All Damian is asking us to do is that we screw up our courage, bump up our electricity bills and make damn sure we keep every single one of the lights in our home blazing between 8.30 and 9.30pm on Saturday March 27.

It will be a tough challenge, not least because the forces arrayed against us are so mightily powerful. Besides leading celebrity Alexandra Burke, leading blonde celebrity named after a fish Zoe Salmon, leading person called Paloma who is not called Picasso – Paloma Faith, and leading capital-lettered pop ensemble BLAKE, Earth Hour has managed to recruit the startlingly popular, well-known, and much-loved Lib Dem MP for Bath Don Foster. Yes. THE Don Foster.

A tough challenge, yes. But not an unsurmountable one. So remember everyone, even if it means interrupting your game of murder in the dark, or even rampant sex with a beautiful stranger who is too embarrassed to do it with the lights on, on March 27th you must put the interests of Western Civilisation before those of petty self-interest. Keep those lights ON. Because you know what will happen if you don’t, don’t you? ManBearPig will take over the world.

Which funnily enough, is pretty much what it is. Even Wikipedia’s own moderators acknowledge that the entry has been hijacked, as this commentary by an “uninvolved editor” makes clear.

Unfortunately, this naked bias and corruption has infected the supposedly neutral Wikipedia’s entire coverage of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) theory. And much of this, as Lawrence Solomon reports in the National Post, is the work of one man, a Cambridge-based scientist and Green Party activist named William Connolley.

Connolley took control of all things climate in the most used information source the world has ever known – Wikipedia. Starting in February 2003, just when opposition to the claims of the band members were beginning to gel, Connolley set to work on the Wikipedia site. He rewrote Wikipedia’s articles on global warming, on the greenhouse effect, on the instrumental temperature record, on the urban heat island, on climate models, on global cooling. On Feb. 14, he began to erase the Little Ice Age; on Aug.11, the Medieval Warm Period. In October, he turned his attention to the hockey stick graph. He rewrote articles on the politics of global warming and on the scientists who were skeptical of the band. Richard Lindzen and Fred Singer, two of the world’s most distinguished climate scientists, were among his early targets, followed by others that the band especially hated, such as Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, authorities on the Medieval Warm Period.

All told, Connolley created or rewrote 5,428 unique Wikipedia articles. His control over Wikipedia was greater still, however, through the role he obtained at Wikipedia as a website administrator, which allowed him to act with virtual impunity. When Connolley didn’t like the subject of a certain article, he removed it — more than 500 articles of various descriptions disappeared at his hand. When he disapproved of the arguments that others were making, he often had them barred — over 2,000 Wikipedia contributors who ran afoul of him found themselves blocked from making further contributions. Acolytes whose writing conformed to Connolley’s global warming views, in contrast, were rewarded with Wikipedia’s blessings. In these ways, Connolley turned Wikipedia into the missionary wing of the global warming movement.

Connolley has supposedly been defrocked as a Wikipedia administrator. Or so Wikipedia claimed in its feeble, there’s-really-not-much-we-can-do response to anxious questions from one of Watts Up With That’s readers.

In September 2009, the Wikipedia Arbitration Committee revoked Mr. Connolley’s administrator status after finding that he misused his administrative privileges while involved in a dispute unrelated to climate warming.

If this is true, it doesn’t seem to have made much difference to his creative input on the Wikipedia’s entries. Here he is – unless its just someone with an identical name – busily sticking his oar in to entries on the Medieval Warm Period (again) and the deeply compromised, soon-to-be-leaving (let’s hope) IPCC head Dr Rajendra Pachauri. And here he is again just three days ago, removing a mention of Climategate from Michael Mann’s entry. And here is an example of one of his Wikipedia chums – name of Stephan Schulz – helping to cover up for him by ensuring that no mention of that embarrassing Lawrence Solomon article appears on Connolley’s Wikipedia entry. And here he is deleting criticism of himself.

Connolley, it should also be noted, was one of the founder members of Real Climate – the friends-of-Michael-Mann propaganda outfit (aka “The Hockey Team”) which, in the guise of disinterested science, pumps out climate-fear-promoting hysteria on AGW and tries to discredit anyone who disagrees with the ManBearPig “consensus”.

Here he is, for example, being bigged up in a 2006 email from Michael Mann:

>> I’ve attached the piece in word format. Hyperlinks are still there,
>> but not clickable in word format. I’ve already given it a good
>> go-over w/ Gavin, Stefan, and William Connelley (our internal “peer
>> review” process at RC), so I think its in pretty good shape. Let me
>> know if any comments…
>>

and here are some of his associates:

From: Phil Jones
To: William M Connolley ,Caspar Ammann
Subject: Figure 7.1c from the 1990 IPCC Report
Date: Fri, 05 Jan 2007 13:38:40 +0000
Cc: Tom Crowley ,”Michael E. Mann” , “raymond s. bradley” , Stefan Rahmstorf , Eric Steig ,gschmidt@giss.nasa.gov, rasmus.benestad@physics.org,garidel@marine.rutgers.edu, David Archer , “Raymond P.” ,k.briffa@uea.ac.uk, t.osborn@uea.ac.uk, “Mitchell, John FB \(Chief Scientist\)” , “Jenkins, Geoff” , “Warrilow, David \(GA\)” , Tom Wigley ,mafb5@sussex.ac.uk, “Folland, Chris”

Get that? The guy who has been writing Wikipedia’s entry on Climategate (plus 5,000 others relating to “Climate Change”) is the bosom buddy of the Climategate scientists.

Nope, this isn’t a problem that is going to go away. Wikipedia may well be beyond redemption – as this useful resource site for Wiki-inaccuracies would seem to suggest. Like so many hippyish notions, Jimmy Wales’s idea of a free encyclopedia for everyone was a noble intention which has been cruelly and horribly abused by some very ugly people.

Do you want to know just how ugly? I’ve been saving the worst till last. Here it is: William Connelley’s Wikipedia photograph.

UPDATE: (thanks, wondrous Thomas 33 for your delving). Et Tu, Jimmy Wales? It seems that the dread Connolley once earned the approbation of the Wiki-King himself, as he boasts here on an old blog:

 

2005-12-19

 

Connolley has done such amazing work…

Back to wikipedia… Nature has an article on wikipedia vs Britannica. It was an interesting exercise, and as the most notable climatologist on wiki they interviewed me, which lead to the sidebar article “Challenges of being a Wikipedian” (see the Nature article; click on the “challenges” link near the bottom). It contains the rather nice quote from Jimbo Wales “Connolley has done such amazing work and has had to deal with a fair amount of nonsense” (does Lumo still read this?).

He can also be found gloating evilly over his powers:

2006-01-16

Wikinews

Well no wonder he’s cross. His world is falling apart. Ed Begley Jr – now probably better known as a climate activist than for his role TV medical soap St Elsewhere – bought in so heavily to Big Al Gore’s Man-Made-Global-Warming meme, he actually became a vegan and is engaged in a competition with some other actor you won’t have heard of to see who can get the lowest Carbon Footprint.

He was also captured in one of the more revealing scenes in Not Evil Just Wrong using his Team-America-style ACTING skills to make moving tears come from his eyes and sobbing sounds from his throat while addressing an audience about the horrors of ManBearPig. Afterwards, he admits these were, in fact, recreated using the amazing technique of acting.

Anyway, the reason I show you that first footage from Fox News – apart from the fact that it’s funny – is to show you an example of how obsessed Warmists are with the notion of “Peer review.” Note how Ed repeats it, mantra-like, to ward off any possible suggestion that the scientists supporting his bomb-the-global-economy-back-to-the-stone-age cause might be wrong. How can they be? They’re peer-reviewed-peer-reviewed-peer-reviewed.

Here’s what poor Ed doesn’t get. It’s perhaps the single most important fact to emerge from the Climategate scandal. Peer-review is dead. Meaningless. Utterly void of credibility. More irredeemably defunct than a Norwegian Blue.

Why? Let’s just remind ourselves what some of those hacked CRU emails said:

“This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the “peer-reviewed literature”. Obviously, they found a solution to that–take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering “Climate Research” as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board…What do others think?”

“I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.”“It results from this journal having a number of editors. The responsible one for this is a well-known skeptic in NZ. He has let a few papers through by Michaels and Gray in the past. I’ve had words with Hans von Storch about this, but got nowhere. Another thing to discuss in Nice !”

What the CRU’s hacked emails convincingly demonstrate is that climate scientists in the AGW camp have corrupted the peer-review process. In true Gramscian style they marched on the institutions – capturing the magazines (Science, Scientific American, Nature, etc), the seats of learning (Climate Research Institute; Hadley Centre), the NGO’s (Greenpeace, WWF, etc), the political bases (especially the EU), the newspapers (pretty much the whole of the MSM I’m ashamed, as a print journalist, to say) – and made sure that the only point of view deemed academically and intellectually acceptable was their one.

Neutral observers in this war sometimes ask how it can be that the vast majority of the world’s scientists seem to be in favour of AGW theory. “Peer-review” is why. Only a handful of scientists – 53 to be precise, not the much-touted 2,500 – were actually responsible for the doom-laden global-warming sections of the IPCC’s reports. They were all part of this cosy, self-selecting, peer-review cabal – and many of them, of course, are implicated in the Climategate emails.

Now peer-review is dead, so should be the IPCC, and Al Gore’s future as a carbon-trading billionaire. Will it happen? I shouldn’t hold your breath.

When you read some of those files – including 1079 emails and 72 documents – you realise just why the boffins at Hadley CRU might have preferred to keep them confidential. As Andrew Bolt puts it, this scandal could well be “the greatest in modern science”. These alleged emails – supposedly exchanged by some of the most prominent scientists pushing AGW theory – suggest:

Conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more.

One of the alleged emails has a gentle gloat over the death in 2004 of John L Daly (one of the first climate change sceptics, founder of the Still Waiting For Greenhouse site), commenting:

“In an odd way this is cheering news.”

But perhaps the most damaging revelations  – the scientific equivalent of the Telegraph’s MPs’ expenses scandal – are those concerning the way Warmist scientists may variously have manipulated or suppressed evidence in order to support their cause.

Here are a few tasters. (So far, we can only refer to them as alleged emails because – though Hadley CRU’s director Phil Jones has confirmed the break-in to Ian Wishart at the Briefing Room – he has yet to fess up to any specific contents.) But if genuine, they suggest dubious practices such as:

Manipulation of evidence:

I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.

Private doubts about whether the world really is heating up:

The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.

Suppression of evidence:

Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?

Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment – minor family crisis.

Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address.

We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.

Fantasies of violence against prominent Climate Sceptic scientists:

Next
time I see Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I’ll be tempted to beat
the crap out of him. Very tempted.

Attempts to disguise the inconvenient truth of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP):

……Phil and I have recently submitted a paper using about a dozen NH records that fit this category, and many of which are available nearly 2K back–I think that trying to adopt a timeframe of 2K, rather than the usual 1K, addresses a good earlier point that Peck made w/ regard to the memo, that it would be nice to try to “contain” the putative “MWP”, even if we don’t yet have a hemispheric mean reconstruction available that far back….

And, perhaps most reprehensibly, a long series of communications discussing how best to squeeze dissenting scientists out of the peer review process. How, in other words, to create a scientific climate in which anyone who disagrees with AGW can be written off as a crank, whose views do not have a scrap of authority.

“This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the “peer-reviewed literature”. Obviously, they found a solution to that–take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering “Climate Research” as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board…What do others think?”

“I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.”“It results from this journal having a number of editors. The responsible one for this is a well-known skeptic in NZ. He has let a few papers through by Michaels and Gray in the past. I’ve had words with Hans von Storch about this, but got nowhere. Another thing to discuss in Nice !”

Hadley CRU has form in this regard. In September – I wrote the story up here as “How the global warming industry is based on a massive lie” – Hadley CRU’s researchers were exposed as having “cherry-picked” data in order to support their untrue claim that global temperatures had risen higher at the end of the 20th century than at any time in the last millenium. Hadley CRU was also the organisation which – in contravention of all acceptable behaviour in the international scientific community – spent years withholding data from researchers it deemed unhelpful to its cause. This matters because Hadley CRU, established in 1990 by the Met Office, is a government-funded body which is supposed to be a model of rectitude. Its HadCrut record is one of the four official sources of global temperature data used by the IPCC.

I asked in my title whether this will be the final nail in the coffin of Anthropenic Global Warming. This was wishful thinking, of course. In the run up to Copenhagen, we will see more and more hysterical (and grotesquely exaggerated) stories such as this in the Mainstream Media. And we will see ever-more-virulent campaigns conducted by eco-fascist activists, such as this risible new advertising campaign by Plane Stupid showing CGI polar bears falling from the sky and exploding because kind of, like, man, that’s sort of what happens whenever you take another trip on an aeroplane.

The world is currently cooling; electorates are increasingly reluctant to support eco-policies leading to more oppressive regulation, higher taxes and higher utility bills; the tide is turning against Al Gore’s Anthropogenic Global Warming theory. The so-called “sceptical” view is now also the majority view.

Unfortunately, we’ve a long, long way to go before the public mood (and scientific truth) is reflected by our policy makers. There are too many vested interests in AGW, with far too much to lose either in terms of reputation or money, for this to end without a bitter fight.

But if the Hadley CRU scandal is true,it’s a blow to the AGW lobby’s credibility which is never likely to recover.

In an extremely brave editorial entitled “Is Global Warming Hot Air?” she speculated that the reason may have been because even architects are getting tired of listening to hysterical drivel about impending eco-doom and the so-called “consensus” on Anthropogenic Global Warming.

In fact, you’d be forgiven for not knowing there is a debate because it’s certainly discouraged by the RIBA, whose successive presidents have said that fighting climate change is the biggest challenge facing the profession.

While there’s no argument that natural resources such as water need to be conserved and low-energy buildings make sense, the scientific evidence has now shifted enough to warrant a more questioning position on climate change.

The editorial was brave because it’s still extremely rare for any editor in the mainstream media to question the prevailing orthodoxy on ManBearPig. Braver still because it is a known fact that 99.82 per cent of all architects (not my mates the Lahiffs, I don’t think, but pretty much all the others) are achingly worthy, politically correct, Big-State-endorsing toadies. (They have to be because Government projects are where all the money is).

The response has been much more mixed than you might imagine. Here are some of the more positive responses:

There are lots of people out there, including droves of architects, who take on the accepted view and know absolutely nothing about global warming, so why should they silence debate on the basis that the person who disagrees also doesn’t know. This is just a new religion where heretics are to be silenced.

Regrettably and incorrectly sustainability/energy conservation as the sole cause of global warming has become the new “sacred cow” which is only very rarely questioned given the risk of general derision.

The environmental movement is a beating stick used by governments. All you believers will be in for quite the shock when you cannot afford to turn on the heating or even have a drink of water, because you cannot afford it.

Excitingly, it has also led to a cat-fight, of sorts, with a female columnist from rival publication Architects’ Journal. Hattie Harman – the AJ’s Sustainability Editor, no less – takes Baillieu apart for her incorrect thinking.

Hattie intones (at least, I’m assuming she intones: her picture – redolent of a Greater London Council Wimmin’s Issues Adviser, C. 1983 – suggests she’s the intoning type):

I am not a climate scientist, but it doesn’t require detailed scientific knowledge to see that we are living beyond our means. I applaud the RIBA’s position on climate change and wish that more of the profession would heed its wake-up call. I would even say that the RIBA has been slow to champion the green agenda. Under Sunand Prasad, it endorsed the Global Commons Institute’s Contraction and Convergence framework, published its climate change toolkits and launched the speaker series, of which secretary of state for environment Hilary Benn was part.

The best bit, though, is the more-in-sorrow-than-anger Spartist ticking off Hattie administers at the end:

Journalistic endeavour would be better spent showcasing pioneering projects and disseminating best practice. It’s alarming to see a widely-read journal do otherwise.

Baillieu’s response? Why, only a challenge to a naked mud-wrestling match, You Tube footage of which it is my pleasure to show you via the following link: www.dirtyarchitecturalgirlsgetdowntoitruffnready.com.

Nah, not really. What Baillieu actually says is:

I’m delighted that the AJ is using its pages to publicise an article in a rival magazine – a first I think. Despite the line trotted out by among others the Green Building Council that there is no debate, there clearly is one otherwise why would the AJ be running with it?

Ooh! Claws out! Over to you, Hattie!

Only 41 per cent accept as an established scientific fact that global warming is taking place and is largely man-made. Almost a third (32 per cent) believe that the link is not yet proved; 8 per cent say that it is environmentalist propaganda to blame man and 15 per cent say that the world is not warming.

Even more interesting than the result, though, is the Thunderer’s appalled reaction. In a leader that might have been easily have been written by the Great Moonbat himself, the Times quite simply refuses to accept that the growing band of sceptics may have a point. Instead, it accuses these ‘deniers’ of being idiots:

It is possible that the collective expertise of brilliant scientists could be wrong. The best minds in the world once held a geocentric theory of the solar system. Before the discovery of sub-atomic particles they believed that everything was made of earth, air, fire and water. Right up to the 19th century, serious scientists wrote recipe books for making animals. But no previous process of scientific trial, error and progress has ever overturned such a well-attested thesis. Lord Rees has reminded us that we now live in a global village and it is, he pointed out, probably inevitable that there will be some global village idiots.

The Times’s approach is not unlike that of a Marxist theorist berating the bourgeoisie for their “false consciousness”; or indeed, a Eurocrat deciding that when sovereign nations keep voting “No” in Euro referendums it doesn’t mean that the EU is an oppressive and unpopular construct but that the voters need working on a bit harder so that they come to the correct “Yes” conclusion next time. It is, in fact, another perfect case of what Jonah Goldberg calls Liberal Fascism.

It is also an example of just how increasingly out-of-touch the MSM is with the views of the wider reading world. Recently, the Times launched a poster campaign boasting that it offered more extensive eco coverage than any other newspaper. Some of the claims made on these posters – such as the one about the North East passage being used as a commercial shipping route for the first time (when actually it has been used since 1934) – have been shot down by the excellent Andrew Orlowski on The Register.

But even if these claims were true, are wall-to-wall horror stories about impending man-made eco-doom really what readers of the quality newspapers want to read these days? My suspicion is not. I’m presuming that the audience which reads and comments on blogs isn’t totally different from the one that reads newspapers in print form. And if that’s the case, then the MSM’s obsession with AGW is looking increasingly out of date.

If you don’t believe me, check out the comments below one of George Monbiot’s columns, or indeed, either of the two Times articles listed above. Commenters who take the Al-Gore-approved line are vastly outnumbered by commenters who believe the whole AGW thing is a load of crock.

And it will take a bit more than bullying accusations that they’re “idiots”, I suspect, to swing them round.

At least that’s the maddening situation that one Tim Nicholson, 42, of Oxford is striving to engineer with the help of our crazed, activist-lawyer-riddled legal system.

Nicholson has been given the go-ahead, on appeal, to sue his former employer Grainger plc for unfair dismissal under  the Employment Equality (Religion and Belief) Regulations 2003 which cover “any religion, religious belief, or philosophical belief”.

Nicholson, formerly Grainger plc’s head of sustainability, said he had tried to set up a “carbon management system” for the company. Yet for some mysterious reason we can only guess at, Nicholson says staff refused to give him the necessary information which would have enabled him to calculate the company’s carbon footprint. Grainger claims it got rid of Nicholson for “operational” and “structural” reasons. Nicholson, however, believes it was a form of discrimination against his sincere, deep, heartfelt and passionate views on AGW.

His solicitor, Shah Qureshi, said: “Essentially what the judgment says is that a belief in man-made climate change and the alleged resulting moral imperative is capable of being a philosophical belief and is therefore protected by the 2003 religion or belief regulations.”

I do hope he wins, for it will only serve to bolster the suit I’m currently planning to launch against my own employer UK plc. Under this new belief system I have invented – Delingpolism (currently with only one known adherent – but the rest of you are more than welcome to join) – anyone who proselytises on behalf of AGW, carbon capture, Cap & Trade or wind farms without being able to demonstrate with at least 95 per cent certainty that their cause has any scientific foundation whatsoever, must be exiled immediately to the Arctic Circle, there to dwell among the still surprisingly large population of ravening polar bears until such time as they are gobbled up, digested and excreted into the Arctic oceans ready to pass through the food chain and end up in the beauteous gullets of the mighty blue whale (or similar).

So far, my religion’s precepts have been completely ignored by my employer. I feel sorely discriminated against. Got to be worth a couple of million in damages, at least, wouldn’t you agree?

Monckton believes that climate change hysteria is being exploited by the green liberal left – watermelons, as they’re nicknamed: green on the outside; red on the inside – to usher in a form of one world government. He claims to have seen evidence of this in a draft treaty due to be signed off by world leaders at this December’s Copenhagen climate change conference.

It will, he believes, in rich nations having as much as 2 per cent of their GDP diverted to third world countries – supposedly to compensate them for the evils wrought by two centuries or so of Western industrialisation; and tough new climate change rules to be imposed on Western economies by UN bureaucrats over which sovereign nations (and their electorates) will have no control.

I don’t know how accurate he is on the specific details, but Monckton is certainly right in principle. The climate fear industry is, I believe, the single greatest threat to national sovereignty (as we’ve already seen under the EU, with its directives on carbon emissions, landfill etc) and individual liberty of our era. It is financed by business interests so powerful that they have even suborned Big Oil (to look at most oil multinationals’ adverts these days, you’d think their main trade was wind-farming); its propaganda is spread by a supine mainstream media and subscribed to wholesale by glib politicians, few of whom have bothered to familiarise themselves with the growing body of evidence against AGW but who think sounding caring and touchy-feelie about “climate change” plays well with the voters.

I don’t believe in conspiracy theories. Unfortunately, the Climate Fear Industry isn’t a theory.

(Just like they said at Rio and Poznan and all the other “let’s see who can rack up the biggest carbon footprint” global shindigs that eco-campaigners insist on staging, the better to stoke up their self-flagellatory eco-guilt).

But, for the global warming deniers among us at least, the panic’s off. Nothing scary or dangerous is going to happen as a result of the Copenhagen summit. It will be a talking shop, abundant with airy platitudes and earnest pieties, but signifying less than ****er all as far as economy-damaging Kyoto-style legislation goes. There will be a political statement of intent. But no binding “agreement”.

Here are few reasons why:

1. A bit like one of those mutant pandas I mentioned yesterday, the science has turned viciously against the warmists. Not that it wasn’t against them before.  But they have their work seriously cut out if they’re ever going to recover from the  speech given at the UN world climate conference in Geneva last week by Professor Mojib Latif of Germany’s Leibniz institute.

National Post columnist Lorne Gunter explains:

“Latif is one of the leading climate modellers in the world. He is the recipient of several international climate-study prizes and a lead author for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He has contributed significantly to the IPCC’s last two five-year reports that have stated unequivocally that man-made greenhouse emissions are causing the planet to warm dangerously.”

Yet in Geneva, Latif was forced to admit that all those An-Inconvenient-Truth-style fantasy projections showing global temperatures rising inexorably with C02 levels were wrong. The world is getting cooler, not warming. It will continue to cool, Latif reckons, till 2020 or possibly 2030. By how much he doesn’t know: “The jury is still out.”

Which begs the rather obvious question: if the IPCC’s doomsday computer models didn’t predict this cooling phase, how can we be sufficiently confident in their other assertions to start basing major economic and social policy decisions on them?

2. The Chinese. Spin it how they will, President Hu Jintao’s two-minute speech to the UN yesterday was a massive blow to the Warmists. In classic “Tell the foolish gwailo what they want to hear, then carry on doing exactly what we want” Chinese diplomatic style, Hu Jintao promised “determined action”, while refusing to commit his country to any binding targets.

The Chinese are not stupid. Their priority number one (and two, and three) is economic growth, not assuaging green lobbyists.

3. People just don’t care about “climate change” that much. Environmental purity is a rich person’s luxury and with the recession most people have other priorities. In the latest Bloomberg poll in the US, for example, just 2 per cent of respondents considered “climate change” the most important issue facing the country.

4. Almost everyone knows deep down that the green lobby’s CO2 targets are pie in the sky. Says Stephen Hayward of the American Competitive Institute in WSJ Online

“Carbon dioxide is the result of complete fuel combustion. Apart from still-unproven technologies, there’s no way to remove it from the process. The only way to reduce emissions is to burn less fuel, which means less energy output.

“So, to meet the target the climate campaigners have set, the U.S., Europe and Japan will have to replace virtually their entire fossil-fuel energy infrastructure. For the U.S., the 80% target means reducing fossil-fuel greenhouse-gas emissions to a level the nation last experienced in 1910. On a per-capita basis, we’d have to go back to the level of about 1875.”

5. If anyone’s going to push these crazy measures through it’s President Obama. But, as Terence Corcoran sensibly points out, after the rough ride he’s had with his healthcare proposals, Obama is unlikely to want to outrage the US taxpayer still further.

“Mr. Obama, already fighting charges his medicare reform will boost taxes on the average American family by $3,000, isn’t likely to simultaneously mount an aggressive push for carbon control legislation that will add another $4,000 a year in taxes.”

6. Right, consider this my serious climate change piece for the week. Now, I can go back to trading childish insults. Phew!

ManBearPig: the world’s deadliest threat. Well, if you’re Prince Charles

In the Spectator today, I interview an Australian geology professor called Ian Plimer whose brilliant new book – Heaven And Earth – is rightly being hailed as the one that is going to nail once and for all the crazy myth that man’s contribution to “climate change” is remotely significant, let alone something we should worry about or waste money trying to stop.

As Professor Plimer observes with characteristic Aussie bluntness: “CO2 is not a pollutant. CO2 is plant food.”

Yet so many of the ruinously expensive policies being formulated on our behalf by everyone from Barack Obama to EU president (and former Maoist) Jose Manuel Barroso to Ed Miliband to (God help us) David Cameron’s Conservatives are based on the scientifically groundless urban myth that human generated CO2 (quite minuscule, anyway, compared with the quantities of greenhouse gases volcanoes belch or even cows fart) is the most dangerous substance on earth.

Prince Charles is fond of telling us that we only have 100 months left to save the earth. (Apparently down to 96 now, or so he claimed in his recent Dimbleby lecture). But I’d say the time we have left to save the world is quite significantly less than that. Not from the perfectly natural process of climate change, of course, but the far far greater threat of climate change alarmism.

Unless those of us with more than half a brain cell unite and act soon, the earth is going to fall prey to  the most destructive, expensive, suicidally pointless taxation and regulation and protectionism in global economic history. We simply cannot afford any longer to allow the likes of the Prince Of Wales, Al Gore, NASA activist James Hansen, Lord Stern and their amen corner in the mainstream media to go on pushing their ludicrous scare story unchallenged.

Right now, out there in the real world, are numerous genuine ecological challenges that urgently need addressing: the decline of fish (thanks European Union fisheries policy!); pollution; diminishing water tables; deforestation; overpopulation; and the great eco-disaster that are bio-fuels. The Quixotic quest to arrest “climate change” – something that has been happening for 4,567 million years regardless of man’s input – is a silly and expensive distraction.

What’s particularly galling about the most outspoken supporters of climate change taxation and regulation is that many of them either are rich enough not to be affected by it or – worse – stand to make vast fortunes as a result of it.

The Prince of Wales is a case in point. When you’re on a salary of £18 million, as he is, you’re probably not going to be bothered overmuch by tiny details such as your gas and electricity bills doubling because of green taxes on carbon emissions. You’re not even going to mind, that much, that if Barack Obama’s new $7.4 trillion cap and trade tax on carbon emissions is introduced the global economic recovery is going to be set by a generation. Indeed, it’s probably very much in the Prince’s interests that we should all be rendered so poor that we can’t even afford to run our cars any more. It will leave Britain’s roads free for Charlie to pootle about as freely as he wishes in his bio-ethanol-powered Aston Martin.