The Collapsing Carbon Market

The Kyoto Protocol required developed countries which did not meet their carbon reduction quotas to purchase credits from clean energy projects in the developing world.  This created a carbon trading market, which meant that many people, including Al Gore, were able to make a great deal of money from the alarm caused by the theory of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming.  Those making such money became a powerful lobby with a strong incentive to further feed the man-made global warming frenzy.

The Guardian of the UK has now reported that the carbon market is no longer growing and may soon collapse.  The failure of the Copenhagen Conference to set new emissions standards to take effect when the Kyoto Protocol reduction schedule ends in 2012, is causing many banks to stop lending money for carbon-emissions offset projects.  These banks are not expanding their workforce on the carbon desks as anticipated and some people are already being released.  The financiers backing one large clean energy project in the developing world backed out this month.  The recession also contributed to there being lower emissions and hence less overshoot on quotas needing to be offset.  The price of carbon offsets has fallen, especially in the U.S. and Australia where attempts to pass carbon cap and trade legislation have failed.

The weakness of the carbon trading market, combined with the realization by many that the science behind the theory of catastrophic man-made global warming was fraudulent, is and will further result in a great weakening of the forces pushing for catastrophic energy use restrictions and the attendant destruction of the economies of the nations of the developed world. 

Prince Charles Says the World is Doomed If We Do Not Act Within 7 Years

Prince Charles, the queen of England's husband, has declared that unless we drastically cut back within 7 years on man's use of fossil fuels which produce CO2, the Earth is doomed!

The situation is so bad that he flew to the Copenhagen Climate Summit in one of the Queen's jets on the same day that Gordon Brown flew on another, non-commercial flight.  They could not share a plane or even take one of the 16 commercial flights scheduled into Copenhagen that day.  Stephen Glover goes on to report:

The Copenhagen summit, supposed to produce an agreement limiting greenhouse gases, has, according to experts, the same carbon footprint as a medium-sized African country such as Malawi. 

There are an amazing 34,000 delegates attending the event, and the grander among them are forced, says my colleague Robert Hardman in Copenhagen, to park their private jets in Norway because Denmark has run out of Tarmac, and to procure their gas-guzzling limousines from Germany.

 It is wonderful to be a smug elitist saving the world from the energy use of the less fortunate masses!

The Socialist Core of the Copenhagen Climate Summit

The recently failed Copenhagen Climate Summit attempted to reach worldwide intergovernmental agreements on drastic fossil fuel energy use.  No binding commitments were reached, much to my relief given the faulty science the whole idea of CO2 emissions reductions is based on and the huge damage to economic activity and individual expenses of the cheap energy use reductions.  Given these problems, why does the catastrophic AGW thesis get so much uncritical support?

This article in The Australian contains a very important nugget of information on just this issue.  The important part was the response of the Copenhagen Climate Summit delegates to Hugo Chavez of Venezuela:

Then President Chavez brought the house down.

When he said the process in Copenhagen was “not democratic, it is not inclusive, but isn’t that the reality of our world, the world is really an imperial dictatorship…down with imperial dictatorships” he got a rousing round of applause.

When he said there was a “silent and terrible ghost in the room” and that ghost was called capitalism, the applause was deafening.

But then he wound up to his grand conclusion – 20 minutes after his 5 minute speaking time was supposed to have ended and after quoting everyone from Karl Marx to Jesus Christ - “our revolution seeks to help all people…socialism, the other ghost that is probably wandering around this room, that’s the way to save the planet, capitalism is the road to hell....let’s fight against capitalism and make it obey us.”  He won a standing ovation.

A Snipet of the Copenhagen AGW Meeting

For your pleasure, I bring you this brief observation from Watts Up With That? on the Copenhagen Conference posted on 17 December 2009:

Today the gloves came off and the true purpose of the “global warming” scare became nakedly visible. Hugo Chavez, the Socialist president of Venezuela, blamed “global warming” on capitalism – and received a standing ovation from very nearly all of the delegates, lamentably including those from those of the capitalist nations of the West that are on the far Left – and that means too many of them.
Previously Robert Mugabe, dictator of Rhodesia, who had refused to leave office when he had been soundly defeated in a recent election, had also won plaudits at the conference for saying that the West ought to pay him plenty of money in reparation of our supposed “climate debt”.

I wonder how much of our aid money to these and other such nations will disappear into the personal bank accounts of such leaders and their country-looting henchmen?

More Hockey Stick Temperature Data

I found the short version of J. Storrs Hall's history of temperature in the the Greenland ice from Watts Up with That?  I am going to present a shorter version here with my comments, but it is worth looking at the original version, which also goes further back in the history of the Earth.  Meanwhile, let us all be very sure that we have a solid understanding of the relatively recent steady and stable climate provided to us by beneficent natural forces prior to man's industrial age, in which man acquired the capability to kill the Earth and promptly set out to do so.  Yes, we all on board with Obama and so many leaders of governments all over the world gathered in Copenhagen who are only too happy to lay down the law and restrict our energy use for the good of the Earth.  ......Good, you know me well enough to know that the last couple of sentences were tongue in cheek, mimicking the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming nuts!

At the Foresight Institute, J. Storrs Hall had some interesting graphs made from NOAA ice core data (Alley, R.B. 2000. The Younger Dryas cold interval as viewed from central Greenland. Quaternary Science Reviews 19:213-226.)

Let us look at the recent history of this Greenland ice core data and note how stable the temperature was prior to 1840 during the Little Ice Age.

Note the unique rise from 1840 to about 1880.  This is a terribly sudden rise.  Now just as Mann and Briffa look at their bristlecone and tree ring data sets with flat temperature histories in much of this same period and then append the land surface instrumental measurement data to the late 20th Century as enhanced by the urban heat island effect to create a similar hockey stick set of temperature data, we examine this data in the same mindset.  Well, clearly the early industrial age, though limited to Britain mostly at that time, with the U.S. and Germany as minor players, was very effective in altering the world's climate!  Shame on those Brits!  It's really their fault.  They should pay us punitive taxes!  Indeed, the Brits owe everyone in the whole world.

We should note that there has been a further temperature rise in fits and starts after 1900 of about another 0.5 C.  Dare we look further back in history as seen by Greenland ice?  Awwww......sure, why not.  We are intrepid explorers here!

Hmm.....You mean before the Little Ice Age there was a warm period which was much warmer than it was in 1900?  It was even warmer than now!  Who woulda thunk?  And look at that awful temperature rise from 900 AD to 1025 AD of 1.7 C.  What do you suppose those people coming out of the Dark Ages in Europe did to cause that?  Were they really roasting that many Christian heretics in bonfires?  Was it due to all the blacksmiths hammering out armor and making swords?  I guess whatever they were doing must have stopped in about 1025 AD.  Maybe they noted the fact that their activities had caused man-made global warming.  I bet they all got together in Copenhagen and signed a treaty to burn less wood and charcoal!  Apparently, after that, it got colder and everyone was really happy again!  Man warming the Earth being such an awful bad thing and all.

 

Dare we look still further back?  Of course, we are all fearless here!

Oh my!  It was as warm (at least in Greenland) from about 2500 BC to 500 AD as it is now!  What on earth were those Romans and Greeks and Persians and Indians and Chinese doing then to cause those high temperatures?  Oh, and how come there was ice on Greenland at all?  How dare the ice in Greenland not have melted in 1200 BC when it was about 2.2 C warmer than now.  Al Gore, the inventor of the internet, says it should melt when that warm and flood the Earth with sea levels 20 feet higher than now.

J. Storrs Hall keeps going back and shows us what we really should worry about.  Namely, the Earth has had a real fascination with ice ages in earlier times.  He reminds us, as I have in the past, that if you want to worry about climate change, worry about the way natural forces tend to give the Earth many an ice age.  We should be very thankful it is warm.  Of course, if it were as warm as it was from 2500 BC to 500 AD, we might actually have good reason to be happy.  After all , man made some pretty good advances in that time, when according to Obama and Gore, man should have been too miserable to function.  He should have been hiding deep in his cool caves.

So, Obama and Gore, the UN, and all those European leaders, and the reluctant Indians and Chinese are all sitting down and trying to put the blacksmiths out of work.  If they put enough blacksmiths out of work, do you suppose they can bring on the return of the Little Ice Age?  Wouldn't that be just grand?

Al Gore Cancels Presentation in Copenhagen

Apparently, Al Gore is afraid of the possible heat from 3000 ticket holders for his 16 December 2009 presentation called Climate Conclusion.  Yes, he has a new presentation based on his book Our Choice.  Those who paid $1200 for tickets were going to be allowed to shake his hand.  He has backed out, the heat from the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia document dump and the resulting scandal, in which most of the leading climate scientists strongly backing the idea of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming have been revealed as data manipulators and schemers to prevent the scientific airing of opposing viewpoints, being too much for him.  Being the politician he is, he can only stand to be loved and cannot take criticism.  His future will be full of criticism now.

The 3,000 Danes who bought tickets will have their money refunded if they take their tickets back to the ticket window where they had bought them.  Would it not be great if everyone who has already been fleeced with higher energy prices or had their jobs threatened by idiot politicians who say they want to kill the coal industry or want no more coal-fired power plants built could be reimbursed?  There surely are coalminers out of work in this recession who would still be employed were it not for the catastrophic AGW fraud.  The same is true for the industries that transport coal.  Perhaps the Democrats in Congress would have allowed a bit more oil drilling if it were not for this AGW nonsense.  The sales of more SUVs might have employed more Americans. Of the 15.7 million Americans unemployed, how many are out of a job due to Obama's tough talk on destroying the coal industry, bankrupting coal-fired power plants, and his threatened energy restrictions?  How many are out of work in anticipation of new foolish regulatory rulings by the EPA, which will not listen to its internal dissenters?

There are many reasons why the unemployment in America has hit such high numbers, the most unemployed since the Great Depression.  But the attacks on energy use and the negative effects of subsidies for alternative energy developments must surely already be responsible for several hundred thousands of the unemployed.  If we allowed more drilling for oil, a few 100,000 more Americans could easily be employed.  Exxon Mobil says it can create 160,000 new jobs with the development of oil fields on and off shore.  Many other oil companies could create tens of thousands of new jobs each.  Yet, we allow the rabid environmentalists and the catastrophic AGW alarmists to cripple our economy still.  When will these wrongheaded policies change?

EPA Energy Restrictions and Copenhagen

The Democrat Senate has put off carbon cap and trade legislation, according to Harry Reid, until the Spring.  This is too late for Obama to make a splash at Copenhagen.  So, he will have the EPA claim that CO2 is a pollutant and have the EPA put severe restrictions on the use of energy in the US.  This is the "operationally significant" energy use restriction Obama has been talking about.  He has made some kind of agreement with China, it appears to some, and he and China will announce some restrictions at Copenhagen.

Will we all have to prepare for rolling blackouts?  Or, will we be denied the use of our cars on Saturdays?  Or will we simply throw more people into the ranks of the unemployed as those businesses which Obama does not like are shutdown?  Don't you just love this change and the transformation of America, People?  It is coming.  If Obama, Pelosi, Reid and their cadres of comrades have their way, this will not be America for long.  After all, if CO2 is a pollutant, why should the sovereign rights of the individual be of any significance at all?

Of course, the socialists will push ahead with all of this despite the unraveling of the claimed scientific evidence for catastrophic man-made global warming.  This will only prove that the need for the mandate to control the People by controlling their energy use drove the so-called "science,", not the other way around.  How revealing!

Probable Massive Exposure of Global Warming Alarmist Fraud

A 62 megabytes zipped file which unpacks to yield about 156 megabytes of e-mail correspondence and computer code from the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit in East Anglia, the UK, whose data was the primary basis for the UN IPCC reports, including the last one of 2007, has been made public by a hacker or a whistleblower.  This information appears to be shedding a lot of light on a conspiracy to mislead other scientists and the public into believing in man-made catastrophic global warming.  The e-mail correspondence discusses withholding the original data from review by skeptics and destroying it if need be to do so, control over editors at major scientific journals so only global warming alarmists would be published, cabal control over manuscript reviewers, celebration of the death of a global warming skeptic, and how to skew data to make the warming of the late 20th Century look more alarming and to minimize the lack of warming in this century.

This data is being discussed at Climate Audit and Watts Up With That and many other websites.  I have long claimed the science of anthropogenic catastrophic global warming was bad.  The mystery was always how had such bad science managed to hijack so many scientific journals, public policy, and the media.  The answer appeared to be that it was always mostly about meeting the socialist and internationalist agendas for power and broad control of all of the People of this Earth.  This correspondence seems to make it clear that these "scientists" really did have an agenda they held more important than science.

There are at least two major effects to be expected from this.  First, it should prove much more difficult for the Democrat Congress to pass the carbon cap and trade legislation in the Senate and for the two houses to come to agreement on a final bill.  It should be harder for the EPA to move forward with its stupid claim that CO2 is a pollutant and invoke the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act to restrict its emission.  Corollary to these, it should be much harder for the US to submit to any treaty or agreement at the upcoming Copenhagen meeting, though I expect Obama will try still to find every way he can to restrict fossil fuel use in America.  This will help tremendously in averting a disaster to our economy, many lost jobs, minimize the arguments for green energy subsidies, and the need to make major changes in our lifestyles.

The second major effect is that science itself will be given a very black eye, despite the heroic efforts of some scientists to combat this bad science and reveal it for the nonsense it was.  The People will be less likely to listen to scientists in the future and will not accept their authority so readily.  This is both good and bad.  I used to think it was principally bad, but now I am seeing this as much more of a mixed bag.  The scientific method is still as important as always and I want the People to understand that.  These scientists were evil because they subverted scientific thinking.  They are to be condemned because they claimed an unwarranted authority and argued from authority to browbeat the public into believing them and following them.  It is very important that the People understand that it is always dangerous to submit their minds to simply accepting the word of authorities.  There is no real option but to think and think very hard yourself, unless you wish always or more often than not, to be hoodwinked.

There is nothing really different about science than politics with respect to the unwary being hoodwinked if they do not use their own minds to critically evaluate for themselves the truth of everything they are told.  There is no substitute for thinking for yourself.  It may be more common for politicians to take advantage of those who do not think for themselves than it is for scientists to do so, but we should learn here that there are plenty of people in any profession who will argue from authority to scam the gullible.

The Copenhagen Treaty Tax on America

Obama had his socialist heart, if a socialist has a heart, set on going to Copenhagen and showing the world that he, Obama The Great World Leader and Unifier, had dragged the U.S. under the Copenhagen Treaty world governance umbrella to both drastically reduce its irresponsible use of energy and to pay the little-advanced countries of the world a penance fee for their development.  It is now fairly clear the U.S. Congress will not give him the carbon cap and trade bill, which was to be his demonstration that he was a Global Warming Alarmist and World Governance leader, in time for the December Copenhagen meeting.

As I have often discussed, there is no Global Warming Catastrophe.  There is no reason to be concerned about the increases in carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere.  There is every reason not to ration our use of energy.  There is no reason to allow the U.S. government or a World Government to tax or restrict our use of energy.

The draft Copenhagen Treaty proposes that every advanced country be taxed on its GDP.  The tax is to be 0.7%.  Such a tax on the U.S. economy with a 2008 GDP of $14.26 trillion would be $99.82 billion.  Being able to pay so much American taxpayer money to the less developed countries of the world would have made Obama feel like a very big man.  A big shot, a VIP.  Not to mention such a virtuous man.  Of course, the American People would have to pick up the tab and pay the bill for his wining and dining the rest of the world and impressing them with his leadership.

Except, of course, they would mostly really be snickering about how they pulled one off on the USA and those naive American People.  It appears that we have escaped this bullet for now.  We will have to keep a close eye on the would-be shooters for some time, however.  They have made it very clear that they are back-shooters.  We always knew the back-shooters were the bad guys in the American West.  We had better keep our eyes open.