Limos and Private Planes: Must be a Climate Conference

Like Glenn Reynolds says, I'll believe it's a crisis when the people telling me it's a crisis start acting like it's a crisis. (And when Big Media starts reporting as if the crisis is based on science rather than politics).

Taking a private jet to a conference on stopping global warming is a bit like traveling in a sedan chair carried by indentured servants to a summit on stopping human trafficking.

Plus, It’s too cold to walk from the hotel to the convention on global warming. Let’s take a limo!

To be fair, lots of attendees went to Copenhagen via the "Climate Express" party train across Europe (no word yet on how they'll get home).

But Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the UN Star Chamber for global warming), who has called for “hefty aviation taxes … to deter people from flying,” himself flew at least 443,000 miles on alleged IPCC business during a recent 19-month period.

State of the Science: Quick summary of ClimateGate issues.

Most Influential Tree in the world. Dilbert, Climate Scientist. Breach in the bunker.

Thinking about the poor.

ClimateGate and the social validation of knowledge. The decline they hid. And now, physicists speak out against corrupt data in paleoclimatology. Political fallout - conflicts of interest among physicists supporting the UN position? Like working for Big Oil?

Physical evidence vs. computer models. The enemies of science on the Left. Not just ClimateGate.

Global warming and the media:

Google won't autosuggest on ClimateGate. Remember, their motto is "Don't be Evil". Makes you feel good about the web histories they're keeping from your personal computer searches. Meanwhile, 54 newspapers publish the same editorial.

If the most challenging public relations problem for "your side" is that you have conspired -- either to suppress science or to suppress the news of suppressing science -- you might want to reconsider responding with, well, a conspiracy.

Contessa Brewer, ClimateGate Denier: Note that Erica Lovely says, that after so many decades of trying to get some traction on the global warming science the scientists "really can't afford to have much detracting science get out". (So, suppressing inconvenient data is O.K., I guess). Examples of "everyday-speak" among scientists: 1. "Mike's Nature Trick", 2. "Hide the Decline", 3. “Plots (1 at a time) yearly maps of calibrated (PCR-infilled or not) MXD reconstructions of growing season temperatures. Uses ‘corrected’ MXD—but shouldn’t usually plot past 1960 because these will be artificially adjusted to look closer to the real temperatures.” 4. “ARGH. Just went back to check on synthetic production. Apparently—I have no memory of this at all—we’re not doing observed rain days! It’s all synthetic from 1990 onwards. So I’m going to need conditionals in the update program to handle that. And separate gridding before 1989. And what TF happens to station counts?" 5. “I support the continued collection of such data, but I am disturbed by how some people in the paleo community try to oversell their product.” 6. "I suppose the earlier talk implying that we should not ‘muddy the waters’ by including contradictory evidence worried me." 7. "All of our attempts, so far, to estimate hemisphere-scale temperatures for the period around 1000 years ago are based on far fewer data than any of us would like. None of the datasets used so far has anything like the geographical distribution that experience with recent centuries indicates we need, and no one has yet found a convincing way of validating the lower-frequency components of them against independent data...." It's all part of how the science became settled.

Global warming and international politics:

Canada: international villain. India and Saudi Arabia want payoffs for retrictive green measures (for different reasons). Russia will get billions in credits from the Kyoto accord (because their economy tanked -- not because they made progress concerning CO2-reducing technology or policies).

The UK government tries to stop re-examination of ClimateGate data.

“Today’s debate about global warming is essentially a debate about freedom. The environmentalists would like to mastermind each and every possible (and impossible) aspect of our lives.”

Vaclav Klaus
Blue Planet in Green Shackles

Devil' Dictionary: skeptic's guide to Copenhagen.

Global Warming as a Religion (complete with free prostitutes, sort of like in ancient Babylon - though maybe not with official sanction this time.):

We're doing affirmations now? "Skeptics"... affirmations... is this religion?

Yes...just substitute caviar wedges for communion wafers and you've got it.

Latest Advice to the Faithful: Don't go green. "Individual voluntary action is a big distraction from what we really need — compulsion."

Well, I guess that lets all the faithful who flew to Copenhagen in private jets off the hook.

Update: Reporting on the conference in "Hopenhagen" first-hand (Registration for PJTV is free): Heavy on the anti-Western, anti-American and anti-capitalist themes, along with gender issues, etc. Climate scientists were also allowed a small venue, "bringing some complexity" to the simplistic scientific picture painted for the public. But politics prevailed, because of the huge differences "between capitalist patriarchy carbon and women's socialist carbon." Obviously. More here on excess and waste, controlling the message, promoting socialism, irrationality, etc.

Fascinating. Including: "Cuba, another, better world" That is, if you like countries with health care for all and food rationing for most, high literacy rates and librarians in prison, little economic activity and billionaire dictators. Worth registering with PJTV if you haven't registered already.