leaders aim to agree a new climate deal to limit global warming that scientists say will bring more heatwaves, floods and rising sea levels. The talks resumed after lunch. "This is a walk-out over process and form, not a walkout over substance, and...

At the Copenhagen summit, there isn't a negotiating process to reach a climate pact. There are two. In 1992, at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, representatives from more than 150 nations—signed an agreement giving birth to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. [It] began holding sessions called the Conference of the Parties—COPs. What's happening in Copenhagen is the 15th such session, hence the nickname COP15. In 1997, COP3 established the Kyoto Protocol, a treaty that set binding targets for greenhouse gas emissions for 37 industrialized countries (cutting emissions 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2012). At...

Tensions are boiling up at the Copenhagen Business Day, a parallel event to the main intergovernmental summit on climate change. I pitched up this morning expecting some self-congratulatory platitudes about how businesses are “stepping up to the carbon challenge” and was met with simmering frustration about the fact that companies have been edged out of the summit by bossy civil servants. It all kicked off when Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the United Nations, began his address by attacking companies for failing to come up with specific financial proposals to help politicians raise the funding to tackle climate change....

So this big climate change confab is going on right now in Copenhagen. Lots of British Thermal Units have given their lives to fly in the delegates from all around the globe. Delegates from the "rich" countries want to feel good and guilty about being rich, greedy, energy guzzlers. Delegates from the "developing" countries want to exploit that guilt and extract their gold--collecting billions of dollars from the rich folks to help them adapt to "climate change." So this conference is about "going green" alright: It's about the green going out of OUR pockets and into theirs! And all...

A political scuffle has broken out about which lawmakers will be allowed to go to Copenhagen, Demark, on a congressional delegation led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). Days before legislators are scheduled to discuss global warming at a climate change summit, accusations flew about the politics of who gets a codel invitation. Rep. Darrell Issa (Calif.), a partisan Republican who has been an outspoken critic of climate change legislation, said Wednesday that even though he was invited by a senior Republican, he may not be allowed to go on the codel to Denmark next week. Pelosi is expected to lead...

Junk Science: The Environmental Protection Agency's sneak attack on the U.S. economy and our freedoms, curiously timed for the opening day of the Copenhagen climate charade, won't go unchallenged. Nor should it. (snip) EPA administrator Lisa Jackson, in a conversation with Sen. James Inhofe, ranking Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, has in effect admitted the finding was based on the junk science and data manipulation practiced at Britain's East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU). "She told me that EPA accepted those findings without any serious independent analysis to see whether they were true," Inhofe said. Dr....

Al Gore has written a moving poem about climate change. Perhaps readers of Telegraph blogs would care to follow his example. There’s a prize in it for the best one. The winner will receive a copy of Christopher Booker’s superb The Real Global Warming Disaster.The competition closes midnight on Sunday. Just post your entry below. (Entries only please; save your comments for my non-poetry-related blogs).Here are some themes you might want to consider: Thoughts of a majestic polar bear as he gazes mournfully over the warming oceans from his melting ice cap.Does anything rhyme with George Monbiot?How the heroic MSM...

The Copenhagen climate summit was thrown into disarray last night after developing countries said the current plans for a deal on global warming condemned millions of people to “absolute devastation”. The row broke out after the draft text of a deal allegedly prepared by the Danish government emerged, which campaigners claimed favoured rich countries and risked squeezing poor nations out of the negotiations. The draft agreement, published online by The Guardian, was interpreted by developing countries as setting unequal limits on carbon emissions for developed and developing countries – meaning that people in rich countries would be permitted to emit...

Written by Administrator Friday, 20 November 2009 22:54 To force IPCC and its supporters to explain why they think their hypotheses have any foundation, and to use the power of the Internet and mass media to communicate our Challenge questions and the IPCC responses to the general public throughout the world.

Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) will round out Sen. James Inhofe's (R-Okla.) "truth squad" at December's climate change summit in Denmark. Inhofe, a noted global warming skeptic, will bring along Wicker and Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), whose attendance had been announced previously. The trio will join a number of other members of Congress and President Barack Obama at the United Nations' Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen this month. Inhofe had previously been tight-lipped on the identity of his third travel companion, waiting until this morning to name Wicker as the person. Inhofe had rejected speculation on a conservative talk radio show...

China's pledge to reduce its carbon emissions relative to the growth of its economy will not be binding or subject to international verification, Chinese officials say, casting doubts on the effectiveness of any agreements reached this week in Copenhagen. Specialists on climate change agree that a key to success at the upcoming summit in the Danish capital will be whether China, the United States, India and the European Union can reach a deal reducing their combined emissions. Analysts are expecting the negotiations to result in a list of individual pledges and an agreement to continue talking in 2010. China, the...

ClimateGate: Britain's Climate Research Unit now says it will release all its data. Does that include the data that have been shredded, deleted and denied publication? In a statement released Saturday by the University of East Anglia, where the CRU is located, it was announced that all unit data, including data that had been denied climate skeptics, would soon be released to prove this is much ado about nothing. Unimpressed by the news is David Holland of Northampton, a grandfather with a background in electrical engineering, who is seeking prosecution of the CRU scientists involved in suppressing and even destroying...

For 20 years, as this crowded planet grew warmer, nations have gathered annually to try to do something about it. History now brings them to this chilly northern capital, and to a crossroads. The world looks to Copenhagen "to witness what I believe will be an historic turning point in the fight against climate change," says Yvo de Boer, United Nations organizer of the two weeks of talks opening Monday. It may witness, instead, history put on hold. The change in US administrations a year ago had aroused hopes the long-running climate talks might finally produce an all-encompassing package in...

Science: For two years, our space agency has refused Freedom of Information requests on why it has repeatedly corrected its climate figures. A leading researcher threatens to sue to find more inconvenient truths. What's become known as "Climate-Gate" may be about to explode on this side of the pond as well. Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, has threatened a lawsuit against NASA if by year-end the agency doesn't honor his FOI requests for information on how and why its climate numbers have been consistently adjusted for errors. "I assume that what is there is highly...

Warming Scandal: The architect of climate fraud steps down, the creator of the infamous "hockey stick" is investigated, and Australia's parliament defeats cap-and-trade. We love the smell of truth in the morning. As the high priests of what Czech President Vaclav Klaus has called a "religion" prepare their pilgrimage to worship the earth goddess Gaia in Copenhagen, complete with humanity being sacrificed, the heresy of climate truth is finally being heard. The gospel of climate change, once expressed with the messianic fervor of an Elmer Gantry by Al Gore, is now expressed with the stammering incoherence of an Elmer Fudd...

Climate Change: Major U.S. corporations have set up a Web site calling for a global climate treaty to be signed in Copenhagen. Considering recent evidence of massive climate fraud, perhaps they should reconsider. Many will remember the classic soft drink ad campaign where young people from many nations gather on a mountaintop and sing that they'd like to buy the world a Coke, the theory being that sharing a soda was the key to world peace. That sort of naivete has led peoples and governments around the world to accept at face value the outright fraud perpetrated by the Milli...

The USA didn’t participate in Kyoto because Al Gore signed an agreement allowing the USA to be bound by carbon dioxide emission cuts, but not China and India–this despite a unanimous vote in the US Senate beforehand opposing such a proposal.  You see, the impossibility of ratification didn’t matter to Clinton/Gore. What mattered was looking good in the eyes of certain international elites. Now, apparently, everything old is new again. China and India refuse to permit any on site international oversight of their emissions releases, but the beat goes on anyway. From the story: China and other major emerging economies will...

As Members of the US Congress continue to talk hopefully of a cap-and-trade system for the United States, the United Nations is now preparing to host its annual Climate Change Conference in the hope of eventually establishing a worldwide cap-and-trade scheme. But recent political and diplomatic developments, to say nothing of the climate-science scandals in England, New Zealand, and the United States, cast doubt on the likelihood and even the workability of such a scheme.On Tuesday, the English-language Copenhagen Post first reported on multiple cases of securities fraud involving the Denmark CO2 Quotas Register, the world's largest. Two days later,...