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Lord Monckton at Durban: It. Isn't. Happening.

http://theclimatescepticsparty.blogspot.com/2011/12/it-isnt-happeni...

By Lord Christopher Monckton of Brenchley at COP17 Durban

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.

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Rob Moore on December 5, 2011 at 5:55pm

Go Christopher-Give them all heaps and may you get the Nobel Prize for your efforts.

I dare say that after Gore that it has been devalued that much that you wouldn't take it.

Permalink Reply by Geoff Brown on December 6, 2011 at 8:37am

Can you imagine Lord Christopher parachuting onto a beach in Durban? I know he has tried some amazing stunts but parachuting?

Craig Rucker of CFACT has issued the following press release:

The Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: December 5, 2011

Climategate 2.0 parachutes into COP17

CFACT skydivers to tow banners into UN Durban conference.
Lord Monckton, Craig Rucker, Climate Depot to parachute.
Emails exposing biased science cannot be ignored

Durban, South Africa - On Tuesday, December 6 at 11:00 AM CAT (local time), CFACT skydivers will parachute past COP17 trailing banners demanding attention to the Climategate 2.0 emails. The skydiving team will land at Toti beach. Media and all interested persons are invited to the beach to observe the landing.

The second batch of emails from scientists working on the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change contain shocking revelations which show an insular cadre of climate scientists coordinating efforts to place advocacy ahead of science, stifle dissent, and conceal information which detracts from a preconceived, ideologically driven, global warming narrative.

“Media covering COP17 are kidding themselves if they think they can ignore and wish away Climategate 2.0,” said CFACT Executive Director Craig Rucker. “Lord Monckton, the folks from Climate Depot and I will carry our message by parachute if that's what it takes to wake up this conference and place the Climategate evidence of corrupted science where the world must see it.”

The Climategate emails provide a shockingly candid look at the machinations of the high priests of global warming. They have given rise to renewed demands that the IPCC, EU and the EPA cancel existing plans and programs to cap and tax carbon emissions. These misguided policies already have created economic havoc in Europe, cost hundreds of thousands of jobs in the U.S. and pose a major threat to the world economy.

Marc Morano, publisher of CFACT's ClimateDepot.com, said that the emails reveal the scientists at the heart of the manmade global warming industry have been "caught red-handed exaggerating the extent of manmade global warming while privately admitting to one another that the evidence is nowhere near as strong as they were claiming."

The new emails led Morano to conclude that they "... further expose the upper echelon of the UN IPCC as being more interested in crafting a careful narrative than following the evidence." He notes, for example, that Penn State professor Michael Mann stated in one email that, "The important thing is to make sure they're [climate skeptics] losing the PR battle." The University of East Anglia's Keith Briffa (a colleague of the already discredited EAU Climate Research Center head Phil Jones) also chimed in, "I find myself in the strange position of being very skeptical of the quality of all present reconstructions, yet sounding like a pro greenhouse zealot here!"

Rucker further noted that "The release of these emails is yet another major setback for alarmists who are hyping fears over climate change in order to exercise influence over ever-increasing segments of the U.S. and world economy."

CFACT, which has been a fully accredited non-governmental organization at these UN events for two decades, will be closely monitoring and offering daily reports on the developments in Durban. Rucker says the new emails provide even stronger reasons to oppose such radical Green initiatives as the World Wildlife Fund-Oxfam proposal for a new $25 per ton global tax on shipping with the goal of curtailing carbon emissions; the call by Bolivia, Cuba, Dominica, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Venezuela for a new climate tax on worldwide financial transactions; and a proposed new "sustainability treaty."

As Rucker notes, "The real agenda of the climate alarmists is to promote massively expanded government regulation worldwide, at the expense of jobs creation and economic growth. The policies they advocate will do the greatest harm to the world's poorest people and ensure that citizens of developing nations have no chance at true freedom and prosperity."

Gandhi told us, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” CFACT's parachute drop will force the media to cease ignoring the evidence. CFACT looks forward to winning.

Permalink Reply by Jeff Hutcho on December 8, 2011 at 10:33pm

Good onya Christopher.

I do like the phrase “transparent impenetrability” . It aptly describes the technique used to get the carbon tax through the Lower House - who would have read the whole lot of documents, and understood their implications ? And in the Senate, the shutting down of debate, to speed up the process of ratifying the bills.

Anyone seen Ruddles recently ?

I have -here

See him mentioned at paragraph 7, starts with "Earlier -----"

Isn't there a country we could send him to that still practises cannabalism ?

And he could take Greg Combet with him, before Combet signs anymore documents.

JeffT

Permalink Reply by Jeff Hutcho on December 9, 2011 at 6:32pm

Maybe all of us that are grinning due to Mr Combet not signing up for the next Kyoto, should take a second look.

From Lord Christopher Monckton's SPPI blog:-

http://sppiblog.org/news/6567

Hmmm,

JeffT

Permalink Reply by James Loring on December 11, 2011 at 2:28pm

According to this article the Durban delegates have agreed on a program.

We'll need to discover exactly what's gone on.

Permalink Reply by Michael Petterson on December 11, 2011 at 2:42pm

The link's wrong it has 2 http's in it. The correct link is http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objecti...

James Loring said:

According to this article the Durban delegates have agreed on a program.

We'll need to discover exactly what's gone on.

Permalink Reply by James Loring on December 11, 2011 at 4:26pm

Link fixed. Thanks Michael.

Permalink Reply by Rob Moore on December 15, 2011 at 3:42pm

From John Roskam | Thursday, 15 December 2011

Historically, the history of international climate negotiations has been…historic. How do we know? Because the media and politicians say so:

'Historic UN Climate Talks Open...' (Copenhagen 2009) – The Age
'Cancun Climate Talks Reach ‘Historic Deal’ ' (Cancun 2010) - The ABC
'Agreement is ‘massively historic’ ' (Durban 2011) - Greg Combet

The IPA’s Tim Wilson was in Durban. Read his historic take on history in the making in The Australian and The Australian Financial Review.

Here's something that truly is historic. The IPA is bringing Dan Hannan and Mark Steyn to Australia in February. Next week in Hey I'll tell you how you can book for their public events.

To get you in the mood here's Hannan in the European Parliament a few days ago on the real meaning of Fiscal Union. Warning - it's very funny. And here's Steyn on Friday about Obama's Kansas speech. Also funny.

The best two recent pieces on Europe are Niall Ferguson last Friday, and Boris Johnson on Monday. Imagine Boris as PM! Toby Young did in this piece in the UK Spectator.

Here's something to tell your lefty, sandal-wearing, bearded uncle at the family Christmas Party when he comes out with 'the Occupy Movement speaks for us all!' No it doesn't. Not according to this new Gallup poll in America released a few days ago.

It’s the end of the year – you know what that means – lots of lists! Here's The Economist's best books of 2011.

And the best book I read this year? Norman Stone's The Atlantic and its Enemies: A Personal History of the Cold War. How could you not read a book reviewed with this headline - 'I'm not a nasty person'.

Last week the IPA's new monthly email digest of our Foundations of Western Civilisation Program went out to IPA members. To read it and to learn about Tacitus click here.

Here's what else the IPA said this week: