From Christopher Monckton of Brenchley: Copenhagen, 7 December 2009
The opening day of the largest international conference ever held has dawned with dense, wet fog blanketing the city of Copenhagen – a metaphor for the two weeks of obnubilation, obfuscation, and obscurantism that are upon us.
Copenhagen is usually a beautiful city, but it has been disfigured by mawkish Green propaganda exhibits in every public place, reminiscent of the Nazi propaganda that dismally blanketed the city during World War II.
In the great hall of the railway station, as we arrived by politically-correct, low-carbon-footprint train from Berlin, there was an enormous, self-serving display saying what a good idea it would be if everyone went everywhere by rail. Actually, the carbon footprint of an Airbus 380, per passenger mile, is lower than that of a train. The railways have some catching up to do, footprint-wise.
Yesterday morning in front of the Folketinget (literally “People’s Thingy”), which is the Danish Parliament, several heavy lorries from the UK were unloading enormous tree-stumps of best mahogany wrenched from the rain-forest by a soi-disant “artist” as a way of raising consciousness of the perils of deforestation. As I was saying to the Prince of Wales the other day (how’s that for a name-drop), deforestation is a real environmental problem, but “global warming” is not.
However pious the “artist’s” intentions, can he justify the astronomical number of timber-miles involved in shipping in these huge tree-stumps, to say nothing of the carbon footprint of the gros-culs that transported it from the British docks all the way to Copenhagen? No, I didn’t think so. No doubt he was paid a disproportionate fee – at taxpayers’ expense, of course.
Taxpayers’ expense. Ay, there’s the rub. Never mind the billions that are being spent on getting the national delegations from at least 192 countries to the conference – not to mention the 300+ UN bureaucracies, each with dozens of bureaucrats, all passing the check to Johnny Taxpayer.
If the provisions already in draft in the Copenhagen Treaty are agreed here in Copenhagen, here’s what it’s going to cost you -
- The equivalent of half the US Defense Budget every year will be taken from your trouser pocket in supposed reparation for imagined – and imaginary – “climate debt”. That’s 2% of gross domestic product, which will be used to pay for the unelected, communistic World Government that the treaty draft describes.
- The other half of the US Defense Budget will also be taken from you, this time by way of a 2% tax on every financial transaction into or out of any Western country. In fact, this could end up costing a lot more than 2% of GDP, because the volume of transactions far exceeds total GDP.
- Suppose a newly-elected US Administration – after the mid-term elections, say – decides it wants nothing to do with Copenhagen, the world government will have the right to inflict unlimited financial penalties on – well, on you, Johnny boy. You elected the Obama team, and you’re going to have to pay for it, in spades.
- The new World Governnent will have the power to regulate all world markets. If the Treaty is passed in its original form, the very concept of the free market – the concept on which the prosperity of the West was built – will be swept away. It is this provision, taken with the absence of any provision for democratic election of the World Government, which establishes that world communism would be the outcome. Say farewell to freedom, and her comely handmaidens democracy and prosperity. The Treaty is against all three.
And that’s not all. The new World Government will have powers to interfere directly, at will, in the economic and financial as well as environmental affairs of your nation, over the heads of your elected representatives and against their will.
The World Government will also have the power to impose carbon rationing and taxation worldwide, flinging the West into bankruptcy in the name of Saving The Planet.
You may wonder why you haven’t heard about the World Government. That’s because the mainstream news media aren’t telling you. They pride themselves on being, in the old phrase, “mirrors of the Establishment”, but now they are merely its poodles.
They are deliberately not telling you about what’s in the Copenhagen Treaty draft, just as they’re silent about what’s in the Climategate emails – the thousands of emails between all of the leading IPCC scientists over the past decade that were recently released by a whistleblower at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit.
The emails reveal that self-serving “scientists” have been inventing, fabricating, falsifying, tweaking, altering, losing, concealing, and destroying the very scientific data on which the entire case for “global-warming” alarm is based. The scientific case for doing anything but waiting and seeing was always thin: now it is in tatters.
Let me end today’s introductory posting with the answers I gave a couple of days ago to a schoolboy who had been asked to do a school project on why “going green” was essential to Save The Planet. His questions, and my answers, are below.
Dear Mr. Hampshire, – Thank you for your questions. The answers are -
1. What are your experiences with “global warming”?
There has been no statistically-significant “global warming” for 15 years. On all measures, there has been rapid global cooling for nine years. These simple and easily-verifiable facts have not been reported in most news media.
There had been 300 years of warming from 1695 to 1995, during which we could not have had any measurable influence over the first 280 years.
We might, in theory, have influenced the 20 years’ warming from 1975-1995, but the rate of warming in that period was no greater than the rate of warming in two previous periods over which we had no influence – 1860-1880 and 1910-1940.
Therefore there is no discernible human influence on global temperature.
It was considerably warmer than the present in nearly all of the past 600 million years; warmer by up to 6 Celsius degrees in each of the past four interglacial warm periods over the past 650,000 years; warmer in at least 7500 of the past 11,400 years since the end of the last Ice Age; warmer in the Holocene, Bronze Age, Roman and medieval warm periods, warmer (in the most reliably-recorded parts of the world, such as the US and the Arctic) in the 1930s.
Therefore today’s global temperatures are unexceptional, unsurprising, and uninteresting.
2. Are scientists ignoring “global warming”?
Scientists are not ignoring “global warming”: they invented it.
Emails exchanged between all of the leading international scientific institutions that have profited lavishly from the “global warming” fraud show that a malevolent clique of perhaps two dozen politicized scientists whose common purpose is the extinction of freedom, democracy, and prosperity worldwide for the profit of themselves and their institutions has fabricated, distorted, altered, lost, concealed, or destroyed scientific data, temperature records and computer programs with intent to obtain a substantial financial advantage by deception.
At least two universities and two prosecuting authorities are currently investigating what may prove to have been the most substantial, unpleasant, and expensive scientific fraud the world has ever known.
3. If scientists are ignoring “global warming”, why now, when the Earth is at its weakest?
The Earth is by no means “at its weakest”. It has survived 4.5 billion years of catastrophes on a scale unimaginable today.
As recently as 70,000 years ago, the eruption of a single supervolcano in Sumatra wiped out all of humanity except just 7000 people, from whom today’s population of 7 billion are all descended. The dinosaurs were wiped out by a single, sudden event – perhaps the impact of the Xixtulub meteorite – 70 million years ago.
Indeed, 99.9% of all creatures that ever walked the Earth were flung into extinction, often violently, millions of years before humankind first stood erect, gazed at the stars, and wondered.
Yet today the Earth is teeming with life – and most of that life lives and moves and has its being in the Tropics, where the climate is warmest. A minuscule fraction of the Earth’s species live at the Poles, where it is coldest. Faced with this compelling evidence that life prefers a warmer climate, in which direction should global temperature ideally change?
The Earth, therefore, far from being weak, has come through the disasters of previous ages with life triumphant and flourishing.
If that is weakness, let us have more of it.
4. What contributions have you made to slow the effects of “global warming”?
The atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide is rising at 2 parts per million by volume per year. Let us pretend that all of that increase is attributable to the energetic industries and enterprises of our busy species. To forestall that small and harmless increase it would be necessary for us to shut down the entire global economy immediately and forever, taking us back to the Stone Age, but without even the right to light carbon-emitting fires in our caves. No automobiles, trains, or planes. No hospitals, factories, elevators, Internet, lights, heat.
And what would be the climatic effect of this self-inflicted economic immolation, 95% of which the draft Treaty of Copenhagen actually advocates? The effect would be as near nil as makes no difference.
Here is why. Let us pretend that the UN’s flagrantly-exaggerated central estimate of the warming effect of extra CO2 in the air is accurate. Then, taking today’s CO2 concentration of 388 ppmv, the amount of future “global warming” we should be able to forestall by shutting down the entire global economy for a year would be 4.7 ln(390/388) = 0.024 C. That is less than one-fortieth of a Celsius degree.
At today’s rate of carbon dioxide emissions, it would take 40 years of total or very-near-total economic shutdown – two entire generations – to prevent just 1 Celsius degree of “global warming”.
However, the UN has exaggerated the warming effects of CO2 approximately sixfold, as numerous papers in the peer-reviewed scientific literature have established. So make that 240 years of pre-Stone-Age economic activity to forestall 1 Celsius degree of “global warming”.
Now, you ask me what contribution I have made to slow “global warming”. Well, the answer is this. Suppose I committed suicide. After the decomposition of my body, my personal “carbon footprint” would be zero. Each year, my ultimate personal sacrifice in the name of Saving The Planet would forestall one-seven-billionth of one-two-hundred-and-fortieth of a Celsius degree.
Or would it? No, it wouldn’t, because – remarkably – as the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide has increased the atmospheric concentration of water vapor has decreased by an amount more or less exactly sufficient to match the (very small) warming effect of the (very small) increase in CO2 concentration,
At least one paper in the scientific literature says that such compensatory decreases in the absolute humidity of the atmosphere must occur. At any rate, so far it has occurred, so that the total greenhouse effect of the whole atmosphere is exactly the same as it was before we began adding CO2 to the atmosphere in measurable quantities after the Second World War.
The only “global warming” that occurred after the Second World War was the warming of 1975-1995, and that warming cannot have been caused by an increase in the greenhouse effect, whether anthropogenic or natural, because there has been no increase in the greenhouse effect at all. So our carbon emissions have been harmless.
Our planet was saved 2000 years ago. It does not need to be saved again