Free Republic

“How’s that hopey, changey stuff working out for you?” These are the words of contempt Sarah Palin aimed at the Obama Administration two weeks ago, but she may as well have taken shot at the climate movement. The Copenhagen negotiations were largely a flop. Climate legislation has stalled out in Congress. Red States and Fossil Fuel Corporations are suing the EPA to revoke their authority to regulate emissions. In 2008, millions of Americans were inspired by the message of Hope: hope that government can change, hope that yes, we can change the direction of this country. Many of those people...

COPENHAGEN – Secretary of State Hillary Clinton today said that the US would help create a $100 billion-a-year fund to help developing countries adapt to climate change and transition to greener technologies. The announcement at the UN climate summit could be the trigger in cinching a deal where more than 190 countries are down to the wire to sign a global climate accord by tomorrow, when the conference is scheduled to end. Developing countries are adamant a deal must include billions of dollars to help them deal with the consequences of a warmer world that wealthier countries caused from emissions...

Global Warming: If we're serious about restoring science to its rightful place, the head of the U.N.'s panel on climate change should step down. Evidence shows he quarterbacked a deliberate and premeditated fraud. The U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been forced to back off its now-discredited claim that the Himalayan glaciers would soon disappear. But it's not true, the panel's vice chairman, Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, told the BBC, that it was simply a "human mistake." The panel's chairman, Dr. Rajendra K. Pachauri, who was forced to admit the claim had no basis in observable scientific fact, said its...

Regulations: A California legislator pushes a November ballot initiative to free the state from the job-killing shackles of a 2006 law designed to fight climate change. The other choice is freezing in the unemployment line. At last report, California's unemployment rate was 12.3%, with 2.25 million residents looking for work. So one would assume the first rule of holes would apply — when you're in one, stop digging. Yet there was Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger touting his state's green initiatives in Copenhagen as California barrels toward full implementation of its own version of job-killing cap-and-trade. "The desire and hope and desperate...

Climate Change: A new study shows that Earth's ability to absorb carbon dioxide from all sources, including man, has remained unchanged for 160 years. As it turns out, there may be no carbon to offset. A major tenet of the global warming religion, straight from the Book of Gore, has been that the ability of the earth to handle increasing CO2 emissions is finite and that once the "tipping point" is reached, the earth will warm uncontrollably. Well, another climate domino has fallen — the myth that man-made CO2 is leading to climate catastrophe. This "settled science" has been upended...

(several paragraphs down, NPR lies about Europe/Kyoto) "It wasn't clear that anything could get done because some group of countries or some country was trying to hold up everything, which is why I think the approach of trying to do an accord with a small number of countries was probably the only way to have anything come out of this at all," she says. Even Europe, which has embraced the Kyoto scheme for emissions reductions, was not part of that small deciding group. "I personally believe that the Kyoto track under the U.N. is done for, nothing is going down...

Global Warming: Russian analysts accuse Britain's Meteorological Office of cherry-picking Russian temperature data to "hide the decline" in global temperatures. Is Copenhagen rooted in a single tree in Siberia? Michael Mann, a Penn State meteorologist, wrote in Friday's Washington Post that "stolen" e-mails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit still don't alter the evidence for climate change. Mann, a creator of the discredited hockey-stick graph used in reports from the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to show man-made warming, attacks climate skeptics, including former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, saying they "confuse the public." Chutzpah has been...

COPENHAGEN -- Green groups on Friday named Canada "Fossil of the Year" -- an award that carried the additional honorific of "Colossal Fossil" -- for what they said was a strategy to sabotage efforts to tackle climate change. "Canada's 2020 [emissions] target is among the worst in the industrialised world, and leaked cabinet documents revealed that the government is contemplating a cap-and-trade plan so weak that it would put even that target out of reach," said Climate Action Network International and Avaaz.org. "This government thinks there's a choice between environment and economy, and for them, tar sands beats climate every...

COPENHAGEN (Reuters) - The Copenhagen climate talks will generate more carbon emissions than any previous climate conference, equivalent to the annual output of over half a million Ethiopians, figures commissioned by hosts Denmark show. Delegates, journalists, activists and observers from almost 200 countries have gathered at the Dec 7-18 summit and their travel and work will create 46,200 tonnes of carbon dioxide, most of it from their flights. This would fill nearly 10,000 Olympic swimming pools, and is the same amount produced each year by 2,300 Americans or 660,000 Ethiopians -- the vast difference is due to the huge gap...

As activists from groups as wide-ranging as the Girl Scouts and the World Council on Churches converge on the climate change conference in Copenhagen, some critics say it's turning into a "circus" sideshow, with 20,000 attendees creating an international echo chamber of climate piety. Apart from the main proceedings, there are 254 side events, 231 exhibits and more than 200 press conferences already on the schedule — meaning there are about 700 extra events keyed up for the 12-day conference. "These circuses get bigger and bigger," said Myron Ebell, director of energy and global warming policy at the Competitive Enterprise...

Here's a quiz. What's the worst thing on the table at the UN Climate Control Conference in Copenhagen December 7-18? If you guessed cap-and-tax, you would be wrong. The reparations could be much, much worse. The draft of the treaty encompasses 181 pages and recites that it shall be the obligation of the developed countries (Europe, United States, Japan, Australia, etc.) to pay the developing countries (China, India, Africa, etc.) huge reparations, annual sums to erase poverty and to share technology with them. Australian lawyer Janet Albrechtsen explains the most recent draft of the treaty: Clause after complicated clause sets...

WASHINGTON (AFP) – US President Barack Obama will Monday meet former vice president and international environmental crusader Al Gore, as he prepares to travel next week to the Copenhagen climate conference. The closed-door meeting is designed to help brief Obama before he meets business and environmental leaders at the White House on Wednesday, the White House said.

What's become known as "Climategate" may be about to explode on this side of the pond as well. Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, has threatened a lawsuit against NASA if by year-end the agency doesn't honor his Freedom of Information (FOI) requests for information on how and why its climate numbers have been consistently adjusted for errors. "I assume that what is there is highly damaging," says Horner, who suspects, based on the public record, the same type of data fudging, manipulation and suppression that has occurred at Britain's East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU)....

US President Barack Obama has changed his plans to attend the UN summit on climate change in Copenhagen next week, the White House has announced. He will arrive later than initially planned, moving his appearance from 9 December to 18 December. The White House said he believed "that continued US leadership can be most productive through his participation at the end of the Copenhagen conference". The summit aims to draw up a treaty to succeed the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. The president had changed his plans after talks with other leaders and after seeing "the progress that has already been made...

A leading scientist acclaimed as the grandfather of global warming has denounced the Copenhagen summit on climate change next week as a farce. James Hansen, the director of Nasa’s Goddard Insitute for Space Studies, told The Times that he planned to boycott the UN conference because it was seeking a counter-productive agreement to limit emissions through a “cap and trade” system. “They are selling indulgences there. The developed nations want to continue basically business as usual so they are expected to purchase indulgences to give some small amount of money to developing countries. They do that in the form of...

Mister Gibbs was recently asked whether President Obama was going to attend the climate meeting in Copenhagen in light of the leaked emails. Gibbs replied, “I think there’s no real scientific basis for the dispute of this.” Mister Gibbs, there are several problems with this statement, that you offered in such a cavalier manner. To accept your statement, we must assume that you think and that is becoming increasingly hard to imagine when you deny the growing pool of evidence that condemns Global Warming as a Fraudulent Science. However, your intelligence is of minimal importance. You see the real question...

NEW DELHI/LONDON (Reuters) – China and other big developing nations rejected core targets for a climate deal such as halving world greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 just five days before talks start in Copenhagen, diplomats said on Wednesday. China, the world's top emitter, together with India, Brazil and South Africa demand that richer nations do more and have drawn "red lines" limiting what they themselves would accept, the diplomats told Reuters. The four rejected key targets proposed by the Danish climate talks hosts in a draft text -- halving global greenhouse gases by 2050, setting a 2020 deadline for a...

<p>LONDON — Britain's University of East Anglia says the director of its prestigious Climatic Research Unit is stepping down pending an investigation into allegations that he overstated the case for man-made climate change.</p> <p>The university says Phil Jones will relinquish his position until the completion of an independent review into allegations that he worked to alter the way in which global temperature data was presented.</p>

ClimateGate: Britain's Climate Research Unit now says it will release all its data. Does that include the data that have been shredded, deleted and denied publication? In a statement released Saturday by the University of East Anglia, where the CRU is located, it was announced that all unit data, including data that had been denied climate skeptics, would soon be released to prove this is much ado about nothing. Unimpressed by the news is David Holland of Northampton, a grandfather with a background in electrical engineering, who is seeking prosecution of the CRU scientists involved in suppressing and even destroying...

PORT OF SPAIN (AFP) – Commonwealth leaders representing two billion people on the planet on Saturday threw their combined weight behind upcoming climate talks, driving momentum towards a new carbon-cutting treaty. "We, as the Commonwealth, representing one third of the world's population, believe the time for action on climate change has come," Australian Prime Minister Rudd said as he unveiled an agreement struck at a summit in Trinidad. The Port of Spain Climate Change Consensus, backed by all 53 member states of the Commonwealth, supported the December 7-18 climate talks in Copenhagen and committed to seeking a legally binding treaty...