I am leaving Los Angeles late Monday for Copenhagen (arrive Tuesday afternoon) to cover the last days of the UN Climate Change Conference for PJTV/PJM. Conference president Connie Hedegaard is bullish about their midway status, saying “we have made considerable progress over the course of the first week”. And Al Gore has not even arrived yet!… not to mention Barack Obama.
Are we saved from Climate Disaster? Will Roger Simon unravel all this? It is, as the saying goes, too soon to tell. But I am writing this to ask readers’ advice. What would you look to know or see? Do you have any contacts I should speak to? Please feel free to leave in the comments or write direct at rogercomments@pajamasmedia.com.
Thanks in advance for any help. I’m going to need it. (I know there’s been “significant warming,” but I am packing my ski underwear.)
“we have made considerable progress over the course of the first week”
I can also imagine the captain of the Titanic saying: “we have made considerable progress since hitting the iceberg.” These people are wasting everybody’s time. The governments they represent are going to hypocritically file the conference conclusions in the back drawer—and ignore them forevermore. Nobody is willing to bankrupt their national economy. Obama lacks the political capital to get any of this nonsense enacted into law. Only the bluest of legislators will dare support him.
I would be sure to have video available and maybe even a second, surreptitious, video camera to record the UN security officers dragging you out of the press conference.
Yes, Roger, Yes! Yes! Yes!
Get any of the American scum, Al Gore, Lisa Jackson, you name them, to answer your questions on video. None of them have not a clue about science or policy associated with Climategate or “climate change.”
And emphasize the crucial role played by Mann’s hockey stick. Without that hockey stick, there is no evidence that recent temperature rises have been caused by human production of CO2. (See my response to Bellamy for details.) And the hockey stick is totally a fraud.
I will be praying for your total success.
Okay, Roger, I’m in. It’s a simple question I ask my geography students: “Explain to me the difference between weather and climate.” I’ll bet the political types attending this conference will do little better than my 9th graders.
Error correction on #3. Remove the word “not” from the sentence:
‘None of them have not a clue about science or policy associated with Climategate or “climate change.”’
According to comments left in several articles on the Copenhagen summit, “…evidence of the medieval warming period is in a museum in Copenhagen.”
Could you: find out which museum this is, visit that museum, take some video, and show us (NOT TELL US, THIS IS FILM!!) (sorry, film school geek popped out…) these artifacts, if indeed there are artifacts?
Because “[a]n artifact is something you can hold in you hand, like say, a skeleton that you chipped out of the permafrost. An anecdote is some kind of hearsay that only exists in the minds of people, like say, human induced global warming.”
Thank you. And thanks to Andrew Breitbart (ahem).
I would be interested in polar bear discourse. In doing my own research, I have come to the belief that talk of polar bear ruin is a sure tip-off that you are dealing with people who are dishonest and know they are. After all, the AGW crowd has actually seized on an animal whose popluations are healthy or growing as their victim-mascot.
Mr.Simon,
I’m very disappointed in you. Your reqeust that Al Gore have his Academy award rescinded because of some emails is totally without understanding on your part. It’s too bad you have decided to become a “doubter” on climate change. I guess the scientific facts of every major scientific institution and scientific concensus the world over are not enough for you. I wish you could see this issue as it is, not a political issue. I don’t care what your political persuasion is. I would ask you and all the other “dounters” out there to rememeber that if they are wrong about climate change then your efforts to discredit it are dangerous to the world and humnanity. If a century of climate change science is really wrong, the worst that happens is we spend some money on better technology and better managing our resources. But if you’re wrong? Please don’t go down in history as the group who fought to keep the earh the center of the solar system, or join the ranks of the flat earth society. History won’t be remembering you kindly if you keep this kind of thing up. No one will remember what you’ve written, they will only remember you as unaware and dangerous to the world. Take a look at Tyco Brahe and how he is now remembered.
Ask all the officials from countries with electorally influenced governments how much extra campaign donations their politicians expect to get from industries threatened with new CO2 regulations. (Nice little big business you have here … Too bad if I decided to regulate it some more…)
Please ask the Danish representatives if global warming will resurrect Reptilicus, the fire breathing monster they fought so valiantly, documented in 1961, while still enjoying their Tivoli Gardens.
Go get ‘em Roger!
See if you can ask them who paid for the finely designed signs the pro-warming protesters are waving?
Might it be a group associated with George Soros…or GE???
Hmmmmm?
Best of Luck Roger!
But I warn you, In this day and age, it’s becoming increasingly clear that those who challenge the system and TPTB seeking the truth usually wind up finding a jail cell.
Be sure to have a photographer with you. Video of being led off in steel bracelets by UN security forces will make for great conversation on this site!
This has ceased to be about only climate. In various video reports, I saw a sea of red flags with the hammer & sickle being proudly waved. The old ZPG talk of one child per family, anti-free market rants and assorted humanist, anti-freedom godless drivel all at the core of a depressing mindlessness. The truth does not matter. This is a world I no longer know.
Roger, ask the atmospheric “scientists” about the ozone “hole.” (I see that Chile recently put out a warning to Punta Arenas for too much thinning in the ozone.) They were wrong about the ozone and CFCs, and they are wrong about CO2. Too much hubris; not enough humility!
@Eric: Which Ivy League school did you attend?
This conference will have no effect on climate or the environment. It will, however, be very influential in deciding if world economies are destroyed or allowed to recover. Sadly, the predetermined course is not heading in the right direction.
Eric:
I guess the scientific facts of every major scientific institution and scientific concensus the world over are not enough for you. I wish you could see this issue as it is, not a political issue.
It is exactly a political issue. The IPCC is a political body. The executive summary of the IPCC report contradicts some of the scientific reports embodied in the unread parts of it. And the Climategate fiasco is the clearest kind of evidence that the ‘scientists’ who produced the crisis-too-good-to-waste were politically motivated to jigger the evidence, the reports, the peer-review process and the publishing process.
‘Scientific consensus’ is neither of those words, when burdened by the CRU manipulations, and disputed by thousands of scientists whose voices have been excluded from the choreographed ‘debate’. This is a stampede, and Eric is merely a fully indoctrinated member of the herd.
“Eric”- what if _you_ are the one in error, along with the cheaters from CRU and the power-seekers like Al Gore? Evidence-real, geological evidence-shows that ice ages come on very fast; about a decade from temperate climate to hundreds of feet of ice. Billions of people dying from cold and/or crop failure, and no way to re-build the energy supply to save them. That’s the future if the Warministas have their way.
Two words: Open Source
Suggest that all parties agree on a set
of source data, put it on the Web, and let
any interested individual process it as they
will; The truth will out.
A good start is made here:
http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2009/12/fables-of-the-reconstruction.html
Yo eric,
Your comment is absurd! This is science, buddy! It must be PROVEN before we need to take it seriously! Ask yourself a question: what percentage of “global warming” is attributable to industrialized man? Hmmmm? Let me give you a hint, the correct answer is ‘I don’t know’. Now, ask yourself another question: Why don’t I know? Hmmm? Correct answer: Because climate science hasn’t figured it out. One more: What caused the midieval warming period (which was warmer than today, BTW)???? Hmmmm? Don’t know that one either, huh? How’s ’bout: what caused the Little Ice Age, that should be an easy one? can’t do that one either, hmmm?I know you can’t answer any of these questions because nobody can! So, why are you trying to stop a problem that science is not even close to understanding? OK, I’ve got to ask one more question: why would you trust scientists wh to hide their data from skeptics? If the science is so conclusive why not show the world? Be honest with yourself, eric, you don’t don’t know jack about the scientific method, nor do you care.
Please ask:
“Since carbon emissions are such a hazard why wasn’t this Climate Conference done via tele-conferencing?”
“Since the true believers, flying around in private jets and living in palatial homes, obviously don’t care about their personal “carbon footprints” why are they so concerned about mine?”
Finally, trusted firsthand reporting. Go Roger! Looking forward to your dispatches.
BTW Eric (#10), just what is the temperature of the earth supposed to be?
Ask if they like cap and trade legislation. Then ask if they are aware of the massive fraud in the EU version of this. Then ask whether they have recommendations about how to enact a fraud-proof system on a world-wide scale.
Then show them some pages from this article
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/earth/4287132.html
and other pages from this site. Ask whether this research is being funded by governments or by venture capital. Ask whether natural gas should be substituted for coal as a stop-gap energy source till other technologies are on line. As if they think vertical algae farms could provide a source for transportation fuel and whether this might be a better solution than cutting down rain forests to plant palms for Europe’s biofuel mandates?
Ask how much of this technology is likely to come from Pacific island countries if the US and other western countries go broke investing in half-baked schemes. Finally, ask whether they are willing to go back to their universities and switch their majors to physics and engineering so they can be part of the solution instead of part of the problem.
How many years of weather = 1 climate?
Roger,
Suggest that an open debate with the climate skeptic scientists would help convince people that global warming is credible. Who would they like to debate?
Please tell them that we’re freezing here in the Midwest, and that we hope some of the hot air they’re generating at their conference will blow over here and warm us up.
And Eric, I forgot to add
Consensus has ALWAYS been one of the most dangerous obstacles in the pursuit of truth. Consensus proves nothing is science! Especially a phony consensus that excludes skeptics! There actually was a consensus that the earth was flat… and that we lived in an earth centered universe. The consensus was very wrong. Only the skeptics debunk weak theories and advance science.
Eric: start thinking for yourself. This is the biggest attempted takeover of the world’s economies. It’s very creative in that it’s not done–yet–by force.
Where did Eric go?
“Some money,” my fundament.
#10 Eric: I guess the scientific facts of every major scientific institution and scientific concensus the world over are not enough for you.
One of the things we’ve learned in the last month via the ClimateGate Files is the degree to which the “consensus” to which you refer has been manufactured, through data manipulation, misconduct in peer review, and flat out threats.
Now I personally am one of those “lukewarmers” : I’m confident there has been warming over the last 400 years, I think there has been an anthropogenic contribution to it, and I think it’s possible human-caused CO2 emissions have had some effect there. But we don’t know the magnitude, and as it stands, all the “good science” toward the human-caused, CO2-forced model is based on corrupted, untrustworthy science.
Eric:
The only consensus out there is that this will be the next big boondoggle. The earth has gone through a lot of changes in its billions of years and it seems to me there is plenty of room to doubt whether any socalled change in temperatures are man made. If they are, I suggest you get rid of your computer, have your electricity shut off and go live in a mud hut.
My advice Roger is ask the fancy pants people at Copenhagen how many people have to live their lives in poverty to satisfy this bizarre obsession of the fanatical environmentalists.
Tim Maguire @ 27 asks precisely the right question. How many weathers does equal a climate change? In my neck of the woods the climate is arid with moderately warm summers and cold winters. The ecosystem is a blend of juniper and prairie.
About 12,000 years ago the region was a frigid grassland with cool summers and harsh winters. Many eons before that the area was a tropical forest. And before that by numbers that crash my calculator, the region was submerged by an inland sea. I have sea creature fossils in my garden now at 7,000 feet above sea level.
Well then, if we’re on a crusade to establish guilt, I want a full hearing at the ICC in the Hague indicting Native Americans for the murder of North America’s mega-fauna. Not only that, but charges for failing to recycle! Ancient kill sites litter my neighborhood, and I demand compensation for the neolithic trash left by previous tenants. Damn them.
I want nothing less than justice for crimes against nature! I demand a full accounting for man’s rapacious looting of his environment! Let no culture or people be spared!
More than that I want another beer.
Roger:
See if you can find and interview Richard Lindzen (MIT, AGW skeptic). He and Choi published a paper in August seemingly showing that the way climate models handle CO2 is incorrect (CO2 does not trap outgoing radiation to the degree the modelers assume). I wouldn’t be surprised if he chose not to attend.
Ask if each AGW promoting scientist named in the e-mails would be willing to be filmed debating those who they disparaged and threatened with lost access to peer-reviewed journals. Would they explain and defend “hide the decline” strategy to an eminent group of statisticians and non-AGW scientists in a televised prime-time program available on major networks and in a joint session of Congress? And finally ask each how much funding their labs receive for AGW-related projects and if they have any investments in green energy projects/companies.
It’s great your going! Good luck!
It’d be interesting to know the temperature in Copenhagen on the day you’re there. I hope you can stay warm!
Thanks for asking what we’d like to know.
My main concern is WHAT WILL OBAMA SIGN that he thinks he can get away with.
He wants to transfer (“share”) our wealth (he already tried (but failed) to commit us to give almost $1 Trillion via the Global Poverty Act of 2007 when he was a Senator, so now he has this instead) — and he wants to put us, to a large degree, under the control of the U.N. and International Laws — and he’s a very determined man.
I hope you’ll be well armed with info and numbers — about the MANY ARTICLES, AND PETITIONS signed by thousands of scientists – those in climate-related fields – and other scientists — one has 30,000 signatures, and others?
5 Questions I’d like to hear answers to — if you corner one of the “warmists.”
1. Just suppose, suppose it was absolutely proven to your satisfaction, that there is no, none, nada AGW or even GW — what would you do?
Would you still support the massive transfer of wealth? Would you still want to continue to impede or even stop future development, technology and the fuels that enable it — that would actually empower poorer nations to create their own growth and future prosperity?
2. If there’s really “consensus,” how do you account for the thousands of articles and many thousands of scientists who have come out, at the risk of loss of career and extreme ridicule, to speak out against this theory? Do you think they’re all being “paid off” by the evil “corporations?”
3. Is there no conflict of interest of a scientific community whose means of existence depends on a certain “result?”
4. Are you aware of the 1970′s Global Cooling panic? The Y2K Millenium panic? Both supposedly had a scientific “consensus” though there were many who disagreed. Don’t you think it’s just possible the same applies here, especially when so many scientists disagree.
5. Do you think it’s at all possible, that this is being promoted for political rather than scientific reasons?
Bon Voyage!
These are some topics I’d like to see covered.
My worst nightmares (seen on video) come to life are:
1. Throngs of people from poorer nations marching, angrily waving signs, DEMANDING. FEELING NOT ONLY ENTITLED TO, BUT CHEATED IF THEY DON’T GET — OUR WEALTH. DEMANDING THAT WORLD WEALTH BE “EQUALIZED” BY BEING HANDED OVER TO THEM.
And the underlying feeling of a threat of violence if we don’t give in.
(No appreciation or gratitude — for all of wealth that is already being poured into their nations — no self reflection on why that “aid” isn’t being used by their governments to promote their own self-generated wealth — after so many years of “aid.”)
2. The VENOM AND BLAME for their fantasies of future apocalypse (especially via that vile PORN WARMING VIDEO) LAYED SQUARELY on the WEALTH AND WELL-BEING of the U.S. and AMERICANS. The ugly, self-deceptive ENVY of it all.
3. The OUTRIGHT GALL of the One-Worlders who FEEL SO SUPERIOR to the rest of us, they actually THINK THEY HAVE A RIGHT to tell us WHAT TO EAT and to have only 1 CHILD. CHINA’S AUDACITY to promote this to the rest of the world — especially when they are looking at a large future male population who will have NO WIVES.)
4. BAREFACED LIES. For instance — hearing Politicos repeat over and over that the LAST 10 YEARS have shown extreme warming — when they know very well THERE’S BEEN COOLING. And — knowing full well that even if there were a real Warming caused by Carbon (which it’s not) and the “world” is brought back to carbon emissions of l850 (which it won’t be) that the HUMAN CONTRIBUTION IS ONLY .03% and WOULDN’T MAKE A BIT OF DIFFERENCE.
Why doesn’t someone make a film about the terrible polar bears eating the darling seals?
How about calling a joint press conference with all of the other skeptics who are going to be there. I think it would be a hoot! And well attended!
I would buy some smoked salmon before they all get boiled in the oceans.
What’s wrong with poached salmon?
As John Holdren, Czar, might say: The UN is a mass of seething maggots infesting that putrescent carcass of global thugmeisters known as the Ban Ki-moon/Pachauri “diplomatic community” (sic).
By ineluctable Rule of 72, the UN founded in 1946 will deliquesce about 2018– think Sovietism, 1917 – ’89 or 1919 -’91. The biggest balloon bursts at the smallest prick… and what will Lower Slobovia do then, poor thing?
# 10 Eric: I see the LUDDITES are being represented here by Eric who posts his anti Capitalist nonsense as though it was divine truth . LOL
Senator “Louisiana Purchase” Landrieu (D) LA.
She has a big vote coming up on healthcare.
It’s a good time to know your senators.
Help me make them famous.
I would ask any available delegate from a G77 country (the caucus of 132 Third World Countries)what his or her country will do to combat global warming or adapt to it if the United States and the EU don’t agree to pick up the tab.
That should shed some light on how they really see the problem.
This year Seattle temperatures have been the coldest in 90 years. QED
My questions:
How can one use data sets with has high variances and major assumptions and make meaningful projections of small variances far into the future?
if the gorbots are right, you won’t be able to poach your salmon because the seas will be too HOT.
but the gravelax is fab. albeit ludicrously expensive. when you see the prices you’ll understand why the EU ransacks every bank account on the continent…
Find out who, and why, is paying for all the identical placards in the astroturf protests there.
Oh, BTW, just finished Roger’s book, and I heartily recommend it. Lots of
Squaliwood dishing, political analysis–if you want to understand your own journey away from the left like I did, it will not disappoint.
Thanks very much, PJ.
Here is another article you might ask about:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/6798052/What-links-the-Copenhagen-conference-with-the-steelworks-closing-in-Redcar.html
It’s one thing to be gored by a bull but to be bulled by a Gore!
For Eric’c education and everybody (consensus?) fun:
http://eclipptv.com/viewVideo.php?video_id=8907
Roger, you have the makings of a great thriller here. Denmark’s Tivoli Gardens! Money! Secrets! Fakery! Al Gore! China and her adviser, the great Maurice Strong! Gosh.
go for it and have a great time.
Why the Copenhagen trip is a loser.
My Mother was a christian. I mean she was the real thing. She believed Got created the world in 4008 BC.
I said, “Mother we are digging bones up that have turned to stone. This process takes millions of years. How do you explain that”?
She did not hesitate for a moment. She said, “God put those stones there to vex me”.
Well Roger, Copenhagen will be on a slightly different subject, but you are up against my Mother’s spirit and you are going to get nowhere.
As you trek to Hopenchangen, Denmark please consider asking:
How many temperature stations were there around the world 15 years ago and how many are there now?
What was the schedule for maintaining them 15 years ago and what is it now? (Note: deferred maintenance in the form of less frequently painting them white changes their reflectivity and thus their heat absorption)
What is the equation for correcting for volcanic heat that floats over certain stations at irregular intervals?
That’s it: three questions every global “leader” should recognize as an indication that they don’t know the first thing about AGW.
Canada is showing 40 below in places and the police cannot find their patrol cars under the snow. Obama’s numbers have hit a very serious new low. Seattle had temps beating 90 year old lows. I feel so much better than I have for a long while.
The hockey stick was used to push the big lie that the world’s climate had been constant with regard to temperature until we started pumping CO2 into the atmosphere.
But I believe Richard Lindzen is now making this vital point: it is simply that the hockey stick denied natural variability in the atmosphere. And that the atmosphere modelers were forced (politically) to base those models on that lack of variability. That’s why the models don’t work. That probably why they had to be tweeked.
The only way to forecast future climate variation (and that’s what the scare mongering of global warming is all about) is to base research data of all sorts on how it has varied in the past.
What’s wrong with poached salmon?
Fish & Game get all over you for that.
Roger, get an interview with Christopher Monckton. He will sum it all up for you and very eloquently too.
“Take a look at Tyco Brahe and how he is now remembered.”
Eric, you are a Tycho expert. Tell me about his nose. No fair looking him up on Wiki.
There is a very nice biography of Steve McIntyre here.
Since everyone there seems to be so very alarmed about our “carbon emissions” and “carbon footprints”, perhaps you could ask them how they can justify all the … uhhh… hot air they’ve generated with this Copenhagen CarbonFest.
And as a follow-up question, you might ask them if they’ve ever heard of “video conferencing”, the usage of which is much more environmentally correct, don’t you think?!
P.S. I hope you’ve completed all the bureaucratic requirements for press accreditation [http://unfccc.int/press/calender_of_events/accreditation/items/2987.php] and that they don’t sideline you as they did Bruce Bawer.