The Great Unravelling: Even fans of “climate fear” admit skeptics are fashionable

Just another signpost on the road to Sensible-land. Remember how skeptics were the fringe minority, the dying dinosaurs, and there were only a few left on the planet? That was last week. Suddenly, begrudgingly, being a skeptic is fashionable (but still wrong, of course). This is “fashionable” in the sense of popular but meaningless, not storming Gucci-type chic, more like getting a high-def TV built into the fridge door. It’s trendy but essentially useless. (By the way, the cool TV has a remote control, DVD and FM radio so you… don’t have to get off the kitchen floor. I suppose it’s just a matter of time before the TV in the family-room will get a fridge built in?)

But I digress.

The Telegraph has the headline “Global warming – there’s hope amid the gloom” .

Geoffrey Lean tells us “scepticism has replaced concern about climate change”, and you and I might think, that therefore, global leaders ought to pay attention to their citizens. But Lean says more skepticism means world leaders have to shout at the punters even louder. Never, ever assume the voters are right.

Lean hasn’t read Marcel Crok and Nicholas Lewis’s report about climate sensitivity being lower […]

Skeptics are winning: “the carbon market is dead”

The collapse of the Man-Made Myth continues apace. You may not read headlines as such (at least not in major dailies) but all the signs are there.

People who we never would have imagined speaking against the Big Scare Campaign are now doing so. Key glaciers are not melting and corals are happy. Governments won’t tell you it’s over, but they are behaving that way (the Australian one excepted, due to an election fluke that gave the Greens the balance of power). The Catholic Herald headlined it: Is the ‘anthropogenic global warming’ consensus on the point of collapse?

Source Barchart.

The last year of carbon trading in EUR's continues to fall. (Click to enlarge).

Mini update: The carbon market is being referred to as “dead”. Johannes Teyssen, chief executive of Germany’s EON, urged policymakers to make fixes. “Let’s talk real: the ETS is bust, it’s dead,” Mr Teyssen said in Brussels this week, adding: “I don’t know a single person in the world that would invest a dime based on ETS signals.” [full story: Financial Times]. Point Carbon analysts have downgraded the forecast price of carbon credits for the second time in two months as the carbon […]

Carbon ship sinking: Barclays bank closes its carbon desk

Gillard once lauded the genius of the carbon market. That part of the “free” market which is free to move, is moving — and right out. The smart money is saying that carbon trading is a dead dog. It’s a has-been-tulip, a sick puppy, a sinking ship.

The future of global carbon trading is so “certain” that Barclays Bank is not even bothering to leave one part time guy in the US office with a post box, so they can pretend they still have an interest in it. The mood has so changed, they see an advantage in letting the world know they’re not wasting a single cent more on carbon trading in the United States of America. Well that made my day. :-).

“That is not good news for carbon-dioxide trading, especially not in the US,”

Barclays was the first UK bank to set up a carbon trading desk, and fast to move into carbon trading: “Barclays Capital is the most active player in the emissions trading market, having traded some 300 million tonnes as at February 2007″.

Barclays Closes US Carbon Desk In Latest Cap And Trade Setback

8.9 out of 10 based on 94 […]

Bret Stephens: The Great Global Warming Fizzle [Wall St Journal]

Another sign of the times. Mark this one in your history books for studies on the Rise and Fall of the Great Warming Delusion. Yes, it’s another well written piece on the religious nature of the faith some have in our ability to change the weather. But this time there are sounds of the death knell…

Jo

The climate religion fades in spasms of anger and twitches of boredom

How do religions die? Generally they don’t, which probably explains why there’s so little literature on the subject. Zoroastrianism, for instance, lost many of its sacred texts when Alexander sacked Persepolis in 330 B.C., and most Zoroastrians converted to Islam over 1,000 years ago. Yet today old Zoroaster still counts as many as 210,000 followers, including 11,000 in the U.S. Christopher Hitchens might say you can’t kill what wasn’t there to begin with.

Consider the case of global warming, another system of doomsaying prophecy and faith in things unseen.

As with religion, it is presided over by a caste of spectacularly unattractive people pretending to an obscure form of knowledge that promises to make the seas retreat and the winds abate. As with […]

IPCC scientists test the Exit doors

RE: Mixed messages on climate ‘vulnerability’. Richard Black, BBC.

AND UPDATED: The Australian reports the leaked IPCC review, AND a radio station just announced it as “IPCC says we don’t know if there is a reason for the carbon tax”. See more below.

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This is another big tipping point on the slide out of the Great Global Scam. IPCC scientists — facing the travesty of predictions-gone-wrong — are trying to salvage some face, and plant some escape-clause seeds for later. But people are not stupid.

A conveniently leaked IPCC draft is testing the ground. What excuses can they get away with? Hidden underneath some pat lines about how anthropogenic global warming is “likely” to influence… ah cold days and warm days, is the get-out-of-jail clause that’s really a bombshell:

“Uncertainty in the sign of projected changes in climate extremes over the coming two to three decades is relatively large because climate change signals are expected to be relatively small compared to natural climate variability”.

Translated: The natural climate forces are stronger than we thought, and we give up, we can’t say whether it will get warmer or colder in the next twenty years.

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A moment of truth in the State of the Union?

Mark From the Hooterville gazette has spotted a very telling moment in Obama’s speech when the crowd laughs. Watch it closely.Without being in the room it’s hard to know who was laughing, and why. A year ago we could have assumed that laughter after a line about “overwhelming evidence” was really the crowd mocking those who don’t believe. But this is different.

“I know there are those who disagree with the overwhelming scientific evidence on climate change…. but…. but… but here’s the thing, even if you doubt the evidence, providing incentives for clean energy and efficiency is the right thing to do.”

I watched it a few times to be sure I wasn’t misreading it. But the clues are clear. Watch Obama, he is not expecting to say a funny line. His response to the rising laugh tells us the laugh was not part of the plan. A good speaker (and he’s polished) knows intuitively that the way to kill a laugh is to speak over the top of it and interrupt the “moment”. (Professional speakers are coached to pause after delivering a scripted line that’s intended for comic effect). But tellingly, Obama tries twice to interject as the […]