Copenhagen's sceptic conference thanks China for emitting CO2

Copenhagen's sceptic conference thanks China for emitting CO2
Hacked emails were from whistleblowers and Eskimos are happy: tales of the expected from climate sceptics




The only clue I find to where the world's leading climate sceptics are meeting in Copenhagen is a large round sticker on a pavement outside a house down a side street. It depicts a happy-looking Eskimo standing on a clearly melting ice flow with a cheerful sun beaming down on him and his ice-cream under the words "Hurra global warming".


Up the stairs, the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow is meeting. Seventy five people, mostly men over 50, are crushed into an ornate room whose walls and ceiling are covered in oil paintings.


Fred Singer, emeritus professor at the University of Virginia and co-author of a classic global warming denial book, is in full flow about "climategate" and how he believes scientists deliberately distort data:



"…..It's easy. You collect it from cities and where temperatures are higher because of the heat island effect… you misapply temperature trends; you mix data from buoys and ships, you hide raw data, try to avoid freedom of information requests, misuse the peer review process… cause editors to resign."


The audience is loving it. Singer is to denialists what George Monbiot is to environmentalists, a genuine superstar, full of statements and suggestions. "They [he does not specify who] control the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change process; they try to smear their opponents. Rajendra Pachauri [the IPCC chair] should return his Nobel prize and the UN Environment Programme should disband the whole panel. Yvo de Boer [head of the UN climate conference] should call off the meeting and send the delegates home."


The audience claps wildly. "Let's all thank China for emitting more beneficial CO2. It benefits agriculture," says Singer. The audience cheers and Singer takes two questions, the second from the Guardian.



"I would like to know whether you or anyone in this room has been to the Himalayas, or to the Sunderbans, or to the villages that are now drowning near Chittagong in Bangladesh, where temperatures are being recorded 4C above normal, where respected scientists are finding significant sea level rises, where cyclones are more frequent and intense? Have any of you tried to find out for yourself what is going on there?"


It is like poking a stick in a hornet's nest. The heads swivel, the grey beards almost turn white, the some draw in their breath, and Singer for a moment looks startled. There is uproar, shouts and cries. "Are you an activist? You sound like an activist," shouts one man. Others hiss. The chair bangs his gavel.


A Swedish scientist gets up and is introduced as Nils-Axel Mörner, a retired sea-level scientist. "In Bangladesh the thing is that the land is sinking. The land in Bangladesh has increased by 70,000 square kilometres. Because of silting up. It's not evidence of sea level rise."


"Have you been to Chittagong in Bangladesh? Have you talked to the scientists at Jadavpur University in Calcutta who have recorded significant sea level rises?" I ask.


The uproar continues and it is left to Lord Christopher Monckton - hereditary peer, former policy adviser to Margaret Thatcher and purveyor of the notion that the Copenhagen talks are part of a UN plot to install world government – to restore order.


Monckton is just as certain that man-made climate change does not exist as he is that the emails hacked from the University of East Anglia, were not stolen.


"There has been a deep analysis of the emails and the way they were edited to remove all the personal details … that is not the work of a hacker but a whistleblower," he tells his rapt audience. "Mr Plod will track him down but I say that he will not be prosecuted."


He too has a message for the climate change conference and its 34,000 particpants three miles down the road: "The major concern I have is that millions of people are already dying of starvation in a dozen regions of the world because of a doubling of world food prices following the taking of US land out of production because of concerns about climate change."


"People in Haiti are eating mud to stay alive. They have it with a bit of butter and salt. We are not debating some abstract scientific theory, but something serious."


It's hard to disagree with that last sentence, and on that note of surprising harmony the Guardian says its goodbyes and returns to the UN conference.