THE Copenhagen conference was rightly killed by greed, science fiction and a surfeit of hot air emitted by the 45,000 delegates, rent-seekers and assorted hangers-on, all of whom attempted to defy common sense and cripple the global economy.

Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, who sought to attain some semblance of world statesmanship as a "friend of the chair" appointed by host, Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen, again demonstrated his lack of diplomatic negotiating skills as conferees failed to agree to a meaningful conclusion.

Fortunately, Rudd's attempts to scare Australians into supporting an untested emissions trading system in advance of the failed conference were derailed by a new and reinvigorated Opposition, under Tony Abbott, at the eleventh hour.

Had Malcolm Turnbull's plan to go along with the Labor Party succeeded, Australia would now be suffering under a new tax scheme that would have ensured the collapse of industries fundamental to the economy.

The collapse at Copenhagen into a weak, almost meaningless morass of platitudes and "legally non-binding" (how's that for humbug?) agreement with no firm limits on emissions provided real-time proof of the inability of the United Nations to organise, let alone operate, anything.That Australia sent more than 100 people to Copenhagen to participate in this gabfest only to return with a piece of paper that reads like a drunk's New Year's resolution is an absolute disgrace. What's more, the whole show will be repeated in Bonn in six months in another exercise of futility, fatuity and duplicity.

Left-leaning nations and taxpayer-funded organisations went to Copenhagen prepared to give the dysfunctional global bureaucracy the power to operate the largest, most intrusive, supra-national tax-and-police authority ever envisaged.

Characters dressed as polar bears and pandas cheered such irrational leaders as Venezuela's Hugo Chavez as he called for the end of capitalism, for only with the end of rationalism can such endangered fruit-loops hope to survive.

One of the few to show any independent thinking was Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who said his nation supported a collective global agreement, but any compromise must not ignore the science. "To settle for something that would be seen as diminished expectations ... would be in our view a very wrong message to emerge," he said.

Without doubt, the wrong message has been sent.

As Patrick Michaels, formerly professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia, wrote in The Wall Street Journal, Climategate - the now famous leaked emails from the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit - demonstrate some arbitrary manipulating of various climate data sources in order to fit preconceived hypotheses, deliberate blocking of freedom of information requests related to data provided to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the silencing of climate scientists sceptical of the prevailing orthodoxy.

In effect, the global warming claims of the so-called science has been ripped apart. The crowd who gathered in Copenhagen were there pushing a fraud.

The Russians were on to it early when they checked the claims being put forward on the basis of the data they had supplied.

Last week, the Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) was issued a report claiming that the Hadley Centre for Climate Change based at the headquarters of the British Meteorological Office in Exeter (Devon, England) had probably tampered with Russian climate data.

The IEA said Russian meteorological-station data did not substantiate the anthropogenic global-warming theory and that the Hadley Climate Research Unit Temperature UK (HadCRUT) survey had cherry-picked available data.

It had ignored material that showed no substantial warming in the late 20th century and early 21st century and included incomplete data, rather than using uninterrupted observations.

The London Daily Telegraph's James Delingpole, a keen student of Climategate, noted: "What the Russians are suggesting here, in other words, is that the entire global temperature record used by the IPCC to inform world government policy is a crock."

In The Weekend Australian yesterday, a number of respected scientists dismissed the alarmist warnings about the extinction of the Great Barrier Reef. The widely anticipated extreme weather predicted by climate alarmists has not eventuated.

Even the threats of rising sea levels have been rejected by one of the world's foremost sea-rise experts, Nils-Axel Morner, the leader of the Maldives Sea Level Project, who wrote in October to Maldives President Mohamed Nasheed telling him that the results of extensive testing of the sea levels in the Maldives over several decades showed "overwhelming evidence that sea level was by no means in a rising mode in the Maldives, but had remained quite stable for the last 30 years".The same goes for Tuvalu and the other island nations claiming to be threatened by calamitous sea rise, he said. Very emotive, but a fraud.

There we have it. As yet, the global warming crowd have failed to produce any observation-based evidence that carbon dioxide levels have led to rising temperatures, but have shown that they are willing to distort data, manipulate facts and censor those who disagree with their ideology.May all those who have peddled this dangerous and unscientific nonsense wake to a lump of coal in their stocking on Christmas Day.

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