The question of whether or not there is anthropomorphic global warming has decidedly not been settled, no matter how many scientists and politicians claim that it has.

The Freedom Society of  York University, England, is to hold a conference on climate change. One of the organizers is our British editor, Sam Westrop, founder of the Freedom Society,who writes this:

Thomas Jefferson once said that, “Reason and free inquiry are the only effectual agents against error.” And so, with that quote in mind, and the understanding that scientific theories must be falsifiable, the Freedom Society is hosting ‘Climate Week’, a five-day event from the 26th to 30th October at the University of York.

The week will question the politics and ethics of climate change science… We do not know if anthropogenic climate change is occurring or not, but in order for us to draw a conclusion – especially as non-scientists – it is vital that the science be liberal, objective and untainted by political pressure…

There have been many examples of ‘scientific consensus’. A useful illustration is the former fear of Global Cooling that gained momentum in the 1960s. The first paragraph of a New York Times article, from 30th January 1961, entitled SCIENTISTS AGREE WORLD IS COLDER; But Climate Experts Meeting Here Fail to Agree on Reasons for Change, read: “After a week of discussions on the causes of climate change, an assembly of specialists from several continents seems to have reached unanimous agreement on only one point: it is getting colder.“…

There are a growing number of cries that the IPCC has negated the traditional scientific method. The climatologist Roger Pielke, despite believing in anthropogenic climate change, has criticised the IPCC for its ill-gotten conclusions and has accused the scientific body of subjectively choosing data to support a selective view of climate change science…

Furthermore, the House of Lords Economics Committee has recently stated that, “We have some concerns about the objectivity of the IPCC process, with some of its emissions scenarios and summary documentation apparently influenced by political considerations.”

The IPCC has not just become a body of political scientists, but scientific politicians as well. These people’s professions have become adulterated with the idealism of environmental morality.

The 2008 International Conference on Climate Change in New York brought to light the “absolute horror stories” about how some scientific journals and political bodies have engaged in the suppression of climate-sceptic scientists trying to publish their work in peer-reviewed journals. This conference included many afflicted current and former IPCC scientists from all over the globe.

The IPCC is not the only culprit … Dr. Ferenc Miskolczi, an atmospheric physicist at NASA, resigned because of the agency’s lack of scientific freedom.

Miskolczi said he wanted to publish and discuss his new research that showed “runaway greenhouse theories contradict energy balance equations,” but he claims that NASA refused to allow him. He recently said that, “Unfortunately, my working relationship with my NASA supervisors eroded to a level that I am not able to tolerate. My idea of the freedom of science cannot coexist with the recent NASA practice of handling new climate change related scientific results.”

A consensus in one branch of science does not mean a consensus across all branches. For example, a recent survey of 51,000 scientists in Canada from the Association of Professional Engineers, Geologists and Geophysicists found that 68% of them disagreed with the statement that “the debate on the scientific causes of recent climate change is settled.” The survey also stated that only 26% of scientists attributed global warming to “human activity such as burning fossil fuels.” …

It becomes only too apparent that there is a desperate need for …  free debate, given the drastic choices that Governments are prepared to make. Whether such decisions involve the complete overhaul of our energy sources, or the (ethically questionable) prevention of industrialisation in developing countries, the need to end scientific censorship is vitally important…

The University of York Freedom Society’s ‘Climate Week’ will not try to cover the complicated and vast subject of the science itself; instead it will highlight the dangers of academic suppression and weigh the ethical questions involved when dealing with such proscription. …

Climate Week will see many scientists, politicians, journalists and environmentalists, from all over Europe and ever further afield, come together for the first time in the UK …

It promises to be an interesting event, where debate will be lively.

A little brightness on the time horizon is discerned by Mark Steyn, the wittiest writer in the West – or anywhere. He foresees that  liberal environmentalists  may be a dying breed. (Read it all.)

Perhaps the environmentalists are right, and the best way to preserve the planet for the next generation is not to have a next generation. But somebody will. Germany’s Turkish Muslims drink less beer than their Teuton compatriots, but is their carbon footprint otherwise significantly different? I would doubt it. The British Medical Journal’s rebuke of English motherhood is already unnecessary: Britain has a below-replacement fertility rate; its population increase depends entirely on immigrants and their children. If Scots and Ulstermen and the like are despoiling the planet, you can tie their tubes. But their place in the maternity ward will be taken by Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, and even some virtuous Ethiopians: As Europe already knows, no matter how fast you self-extinguish, First World infrastructure does not stay empty. Ethiopia comes to you: Abyssinia in all the old familiar places.

As I usually say around this point, the future belongs to those who show up for it. The Germans, Italians and Spaniards have upside-down family trees of the type the biens pensants are commending to the Anglo-Americans. But a people without grandchildren cannot grandfather in their environmental fetishism for all eternity. The health of the planet will be determined by those who stick around – like the Ethopians. I’m chary about predictions but I’d be willing to bet that by the end of this century the anguished western liberal environmentalist will be on the endangered species list.

From The Washington Times:

The House-passed climate change bill, if enacted, would expand the federal government so much that it would take billions of dollars and thousands of new employees to implement.

Now-obscure federal agencies such as the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission would have to become mini-behemoths in order to handle their expanded responsibilities. Congress would have to appropriate billions of dollars for more bureaucrats, much of which is not reflected in the House bill…

The [Commodities Futures Trading] commission, which would police the new futures market for allowances, apparently would need to expand its work force by at least 31 percent initially to fulfill its obligations under the bill. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which would oversee the day-to-day trading of allowances, has estimated that it would have to expand by 20 percent or 30 percent.

The Environmental Protection Agency, which would oversee pollution regulation, also would balloon in size…

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said the government’s expansion would cost $8 billion over a 10-year period. For the bill to operate effectively, nearly 1,500 regulations and mandates would have to be approved for at least 21 federal agencies. The rule-making process alone would take years.

And all to avert an imaginary disaster?

From an article by Alan Oxley in Investor’s Business Daily:

Environmental NGOs (nongovernmental organizations) Greenpeace and Worldwide Fund for Nature have just released the “NGO Climate Change Treaty.” It’s their wish list for terms of a treaty to replace the expiring Kyoto Protocol, and they’re pushing it this week at a U.N. meeting in Bonn, Germany.

Environmental activists have always believed governments should put the environment ahead of every other issue, including economic growth. The NGO Treaty is a blueprint for this.

In addition to soliciting the same sort of tough emissions targets they’ve demanded in the past, this latest document maps out a strict plan to restructure the global economy into their “Brave New World.” Yet it reads like an old Soviet 20-year plan.

The negotiators who inked the original Kyoto treaty envisaged that the agreement would create an open global market for emissions trading which would efficiently distribute the cost of reducing emissions among the world’s economies.

Under the NGO plan, a form of global government supplants national sovereignty, and a central committee of international officials allocates the proceeds from the sale of carbon emission, not the market. The activists lay out, in no uncertain terms, just who should bear the costs and how high those costs should be.

Worldwide Fund for Nature and Greenpeace also want industry in developed nations to pay $160 billion every year for the first five years. Their Treaty creates a “Committee” of backroom officials selected from parties to the Treaty which approves a plan by each member to reduce emissions.

If the plans are deemed unacceptable, countries would be forced to go before two other regulating bodies (the Facilitation Branch and then the Compliance Branch) to “correct” their strategies or be penalized for not doing so.

The Secretary-General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, demands world-wide redistribution of wealth and the curbing of economic activity in order to ‘save the planet’ from poverty, hunger, disease, and insecurity. This must be done within four months he says, or  else…

We have just four months. Four months to secure the future of our planet.

Any agreement must be fair, effective, equitable and comprehensive, and based on science. And it must help vulnerable nations adapt to climate change…

The science is clear… What is needed is the political will. We have the capacity. We have finance. We have the technology. The largest lacking is political will. That is why I will convey some meetings focused on climate change. I have invited all the leaders of the world … Two years ago, only a handful of world leaders could talk about climate change. Today, leaders of all the world, all the countries on every continent are aware of the threats we face now. This is great progress, for we need leadership of the very highest order. Awareness is the first step. The challenge now is to act. Since my first day as Secretary-General, I have spoken out about the grave climate change threat. My words, at times, have been blunt. When the leaders of the G-8 agreed in July to keep the global temperature increase within two degrees centigrade by the year 2050, that was welcomed and I welcome that statement. But I also said again, it was not enough. But leaders have agreed to cut green house gas emissions by 80 per cent by 2050. That is welcomed again. But that must be accompanied by the ambitious mid-term target by 2020 as science tells us to do. There I said, while I applaud their commitment, that is not enough. I called for matching these long-term goals with ambitious mid-term emission reduction targets.

Let me be clear about what we need to do.

There are four points [of] very important key political issues.

First industrialized countries must lead by committing to binding mid-term reduction targets on the order of 25 to 40 per cent below 1990 levels. Unfortunately, the mid-term emission targets announced so far are not close enough to this range…

Second, developing countries need to take nationally appropriate mitigation actions in order to reduce the growth in their emissions substantially below business as usual…

Third, developed countries must provide sufficient, measurable, reportable and verifiable financial and technological support to developing countries… Significant resources will be needed from both public and private sources. Developing countries, especially the most vulnerable, will collectively need billions of dollars in public financing for adaptation. I am talking here about new money – not re-packaged Official Development Assistance…

Fourth, we need an equitable and accountable mechanism for distributing these financial and technological resources, taking into account the views of all countries in decision-making.

Accomplishing all of this requires tough decisions. It will take flexibility and hard work to negotiate the most difficult issues. Trust between developed and developing countries is essential. When governments succeed in sealing a deal in Copenhagen, we will have shown the spirit of international solidarity. We will have shown leadership – political will…

Roll on, Copenhagen. Only, while they’re at it, why don’t they agree to make gold out of moonbeams? The science is clear.

Robert Murphy, author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism, writes in Townhall on the cash-for-clunkers scheme:

Every dollar the government spends comes from either taxes, borrowing, or inflation. In all cases, the citizens are ultimately paying for it. You don’t make the country wealthier by taking money from some citizens and giving it to others so that they can buy a car that’s too expensive for their budget…

It is because of government meddling that this recession has been so long and so painful. It is no coincidence that the two periods of the biggest power grabs in Washington—the 1930s and right now—coincided with the worst economies in U.S. history. Having the feds borrow a few more billion, to pay people to buy cars, does nothing to alleviate the underlying problems. The economy can’t return to normal when every business decision needs to consider what politicians might announce next week…

The cash-for-clunkers plan is a giant waste of tax dollars. It further distorts the economy, making industry even more vulnerable to the changing whims of D.C. politicians. To add insult to injury, the alleged environmental benefits are minimal. The only virtue of the program is that it steers billions of dollars into the pockets of those with friends in high places.

From The Vancouver Sun:

Ian Plimer has outraged the ayatollahs of purist environmentalism, the Torquemadas of the doctrine of global warming, and he seems to relish the damnation they heap on him.

Plimer is a geologist, professor of mining geology at Adelaide University, and he may well be Australia’s best-known and most notorious academic.[He] is an unremitting critic of “anthropogenic global warming” — man-made climate change to you and me — and the current environmental orthodoxy that if we change our polluting ways, global warming can be reversed. It is, of course, not new to have a highly qualified scientist saying that global warming is an entirely natural phenomenon with many precedents in history. Many have made the argument, too, that it is rubbish to contend human behaviour is causing the current climate change. And it has often been well argued that it is totally ridiculous to suppose that changes in human behaviour — cleaning up our act through expensive slight-of-hand taxation tricks — can reverse the trend. But most of these scientific and academic voices have fallen silent in the face of environmental Jacobinism. Purging humankind of its supposed sins of environmental degradation has become a religion with a fanatical and often intolerant priesthood, especially among the First World urban elites.

But Plimer shows no sign of giving way to this orthodoxy and has just published the latest of his six books and 60 academic papers on the subject of global warming. This book, Heaven and Earth — Global Warming: The Missing Science … presents the proposition that anthropogenic global warming is little more than a con trick on the public perpetrated by fundamentalist environmentalists and callously adopted by politicians and government officials who love nothing more than an issue that causes public anxiety [so that they can have yet another excuse to control our lives – JB].

 While environmentalists for the most part draw their conclusions based on climate information gathered in the last few hundred years, geologists, Plimer says, have a time frame stretching back many thousands of millions of years. The dynamic and changing character of the Earth’s climate has always been known by geologists. These changes are cyclical and random, he says. They are not caused or significantly affected by human behavior. Polar ice, for example, has been present on the Earth for less than 20 per cent of geological time, Plimer writes. Plus, animal extinctions are an entirely normal part of the Earth’s evolution.

 (Plimer, by the way, is also a vehement anti-creationist and has been hauled into court for disrupting meetings by religious leaders and evangelists who claim the Bible is literal truth.)

Plimer gets especially upset about carbon dioxide, its role in Earth’s daily life and the supposed effects on climate of human manufacture of the gas. He says atmospheric carbon dioxide is now at the lowest levels it has been for 500 million years, and that atmospheric carbon dioxide is only 0.001 per cent of the total amount of the chemical held in the oceans, surface rocks, soils and various life forms. Indeed, Plimer says carbon dioxide is not a pollutant, but a plant food. Plants eat carbon dioxide and excrete oxygen. Human activity, he says, contributes only the tiniest fraction to even the atmospheric presence of carbon dioxide.

There is no problem with global warming, Plimer says repeatedly. He points out that for humans periods of global warming have been times of abundance when civilization made leaps forward. Ice ages, in contrast, have been times when human development slowed or even declined.

 So global warming, says Plimer, is something humans should welcome and embrace as a harbinger of good times to come.

Notes on the ‘global warming’ scam.

Christopher Booker writes in the Telegraph: 

It was delightfully appropriate that, as large parts of Argentina were swept by severe blizzards last week, on a scale never experienced before, the city of Nashville, Tennessee, should have enjoyed the coolest July 21 in its history, breaking a record established in 1877. Appropriate, because Nashville is the home of Al Gore, the man who for 20 years has been predicting that we should all by now be in the grip of runaway global warming.

His predictions have proved so wildly wrong – along with those of the Met Office’s £33 million computer model which forecast that we should now be enjoying a “barbecue summer” and that 2009 would be one of “the five warmest years ever” – that the propaganda machine has had to work overtime to maintain what is threatening to become the most expensive fiction* in history.

* According to the Science and Public Policy Institute, ‘the US government has spent over $79 billion since 1989 on policies related to climate change, including science and technologu research, administration, education campaigns, foreign aid, and tax breaks.’

Check out the full report at scienceandpublicpolicy.org

Investor’s Business Daily suggests that the only place that’s really getting hotter is Al Gore’s head –

Because he must be getting flustered now, what with his efforts to save the benighted world from global warming continually being exposed as a fraud.

The true believers will not be moved by the peer-reviewed findings of Chris de Freitas, John McLean and Bob Carter, scientists at universities in Australia and New Zealand.

Warming advocates have too much invested in perpetuating the myth. (And are probably having too much fun calling those who don’t agree with them “deniers” and likening skeptics to fascists.)

But these scientists have made an important contribution to the debate that Gore says doesn’t exist.

Their research, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, indicates that nature, not man, has been the dominant force in climate change in the late 20th century.

“The surge in global temperatures since 1977 can be attributed to a 1976 climate shift in the Pacific Ocean that made warming El Nino conditions more likely than they were over the previous 30 years and cooling La Nina conditions less likely” says co-author de Freitas.

“We have shown that internal global climate-system variability accounts for at least 80% of the observed global climate variation over the past half-century. It may even be more if the period of influence of major volcanoes can be more clearly identified and the corresponding data excluded from the analysis.”

These findings are largely being ignored by the mainstream media. They simply don’t fit the worn narrative that man is dangerously warming the Earth through his carbon dioxide emissions and a radical alteration of Western lifestyles mandated by government policy is desperately needed.

They will be ignored, as well, by the Democratic machine that is trying to ram an economy-smothering carbon cap-and-trade regime through Congress.

Despite efforts to keep the global warming scare alive, the growing evidence that humans aren’t heating the planet is piercing the public consciousness and alarmists are becoming marginalized.

Sharp Americans are starting to understand H.L. Mencken’s observation that “The urge to save humanity is always a false front for the urge to rule it.” That pretty much sums up the modern environmentalist movement.

Secretary of State Cruella DeVille (aka Hillary Clinton) tried to impose Obama’s will on the Indians in the interest of controlling the weather.    

From Power Line:

Now, Clinton has finally visited India, but the government probably wishes she had stayed home. For Clinton used the visit to attempt to pressure India to accept binding limits on carbon emissions. Clinton made this effort despite the fact that (1) India’s carbon emissions are among the lowest in the world on a per capita basis and (2) its economy has been been wracked by the global financial crisis.

India flatly rejected Clinton’s overture, as well it should have.

Abe Greenwald [follow this link, it’s a good read – JB] points out, that this latest instance of U.S. “meddling” illustrates the major shortcomings of Obama’s foreign policy: (1) the administration takes our allies for granted, (2) it confuses its “gift of the gab” with an ability to persuade nations to act against their interests, and (3) it is simply arrogant.

In Greenwald’s words: “If the Obama administration bossed around our enemies with half the energy it puts into bossing around our friends, perhaps the planet wouldn’t look like a rogue nations’ free-for-all right now.”