Climate Facts Ignored Amid Hysteria at UN Summit in Doha

To coincide with the United Nations global warming summit in Doha, Qatar, the usual flurry of hysterical press releases repackaged as “news” and a barrage of dubious “studies” from tax-funded climate alarmists have made headlines in the establishment media — all of it, critics say, aimed at creating at least the perception of support for UN goals. Notably absent from the shrill warnings of gloom and doom about human carbon emissions, however, is one important fact: There has been no global warming, man-made or otherwise, for some 16 years, according to data compiled by the alarmists themselves.

Despite the embarrassing lack of any increase in planetary temperatures, climate-change alarmists and representatives from almost 200 governments and dictatorships are still assembled at the UN Conference of the Parties (COP18). They claim their mission is to save the planet from warming purportedly caused, in part at least, by human emissions of carbon dioxide — a byproduct of human breathing, an essential molecule to all plant life, and a fraction of one percent of all the greenhouse gases naturally present in the atmosphere.

In reality, however, according to experts and analysts, the real goals of the global summit bear little resemblance to the increasingly wild claims made by the UN and its allies. Evidence of that can be found in the global organization’s own documents and, more recently, in the fact that there has been no global warming even as the hysteria peddlers continue to demand a planetary carbon-control regime to save humanity from a non-problem. The climate models were clearly wrong, yet the increasingly irrelevant climate alarmism marches on.

Based on now-discredited computer models, the UN’s tax-funded climate “scientists” have been claiming almost since the end of the decades-old “global cooling” hoax that the Earth should have been warming dramatically. It has not. Instead, according to global temperature data compiled by the U.K. Met Office and the disgraced Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the center of the “ClimateGate” scandal, there has actually been no observable warming for over a decade and a half. While ignored at the COP18, outside of the Doha alarmists’ bubble, that fact has not gone unnoticed.

“The wearisomely elaborate choreography of these yearly galah sessions has followed its usual course this time, with a spate of suspiciously timed reports in the once-mainstream media solemnly recording that ‘Scientists Say’ their predictions of doom are worse than ever,” observed Lord Christopher Monckton, a former advisor to then-U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and a longtime foe of bogus UN “climate science” and the organization’s increasingly brazen power grabs. “The smarter minds at the conference (all two of us) are beginning to ask what it was that the much-trumpeted ‘consensus’ got wrong.”

Meanwhile, recent efforts to exploit fear by climate alarmists and UN bureaucrats seeking to blame “global warming” for weather events like Hurricane Sandy, for example, are absurd on their face, according to Lord Monckton and a wide array of experts. In reality, these sorts of bogus claims are nothing more than fear mongering aimed at drumming up hysteria and duping the public to facilitate a global agreement that would benefit the UN, power-hungry governments, dictatorships, and elements of “Big Business” — all at the expense of humanity, science, prosperity, liberty, national sovereignty, and real environmental problems.

“The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Reports are the ‘scientific’ source of claims for more severe and extreme weather,” observed Dr. Tim Ball, a climate scientist who has been one of the more prominent experts to challenge the UN’s dubious theories aside from former IPCC experts themselves. “In fact the incidence and severity of extreme weather — hurricanes, wind storms, tornadoes, heat waves, drought, floods, ice storms, etc. — have not generally increased recently and are well within long term natural variability.”

Despite those facts, top UN officials continue to make blatantly false claims about climate, warning that if governments refuse to promptly force their populations to submit to the outlandish demands, certain disaster awaits. The tone is only getting more and more hysterical, too. Last month, before the COP18 began in Doha, even UN boss Ban Ki-moon himself made those same absurd allegations, damaging his remaining credibility further; possibly beyond repair.

“Extreme weather due to climate change is the new normal … Our challenge remains, clear and urgent: to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, to strengthen adaptation to … even larger climate shocks … and to reach a legally binding climate agreement by 2015,” Ban told the UN General Assembly, mostly a gathering of oppressive dictatorships responsible for keeping the victims of their tyranny in dire poverty. “This should be one of the main lessons of Hurricane Sandy.”

Even with the taxpayer-funded gravy train available to “scientists” and “activists” who desperately cling to UN theories in the face of all evidence, though, real experts are speaking out. Following the UN secretary general’s comments bizarrely linking Hurricane Sandy to human-caused CO2 emissions, a coalition of more than 125 scientists and experts in the field published an open letter in the Financial Post urging him to come back to reality.

“Global warming that has not occurred cannot have caused the extreme weather of the past few years,” the concerned scientists explained, noting that aside from the now-obvious lack of warming over 16 years, the incidence and severity of extreme weather has not increased either. “Whether, when and how atmospheric warming will resume is unknown. The science is unclear. Some scientists point out that near-term natural cooling, linked to variations in solar output, is also a distinct possibility.”

On top of that, the scientists explained to the apparently confused UN chief, the organization’s theories themselves are not supported by science. “Climate changes naturally all the time, sometimes dramatically,” they added in the letter. “The hypothesis that our emissions of CO2 have caused, or will cause, dangerous warming is not supported by the evidence … There is no sound reason for the costly, restrictive public policy decisions proposed at the U.N. climate conference in Qatar. Rigorous analysis of unbiased observational data does not support the projections of future global warming predicted by computer models now proven to exaggerate warming and its effects.”

If the UN and its mostly dictatorial member regimes are not truly interested in science or saving humanity from the supposed evils of non-existent “global warming,” though, what is it that they want? Why has the U.S. government squandered nearly $150 billion — possibly more — on a bogus issue? According to experts and analysts who have monitored the UN and its scheming for decades, the organization’s goals are the same as they always have been.

Among the prime objective, which is advanced regardless of the half-baked justifications offered to support it, is to further empower the scandal-plagued global body while extracting ever larger sums of money from taxpayers for the UN and oppressive third world regimes. Western governments, meanwhile, hope to increase their control over economic activity while boosting revenues and enriching climate-change profiteers like Al Gore, “carbon market” players, and other special interests with huge financial stakes in keeping the hysteria alive.

Analysts are divided on what the UN may be able to achieve at its latest climate summit, one of the smallest yet, as the annual gatherings increasingly become the objects or scorn and ridicule worldwide. Certain regimes seeking handouts, self-styled authorities like the European Union, investors in phony “carbon markets,” and other players, for instance, are hoping to extend the controversial 1997 emissions-limiting Kyoto Protocol, which expires this year and does not include the U.S. government. Another aim that may or may not come to fruition is moving forward with a planetary mechanism for wealth redistribution known as the “Green Climate Fund.”

“It is difficult to predict the outcome from Doha,” observed the Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP) in its latest update on the issues. “But if the past is any guide, the conference will end with days of ‘Herculean’ negotiations over a nebulous agreement to continue such conferences for the indefinite future. No reason to stop the circus.”

Some analysts said this year that with the “climate science” and global economy both imploding while the public slowly wakes up to the UN’s expensive global-warming scheme, Doha might well be the last international “climate” summit. With hundreds of billions or even trillions of taxpayer dollars at stake, though, more than a few experts believe the global body and its member governments will try to keep what critics refer to as the “climate charade” going for as long as possible. However, with no warming for 16 years, that task is becoming increasingly difficult and will only get tougher in the years ahead.

^{Photo of European Commissioner for Climate Action Connie Hedegaard addressing media regarding the Doha climate conference: AP Images}

Alex Newman, a foreign correspondent for The New American, is currently based in Europe. He can be reached at [email protected].

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