Fausta’s Blog

Andrew Gilligan reports from the summit zoo:
Copenhagen climate summit: 1,200 limos, 140 private planes and caviar wedges
Copenhagen is preparing for the climate change summit that will produce as much carbon dioxide as a town the size of Middlesbrough.

According to the organisers, the eleven-day conference, including the participants’ travel, will create a total of 41,000 tonnes of “carbon dioxide equivalent”, equal to the amount produced over the same period by a city the size of Middlesbrough.

For those of us not familiar, Middlesbrough has a population of 142,691 or so, larger than Savannah, Ga (or a small African country).

As it turns out there aren’t enough limos on Denmark to meet demand, so they’re bringing them from Germany and Sweden:

Ms Jorgensen reckons that between her and her rivals the total number of limos in Copenhagen next week has already broken the 1,200 barrier. The French alone rang up on Thursday and ordered another 42. “We haven’t got enough limos in the country to fulfil the demand,” she says. “We’re having to drive them in hundreds of miles from Germany and Sweden.”

And why bother flying coach?

The airport says it is expecting up to 140 extra private jets during the peak period alone, so far over its capacity that the planes will have to fly off to regional airports – or to Sweden – to park, returning to Copenhagen to pick up their VIP passengers.

Looks like the Swedes are having a sweet time from all this, but the hotels in Copenhagen are loving it,

The top hotels – all fully booked at £650 a night – are readying their Climate Convention menus of (no doubt sustainable) scallops, foie gras and sculpted caviar wedges.

I’m curious at how does one sculpt caviar, but I digress.

Ironically, about the only ones who won’t be rolling in dough are the whores,

the local sex workers’ union – they have unions here – has announced that all its 1,400 members will give free intercourse to anyone with a climate conference delegate’s pass. The term “carbon dating” just took on an entirely new meaning.

Gilligan says

At least the sex will be C02-neutral

but he forgets that humans emit CO2, particularly from all that heavy breathing.

But hey, Christmas is a religious holiday that has no place at a United Nations function, so there won’t be any Christmas trees.

The global alarmists wouldn’t want to have competition for their faith-based cult, would they?

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As if climategate wasn’t enough, Al Gore may be worrying about this:

One of the problems facing the negotiators at Copenhagen is what to do with the mountain of carbon credits that Russia threatens to put on the market. In a news report late last month, the Washington Post noted that under the formula reached under the Kyoto Protocol, “Russia is expected to post the largest absolute drop in emissions from 1990 levels of any of the countries that signed the treaty. But the decline is almost entirely the result of the 1991 collapse of the Soviet economy rather than environmental measures by the government. Critics say Moscow doesn’t deserve to keep its carbon credits because it didn’t earn them with any special effort. ” The West could retrospectively compensate the Russians for the collapse of the Soviet economy.

How else to face this? Borrowing!

“Borrow to the hilt to stop global warming, says Lord Stern”,

Imagine that. A global warming dyed in the wool believer thinks borrowing to the hilt is a good idea.

In the meantime, China, India, Brazil and South Africa are not going along with the recommendation to cut emissions. I’m willing to bet that their whores remain honest and insist on demanding cold hard cash, too.

Al won’t be going to the conference. Maybe he’s contemplating going into the conference limo rental business, if only to leverage himself from the possible loss in the carbon-credit business.

When tribalism trumps truth:

Mark Steyn: Cooking the books on climate

The trouble with outsourcing your marbles to the peer-reviewed set is that, if you take away one single thing from the leaked documents, it’s that the global warm-mongers have wholly corrupted the “peer-review” process. When it comes to promoting the impending ecopalypse, the Climate Research Unit is the nerve-center of the operation. The “science” of the CRU dominates the “science” behind the United Nations IPCC, which dominates the “science” behind the Congressional cap-and-trade boondoggle, the upcoming Copenhagen shakindownen of the developed world, and the now-routine phenomenon of leaders of advanced, prosperous societies talking like gibbering madmen escaped from the padded cell, whether it’s President Barack Obama promising to end the rise of the oceans or the Prince of Wales saying we only have 96 months left to save the planet.

But don’t worry, it’s all “peer-reviewed.”

Here’s what Phil Jones of the CRU and his colleague Michael Mann of Penn State mean by “peer review”. When Climate Research published a paper dissenting from the Jones-Mann “consensus,” Jones demanded that the journal “rid itself of this troublesome editor,” and Mann advised that “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.”

So much for Climate Research. When Geophysical Research Letters also showed signs of wandering off the “consensus” reservation, Dr. Tom Wigley (”one of the world’s foremost experts on climate change”) suggested they get the goods on its editor, Jim Saiers, and go to his bosses at the American Geophysical Union to “get him ousted.” When another pair of troublesome dissenters emerge, Dr. Jones assured Dr. Mann, “I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”

Which, in essence, is what they did. The more frantically they talked up “peer review” as the only legitimate basis for criticism, the more assiduously they turned the process into what James Lewis calls the Chicago machine politics of international science. The headline in the Wall Street Journal Europe is unimproveable: “How To Forge A Consensus.” Pressuring publishers, firing editors, blacklisting scientists: That’s “peer review,” climate-style. The more their echo chamber shriveled, the more Mann and Jones insisted that they and only they represent the “peer-reviewed” “consensus.” And gullible types like Ed Begley Jr. and Andrew Revkin of the New York Times fell for it hook, line and tree-ring.

The e-mails of “Andy” (as his CRU chums fondly know him) are especially pitiful. Confronted by serious questions from Stephen McIntyre, the dogged Ontario retiree whose “Climate Audit” Web site exposed the fraud of Dr. Mann’s global-warming “hockey stick” graph, “Andy” writes to Dr. Mann to say not to worry, he’s going to “cover” the story from a more oblique angle:

“I’m going to blog on this as it relates to the value of the peer review process and not on the merits of the mcintyre et al attacks.

“peer review, for all its imperfections, is where the herky-jerky process of knowledge building happens, would you agree?”

And, amazingly, Dr. Mann does!

“Re, your point at the end – you’ve taken the words out of my mouth.”

And that’s what Andrew Revkin did, week in, week out: He took the words out of Michael Mann’s mouth and served them up to impressionable readers of the New York Times and opportunist politicians around the world champing at the bit to inaugurate a vast global regulatory body to confiscate trillions of dollars of your hard-earned wealth in the cause of “saving the planet” from an imaginary crisis concocted by a few dozen thuggish ideologues. If you fall for this after the revelations of the past week, you’re as big a dupe as Begley or Revkin.

As Erik puts it, One is left to wonder why they felt the need to rig the game in the first place, if their science is as robust as they claim.

Why did this happen?

Scientific fraudsters are not, in general, people pushing theories they know to be false. Outright charlatanism is not actually common, because it’s relatively easy to detect. Humans are evolved for a social competitive environment and are rather good at spotting lies, except when they’re fooling themselves because they want to believe.

In general, scientific fraudsters are people who are overinvested in a theory that they believe. Because they know it must be true, they interpret predictive failures as “The data is surely wrong”. It is only a short step from “The data is surely wrong” to fixing the pesky data until it looks right

As it is, The Entire Climate Warming Movement Stands Discredited. The data was clearly cooked, but we’ll be paying for the poor policymaking:

If the historical temperature data were generally known to be garbage (which I was pretty sure was true even before the leak), it couldn’t be used to justify public policy that is both bad and expensive – like the U.S.’s “cap-and-trade” bill in progress, which has so many giveaways and exemptions that it subverts its own ostensible purposes.

Obama’s heading to the Climate Change conference next, and he’ll be dictating policy after the facts were made to fit the theory.

Hold on to your wallet.

Related reading
A few thoughts on Climategate, via James Joyner, who’ll be on C-Span tomorrow at 7:30-8:30AM Eastern.

“What possessed our prehistorical ancestors to feast and fornicate on this day of all days?” asks Rick Moran

Short answer: Back then there was no internet.

Now with internet, there’s the Global Orgasm (”Peace through global ecstasy”), but will it be an anti-climax?

Sex, puns, and internet. What more can a woman want? 24 – that’s what!

Yesterday I linked to Cassandra’s smackdown of William Arkin. Today I’m linking to Lileks’s (h/t Larwyn).

Lilek’s smackdown of Arkin is great, but my favorite line comes before Lileks gets to it – it’s about the sixties:

the 60s aren’t seen as The Past; the 60s are a Timeless Vault of Cultural Touchstones, the apotheosis of Western Civ.

Indeed, nowadays a day doesn’t go by without one having to hear the present-day rehashing of 1960s “counterculture values”:

• that tired, old, narcissistic war protestors are speaking “truth to power” when they are actually basking in their own reflections
• that we’re fighting a war in a far-away place, and that it’ll never affect us, even when it obviously does
• that running away won’t have any adverse consequences
• that “saving the earth” matters more than saving unborn children because it’s “our bodies, our selves”
• that “world music” and chick lit are better than anything Dead White Men ever produced
• that angry spinsters bestow deranged women “absolute moral authority” to go kiss petty tyrants in Latin America
• that global orgasms will bring about peace because “all you need is love” (and gad, was there ever a more hollow sentiment than “all you need is love”?)
• that we shouldn’t worry so much about Iran and pay attention to what’s really important – global warming
• that Judeo-Christian values should be despised for the sake of “diversity”
• that America is the cause, alpha and omega, of all evil.

I was hearing this crap back when I was a young fool thirty or forty years ago and, much water under the bridge later, it is disheartening that so many are STILL so deluded.

As Barry Casselman says, the West is in a trance

I am increasingly convinced that the West is in denial of what is truly happening in the world. This self-delusion is the most dangerous response possible to the intense and rapid change all over the planet. This self-denial takes many forms, including obsessions with abstract issues of little real consequence, e.g., animal rights, capital punishment, celebrity gossip, political correctness, etc. It is accompanied by the rise of secular mandates and the suppression of spiritual values. It exhibits excesses of greed that threaten both capitalism and representative government.

The malign forces that conspire against the West (in contrast to the benign forces which only wish to compete with it), however, are not paralyzed. They are moving and growing at great speed.

Pat Santy looks at the myths that fuel the Left’s denial. Neo-neocon examines the political anger firing up the upsurge in Romanticism

There’s an interesting socioeconomic trend to Romanticism: it’s a philosophy that seems to attract a surprising number of the more well-to-do and well-educated

All of these elements are part of the present-day trance.

That the denial is taking the form of 1960s superficiality only adds insult to injury. Those malign forces Casselman mentions don’t simply wait.

Now go read Jeremayakovka, and try to wake up, if you may.

Technorati tags politics, current affairs, Iran, capitalism, Global Warming

As previously noted, tomorrow’s both the Winter Solstice and the Global Orgasm for Peace Day.

I figured I better give advance warning to anyone interested, in case you either want to synchronize yourselves or prefer to abstain, so you can make the necessary arrangements.

My apologies to people in the countries on the other side of the International Date Line for being remiss in notifying you ahead of time.

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Following up on other news, the eyeballs went for £16,500.00. Does that include shipping and handling? No, it doesn’t

Shipping: Collection or shipping will be the buyers full responsibility.