[Vision2020] The Myth of the Copenhagen Conspiracy

[nickgier at roadrunner.com]

Greetings:

This is my radio commentary/column for this week.  I want to thank Ted Moffett for his help on this one.

Nick Gier

THE MYTH OF THE COPENHAGEN CLIMATE CONSPIRACY

By Nick Gier

Climate skeptics are praising Lord Christopher Monckton's October 14 address to the Minnesota Free Market Institute in which he declared that man-made global warming is a hoax. In his speech Monckton, former adviser to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, revealed the Copenhagen Conspiracy, which predicts that in Copenhagen Obama and other world leaders will set up a Communist world government under the guise of flawed climate studies.

Earlier in the year scientists from realclimate.org studied some of Monckton's graphs, and they decided that the Viscount of Brenchley misrepresented data from the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and manipulated other evidence to conclude that there has been substantial cooling since 2002.

The World Meteorological Institute, that left-wing organization that feeds lies to your weather reporter every evening, just released a report indicating that the first years of the 21st Century (except for 1998) were the warmest on record. The world’s oceans are warming at even a greater rate.

After pointing all of the errors and deceptions in one of Monckton's graphs on CO2 emissions, NASA's Gavin Schmidt asks "How can this be described except as fake?" 

Climate skeptics are capitalizing on illegally obtained e-mails from the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University.  The claim that these messages are the "smoking gun" that anthropogenic climate change is a fraud is of course absurd. 

At least eight experts in science ethics have read the e-mails and they have concluded that, while there was intemperate language about climate skeptics, there was neither fabrication nor manipulation of data.

Much hay has been made of East Anglia researcher Phil Jones’ use of a "trick" in one of his papers, but in this context it simply means an ingenious way of presenting data. 

One e-mail indicated that two papers by climate skeptics might be withheld from the 2007 IPCC report, but in the end both papers were included and discussed. 

Another e-mail by Phil Jones instructed his colleagues to delete e-mails that were requested by skeptics, but his colleagues say that they did not comply.  The Climate Research Unit issued the following statement: "No record has been deleted, altered, or otherwise dealt with in any fashion." 

Let’s look at the credentials of three other climate skeptics.  The first one is Tim Ball, who lied that he was the first Ph.D. in climatology in Canada and that he was a professor of climatology at the University of Winnipeg.  Ball has had no peer-reviewed papers in the field for 13 years, and that he is a "paid promoter of the oil and gas industry rather than a practicing scientist."  

There is also Patrick Michaels, a fellow at the CATO Institute, which insists on free market solutions for everything.  Climate scientist Tom Wigley states that Michaels' "statements on the subject of computer models are a catalogue of misrepresentations and misinterpretation.  Many of the supposedly factual statements made in his testimony are either inaccurate or are seriously misleading."

Finally, I offer John Theon, who has not done any science for thirty years and therefore has no expertise to comment on sophisticated computer climate modeling.  As a former NASA official, Theon falsely claims to have been James Hansen’s boss, and he is also the source of the libelous claim that Hansen, one of the nation’s top climate scientist, manipulated data. 

Climate skeptics claim that investing in the green economy that will control greenhouse gas emissions will force us back into the Stone Age. In my column last week I demonstrated that Denmark is on track to meet its Kyoto obligations, and that there is nothing Paleolithic about its low unemployment, highly competitive economy, and aggressively green economy.

With regard to Lord Monckton's visions of Communist world government and the erasure of national sovereignty, legal experts say that this is completely unfounded and paranoid. On this issue the fact-checking Politifact.com has decided to give Monckton a special award.  On their Truth-O-Meter the Viscount of Brenchley received the rating "Britches on Fire."

In Copenhagen Lord Monckton confronted young protesters and called them Hitler Youth.  Even when one of the students identified himself as Jewish and said that his grandparents died in the Holocaust, Monckton continued to insult the protesters. This certainly not a proper way for a British peer to conduct himself.  His lordship behaves far worse in public than the East Anglia researchers did in private e-mails. 

Nick Gier taught philosophy at the University of Idaho for 31 years.