Copenhagen all about 'American money'

A former Texas congressman whose work included efforts to clamp down on America's borders, free up gun purchases and protect human life contends the massive conference in Copenhagen had little to do with global warming and everything to do with doling out American money.

Steve Stockman, who was in the Danish capital for the two-week event, told WND in an interview from the conference, "We're over here trying to dissuade any kind of agreement that would give away American sovereignty, which is what it's all about."

He said members of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow boarded a Greenpeace ship in the harbor to unfurl a banner announcing it was a "Ship of lies."

CFACT protest banner on Greenpeace ship

He also addressed events sponsored by CFACT at the Copenhagen summit. He told WND conference participants appeared to have one issue on their agenda: obtaining promises of American money for themselves.

"It was about transferring the wealth of taxpayers," he said, noting Obama doesn't actually need any sort of international "treaty" to do that.

He cited the $250 million the World Bank, of which the U.S. is a major supporter, agreed to grant North Vietnam to cut carbon dioxide.

"I didn't know Vietnam had the ability to generate much carbon dioxide," he told WND.

But he noted from his perspective the conference's disintegration appeared to stem from the fact "America hasn't ponied up enough money."

"This has nothing to do with science," he said. "We've talked to [protesters.] They don't know anything about climate change."

Obama addressed the conference today on its last full day, declaring the fact "all major economies have come together to accept their responsibility to take action to confront the threat of climate change" was a meaningful "breakthrough."

He boasted American efforts will serve "as a foundation for our leadership around the world," even though the agreements made at the summit were voluntary.

"We agreed to join an international effort to provide financing to help developing countries, particularly the poorest and most vulnerable, adapt to climate change. And we reaffirmed the necessity of listing our national actions and commitments in a transparent way," he said.

He said he had agreed to a target of limiting warming to no more than two degress Celsius and "to take action to meet this objective consistent with science."

The absence of any formal treaty bothered him.

"I actually think that it's necessary for us ultimately to get to such a treaty, and I am supportive of such efforts. But this is a classic example of a situation where if we just waited for that, then we would not make any progress. And in fact I think there might be such frustration and cynicism that rather than taking one step forward, we ended up taking two steps back," he said.

"What I think that some people are going to legitimately ask is, well, if it's not legally binding what prevents us from, 10 years from now, looking and saying, you know, everybody fell short of these goals and there's no consequences to it? My response is that, A, that's why I think we should still drive towards something that is more binding than it is. But that was not achievable at this conference."

Myron Ebell of the GlobalWarming.org website, where "cooler heads prevail," said of the conference the news wasn't really that no formal agreement was produced – "That outcome was foreseen months ago."

He said the focal point was the "spectacular" breakup of the "grand alliance pushing global warming alarmism and energy-rationing policies."

"The official United Nations global warming bureaucracy has thrown out the twenty to thirty thousand environmentalists who traveled to Copenhagen to attend the meeting as officially-accredited delegates of non-governmental organizations (or NGOs). The environmentalists are extremely angry and have every justification for being angry," Ebell reported.

"This is potentially momentous because the two wings of alarmism are totally dependent on one another. The U.N.'s Kyoto bandwagon has been pushed along by the environmental movement and no new treaty to follow the Kyoto Protocol, when it expires at the end of 2012, will have a chance of being adopted without the continuing and unremitting backing of the environmentalists whom the U.N. has unceremoniously booted out this week. For the environmental groups, Kyoto and its successor treaty are the only viable vehicles for achieving their goals of reducing emissions and putting the world on an energy starvation diet," he wrote.

Most of the differences, he reported, developed over poor planning by the U.N., which apparently believed 30,000-plus people easily could fit into an auditorium that holds 15,000. Thousands eventually were left standing outside in unusually cold and snowy weather for this time of year.

"The real news is that there is now a tremendous amount of animosity and distrust between the U.N. establishment and the environmental establishment. They know that they need each other, which is why the mainstream environmental NGOs have not made a stink and why the establishment press hasn't made it a front page story. But the fissure arising out of the U.N.'s incompetence is going to take a long time to heal and could easily grow much wider," Ebell said.

As WND reported, a Colorado scientist described by the Washington Post as "the World's Most Famous Hurricane Expert" said e-mails among scientists at the world's top climate-change research institute revealed possible data manipulation among "warmists," those who believe man's actions are triggering possibly catastrophic climate change.

"The recent 'ClimateGate' revelations coming out of the UK University of East Anglia are but the tip of a giant iceberg of a well-organized international climate-warming conspiracy that has been gathering momentum for the last 25 years," said Colorado State University's William Gray.

His annual hurricane forecasts are the standard for weather prognostications. His work pioneered the science of forecasting hurricanes, and he has served as weather forecaster for the U.S. Air Force. He is emeritus professor of atmospheric science at CSU and heads the school's Department of Atmospheric Sciences Tropical Meteorology Project.

Gray was referring to e-mails and other information obtained by a hacker and posted on a Russian web server that included interactions among the world's most influential climate-change scientists.

One e-mail said: "I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd (sic) from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline."

Another expressed internal doubts: "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't. The CERES data published in the August (Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society) 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate."

Further, an e-mail exchange suggested the suppression of information: "Can you delete any e-mails you may have had with Keith re (Assessment Report 4)? Keith will do likewise. He's not in at the moment – minor family crisis."

Gray said, "This conspiracy would become much more manifest if all the e-mails of the publicly funded climate-research groups of the U.S. and of foreign governments were ever made public."

His comments were posted at ClimateDepot.com just as world leaders were assembling in Copenhagen to discuss taking drastic economic measures to curb "global warming."

He's long described global warming as a hoax, telling the Washington Post three years ago, "I am of the opinion that this is one of the greatest hoaxes ever perpetrated on the American people."

University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit

Phil Jones, head of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, confirmed the documents appeared authentic. He has temporarily stepped down while an investigation is taking place.

Despite the advocacy of a financially vested former vice president, Al Gore, and others, public opinion about whether mankind is causing an ultimately catastrophic rise in global temperatures is shifting.

U.S. Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, has urged members of Congress to consider the joint opinion of nearly 32,000 scientists, including more than 9,000 Ph.D.s, who believe humans likely have little or nothing to do with any "global warming."

The Petition Project, launched some 10 years ago when the first few thousand signatures were gathered, has steadily grown without any special effort or campaign.

But in the last few years, and especially because of the release of Gore's movie "An Inconvenient Truth," the campaign has been reinvigorated.

"Mr. Gore's movie, asserting a 'consensus' and 'settled science' in agreement about human-caused global warming, conveyed the claims about human-caused global warming to ordinary moviegoers and to public-school children, to whom the film was widely distributed. Unfortunately, Mr. Gore's movie contains many very serious incorrect claims which no informed, honest scientist could endorse," project spokesman and founder Art Robinson has told WND.

Robinson, a research professor of chemistry, cofounded the Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine with Linus Pauling in 1973, and later cofounded the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine.

Paul later cited the petition results in statement to Congress.

"Our energy policies must be based upon scientific truth – not fictional movies or self-interested international agendas," Paul said. "They should be based upon the accomplishments of technological free enterprise that have provided our modern civilization, including our energy industries. That free enterprise must not be hindered by bogus claims about imaginary disasters."

The petition states: "There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth."

Robinson has warned of serious political and economic consequences of assuming "global warming" results from mankind's actions.

"The campaign to severely ration hydrocarbon energy technology has now been markedly expanded," he said. "In the course of this campaign, many scientifically invalid claims about impending climate emergencies are being made. Simultaneously, proposed political actions to severely reduce hydrocarbon use now threaten the prosperity of Americans and the very existence of hundreds of millions of people in poorer countries," he told WND.

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