Can COP17 technocrats rescue the warming scam?

The mood at this year's UN climate conference is subdued. Perhaps fearful. In CFACT's talks with the representatives of government, business, even the more radical NGOs, we've yet to find anyone confident that a successor treaty to the Kyoto Protocol will emerge in Durban.



The usual sideshow has been assembled. You can find rows of displays making their standard pleas for your tax dollars. Wind farms, solar, mass redistribution in the name of “climate justice,” and all the usual scare tactics have assembled.



Oxfam actually sat at a conference table they had carried into the waves of the Indian Ocean. But the sea level had not risen – not in any meaningful way. They carried their table to the same place on the beach where the waves would have found them years ago, or had humankind never engaged in commerce, industry, or had the temerity to harness fire in the first place.



Carbon profiteers and the global warming left sense that the annual climate party isn't quite the same shindig it once was. They are pulling out their usual tricks, but the public has seen through them.



For the massive global warming industry, all hope vests now in the technocrats. Behind closed doors, out of site of the huge plenary session and the NGO freak show, a very small cadre of bureaucrats are meeting. They dream of treaties, but these skilled inside operators won't let that stop them. They are putting together side agreements which permit them a way to work around such inconvenient obstacles as the U.S. Senate and whichever protections have been created to protect the sovereignty of other nations. Do not underestimate, the potency and cost of these side agreements.



Global warming is about money. Billions. They want to make it trillions. Those cashing in on this fortune will not go gentle into that dark night. The Green Climate Fund alone is now set at $100 billion and they are pushing in Durban to make it $400 billion. $400 billion may sound like a lot of money, but it is only a very small slice of the global warming pie. Consider the subsidies, set asides, guarantees, handouts, grants, shakedowns, etc. The money is vast and the special interests protecting it are legion.



The global warming cause may not be what it was, but make no mistake – the danger in Durban is real. The climatecrats will leave Africa with their money intact and with fresh plans to renew their assault upon the economy of the free world next year.



Lord Christopher Monckton is at COP17 as a member of CFACT's delegation. He has become so well recognized in this field that he draws attention here like a magnet. The organizers of radical warming NGOs can't resist the chance to take him on. He debates them where they stand and never fails to knock them for a loop. For CFACT, the jury is still out as to whether or how much the world may have warmed. We are very confident the left has it wrong when they place humans at the controls of the world's thermostat. However, consider the following argument from Lord Monckton who questions the fundamental basis of the whole warming scare.



It. Isn't. Happening.

By Lord Christopher Monckton of Brenchley



Mainstream science, politics, bureaucracy, academe, banking, business, media – all were of one mind. The West, so the playbook ran, must be shut down at once to Save The Planet from “global warming”, er, “climate change”, um, “climate disruption”, no, “extreme-weather events”, ah, that is, “energy-security challenges”. Shale gas? That would solve everything. Hundreds of years’ global supply. No more peak oil. Low carbon footprint. Ban it quick.



I find myself with CFACT in Durban among the creatures of “consensus” for the annual UN climate gabfest. Yet the party line was wrong. At a recent dinner for the inconvenient economist Bjorn Lomborg in London, I first uttered the three fateful words that now fill the hearts of the world’s governing climate racketeers with dread.



“It. Isn’t. Happening.”



When I plopped these three plump pebbles into the conversation, there was a ripple of aghast silence. It was as though I’d perpetrated what the Professor of Greek at Cambridge used to call a “gaseous halation” in front of the Queen.



Most of the diners were climate skeptics. But they were making a bundle out of it. The skeptics had almost as much of a direct, cash vested interest in flogging the long-dead horse of climatic apocalypse as the prophets and profiteers of climate doom.



It just wasn’t the done thing to poop on the party by pointing out that every dire prediction that the usual suspects had made with such sneering arrogance has failed.



Just look. Professor “Phil” Jones of the “University” of East Anglia had to admit, when the BBC’s chief environmental campaigner – er, “correspondent” – put to him a question I’d drafted – that there had been no statistically-significant “global warming” for 15 years. Oops! The UN’s models had not predicted that.



Arctic sea ice was supposed to be gone by 2013. Then it rebounded. Then it was going to reach a new low on 15 September this year, when Al Gore launched his Titanic “Climate Unreality” project. The ice did not oblige. Gore hit a berg that somehow hadn’t melted. His project sank. Even his fellow fortune-hunters in the Green[back] movement now disown his bleating attribution of every recent natural disaster to “global warming”.



Antarctic sea ice has been on the up throughout the satellite era. Global sea ice shows little trend in 30 years.



Polar bears were supposed to be headed for extinction. The fossils on the Supreme Court said so (but they’ve been extinct for years). Today there are five times as many polar bears as 70 years ago.



Kilimanjaro has been losing ice since 1880. Most of the summit glacier had gone by 1936, when Hemingway wrote The Snows. “Global warming” could not have caused the recent ice loss: NASA says the region has been cooling for 30 years. The summit temperature, monitored by satellites, has not changed. Now the glacier is growing again.



Sea level is the big one. James Hansen of NASA, who made more than $1 million out of the climate scare last year alone, had predicted it would rise imminently by 246 feet. Was he right? No. The increase over the past eight years, according to the Envisat satellite, was at a rate equivalent to 2 inches per century. Not meters, not even feet. Inches. Two of them. Per century. Gee wow golly gosh! Take to the boats!



Malaria was going to spread because of “global warming.” Yet the terrible leap in mortality from 50,000 to 1 million child deaths a year occurred a generation ago, when the Environmental Defense Fund – which, with Greenpeace and the World Wide Fund, spent $1 billion of taxpayers’ and donors’ cash on anti-Western pseudo-enviro propaganda last year alone – successfully campaigned for a worldwide ban on DDT, the only effective agent against the mosquitoes that carry malaria.



When the Board of the EDF met to plan the DDT ban, its then legal advisor, Victor John Yannacone Jr., begged it to ban only outdoor use: DDT sprayed inside houses would harm only the mosquitoes and spare the children.



The then chairman, furious, fired Yannacone on the spot. As he left the room, someone said: “That’s the last time we employ anyone who knows any science.” That ban has killed 40 million children.



Extreme-weather deaths are down sharply. Global tropical-cyclone and hurricane activity is almost at its least in 30 years. Severe tornadoes have declined. Patterns of drought and flood remain as unpredictable and as devastating as ever. Bangladesh and nearly all of the Pacific atolls are gaining land mass, not losing it.



Net primary productivity of trees and plants worldwide is up. If you want a greener planet, add as much CO2 to the air as you can. Your emissions are also helping to stave off the next Ice Age. It’s already 6000 years overdue.



Yet the dreary, wasteful, pointless congresses of the greedy feeble-minded continue. The Bali Road-Map to Nowhere. The Copenhagen World-Government Treaty that collapsed as soon as it saw the light of day. The Cancun Concordats to establish 1000 – yes, 1000 – new bureaucracies: the structure of the unelected world government that every ex-politician from Gore and Chirac to Attali is demanding.



Everyone says nothing will happen at Durban. That worries me. It suggests the process of building a totalitarian global junta by what one UN official at Cancun called “transparent impenetrability” – publishing documents of such prolix length and complex obscurantism that no one can understand a word and yet no one can later deny the information was available – will invisibly gather pace.



Lord Reith, the BBC’s first chairman, laying the foundation-stone of what is now the abomination of desolation called Harlow New Town, was heard to mutter, “You’re not going to like it, but you’re going to have it!”



So it will be with the Marxists’ wet dream that is global totalitarian dictatorship. You’re not going to like it. But the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow and I are in Durban to stop them. So perhaps you’re not going to have it after all.





Lord Monckton in the countryside just outside Durban, South Africa. Lord Monckton in the countryside just outside Durban, South Africa.

