Obama's massive FAIL at Copenhagen

High fives all around!

The UN climate summit reached a weak outline of a global agreement last night in Copenhagen, falling far short of what Britain and many poor countries were seeking and leaving months of tough negotiations to come.
After eight draft texts and all-day talks between 115 world leaders, it was left to Barack Obama and Wen Jiabao, the Chinese premier, to broker a political agreement. The so-called Copenhagen accord "recognises" the scientific case for keeping temperature rises to no more than 2C but did not contain commitments to emissions reductions to achieve that goal.
American officials spun the deal as a "meaningful agreement", but even Obama said: "This progress is not enough."
"We have come a long way, but we have much further to go," he added.

Who said it? "I hope he fails."

UPDATE: More news from Copenhagen:

In a strange twist, a Washington snowstorm is forcing Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-California, to make an early departure from a global warming summit here in Denmark.

LOL. We're expecting up to a foot of snow here in the hills of western Maryland. My sons and I just got back from buying The World's Best Christmas Tree. (Family tradition requires that the entire family praise my selection as absolutely the most beautiful tree they've ever seen.) Now we're about to decorate the tree andnd I say, "Let It Snow!"

UPDATE III: Great minds think alike -- The Boss digs Dino, too!

Obama managed to cobble a "feeble" agreement that he is, of course, calling "unprecedented."
Obama leaves the snow-covered Copenhagen summit just in time to catch the East Coast blizzard.

It's gonna be a blue Christmas for Obama, if we can get Ben Nelson to stand strong and vote "no" on cloture. If any Nebraskans are reading this, CONTACT NELSON'S OFFICE NOW!

Dear 'experts': Don't bother auditioning for 'Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?'

Idea for title borrowed from Jimmie Bise, video swiped from The Blog Prof:

For crying out loud! These idiots were urging us to undo two centuries of economic growth on the basis of bug-riddled computer code? I'm convinced that the whole purpose of this climate-change crap was for a bunch of universities to get taxpayer money. "Give us grants so we can buy super-computers and save the world!"

Exit question: What's your over/under on the number of gigabytes of porn on the hard drives of those CRU computers?

Politically correct genocide

Saving the planet by eliminating Africans?

Rushing to the front of the race for the prize of Most Vomit-Inducing Environmental Initiative Ever Devised, the UK's Optimum Population Trust -- which counts such grandees as David Attenborough and Jonathon Porritt among its supporters -- has just launched PopOffsets. This quirkily named campaign is actually deeply sinister: It invites well-off Westerners to offset their carbon emissions by paying for poor people in the Third World to stop procreating.
In short, if you feel bad about your CO2-emitting jaunt to Barbados, or the new Ferrari you just splurged on, then simply give some money to a charity which helps to "convince" Third World women not to have children, and -- presto! -- the carbon saved by having one less black child in the world will put your guilt-ridden mind at rest.
The Optimum Population Trust is a creepy Malthusian outfit made up of Lords, Ladies, and Sirs who all believe that the world's problems are caused by "too many people." It recently carried out a cost-benefit analysis of the best way to tackle global warming and "discovered" (I prefer the word "decided") that every £4 spent on contraception saves one ton of CO2 from being added to the environment, whereas you would need to spend £8 on tree-planting, £15 on wind power, £31 on solar energy, and £56 on hybrid vehicle technology to realize the same carbon savings.

When Jill at Pundit and Pundette brought Brendan O’Neill's item to my attention, I was moved to remark:

What makes such idiocy as "population offsets" fashionable among the bien pensant sophisticates is their conceited belief that they possess a monopoly on good intentions, and that good intentions are all that matter. That nonsensical belief was thoroughly debunked by Thomas Sowell's The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy.
Once you understand the nature of this fallacy -- "Good intentions toward Group X will result in policy beneficial to Group X" -- you gain a certain contempt for the way liberals habitually celebrate their own good intentions by accusing conservatives of mala fides. In terms of public policy, it matters not a whit whether you love Africans, hate Africans or don't have an opinion about Africans; the test is whether they are actually benefitted by your policy. . . .

You can read the whole thing. I conclude by observing how elitists try to get away with sloppy thinking by stigmatizing their critics with labels like "anti-intellectual."

That method of argument-by-accusation should always arouse suspicion: What are they trying to hide? And the suspicion is compounded when the global-warming fearmongers require 140 private planes and 1,200 limousines to carry them to the "Climate Summit."

Coincidentally -- speaking of green lies -- Andrew Breitbart today found himself accused of murderous malice by . . . Charles Johnson. Laura W. at AOSHQ has more mendaciousness by Mad King Charles.

'Trust us -- we're scientists!'

As our teachers used to say in math class, "show your work":

SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.
It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.
The UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was forced to reveal the loss following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation.

(Via Memeorandum.) My Catholic friend Pete at Da Tech Guy knows how to push my Protestant buttons:

Q: What do the "Global Warming" people have in common with some forms of Protestantism?
A: Apparently they also are making the argument that the salvation of Global Warming should be a question of faith and not works.

Right, Pete. While we await your Ph.D. dissertation on the physics of transubstantiation -- zing! -- let's agree that there have always been religious overtones to environmentalism. One reason that abortion is such a sacred right to some Baby Boomers is that they were deceived by the "Population Bomb" hoax of the 1960s and '70s, when neo-Malthusians warned that the alternative to draconian population control was a Soylent Green-style dystopia.

For decades, elitists have sneered at those of us who are skeptical toward the claims of what I describe as the Temple Cult of Scientism:

The High Priests perform their statistical rituals and the cultists genuflect reverently before their idol, Science.

The federally-mandated triumph of secularism in public education -- Engel v. Vitale, Abington School District, Epperson v. Arkansas -- has steadily enlarged the credulous congregation of the Temple Cult.

These landmark Supreme Court decisions stigmatized religion as unconstitutionally subversive of the educational process, ensuring that future generations of American youth would be inculcated with a sort of neo-Manichean worldview, wherein traditional religious belief had nothing relevant to say about science, history, psychology or any other realm of human inquiry.

Ideas Have Consequences, as Richard Weaver famously observed, and this legally-certified declaration that there was no overlap between Faith and Reason has not merely marginalized Faith, it has also undermined Reason. When we behold the religious fanaticism of the Temple Cult in regard to Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW), we must understand this irrational fruit as a natural product of the poisoned tree of Scientism.

Philip E. Johnson's Reason in the Balance demonstrated how Darwinism -- one of the bedrock tenets of Scientism -- inevitably perverts not only science but also education, law and many other intellectual endeavors. It is but one step from this sort of Scientism to the revolutionary terror of Jacobinism, for when men jettison the anchor of Faith, the selfish conceit of Reason makes them dangerous fools, as Edmund Burke explained:

A spirit of innovation is generally the result of a selfish temper, and confined views. People will not look forward to posterity, who will not look backward to their ancestors. . . .
We know that we have made no discoveries, and we think that no discoveries are to be made, in morality; nor many in the great principles of government; nor in the ideas of liberty, which were understood long before we were born, altogether as they will be after the grave has heaped its mould upon our presumption, and the silent tomb shall have imposed its law on our pert loquacity.

This temptation to think that we are morally superior to our ancestors, you see, is the road to hell that Scientism paves. You need not be a Bible-thumping fundamentalist (like me) to notice how the adherents of Darwin tend to smuggle into their arguments a predisposition toward Whig history, wherein humankind is relentlessly struggling upward on the road of Progress. Here it is best to recall the brilliant aphorism of G.K. Chesterton:

"My attitude toward progress has passed from antagonism to boredom. I have long ceased to argue with people who prefer Thursday to Wednesday because it is Thursday."

Exactly. If everything is Progress and Progress is everything, then decline becomes an ontological impossibility and -- by logical extension -- today's Congress is morally superior to the Founders who gathered at Philadelphia in 1776 and 1787.

Anyone who doesn't understand how such a worldview undermines the Rule of Law and puts our rights at the mercy of legislators and bureaucrats has forfeited any claim to intellectual superiority that would qualify them to lecture the rest of us about Science.

Christopher Hitchens is both intelligent and an atheist, but intelligent men who suppose themselves smarter than God are ultimately defeated by their own syllogisms. Man dies and God endures, and if man's conceptions of the eternal and infinite -- the Alpha and Omega -- are sufficiently flawed as to be vulnerable to literary criticism or scientific dispute, then this is merely because, as the Apostle Paul said, "now we see through a glass, darkly."

There are no accidents, you see, and those who seek God earnestly and diligently will not forever be frustrated in the search. In checking my citation just now, I was directed to I Corinthians 13, which rather famously addresses the relationship between faith and works:

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.

Read the whole thing, as they say. Truly there are no accidents, and by his seeming joke about Protestantism, my Catholic friend Pete has directed me by the roundabout route toward the passage that justifies a Protestant creed: Sola Scriptura, Sola Fide, Sola Gratia.

We end, then, with Paul's meditation on love and charity. Considering the season -- especially Mrs. Other McCain's decision to be a one-woman stimulus program on Black Friday -- I am tempted to declare myself a fit object of charity.

However, I am merely a greedy capitalist blogger, and this is a fee-for-service operation, so if you wish to show appreciation for my services in vindicating Faith and Reason, $5 or $10 in the tip jar might do the trick. If your prefer even more shameless capitalism, we'll count this as the latest installment of our second annual Holiday Book Sale. And don't forget: What to Give Your Wife for Christmas.

'Cap and Trade Is Dead'

Well, duh! This is kind of obvious, isn't it? Once the fraudulent "science" behind the global warming scare was exposed, Al Gore became the Piltdown Man of American politics and that whole Kyoto-style agenda was as obsolete as the mullet and parachute pants. Delicious commentary from Eric Raymond:

For those of you who have been stigmatizing AGW skeptics as "deniers" and dismissing their charges that the whole enterprise is fraudulent? Hope you like the taste of crow, because I do believe there’s a buttload of it coming at you. Piping hot.

Unlike crow, schadenfreude is a dish best served cold. And I remind you what I said in June:

The simplest way to define conservatism is this: The belief that liberalism is wrong.

All along, the strongest evidence that anthropogenic global warming (AGW) was a hoax was a simple fact: Liberals believed in it.

Kind of like the Obama administration's economic plan, really. It didn't take any prophetic power to declare last December, "It Won't Work." And the emerging obviousness of the failure of Obamanomics is just further confirmation of the fundamental truth that liberalism is always wrong.

Now, if only we can get liberals to agree that Florida will win the SEC championship next Saturday, an Alabama victory is guaranteed.

(Hat-tip: Memeorandum.)

UPDATE: G.M. Roper:

The recent exposure of emails, data and software from the pre-eminent global warming organization -- the Climate Research Unit -- shows not only that scientists are human and thus tribal, arrogant and sometimes deceitful, but also the modern process is inadequate and antiquated.
Skeptics have argued that critical data had been "cooked," and scientists had been refusing requests for data. Now we know that not only was the data misused and that the scientists had been engaged in a coverup and suppression of dissent, but also that they are not even able to understand their own data. . . .

Read the whole thing. What we need, I tell you, is a scientific consensus that Florida will win next Saturday. Get the CRU working on it. Roll Tide.

More 'scientific' kookery

Dr. Jones awaits the global-warming gotterdammerung:

If anything, I would like to see the climate change happen, so the science could be proved right, regardless of the consequences.

Via Tim Blair, who observes, "Of course, if change doesn’t happen, it won't prove that science was wrong. It'll prove that certain scientists were."

Fanatical certainty among misguided experts is by no means limited to the global-warming cultists. The field of psychology, for example, has been whipsawed by successive eruptions of the "expert consensus." There was the whole Freudian analytical couch-trip trend, pre-frontal lobotomies and eletroshock treatments, deinstitutionalization and so on, until today everything is attributed to neurochemistry. This latest consensus is probably wrong, too.

I'm eagerly awaiting the day when psychiatric practice comes full circle and the expert consensus declares that all mental illness is caused by masturbation, demon possession or both: "Nurse, bring the holy water, it's time for Mr. Sullivan's exorcism."

Good luck with that, Dr. Jones

“That was an email from ten years ago. Can you remember the exact context of what you wrote ten years ago?"
-- Dr. Phil Jones, trying to explain the "hide the decline" e-mail in the massive scandal now known as ClimateGate

Thanks to Ace of Spades for catching that. Y'know, it's the darned irony that makes me smile about this.

It would seem that Dr. Jones is claiming that he's been smeared on the basis of somebody else's writing taken out of context. Terrible when things like that happen . . . right, Stogie?

Lies, damned lies, and 'climate change'

One of the biggest scientific scandals of our age, described in two sentences:

That supposed scientific "consensus" about global warming may actually be a conspiracy. E-mails from a British climate-research organization -- obtained by an Australian magazine, Investigate -- disclose scientists discussing a statistical "trick" to "hide the decline" of global temperatures in their data.

More reaction at Memeorandum.

UPDATE I: Before we go any further, let's understand why this is so important. There have always been scientists who have disputed the "consensus" about global warming. Many of the alleged "experts" whose authority has been cited on behalf of this consensus are not, in fact. especially qualified in the field of meteorology, and some of the most prominent spokesmen on the topic of climate change -- e.g., Al Gore -- are no more qualified than you or I to speak as experts.

With the assistance of a pliant media establishment, the global-warming crowd has created the impression that all qualified experts agree with their theory, and that all skeptics are either biased or unqualified. The consensus-mongers have arrogated to themselves the authority to decide who is or is not an expert, and what does and does not qualify as evidence. Once this was Jedi mind-trick was accomplished, it was predictable that any data contradicting the "consensus" would be ignored or suppressed.

Remember this, the next time you hear some media elitist carping about "anti-intellectualism."

UPDATE II: Ed Morrissey quotes extensively from the Climate Research Unite e-mails, and comments:

Do scientists use data to test theories, or do they use theories to test data? . . . [H]ere we have scientists who cling to the theory so tightly that they reject the data. That’s not science; it’s religious belief.

Kind of like economists who think the Obama/Pelosi agenda will lead to recovery.

Expect further updates . . .