Al Gore cancels Copenhagen appearance: Too late to save polar bears?

Re-cap of the ClimateGate controversy, with some historical background here. Tim Blair reports on tragic activists disappointed by Al Gore's cancellation of a personal appearance in Copenhagen. Quoting Mark Steyn:

It may well be that Warmergate has come along too late. I won’t pretend to know the motivations of Jones, Mann and their colleagues, but judging from recent eco-advertising their work appears to have driven worshippers at the First Church of the Settled Scientist literally insane. A new commercial shows polar bears dropping from the skies onto city streets and crushing the cars below …

As the ad explains, “An average European flight produces over 400 kg of greenhouse gases for every passenger. That’s the weight of an adult polar bear.”?Oooookay. It’s A Warmerful Life: every time they call your flight, a poley bear loses its wings.

Blair observes:

Meanwhile, tragic activists who’ve flown to Denmark in the hope of shaking Al Gore’s hand may have killed their share of bears for nothing:
Al Gore has canceled his $1,209-a-handshake appearance in Copenhagen.

Al Gore staunchly refused to debate anyone concerning global warming even before ClimateGate broke. Guess there's no chance of a debate now.

Steyn has a list (somewhat different from mine) concerning how the science became settled. Read the whole thing.

The science is so settled it’s now perfectly routine for leaders of the developed world to go around sounding like apocalyptic madmen of the kind that used to wander the streets wearing sandwich boards and handing out homemade pamphlets. Governments that are incapable of—to pluck at random—enforcing their southern border, reducing waiting times for routine operations to below two years, or doing something about the nightly ritual of car-torching “youths,” are nevertheless taken seriously when they claim to be able to change the very heavens—if only they can tax and regulate us enough. As they will if they reach “consensus” at Copenhagen. And most probably even if they don’t.

How did we reach this point? Ah, well. Like the proverbial sausage factory, you never want to look too closely at how the science gets settled.

He then gets kind of technical. And he considers the quality of the data with which the CRU was working to be an even greater scandal than their attempts to "hide the decline" - don't stop at the "how the science was settled" list.

The Deceiver website (Motto: Do as you say or we'll say what you do) broke the news about Gore's cancelled appearance, and also has some Global Warming news about Sting.

Tigerhawk on the "moral imperative" to stop global warming via control of the world's economy:

How about we do a bunch of easy stuff first with deregulation and money that is already committed, like making it a lot easier to build nuclear power plants and spending that "stimulus" money on a massive upgrade of electrical grid instead of repaving 12 miles of highway in each Congressional district? Maybe some experimental seeding of the Arctic atmosphere with reflective particulates. All cheap, reversible stuff that will give governments some chance to show competence.

No, really.

When you start with a massive transfer of wealth and an almost gleeful deconstruction of consumer capitalism, you are bound to trigger equally massive resistance, almost no matter how swell your science and how scary your predictions of catastrophe. That is so obvious, one is forced to wonder whether the real point is the massive transfer of wealth and the deconstruction of consumer capitalism.