Demonstrators hold a picture of U.S. President Barack Obama
and signs during a demonstration outside the Bella Center,
the venue of the U.N. Climate Conference in Copenhagen,
Denmark, early Saturday, Dec. 19, 2009. Obama said the
United States, China and several other countries reached an
"unprecedented breakthrough" Friday to curb greenhouse gas
emissions after a frenzied day of diplomacy at the U.N.
climate talks. (AP Photo/Peter Dejong)
The first time President Obama went to Copenhagen, he came home empty handed (remember the “Chicago Olympics”?). Last week, he again visited the city of Hans Christian Andersen and returned, tail between his legs, with nothing to show for his efforts. Unless, of course, one counts the horrible winter blizzard that followed him back to Washington. Some inescapable irony, there.
Humiliated beyond description, Obama was snubbed and insulted by virtually every international delegate and head of state. Chinese prime minister Wen Jiabao refused to extend his scheduled talks with the American president, and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad accused Barack Obama of following the footsteps of George W. Bush since entering the White House, saying he had “missed a chance to make a clean break.” Little Mahmoud evidently knew what the American public didn’t: that Obama was ordering cruise missiles into Yemen to bomb “enemies.”
Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez waves on
arrival at the Bella Center for the plenary session
of the UN Climate Summit in Copenhagen, Friday,
Dec. 18, 2009. President Barack Obama plunged
into an unscheduled meeting Friday with represen-
tatives of nearly 20 nations as world leaders,
pressed for time, struggled to reach an agreement
on how to curb heat-trapping gasses that are
warming the planet. (AP Photo/Heribert Proepper)
By far, the best-received speech at the climate conference was that of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. The fat communist dictator said he "still" smelled sulfur after President Obama made a keynote speech at the conference Friday, accusing the American president of carrying the same satanic scent that Chavez believes followed Obama's predecessor, George W. Bush. Three years after Chavez likened Bush to the devil during a speech at the United Nations General Assembly in New York, he tore into Obama, claiming Friday that "it still smells like sulfur in the world."
The assembled socialist world leaders, greenies, pinkos, and assorted enviro-looneys cheered on Chavez Wednesday during his speech, a wild attack on all things capitalist that earned him standing ovations from the delegates. He criticized America and other developed nations for creating an "imperial dictatorship" that rules the world and urged his audience to "fight against capitalism," the "silent and terrible ghost" that was haunting the elegant conference chambers in the Danish capital. Calling upon spiritual leaders as varied as Jesus, Muhammad and Karl Marx, he called capitalism the "road to hell" responsible for poverty, murder, AIDS — and, of course, the destruction of the environment. The crowd loved him.
President Barack Obama seen before speaking at the United
Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark,
Friday, Dec. 18, 2009. (AP Photo/RIA-Novosti, Mikhail
Klimentyev, Presidential Press Service)
One of the best examples of Copenhagen’s farrago of farce was cited by Mark Stein, writing in the Orange County Register. He cites a Reuters report of a moving speech by Ian Fry, lead negotiator for Tuvalu, the beleaguered Pacific island nation “soon to be under water because of a planet-devastating combination of your SUV and unsustainable bovine flatulence from Vermont farms.” Fry told the assembled greenies: "The fate of my country rests in your hands. I make this as a strong and impassioned plea ... I woke this morning and I was crying and that was not easy for a grown man to admit," he continued, "his voice choking with emotion," in the Reuters reporter's words. Observes Stein: “Who could fail to be moved?”
Stein goes on: “Alas, nowhere in this emotionally harrowing dispatch was there room to mention that Ian Fry's country is not Tuvalu but Australia, where he lives relatively safe from rising sea levels given that he's a hundred miles inland. A career doom-monger, he's resided in Queanbeyan, New South Wales for over a decade while working his way, in the revealing phrase of his neighbor Michelle Ormay, to being ‘very high up in climate change.’ As to whether the emotion-choked lachrymose pleader has ever lived in ‘his’ endangered country of Tuvalu, his wife told Samantha Maiden of The Australian that she would ‘rather not comment.’ Like his fellow Copenhagen delegate Brad Pitt, Ian Fry is an actor: He's not a Tuvaluan, but he plays one on the world stage.” This is great stuff!
Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad gestures during a
press conference at the U.N. Climate Conference in Copen-
hagen Friday Dec. 18, 2009. The largest and most important
climate change conference is on its last scheduled day,
aiming to secure an agreement on how to protect the world
from calamitous global warming. (AP Photo/Peter Dejong)
Obama reportedly was reluctant to attend the final day of the UN’s Copenhagen climate-change summit unless it was guaranteed to be a major political success. But he went anyway, was twice humiliated in public by the Chinese premier and then finally settled for what the White House hailed as a “meaningful agreement.”
Of course, that was a transparent face-saving lie. The Copenhagen Circus produced no agreement at all; only “pledges that will not be legally binding.” On Saturday, the Courier-Journal, trying its best to put a positive spin on the devastating failure of the Copenhagen Global Warming Climate Change Conference, ran a front-page cut & paste from the Associated Press, praising Obama and the “historically significant” agreement reached. The next day, buried on page A-26, the C-J ran a short article mentioning how disappointing environmentalists were that the conference produced no agreement to reduce the use of carbon fuels. The socialist takeover of the world’s energy supplies was thwarted by madness and incompetence, but the C-J was loath to celebrate.
A protestor makes her way to the Bella Center during a
demonstration in Copenhagen, Wednesday, Dec. 16, 2009.
More than 100 climate activists were detained Wednesday
for trying to break into a U.N. conference where 193 nations
are deadlocked in talks on a deal to curb global warming,
police said. (AP Photo/POLFOTO, Jens Panduro)
The best summary of the Copenhagen debacle can be found in Gerald Warner’s column from Friday, in the London Telegraph: "When your attempt at recreating the Congress of Vienna with a third-rate cast of extras turns into a shambles, when the data with which you have tried to terrify the world is daily exposed as ever more phony, when the blatant greed and self-interest of the participants has become obvious to all beholders, when those pesky polar bears just keep increasing and multiplying -- what do you do?"
The Copenhagen flop will fade quickly into the mainstream (dinosaur) media’s memory hole, as the thousand delegate clowns climb back into their Prius and drive out of the center ring. O.K., we admit it’s a pretty lame metaphor; the delegates left in their stretch limousines for the airport, where their private 727’s were parked. While HM The Queen was riding public transportation (a train) up to her digs in Norfolk for the holidays, her jug-eared son was heading back to London on Mom’s official jet—the Queen’s Flight—mere moments ahead of the worst European blizzard since Good King Wenceslas looked out, on the Feast of Stephen.
Obama just left in a huff.
Examiner Extra: As the global summit on climate change fades away under Copenhagen’s deep blanket of snow, The Daily Beast’s Tunku Varadarajan offers an eyebrow-raising A-Z guide to the proceedings. Very nearly a hundred years ago, Ambrose Bierce compiled A Devil's Dictionary, in which he sought to puncture the cultural cant of his time. Here is an attempt—at much shorter length—to prick a very contemporary kind of cant, that which has swollen the debate on climate change to ungovernable proportions.
B is for Björn Lomborg, the Danish professor whose book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, should have put Al Gore out of business forever; for the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) that aren’t ready to abandon the good, carbon-burning life just yet; and for boondoggle (see "ethanol," infra).
C is for the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, the now-discredited source of much of the data used to fuel climate hysteria. In November, in an episode that was oh-so-predictably dubbed Climategate, a cache of leaked emails showed that researchers systematically hid or manipulated data that was inconsistent with the accepted narrative of man-made climate change. (Read John Tierney's clear-headed critique here.) Don't forget carbon dioxide, a colorless, odorless gas once considered essential to life on earth, not to mention bubbles in Champagne. (Although it's now regarded as a poisonous pollutant, you can, however, trade it.) Think also of consensus—the idea that science is settled by an asserted poll of experts after all objections from dissenting scientists have been suppressed.
D is for deniers. A mere notch above Holocaust deniers, these are the people who refuse to accept that climate change is largely man-induced. Heretics, they'd be burned at the stake if that were not such a bad thing for the ozone layer.
E is for environmentalism, which the philosopher Harvey Mansfield has defined as “school prayer for liberals,” ecoterrorists (who believe that all life, except yours, is sacred, and who tend to have names like "Swampy"), and ethanol (see "boondoggle," supra).
F is for fossil fuels, the consumption of which, over the last century, has powered prosperity and growth the world over, and for dear old Freeman Dyson, a distinguished scientist who copped some fearful flak for dissenting from the warmist consensus. ("I'm not saying the warming doesn't cause problems, obviously it does. Obviously we should be trying to understand it. I'm saying that the problems are being grossly exaggerated.")
G is for green, a mantra, a shibboleth, a way of life; the Guardian (house journal of the global-warming platoons); and Gwyneth Paltrow, who has said that she can "just feel" it getting globally warmer in her bones…Maybe her husband's band, Coldplay, should be re-named. Foreplay?
H is "hide the decline", (referring to a temperature graph that appeared on the cover of a 1999 report from the World Meteorological Organization). The phrase has been embraced by deniers as proof that the warmists are charlatans, as, previously, was the "hockey stick"—a graph that shows warming in the Northern Hemisphere, and which was featured in the 2001 IPCC Third Assessment Report. Since its publication, the scientific methodology used to create it has been a source of intense dispute.
I is for internal combustion and the body that has demonized it—the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a subsidiary of the U.N. which, with Al Gore, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. The letter is also for incandescent light bulbs, the cheery glow we’ll have to learn to live without; the Inuit, who have 27 words for snow but only one for ozone; indulgences, the medieval scam run by the Catholic Church that Carbon Offsets closely resemble; and for inconvenient truth, such as the data buried at the CRU at East Anglia.
J is for Phil Jones, Cassandra in chief of global warming at East Anglia, long a foreteller of imminent catastrophe (superstorms, famines, polar bear extinction). Jones was little-known in America, where NASA's James Hansen is the Gandalf of the Hobbits marching to defeat the Greenhouse Mordor and return the Middle-earth to trembling Springtime. (Hansen, it should be noted, has compared coal trains to death-camp trains.)
K is for Kyoto, a Japanese city where the only thing of significance to have happened in the last 50 years was a 1997 Protocol which proposed mandatory emission reductions for developed countries. Those who pillory George W. Bush for not submitting the treaty to the Senate for ratification forget that Clinton administration didn't do so either. (Quiz: Who was Clinton's vice president?). Keep an eye, too, on Khosla Ventures (see "money," below).
L is for Nigel Lawson (father of the very warming Nigella), whose book—"An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming"—is a beacon of clarity in a sea of murk.
M is for Man, who, to quote Ambrose Bierce, is "an animal so lost in rapturous contemplation of what he thinks he is as to overlook what he indubitably ought to be. His chief occupation is extermination of other animals and his own species, which, however, multiplies with such insistent rapidity as to infest the whole habitable earth and Canada." And then there's methane, a greenhouse gas parped into the air 24/7 by bovine polluters across the globe; the Medieval Climate Optimum, a warm period from about the 10th to the 14th century which warmists (i) ignore and/or (iii) cannot explain; ManBearPig, South Park's derisive nickname for global warming; and money (as in "Follow the…"; see Khosla Ventures, above).
N is for Noah, the Bible's original climate-change fanatic; nuclear energy, the cleanest solution to our "carbon" worries in the eyes of everyone but the warmists; and the Northwest Passage. Some scientists say that as more Arctic ice melts as a result of warming, the passage will open, conveniently, to ships.
O is for Obama, the man who may just end the Industrial Revolution; and ozone, the g-spot of the climate debate.
P is for peer-review, a scholarly process in which research that supports established IPCC conclusions is approved for publication, while contrary opinions are shredded; polar bears, the ursine mascots of the global-warming team—they're cute, cuddly (on film) and adrift on melted icebergs; and cap-and-trade permits, which give Congress hundreds of billions of dollars in new subsidies to distribute without putting the money on the federal balance sheet.
Q is for quixotic, a vivid feature of the drive for emissions reduction.
R is respiration, the process by which you, dear reader, commit global warming; and for Jairam Ramesh, the feisty, bouffant-haired Indian minister for the environment who has thumbed his elegant nose repeatedly at American demands that India slash its carbon emissions.
S is for the sun, the likeliest global-warming culprit; and for Stern (Todd or Nicholas, take your pick). The former is the Obama administration's climate-change czar, who, it is rumored, could commit the U.S. to a nationwide emissions-reduction program at Copenhagen. The latter—Baron Stern of Brentford—is the author of a controversial British government report on climate change. He is not known to enjoy the company of those who disagree with him on the subject.
T is for "Mike's nature trick," a new method of manipulating data to support that idea that human beings are causing global warming. Phil Jones (see J, above) wrote that, in compiling new data, he had "just completed Mike's nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e., from 1981 onward) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline." Add to all this those lovely, bucolic "tree rings," whose changing sizes are regarded as proof of global warming in past centuries, even if recent fluctuations don't seem to match world temperature changes at all.
U is for under-arm spray. Go sweaty. Stink a little and save the environment.
W is for Martin Weitzman, the liberal Harvard economist who is honest enough to admit that there's no genuine economic case for cap and trade except by rigging the discount rate; and for Woods: no, not the forests, but the golfer. His is the only story that has a chance this week of knocking climate change off what are still, quaintly, called the front pages.
X is for XOM, or ExxonMobil, the greatest environmental villain known to man (and polar bears).
Y is for our young, now hardwired to be eco-fanatics, for better or worse, and for Yvo de Boer. Never heard of him? He's the U.N.'s UNFCCC man who's been arranging conferences, with their megacarbon footprints, in places such as Rio, Bali, Trinidad, and now Copenhagen. You never voted for him, but he's hoping to control how much you fly, drive, heat your home, and exhale.
Z is for zeitgeist, without which the entire controversy over man-made climate change would never had achieved traction in public debate; for Zanzibar, Zimbabwe, and Zambia (we’re doing it all for them, right?); zero population growth, which is the true aim of global warmism; and that great big, stomping, bellowing climate-change zoo, coming to a Danish capital near you.
Tunku Varadarajan is a national affairs correspondent and writer at large for The Daily Beast. He is also a research fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and a professor at NYU’s Stern Business School.
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Comments
funny 'fat dictators' like Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez Frias are able to win free and fair elections (as judged by the OAS, EEU and Carter Institute) - it seems that 'dictators' are leaders who would be rather to by their constituents then be dictated to by the US Empire.
This is funny! Do you just sorta browse through news stories to cherry-pick quotes and then just make up the rest?
Journalism, this isn't. Maybe time for a different vocation?
This was as funny (and true) a commentary as I have read for awhile. Good work
"Humiliated beyond description." Wow. Exaggerate much?
You are a sad, sad man.
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