COP21 – Delingpole World

UK Legal Professor to Climate Activists: Breaking the Law is OK

Patrick Aventurier/Getty Images

Because the COP21 talks in Paris were a flop climate activists should take the law into their own hands and trydirect action instead.

So recommends Tara Smith, a lecturer in law at the University of Bangor, Wales, in an article for the Conversation, a website popular with academics.

In a section titled “Playing by the rules isn’t working”, she says:

While necessity is difficult to assert in climate activism trials, the Delta 5 and Greenpeace cases raise a big question: should activists be allowed to take matters into their own hands to prevent global warming and climate change? Given underwhelming results in combating this at the international level to date, arguably they should.

Warming to her revolutionary theme she goes on:

The Paris climate change agreement in December was celebrated as a major achievement in bringing all states together, developed and developing alike, to agree on a common plan to reduce global carbon emissions. However, on closer inspection, it doesn’t seem to be ambitious enough to work as expected. Warming will be limited to 2.7°C, at best, while the agreement isn’t yet legally-binding. Climate change is still likely to have severe effects.

If states are unwilling or unable to sufficiently reduce their carbon emissions in time to make a real difference, shouldn’t people around the world be encouraged to take robust action without fear of being thrown in jail for their efforts to do good?

There is precedent for this, argues Smith, who compares to the situation to disobeying orders in Nazi Germany to transport Jews to concentration camp.

Read the rest at Breitbart.

RIP Bob Carter: The Geologist Who Always Knew ‘Global Warming’ Was a Crock

Professor Bob Carter, one of the world’s leading climate sceptics, has just dropped dead of a heart attack at the far too young age of 74. Perhaps it would be pushing it to say that he was driven to an early grave by the alarmist establishment. But there’s no question that his retirement would have been a lot more comfortable, less stressful and better paid if he’d hitched his career onto the Climate Change Gravy Train rather than doggedly speaking up for the cause of honest science.

Bob had known for years that man-made global warming theory was a crock. As a brilliant earth scientist – until 1998 he was head of the geology department at James Cook University in Australia – he understood perfectly well that on the geological scale our planet has experienced shifts in climate of a magnitude so vast as to make a mockery of the notion that humans can influence or control it.

His mistake was to admit this in public rather than keep schtum and take the money. As a result, Bob’s university decided to punish him for his heresy with a series of petty slights:

First James Cook University (JCU) took away his office, then they took his title. In protest at that, another professor hired Bob immediately for an hour a week so Bob could continue supervising students and keep his library access. But that was blocked as well, even the library pass and his email account were taken away, though they cost the University almost nothing.

James Cook University didn’t even bother to pretend to be interested in whether or not Bob was right. All that mattered to JCU is that Bob’s views were not politically correct – and that therefore this might jeopardise their image:

The only reasons given were that the staff of the School of Earth and Environmental Studies had discussed the issue (without any consultation with Carter) and decided that his views on climate change did not fit well within the School’s own teaching and research activities. Apparently it took up too much time to defend Carter against outside complaints about his public writings and lectures on climate change. (Busy executives don’t have time to say “Why don’t you ask Carter yourself?” or “We value vigorous debate here.” Presumably they are too busy practising their lines and learning the litany? )

The harrying of sceptics is commonplace in academe. (See, for example, the even more shocking treatment of Willie Soon).

Read the rest at Breitbart.

Global Warming Is Not the Problem. Global Governance Is

Media Matters for America – George Soros’s pet attack poodle site – has published a list of the 15 Most Ridiculous Things Conservative Media Said In 2015.

I’m proud to say that I come in at number 6 (though obviously I would have preferred higher) with my statement that alarmist climate scientists are “a bunch of talentless low lives who cannot be trusted.”

In retrospect I wish to apologise for that sentence.

What I really should have said is that these are a bunch of lying, cheating, scum-sucking, bottom-feeding, third-rate tosspots who don’t even deserve the name “scientists” because what they practise isn’t really science but data-fiddling, cherry-picking, grant-troughing, activism-driven propaganda. Posterity will grant them about as much respect as we now accord the 17th century quacks who bled their patients using leeches, or the early 20th century German scientists who helped Hitler compose his diatribe against the discredited Jewish science of Einstein, or the scientists who ganged up on Alfred Wegener for his novel – but correct – theories on continental drift. Really, if none of them ever published another paper in their lives and all their grant funding dried up at midnight tonight, the cause of climate science would not suffer one jot – and the world would become a much better (and richer) place.

Having read through all the other items on the Media Matters list, I can’t find much fault with any of them either.

Take Mark Steyn telling Fox News that “[ISIS leader] al-Baghdadi will be sawing Bernie Sanders’ head off, and he’ll be saying as his neck is being sliced, ‘If only we’d had an emissions trading scheme.’”

Apart from being very funny it also happens to be true. The attempts by Bernie Sanders – and many others including the Prince of Wales and US Secretary of State John Kerry – to link “climate change” to terrorism are both hysterical and wrong, as I demonstrate here, here and here.

Worse than that, though, these claims are fraudulent. They represent a deliberate conspiracy by our political class (and their amen corner in the media) to mislead us about the relative urgency and risks of the threats facing us in the coming years.

To anyone with even half an eye on world events, it’s perfectly obvious that there are many more desperate problems – fundamentalist Islam, say – than the imaginary problem of man-made global warming. So why do our political class persist in pretending to us, in defiance of all the evidence, that “climate change” represents the only global issue serious enough to justify the convening of a conference like the recent one in Paris attended by 40,000 delegates and the leaders of over 150 nation states?

The answer to this is too complicated for one sentence – for the full story read this book – but the consequences can be summed up in two words: global governance.

This was always the masterplan of the sinister Marxist billionaire who invented the global warming scare – Maurice Strong. (You can read more about him here and here). Environmentalism, he understood early on, was the perfect excuse to override the democratic process: after all, when the future of the world is at stake, it only makes sense to ignore the little people and concentrate power in the hands of enlightened technocrats like Maurice Strong and his eco-fascistic control freak pals….

Read the rest at Breitbart.

Obama’s Useful Idiot Jonathan Chait Declares Paris Climate Talks a Massive Success

The Associated Press

Sometimes I wonder how the left can remain so woefully ill-informed on the subject of climate change. Then I read articles like this piece of complete Chait that one of America’s leading liberal commentators has just produced for New York magazine and all becomes clear: because ‘progressive’ journalists who write about the environment don’t do research or due diligence — only fluffy sentiment and green propaganda.

Let me show you, with reference to Chait’s article — excerpts from which I’ll put in italics, with my gloss below — what I mean.

This weekend, leaders from 196 countries approved the first global agreement to limit greenhouse-gas emissions in human history. The pact is a triumph of international diplomacy shared by diplomats across the planet.

The agreement is non-binding, carries no penalties and is entirely voluntary. That’s why everyone signed: because it meant nothing — not because any diplomatic skills were necessary.

Obama’s climate agenda has lurked quietly on the recesses of the American imagination for most of his presidency. It is also probably the administration’s most important accomplishment.

That last sentence is probably true — but only because from Syria to Russia to Obamacare to Benghazi to Common Core to the proliferation of divisive #blacklivesmatter identity politics lunacy, everything else on the administration’s watch has been an even bigger fail.

Melted glaciers cannot be easily refrozen

Five Ice Ages say you’re a fool.

extinct species cannot be reborn

Jurassic Park

flooded coastal cities are unlikely to be rebuilt

Current rate of sea level rise — about 5 inches per century. You think, what, that in 500 years’ time when the seas have finally reached the bottom of people’s shorts, they won’t have figured out a way of dealing with the problem?

Read the rest at Breitbart.

Three Things We Must Do After the Failure of COP21: Rejoice; Rejoice and Rejoice!

Carsten Koall/Getty Images

At a party last week I bumped into an old Oxford contemporary of mine who has spent his entire working life since sucking at the green teat of Big Eco: Chief Sustainability Officer for Wessex borough council, or some such similar non-job. I’d just come back from the COP21 conference in Paris and when I told him this his brow furrowed in sympathy.

“But what are you going to do?” he said.

“What do you mean what am I going to do?” I said.

“Well, it’s all over for you isn’t it? The science is settled. You deniers have basically lost…”

Which, weirdly enough, was not dissimilar to what the leader of the UK Green Party Natalie Bennett said when I debated with her yesterday on LBC radio about the disastrous outcome of the COP21 climate summit. According to Natalie, I was the kind of dinosaur that people like her wouldn’t need to talk to for much longer because our opinions were now so discredited there was no place for us in the debate.

Delusion? Cognitive dissonance? No, I’d say the psychological trauma and confusion the Greenies are going through in the wake of the COP21 debacle is far, far worse than that.

They make Japanese soldiers on remote Pacific islands still fighting World War II for Emperor Hirohito look informed and sensible; they make passengers on the listing Titanic worrying whether there’ll be enough ice for tomorrow night’s gin and tonic look sane and forward looking. They’re like the Jonathan Pryce character at the dark end of the Terry Gilliam movie, lolling brain dead in their chairs, completely away with the fairies and dementedly singing the movie’s title song Brazil – which is quite appropriate really, given that Brazil – Rio to be specific – was the place where all this climate nonsense started, what feels like a lifetime ago at the 1992 Earth Summit.

Meanwhile in the real world, reality looks like this:

Read the rest at Breitbart.

Even Greenies Admit Paris Climate Talks Were a Total Waste of Time

AFP

As we predicted here, here and here at Breitbart, the COP21 Paris climate talks were a total waste of time.

No binding commitments have been made; all the countries in the world (apart from Britain) are free to emit as much carbon dioxide as they choose; the only thing everyone has agreed on is that they really, really care about global CO2 levels and that one day, maybe tomorrow, maybe mañana, they might do something about it. In other words, the 150 leaders and 40,000 delegates really would have been better off staying at home.

That’s the pessimistic view.

The more optimistic view is that it was worth it just so we could all enjoy the wailings and lamentations of disappointed greenies, throwing their toys out of the pram.

Here’s James Hansen, NASA’s former in-house activist and the man who invented global warming hysteria:

“It’s a fraud really, a fake,” he says, rubbing his head. “It’s just bullshit for them to say: ‘We’ll have a 2C warming target and then try to do a little better every five years.’ It’s just worthless words. There is no action, just promises. As long as fossil fuels appear to be the cheapest fuels out there, they will be continued to be burned.”

I never thought I’d say this but Hansen is totally right here. It was all bullshit.

Read the rest at Breitbart.

COP21: The Only Six Things You Need to Know About the Paris Climate Debacle

MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images

Sometime round about now the negotiators at the Paris COP21 climate conference will be thrashing out the final details agreement which will make no measurable difference to “climate change” but will definitely cost all of us a great deal of money.

Here is what you need to know.

1. All that stuff you’ve read and heard about “time running out”, “deadlock” , “last minute deals” — it’s all a charade; everything was pre-ordained.

Every COP conference there has ever been has run on exactly the same lines. Whatever comes out of this one, it will be a fudge and a compromise whose only certain achievement will be to ensure that there are more such conferences next year (in sunny Marrakech, Morocco) and the one after and the one after that…

In truth, COP is not really about saving the planet. Rather, it’s a massive jobs fair for activists, shyster politicians, bureaucrats, corporate scamsters, and people with otherwise worthless degrees in “sustainability”, “conservation biology”, “ecology”, etc.

2. No serious person in the world believes in man-made climate change any more. They just don’t.

When did the edifice finally collapse? Well there are lots of competing candidates. But if you haven’t seen the testimony presented by John Christy, Judith Curry, or William Happer at the Ted Cruz hearings in Congress earlier this week, that’s a good place to start. Then, in a league of his own, is Mark Steyn — who doesn’t mince his words…

Read the rest at Breitbart.

Lefties, Liberals and Warmists Behave like a Different Species

They are capable of emotion, but only when it suits their predetermined agenda of things that matter.

Because I used to go to venues like Bataclan an awful lot myself, I’ve been dwelling a great deal on what the fans must have gone through that night. And the conclusion I’ve reached is how utterly random the whole business must have been: whether you survived or died was almost entirely dependent on being at the right or wrong bit at the right or wrong time.

Even the band Eagles Of Death Metal, it turns out, only escaped by the skin of their teeth. The bassist barricaded himself into a room; the singer and guitarist escaped into the street and went briefly back to look for a missing girlfriend only to meet a gunman lowering his assault rifle at them; the drummer crawled out using his drum kit for cover.

I find these details fascinating, perhaps due to morbid curiosity or an overactive imagination. But there’s one empathetic exercise of which I’m utterly incapable — and that’s putting myself in the shoes of those who don’t feel this stuff as viscerally as I do.

For example, the bien-pensant twenty-something French media professionals interviewed in a bar afterwards by Canadian journalist Ezra Levant. Here they were in Paris only one night after young men and women just like them had been shot, stabbed or blown up by people yelling ‘Allahu Akbar’; and all they wanted to do was to apologise on behalf the Muslim community. One asserted that the Quran wasn’t violent; another that only 0.005 per cent of the Muslim population supported terrorism. How many more deaths, you wondered, would it take to dent their complacency? Not 139, clearly. But would 1,390 be enough? 13,900?

We’re often told that progressive types are all heart whereas evil right-wing bastards like me are all about head. But I think it’s more complicated than that. Yes, liberal lefties are indeed capable of summoning raw emotion when considering certain issues: only, though, so long as those issues accord with their predetermined agenda of the things that really matter in the world.

Climate change, for example. According to luminaries such as US Secretary of State John Kerry, Nobel-prizewinning economist Paul Krugman, US presidential contender Bernie Sanders, and possibly even our own Prince of Wales, it represents a greater threat than terrorism. Well, fine. Perhaps it does. So let’s just look at the figures shall we?

In 2014, according to the Global Terrorism Index, 32,658 people were killed by terrorism — a rise of 80 per cent on the previous year. This upward trend seems unlikely to flatten any time soon.

Now let’s look at the number of deaths attributable to ‘climate change’ in the same year. Zero. As it was in the previous year. And in the year before that. The smartarse get-out is that it’s extreme weather events like hurricanes, floods, droughts and so on which kill people, not climate. But the non-casuistic explanation is just as valid: as even the IPCC’s last Assessment Report more or less conceded, the evidence that ‘climate change’ has led to an increase in extreme weather events is slim to nonexistent.

Read the rest at the Spectator.

Paris Climate Talks Are Doomed Because China Knows ‘Climate Change’ Is a Hoax

AP Photo/Andy Wong

“The fact of the matter is that there’s a reason why you have the largest gathering of world leaders probably in world history here in Paris. Everyone else is taking climate change seriously.” Barack Obama.

Like a lot of the president’s statements on climate change this isn’t actually true. In fact there are lots and lots of people in the world who know it’s a hoax. And among them, unfortunately, happen to be the ruling elite of the most significant carbon emitting nation of them all: China.

We know this because of a devastating report, released today by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, written by one of the West’s leading experts on the Chinese environmental economy, Patricia Adams.

Adams, an economist, executive director of Toronto-based Probe International, who has been working with the Chinese environmental movement since the mid-Eighties, is under absolutely no illusions about China’s real position on “climate change.”

China sees it as a brilliant opportunity to fleece the gullible gwailo for as much money as it can, to burnish its international image by making all the right green noises, and to blackmail the West into providing it with free technology.

But it has no intention whatsoever of sacrificing economic growth by reducing its carbon dioxide emissions.

China knows this. The West either knows this or strongly suspects this. So any agreement reached next week which pretends otherwise will either be a fudge, a lie, or an outright capitulation by Western negotiators – because China knows what it wants and it isn’t budging, no sirree.

Here’s how Adams puts it:

China, the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide, is under intense international pressure to reduce its use of fossil fuels. Although China’s leaders aim to reduce the country’s fossil-fuel consumption to 80% of its energy mix by 2030, they will not forsake national economic growth for the supposed global good. This is because China’s Communist Party knows that to stay in power – its highest priority – it must maintain the economic growth rates that have raised the incomes of much of its population and kept opposition at bay. China’s leaders know that GDP growth is tied to fossil- fuel use.

So far so disastrous for the COP21 negotiations. But worse is to come, far worse.

Obama and other Western leaders like to pretend that China’s appalling air pollution – the “airpocalypse” afflicting major cities which kills at least half a million a year – gives it a strong incentive to reduce its CO2 levels. But in fact the opposite is true.

That’s because China understands – as the West pretends not to – that CO2 and “pollution” are very different things.

Read the rest at Breitbart.

Ding, Dong – The Godfather of Global Warming Is Dead!

ANTONIO SCORZA/AFP/GettyImages

Paris, COP21 Climate Summit – One of the most dangerous men of the Twentieth Century has just died: and the weird thing is, hardly anyone noticed.

His name was Maurice Strong (picture above, on the right), Canadian billionaire, diplomat and UN apparatchik, and though you may not have heard of him, he probably did more to make your world a more expensive, inconvenient, overregulated, hectored, bullied, lied-to, sclerotic, undemocratic place than anyone post Hitler, Stalin and (his personal friend) Mao.

He’s the reason, for example, that most of the world’s leaders, 40,000 delegates and their attendant carbon mega-footprint descended here on Paris yesterday in order to talk about magical fairy dust for two weeks and then charge you $1.5 trillion (that’s per year, by the way) for the privilege.

He’s the reason that “climate change” is now so heavily embedded within our system of global governance that it is now almost literally impossible for any politician or anyone else whose career depends on the state to admit that’s it not a problem and to argue that there are more important issues in the world, like maybe the terrorism that killed over 130 innocent people just the other week now, where was it?- oh yeah, here in Paris where for some bizarre reason all the delegates are talking about carbon emissions instead…

He was the father of the mother of all climate summits: the one in Rio in 1992 that spawned a million and one bastard offspring, like the one in Paris now.

He was the main instigator of the blueprint for arguably the most sinister and insidious assault on liberty and free markets: Agenda 21.

If you had met him – if you’d even noticed him – you would have probably quite liked him:

One of the most remarkable things about Strong was how unremarkable he was in person. Somebody once said that you wouldn’t pick him out of a crowd of two.

Nevertheless, he was an avuncular and likeable figure, even to those who disagreed strongly with his world view, as I did. I interviewed him numerous times over a 20-year period, and found that he took scarcely-concealed delight in explaining his often Machiavellian political manoeuvrings.

But as I argue in Watermelons – which gave a lot of space to Strong – it’s a big mistake to expect that supervillains will always have scars down the side of their face and fluffy white cat on their lap.

Strong’s true evil lay in the effects of his acts, not in his (claimed) good intentions.

Then again, the mask did occasionally slip.

Read the rest at Breitbart.