Some naive folk, who probably still don't understand that governments do not, in fact, make money of their own but merely take what has been earned by others and redistribute it to causes they think will win them the most votes, may believe that the wealth redistribution will actually lower the temperature of the planet. There is no evidence, scientific or otherwise, that this will happen. The only certainty is that billions will be ripped off by bankers and other middle men before the remainder arrives in the Third World to be looted by a line-up of dictators and tyrants. While there has been a surfeit of talking at the main Copenhagen conference, there has been no discussion of the fraudulent practices that lie behind the bulk of the fabricated data on which those who support the still unproven claim that humans are the principal drivers of global warming. On the other side of the city, scientists have been lining up to debunk the extravagant claims made by people like former US vice president Al Gore and the coterie of scientists disgraced by their alleged role in the manipulation of material at the East Anglia Climate Research Unit. Among them were Professor Henrik Svensmark, a physicist from the Danish National Space Center in Copenhagen, who said the recent warming period was caused by solar activity and that during the medieval warming period, the last time the world experienced a period of high temperatures, the sun and Earth were in a similar cycle. He was accompanied by Professor Nils-Axel Morner, a geologist from Stockholm University, who said sea-level rise has also been exaggerated by the ``climate alarmists'' using computer models and that observational data from lake sediments, coastlines and trees show sea levels have remained stable. Others gave papers in which they argued that another geologist from the environmental lobby had got it wrong on ice caps, that the melting ice sheets is caused by geothermal activity rather than global surface temperatures and that CO2 from naturally occurring volcanic activity was a greater driver of warming than humans. An Australian analyst, Joanne Nova, produced a report based on official figures (available at the website of the Science and Public Policy Institute) to show that US federal spending on climate change alone since 1991 had been $79 billion, that the cost of international carbon trading last year topped $126 billion and would soon amount to trillions, making buying and selling the right to emit CO2 "the largest single commodity traded'' in the world. Yet, she said, ``no one is able to point to a single piece of evidence that man-made carbon dioxide has a significant effect on global climate''. Mr Gore, who stands to make an estimated $2 billion from his stake in the carbon market, did not attend. He has still to answer questions raised by the British High Court over allegations of nine errors made in his alarmist film An Inconvenient Truth and the issues raised by the corruption of the scientific process on which the Copenhagen conference claims are based. While those predicting the end of the world may choose not to confront the issues raised by the fabricated data, Professor Aynsley Kellow, the head of the University of Tasmania's School of Government, did canvass the matter with publisher Michael Duffy on the ABC's Counterpoint radio program. Professor Kellow, an expert reviewer for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's fourth report, said despite the denials made by key scientists whose work has been used to support the global warming theory, the leaked emails show the manipulation of the analysis was "in many ways worse than many of us expected when we knew about this case from the outside without access to these kinds of exchanges''. "What you have is evidence of a quite clear willingness to manipulate raw data to suit predetermined results, you've got a resistance to any notion of transparency, an active resistance to freedom of information requests or quite reasonable requests from scientists to have a look at data so that it can be verified,'' Professor Kellow said. He listed the malpractices as evidence of attempts to subvert the peer-review process, evidence of pressure being placed on editors to reject dissident views on climate science, and then attempts by the lead authors in the IPCC report to keep any opposing peer-reviewed science that has managed to get into the literature out of the IPCC report and, ultimately, ensuring it doesn't find its way into the all-important summary for policy makers, which, he said, was about all the politicians and bureaucrats read. The policy makers are now convinced, according to Professor Kellow, that earth's climate system is like a kind of thermostat in which we can dial in a particular level of CO2 and get a two-degree temperature rise over the next 100 years. In the professor's view, "anyone who knows anything about climate science will tell you that that's nonsense''. Very expensive nonsense, too, if the farcical plan to salve the consciences of Western Greens by transferring the capital and industries of developed nations to the Third World is agreed to this week in Copenhagen.