Pressure mounting for Rajendra Pachauri to resign as IPCC head

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Pressure is mounting for Rajendra Pachauri to resign as head of the UN climate change panel over fears that his increasingly troubled tenure is hampering efforts to halt global warming.

By Heidi Blake

Rajendra Pachauri Photo: AFP/GETTY IMAGES

The Indian chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been dogged by controversy since he was forced to admit a serious error in a landmark report arguing the case for man-made global warming earlier this year.

Climate sceptics have long been vocal cricitcs of Dr Pachauri, but environmentalists and politicians have now joined a chorus of voices calling for his resignation after eight years in the job following an independent report last month that recommended chairmen of the IPCC should serve for no longer than six years.

Dr Pachauri's standing was badly damaged earlier this year when it emerged that the claim in a 2007 report by the IPCC that the Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035 was a mistake.

The former railways engineer has admitted the error dealt a grave blow to the credibility of the IPCC, which was set up to sift through scientific research and produce the most authoritative reports for the UN.

Tim Yeo, chairman of the House of Commons Energy and Climate Change Select Committee, joined calls for his resignation this morning.

"I’m afraid I think Dr Pachauri should resign. Firstly he personally has lost credibility, particularly in relation to his claim about the melting of the Himalayan glaciers in the next 30 years," he told the BBC.

He added: "It’s vital that this body is led by someone whose academic and intellectual credentials are unquestioned and I’m afraid that can no longer be said of him."

The Indian government has swung its full support behind Dr Pachauri, but many of the chairman's former allies now believe that he should resign in order to avert a clash between India and the IPCC.

The BBC reported that Professor Sir Brian Hoskins, the eminent British climatologist, is among those who now believe that Dr Pachauri has no alternative but to step down.

Greenpeace said in February that Dr Pachauri's resignation and the installation of a new leader would restore confidence in the IPCC.

A damning report into the running of the UN climate change panel by the independent InterAcademy Council recommend last month that the chairman should serve only one six-year-term at a time and called for checks on conflicts of interest by board members.

The review did not comment specifically on Dr Pachauri's tenure but the one-term recommendation would force the current chairman's out of office if accepted, as he is already serving his second term.

Dr Pachauri has also come under scrutiny because of his other role leading The Energy Research Institute (Teri), a think tank promoting sustainable development.

Questions have been raised about "conflicts of interest", with some arguing that Dr Pachauri had a vested interest in proving climate change by business dealings with carbon trading companies. However he was cleared on any financial wrongdoing recently by an independent review.

The 70-year-old has also hit the headlines for ‘steamy novels’ he penned while travelling the world in his demanding job.

Britain's Weather Office Proposes Climate-Gate Do-Over

By George Russell

- FOXNews.com

At a meeting Monday of 150 climate scientists, representatives of Britain's weather office proposed that the world's climatologists start all over again and produce a new trove of global temperature data that is open to public scrutiny and "rigorous" peer review.

After the firestorm of criticism called Climate-gate, the British government's official Meteorological Office has decided to give its modern climate data a do-over.

At a meeting on Monday of about 150 climate scientists in the quiet Turkish seaside resort of Antalya, representatives of the weather office (known in Britain as the Met Office) quietly proposed that the world's climate scientists start all over again on a "grand challenge" to produce a new, common trove of global temperature data that is open to public scrutiny and "rigorous" peer review.

In other words, conduct investigations into modern global warming in a way that may help to end the mammoth controversy over world temperature data that has been stirred up in the past few years.

The executive summary of the Met Office proposal to the World Meteorological Organization's Committee for Climatology was obtained by Fox News. In it, the Met Office defends its historical record of temperature readings, along with similar data collected in the U.S., as a "robust indicator of global change." But it admits that "further development" of the record is required "in particular to better assess the risks posed by changes in extremes of climate."

Among other things, its older data is maintained on a monthly basis, and the Met Office proposal says that is "grossly inadequate" to providing information on a daily and "sub-daily" basis.

A Met Office spokesman, Dave Britton, declared that the decision to re-do the data collection had been gestating for "a long time," then added: "But it would be naïve to say that [the Climate-gate controversy] didn't have an impact." He added: "It's not something that we can do alone."

As a result, the proposal says, "we feel that it is timely to propose an international effort to reanalyze surface temperature data in collaboration with the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), which has the responsibility for global observing and monitoring systems for weather and climate."

The new effort, the proposal says, would provide:

• "verifiable datasets starting from a common databank of unrestricted data"
• "methods that are fully documented in the peer reviewed literature and open to scrutiny;"
• "a set of independent assessments of surface temperature produced by independent groups using independent methods,"
• "comprehensive audit trails to deliver confidence in the results;"
• "robust assessment of uncertainties associated with observational error, temporal and geographical in homogeneities."

Click here to read the executive summary.

The Met Office proposes that the new international effort to recalibrate temperature data start at a "workshop"' hosted by its Hadley Climate Research Centre, which maintains data in collaboration with the controversial Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at Britain's East Anglia University. The Met Office would invite "key players" to start the "agreed community challenge" of creating the new datasets. A Met Office spokesman said the new effort would take about three years to complete, but would not estimate the cost.

The Met Office proposal asserts that "we do not anticipate any substantial changes in the resulting global and continental-scale ... trends" as a result of the new round of data collection. But, the proposal adds, "this effort will ensure that the datasets are completely robust and that all methods are transparent."

Those strongly underlined assurances put the Met Office in strong contrast to the accusations that have been hurled at its collaborator, CRU, epicenter of the Climate-gate controversy. Among other things, the CRU had stonewalled climate skeptics who demanded to know more about its scientific methods in establishing a dramatic record of global warming, especially in the 20th century. (An inquiry established that the institution had flouted British freedom of information laws in refusing to come up with the data.)

The stonewall began to crumble after a gusher of leaked emails revealed climate scientists, including the CRU's chief, Phil Jones, discussing how to keep controversial climate data out of the hands of the skeptics, keep opposing scientific viewpoints out of peer-reviewed scientific journals, and bemoaned that their climate models failed to account for more than a decade of stagnation in global temperatures.Jones later revealed that key temperature datasets used in Hadley's predictions had been lost, and could not be retrieved for verification.

Jones stepped down temporarily after the British government announced an ostensibly independent inquiry into the still-growing scandal, but that only fanned the flames, as skeptics pointed out ties between several panel members and the East Anglia center. In an interview two weeks ago, Jones also admitted that there has been no "statistically significant" global warming in the past 15 years.

The Met Office's desire for more robust and transparent data could also prove to be a blow for Rajendra Pachauri, head of the United Nations-backed International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), whose most recent report, published in 2007, has been exposed by skeptics as rife with scientific errors, larded with un-reviewed and non-scientific source materials, and other failings.

As details of the report's sloppiness emerged, the ranks of skeptics of the work have swelled to include larger numbers of the scientific community, including weather specialists who worked on the sprawling IPCC report. Calls for Pachauri's resignation have come from organizations as normally opposed as the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the British chapter of Greenpeace. So far, he has refused to step down.

The Met proposal argues says that its old datasets "are adequate for answering the pressing 20th Century questions of whether climate is changing and if so how. Bet they are fundamentally ill-conditioned to answer 21st Century questions such as how extremes are changing and therefore what adaptation and mitigation decisions should be taken."

Those "21st Century questions" are not small and they are very far from cheap. At Copenhagen, wealthy nations were being asked to spend trillions of dollars on answering them, a deal that only fell through when China, India, and other near-developed nations refused to join the mammoth climate-control deal.

The question after the Met Office's proposal may be whether environmentalists eager to move those mountains of cash are also ready to stand down until the 21st century questions get 21st century answers.

The essentials in Copenhagen

Rather than getting every small detail of a new global climate treaty done in Copenhagen, UN climate chief Yvo de Boer hopes the conference will reach agreements on four political essentials.

Michael von Bülow16/03/2009 10:30

The UN climate conference in Copenhagen in December this year may not yield a new global climate treaty with every minor detail in place. But hopefully it will close with agreements on four political essentials, thereby creating a clarity the world – not least the financially struck business world – needs.

The wish for clarity is expressed by Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), in an interview with Environment & Energy Publishing (E&E). According to Yvo de Boer, the four essentials calling for an international agreement in Copenhagen are:

1. How much are the industrialized countries willing to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases?

2. How much are major developing countries such as China and India willing to do to limit the growth of their emissions?

3. How is the help needed by developing countries to engage in reducing their emissions and adapting to the impacts of climate change going to be financed?

4. How is that money going to be managed?

“If Copenhagen can deliver on those four points I’d be happy,” says Yvo de Boer.

He sees a need to get something signed and agreed in Copenhagen, but he thinks it will be very difficult to get every final, small detail of a whole new treaty done. The new climate treaty will be replacing the Kyoto Protocol which was adopted in Kyoto, Japan, in December 1997 and entered into force on 16 February 2005.

The Kyoto Protocol which sets binding targets for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions has been signed and ratified by 184 parties of the UN Climate Convention. One notable exception is the United States, and Yvo de Boer is “really happy” to see the US back in the international climate change process and that the US is also engaging domestically in the process.

“My big lesson from the Kyoto era is that it's really important that the government delegation that represents the United States is in close touch with the Senate, with the elected officials on what's acceptable and what's not,” says de Boer, and he adds:

“I think that a major shortcoming of Kyoto was that the official delegation came back with a treaty they knew was never going to make it through the Senate. And this time I have the feeling that the communication is much stronger, that the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, through John Kerry, is really expressing strongly what they feel needs to be done in Copenhagen.”

Yvo de Boer thinks the Kyoto Protocol was rejected by the US for mainly two reasons. Firstly, because it did not involve action on the part of major developing countries. Secondly, because it was felt by the Bush administration that Kyoto would be harmful to the US economy.

Copenhagen will be a whole different scenario, and de Boer feels confident that President Barack Obama can successfully engage China and India and convince them to sign the next treaty.

“I think that Secretary of State Clinton's visit to Beijing was a really important and encouraging step to get us moving on that road,” says Yvo de Boer.

Asked about the global recession, de Boer thinks it will certainly have an impact on the negotiations in Copenhagen.

“You see already that investments in renewable energy projects are going down, partly because of the oil price going down and partly because of the economic activity going down,” he says.

But even though greenhouse gas emissions are expected to slow down as a result of shrinking industrial activities, de Boer does not believe it will lessen the pressure on countries to act and sign a new treaty.

“I get the impression talking to business people that they still want clarity from Copenhagen. If you're making investments now, for example in the energy sector, in power plants that are going to be around for the next 30 to 50 years, you can't really afford to keep waiting and waiting and waiting for governments to say where they're going to go on this issue.”

UN hits back at climate sceptics amid e-mails row

The e-mails were posted on the internet last month

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The UN's official panel on climate change has hit back at sceptics' claims that the case for human influence on global warming has been exaggerated.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said it was "firmly" standing by findings that a rise in the use of greenhouse gases was a factor.

It was responding to a row over the reliability of data from East Anglia University's Climatic Research Unit

Leaked e-mail exchanges prompted claims that data had been manipulated.

Last month, hundreds of messages between scientists at the unit and their peers around the world were put on the internet along with other documents.

Some observers alleged one of the e-mails suggested head of the unit Professor Phil Jones wanted certain papers excluded from the UN's next major assessment of climate science.

The body of evidence is the result of the careful and painstaking work of hundreds of scientists worldwide Professor Thomas Stocker and Professor Qin Dahe, IPCC

Professor Jones, who denies this was his intention, has stood down from his post while an independent inquiry takes place.

In a statement, Professor Thomas Stocker and Professor Qin Dahe, co-chairmen of the IPCC's working group 1, condemned the act of posting the private e-mails on the internet, but avoided commenting on their content.

They went on to point to a key finding that states: "The warming in the climate system is unequivocal.

"[It] is based on measurements made by many independent institutions worldwide that demonstrate significant changes on land, in the atmosphere, the ocean and in the ice-covered areas of the Earth.

"Through further independent scientific work involving statistical methods and a range of different climate models, these changes have been detected as significant deviations from natural climate variability and have been attributed to the increase of greenhouse gases."

They added: "The body of evidence is the result of the careful and painstaking work of hundreds of scientists worldwide.

There is an anti-science group, there is a flat Earth group, if I may say so, over the scientific evidence for climate change Gordon Brown, Prime Minister

"The internal consistency from multiple lines of evidence strongly supports the work of the scientific community, including those individuals singled out in these e-mail exchanges."

The row comes ahead of the Copenhagen climate summit which starts on Monday.

Professor Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, vice-chairman of the IPCC, said it was no coincidence the information was released in the run-up to the summit.

He claimed unnamed conspirators could have paid for Russian hackers to break into the university computers to steal the e-mails.

He said the theft was a scandal and was "probably ordered" to disrupt the confidence negotiators have in the science.

Earlier, Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband told the BBC he would be "very surprised" if there had been any wrongdoing on the part of the East Anglia University scientists.

"We're in a moment when the world is about to make some big political decisions," he said.

"And there will be people who don't want the world to make those big decisions and they are trying to use this in part to say somehow this is all in doubt and perhaps we should put the whole thing off.

"Well, I just think they're wrong about that."

Prime Minister Gordon Brown said the scientific evidence was "very clear" and called doubters a "flat Earth group".

He said: "There is an anti-change group. There is an anti-reform group. There is an anti-science group, there is a flat Earth group, if I may say so, over the scientific evidence for climate change."

'Open and transparent'

Meanwhile, the Met Office said it would publish all the data from weather stations worldwide, which it said proved climate change was caused by humans.

Its database is a main source of analysis for the IPCC.

It has written to 188 countries for permission to publish the material, dating back 160 years from more than 1,000 weather stations.

John Mitchell, head of climate science at the Met Office, said the evidence for man-made global warming was overwhelming - and the data would show that.

"So this is not an issue of whether we are confident or not in the figures for the trend in global warming, it's more about being open and transparent," he told the BBC.

The Met Office said it had already planned to publish the material long before the row and denied reports that government ministers had tried to block the publication.

THE ECONOMIST: - Climate change e-mails - REPLAY ALL

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A row over climate change e-mails grows louder

AFP

AS POLITICIANS, policy wonks, businessmen, NGO types, hacks and hangers-on converge in Copenhagen for the forthcoming climate conference, a row over a set of e-mails from a previously obscure part of Britain's University of East Anglia is becoming ever louder, if no more illuminating. Two weeks ago e-mails and other documents that had been leaked or hacked from the university's Climatic Research Unit (CRU) were sent to various websites. Those with a longstanding opposition to action on climate change, from bloggers to members of the American Senate to the Saudi government, are touting the e-mails as a resource with which to derail the Copenhagen talks.

CRU's researchers use various techniques to reconstruct the temperatures of times past. Some of the reconstructions they have been party to have long been the subject of technical criticism, sometimes in peer-reviewed literature, more frequently on blogs, notably Climate Audit, an award-winning blog by Stephen McIntyre. The critics have made many attempts to get CRU to distribute the raw data and computer codes which its scientists work on. The e-mails and other documents read as though the researchers were obstructive in dealing with some of these requests, that some of the data they used were in poor shape, that they may have indulged in spin when presenting some results and that they really did not care for their critics.

The head of the CRU, Phil Jones, has stepped aside while the university undertakes an enquiry apparently centred on how the files got out and on how they relate to freedom of information requests. On Friday December 4th Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said that the organisation would also hold some sort of an inquiry, perhaps looking at the scientific substance of the issues and the scientists' approach to the IPCC.

The IPCC bases its work on papers that have been published in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. In one e-mail Mr Jones talks of stopping a couple of papers that he holds in low esteem from being discussed in an IPCC report “even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is”. This does not look good, though it is worth noting that at least one of those papers was, in fact, included in the report. Other e-mails talk of trying to get editors at specific journals removed.

That the e-mails and documents should be inspected in some sort of systematic way for evidence of poor practice or even chicanery is a fair next step. But it is ludicrous to think that climate science is a house of cards that will collapse if the e-mails were to discredit CRU's work.

Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. It warms the surface and increases the amount of water vapour that the atmosphere can hold, which in turn warms things further. How much warming you get for a given amount of carbon dioxide is hard to say, because there are feedback processes involved, such as the making of clouds, and also other factors at work. It may be that this century's warming will be moderate, staying below 2ºC. It is quite possible, though, that unless something is done the warming will be greater, and there is a real risk that it could be a lot greater, perhaps 4ºC or more.

The inquiries into the “climategate” e-mails and files may find that some of the researchers fell short of the standards of their calling, or that some of the science in question does not stand up as well as its authors would wish. To think that all action on climate change should cease pending such inquiries, though, is foolish, cynical or both.

Climategate reveals 'the most influential tree in the world'

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Leaked emails from the Climatic Research Unit show how the world's weightiest climate data has been distorted, says Christopher Booker

By Christopher Booker
Published: 7:41PM GMT 05 Dec 2009

The magical faraway tree: a larch in the Yamal Peninsula in Siberia, sampled by Dr Keith Briffa, has been called 'the most influential tree in the world' Photo: NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC CREATIVE

Coming to light in recent days has been one of the most extraordinary scientific detective stories of our time, bizarrely centred on a single tree in Siberia dubbed "the most influential tree in the world". On this astonishing tale, it is no exaggeration to say, could hang in considerable part the future shape of our civilisation. Right at the heart of the sound and fury of "Climategate" – the emails leaked from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) in East Anglia – is one story of scientific chicanery, overlooked by the media, whose implications dwarf all the rest. If all those thousands of emails and other documents were leaked by an angry whistle-blower, as now seems likely, it was this story more than any other that he or she wanted the world to see.

To appreciate its significance, as I observed last week, it is first necessary to understand that the people these incriminating documents relate to are not just any group of scientists. Professor Philip Jones of the CRU, his colleague Dr Keith Briffa, the US computer modeller Dr Michael Mann, of "hockey stick" fame, and several more make up a tightly-knit group who have been right at the centre of the last two reports of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). On their account, as we shall see at this week's Copenhagen conference, the world faces by far the largest bill proposed by any group of politicians in history, amounting to many trillions of dollars.

It is therefore vitally important that we should trust the methods by which these men have made their case. The supreme prize that they have been working for so long has been to establish that the world is warmer today than ever before in recorded history. To do this it has been necessary to eliminate a wealth of evidence that the world 1,000 years ago was, for entirely natural reasons, warmer than today (the so-called Medieval Warm Period).

The most celebrated attempt to demonstrate this was the "hockey stick" graph produced by Dr Mann in 1999, which instantly became the chief icon of the IPCC and the global warming lobby all over the world. But in 2003 a Canadian statistician, Steve McIntyre, with his colleague Professor Ross McKitrick, showed how the graph had been fabricated by a computer model that produced "hockey stick" graphs whatever random data were fed into it. A wholly unrepresentative sample of tree rings from bristlecone pines in the western USA had been made to stand as "proxies" to show that there was no Medieval Warm Period, and that late 20th-century temperatures had soared to unprecedented levels.

Although McIntyre's exposure of the "hockey stick" was upheld in 2006 by two expert panels commissioned by the US Congress, the small group of scientists at the top of the IPCC brushed this aside by pointing at a hugely influential series of graphs originating from the CRU, from Jones and Briffa. These appeared to confirm the rewriting of climate history in the "hockey stick", by using quite different tree ring data from Siberia. Briffa was put in charge of the key chapter of the IPCC's fourth report, in 2007, which dismissed all McIntyre's criticisms.

At the forefront of those who found suspicious the graphs based on tree rings from the Yamal peninsula in Siberia was McIntyre himself, not least because for years the CRU refused to disclose the data used to construct them. This breached a basic rule of scientific procedure. But last summer the Royal Society insisted on the rule being obeyed, and two months ago Briffa accordingly published on his website some of the data McIntyre had been after.

This was startling enough, as McIntyre demonstrated in an explosive series of posts on his Climate Audit blog, because it showed that the CRU studies were based on cherry-picking hundreds of Siberian samples only to leave those that showed the picture that was wanted. Other studies based on similar data had clearly shown the Medieval Warm Period as hotter than today. Indeed only the evidence from one tree, YADO61, seemed to show a "hockey stick" pattern, and it was this, in light of the extraordinary reverence given to the CRU's studies, which led McIntyre to dub it "the most influential tree in the world".

But more dramatic still has been the new evidence from the CRU's leaked documents, showing just how the evidence was finally rigged. The most quoted remark in those emails has been one from Prof Jones in 1999, reporting that he had used "Mike [Mann]'s Nature trick of adding in the real temps" to "Keith's" graph, in order to "hide the decline". Invariably this has been quoted out of context. Its true significance, we can now see, is that what they intended to hide was the awkward fact that, apart from that one tree, the Yamal data showed temperatures not having risen in the late 20th century but declining. What Jones suggested, emulating Mann's procedure for the "hockey stick" (originally published in Nature), was that tree-ring data after 1960 should be eliminated, and substituted – without explanation – with a line based on the quite different data of measured global temperatures, to convey that temperatures after 1960 had shot up.

A further devastating blow has now been dealt to the CRU graphs by an expert contributor to McIntyre's Climate Audit, known only as "Lucy Skywalker". She has cross-checked with the actual temperature records for that part of Siberia, showing that in the past 50 years temperatures have not risen at all. (For further details see the science blog Watts Up With That.)

In other words, what has become arguably the most influential set of evidence used to support the case that the world faces unprecedented global warming, developed, copied and promoted hundreds of times, has now been as definitively kicked into touch as was Mann's "hockey stick" before it. Yet it is on a blind acceptance of this kind of evidence that 16,500 politicians, officials, scientists and environmental activists will be gathering in Copenhagen to discuss measures which, if adopted, would require us all in the West to cut back on our carbon dioxide emissions by anything up to 80 per cent, utterly transforming the world economy.

Little of this extraordinary story been reported by the BBC or most of our mass-media, so possessed by groupthink that they are unable to see the mountain of evidence now staring them in the face. Not for nothing was Copenhagen the city in which Hans Andersen wrote his story about the Emperor whose people were brainwashed into believing that he was wearing a beautiful suit of clothes. But today there are a great many more than just one little boy ready to point out that this particular Emperor is wearing nothing at all.

I will only add two footnotes to this real-life new version of the old story. One is that, as we can see from the CRU's website, the largest single source of funding for all its projects has been the European Union, which at Copenhagen will be more insistent than anyone that the world should sign up to what amounts to the most costly economic suicide note in history.

The other is that the ugly, drum-like concrete building at the University of East Anglia which houses the CRU is named after its founder, the late Hubert Lamb, the doyen of historical climate experts. It was Professor Lamb whose most famous contribution to climatology was his documenting and naming of what he called the Medieval Warm Epoch, that glaring contradiction of modern global warming theory which his successors have devoted untold efforts to demolishing. If only they had looked at the evidence of those Siberian trees in the spirit of true science, they might have told us that all their efforts to show otherwise were in vain, and that their very much more distinguished predecessor was right after all

Copenhagen Conference Has Massive Carbon Footprint

FRIDAY, 04 DECEMBER 2009 14:21

The veracity of proponents of the theory of man-made climate change is very much in doubt in the days leading up to the UN conference in Copenhagen. However, one thing that will be proven beyond a doubt in the next several weeks is that not all pollution is created equal: Some pollution is apparently sanctified by the context of its generation. The upcoming UN Climate Change conference is going to have a carbon "footprint" that would not fit in a pair of snowshoes, and the delegates’ alleged contribution to global warming will not be limited to the political hot air of their speechifying. According to a report at FOXNews.com: The U.N. estimates the 12-day conference will create 40,584 tons of carbon dioxide equivalents, roughly the same amount as the carbon emissions of Morocco in 2006. Those greenhouse gas emissions are comprised of two parts: international travel and local emissions from hotels and transportation venues. Organizers will also reportedly lay 900 kilometers of computer cable and 50,000 square miles of carpet, along with more than 200,000 meals to be served and 200,000 cups of coffee. The one bright spot is that the announcement that former Vice President Al Gore will not be delivering one of his soporific speeches at Copenhagen may result in a statistically significant reduction in the amount of coffee consumed by delegates striving to remain awake. Given the sudden implosion of what little remained of the credibility of the global-warming theory in the wake of “Climategate,” the destruction of data at the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, and the embarrassing delays at NASA regarding their own ability to produce the data that allegedly informed that agency’s findings, one might wonder what could remain on the conference agenda. Nevertheless, lacking demonstrable scientific proof to support the radical agenda that was originally advanced for Copenhagen, it may still be expected that the “four essential” questions recently set forth by UN officials remain on track for discussion and action: 1. How much are the industrialized countries willing to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases? 2. How much are major developing countries such as China and India willing to do to limit the growth of their emissions? 3. How is the help needed by developing countries to engage in reducing their emissions and adapting to the impacts of climate change going to be financed? 4. How is that money going to be managed? In short, while delegates whose raison d’être for gathering in the first place has been subjected to justified public ridicule, nothing will have changed concerning the fundamental policy goals that will be set forth before the world. And the United States delegation will apparently be leading the way to accomplishing an agenda that threatens the prosperity of their own nation. Again, according to FOXNews.com: President Obama will travel to the Danish capital on Dec. 9 to offer his goal of cutting emissions 17 percent by 2020, in line with a bill passed by the House in June and slightly less than a 20-percent decrease proposed in the Senate. “The president going to Copenhagen will give positive momentum to the negotiations,” Michael Froman, Obama’s deputy national security adviser for international economies, told reporters last month. “We think it will enhance prospects for success.” Joined by up to seven cabinet members, Obama will also propose reducing emissions by 83 percent by 2050 and a 30 percent reduction in 2005 levels by 2025. China and India have said industrialized countries like the United States — the biggest greenhouse gas producer among developed nations — must be willing to slash carbon output 40 percent by 2020 from 1990 levels if it expects poorer economies to agree to long-term goals. Such reductions can only be accomplished at a very great cost. That the rationale for enduring such costs has been undermined, if not eliminated entirely, why proceed? In part because the political elites cannot endure looking foolish, and in part because it is the environmental excuse for the agenda for a radical economic redistribution that will be pushed at Copenhagen, which has been about power and social engineering all along. In advancing their agenda, the internationalists can justify anything — even the pollution they produce while "saving the Earth from pollution."