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A little Christmas miracle

For those of you who weren't aware, last Friday our three year old daughter Isabella's middle finger on her right hand was amputated down to the first joint, in an accident at her daycare centre (see the editorial in TGIF).

It's one of the reasons I've been quieter this week as we deal with the medical dramas associated with the trauma.

Sadly, it wasn't a clean amputation. Isabella had climbed onto the middle of a plank being used as a makeshift see-saw across a metal rail acting as the pivot point. At the same time as she gripped the board, a bunch of other kids, two at each end according to the staff, raced for the seats on the plank, and as the board swayed under their weight it crushed, shredded and then amputated the finger.

In the words of Middlemore Hospital, NZ's best plastic surgery unit, the wound was "disgusting", so much so that the senior ED doctor made a judgement call on her own that the finger stood no chance of reattachment and therefore no priority was given my daughter for a plastics assessment when she arrived. The ED didn't inform us of its decision until three hours after we arrived in the ambulance.

Needless to say there was some fairly heavy foot-stamping going on from my part at this point, and at 4pm Isabella was finally seen for the first time by a plastic surgeon, more than four hours after the accident. She informed us that it wasn't ED's call, but nonetheless there was little chance of a successful reattachment. She took the fingertip upstairs to a senior surgical consultant and gave us three options: amputate finger cleanly (hospital's preferred option), sew the stump of the finger to the groin in the hope of growing flesh back around the bone that might later be moulded into what looked like a finger, sans nail, or reattach the finger and essentially pray for a miracle.

There was never a question. We took the reattachment option.

"The likelihood of this surgery succeeding is almost impossible as her finger is too badly damaged," the senior surgeon later told us just as Isabella was wheeled in to theatre, "but we'll give it our best shot because you've asked us to do this option."

While the surgeons worked, we and others prayed hard for the miracle the hospital kept telling us we were not likely to get.

This week, on the eve of Christmas Eve, those prayers were answered. The dressing was changed, and the fingertip was alive and thriving. The surgeons believe there's now an excellent chance Isabella's finger will survive intact, albeit as part of a long healing process.

I saw the reattached finger myself, and couldn't believe it.

A baby in a manger 2000 odd years ago has delivered us, via the hands of skilled but doubting surgeons, a Christmas miracle for our baby who'd been mangled.

She won't have a comfortable Christmas – the wound, the drugs and the confined to barracks, no swimming, not much playing – will see to that. We are mindful that others have far less this Christmas, and our hearts go out to you. For all those who sent prayers and good wishes, our thanks. For us, the spirit of Christmas has a truly different depth this year.

 

And so it begins…

"The shift happens as the United States backed what amounts to the single biggest transfer of wealth from rich to poor nations for any one cause -- in a sense offering compensation for decades of warming the Earth." – Juliet Eilperin, Washington Post, today

The deal expected at Copenhagen, highlighted back in May when I released my book Air Con, followed up by Investigate magazine and Lord Monckton before catching fire across the internet, has now come to pass.

No, it is not yet legally binding. But it will be.

You see, throughout this torturous process in the Danish capital over the last 14 days, the people pulling the strings have clung to their central core themes: wealth transfer, world governance. Climate was actually a distant third on the priority list.

Anyone wishing to trace back the longer history need only read Air Con, or any number of UN publications buried deep in the UN website with innocuous names that give no clue to the ambitions contained within their pages.

Here's why the US$100 billion wealth transfer is the wedge that will fundamentally overhaul the political landscape of planet earth forever:

It's not the amount of money that's the issue, it is instead the infrastructure required to administer the money and oversee its collection and expenditure. By agreeing to provide a vast sum on money in "climate compensation", the globalists have automatically created the need for a vast global bureaucracy to administer the programme. How else could it possibly be done?

And which global agency is perched to implant itself as this massive governance organization? Try this one for size.

What's integral to this is what administering this money will do for the UN. Currently, it has an 'official' budget of US$4.2 billion a year. I say 'official' because in partnership with donor countries the UN administers several billion more each year through the UN Development Programme and similar entities. But let's go with $4.2 billion for now.

For US$100 billion a year, you are talking some serious prestige and power for the UN. Assuming 80% of the funding reaches its destination (probably in the Swiss bank accounts of corrupt Third World leaders), that's still 20% to pay the wages of a vastly increased UN field staff and 'peacekeeping' force to protect them as they administer the programme.

And of course, $100 billion is only a starting point. The UN and the Third World have talked of up to $1 trillion a year in climate adaptation and compensation.

Barack Obama talks about the 'mechanism' to deliver this pool of funds, that it needs to be global but it need not encroach on sovereignty too much. In principle, it won't at all – that's because sovereigns make a free will choice to sign and ratify the agreement and its conditions. They're still sovereign, but like any contract they are required to keep their promise to allow the UN agency access and control over relevant areas if required. Sovereignty in name only.

The Third World countries are suspicious because, much as they desire the cash, they know the UN will be demanding accountability for the cash, and perhaps even political reform. In this way, the UN hopes to drag the Third World up closer to the level of the First World, and it hopes to be hailed as a hero for modernizing and democratizing the planet, ready for full global government and the end of nation states.

This is, of course, is already on the UNDP agenda.

So while others label Copenhagen a "failure", I suggest you look a little more carefully. This is not really about specific emissions cuts, the bigger game is to sneak the infrastructure in. And there's every indication they are well on track to succeed on this.

NZ Study may hold key to faulty world temp data

A long-forgotten scientific paper on temperature trends in New Zealand may be the smoking gun on temperature manipulation worldwide.

Since Climategate first broke, we've seen scandal over temperature adjustments by NZ's National Institute of Water and Atmospheric research, NIWA, which in turn prompted a fresh look at raw temperature data from Darwin and elsewhere.

Now, a study published in the NZ Journal of Science back in 1980 reveals weather stations at the heart of NIWA's claims of massive warming were shown to be unreliable and untrustworthy by a senior Met Office climate scientist 30 years ago, long before global warming became a politically charged issue.

The story is published in tonight's TGIF Edition, and has international ramifications.

That's because the study's author, former Met Office Auckland director Jim Hessell, found a wide range of problems with Stevenson Screen temperature stations and similar types of unit.

Hessell debunked a claim that New Zealand was showing a 1C warming trend between 1940 and 1980, saying the sites showing the biggest increases were either urbanized and suffering from urban heat island effect, or they were faulty Stevenson Screen installations prone to showing hotter than normal temperatures because of their design and location.

One of the conclusions is that urbanized temperature stations are almost a waste of time in climate study:

"For the purpose of assessing climatic change, a 'rural' environment needs to be carefully defined. Climatic temperature trends can only be assessed from rural sites which have suffered no major transformations due to changes in shelter or urbanisation, or from sites for which the records have been made homogenous. Urban environments usually suffer continual modifications due to one cause or another."

"It is concluded that the warming trends in New Zealand previously claimed, are in doubt and that as has been found in Australia (Tucker 1975) no clear evidence for long term secular warming or cooling in Australasia over the last 50 years [1930-1980] exists as yet."

Hessell divided weather stations in New Zealand into two classes, "A" and "B", where A class locations had suffered increasing urbanization or significant site changes, and B class locations had not.

"It can be seen immediately that the average increase in mean temperatures at the A class stations is about five times that of the B class", the study notes.

Among the studies listed as a contaminated A site is Kelburn, which was at the heart of the NIWA scandal a fortnight ago.

A link to the study can be found in TGIF Edition.

Other suggested reading: Air Con

 

UN’s Ban Ki-moon boasts: global government coming like it or not

In an interview with the LA Times, Ban Ki-moon says this:

Q: There has been talk of reducing the U.N.'s role in future climate change policy and allowing Western-led institutions to oversee how the developing world spends any money it receives from developed countries. Can there be a deal that excludes the U.N.?

A: "How can you scrap the role of the United Nations? The United Nations has global reach.

"The United Nations will be there and should be involved in this implementation process.

"One of the principles agreed upon is that all commitments should be reportable, measurable and verifiable. This is what has been agreed by both developed and developing countries.

"We will establish a global governance structure to monitor and manage the implementation of this. Experts from both worlds should participate."

This, of course, relates to the clause in the Draft Treaty that specifically talked of setting up a global government structure to regulate and control the world's usage of carbon and carbon trading, and to police the internal policies of member states.

In other words, a global government. The Draft records the proposed organization will have hefty enforcement powers, and the ability to levy taxes and fines on countries and their citizens for non compliance with the governing organization's edicts or climate targets.

Global coincidence theory?

None dare call it a conspiracy, but the globalists in Australia, China and the UK appear to be acting in concert to begin heavily censoring the internet, presumably once the great global governing structure is in place within 24 months or so.

The UK House of Lords is reportedly mulling the impact of proposed new legislation which would give British officials the power to shut down internet access to sites the government did not want people to access, or shut down internet service for citizens the government felt were against them.

11     Obligations to limit internet access    

After section 124G of the Communications Act 2003 insert—

"124H      Obligations to limit internet access

     (1)     The Secretary of State may at any time by order impose a technical obligation on internet service providers if the Secretary of State considers it appropriate in view of—

    (a)     an assessment carried out or steps taken by OFCOM under section 124G; or

    (b)     any other consideration.

    (2)     An order under this section must specify the date from which the technical obligation is to have effect, or provide for it to be specified.

    (3)     The order may also specify—

    (a)     the criteria for taking the technical measure concerned against a subscriber;

    (b)     the steps to be taken as part of the measure and when they are to be taken."

UK legal advisor Francis Davey writes:

For example the power could be used to:

• order ISP's to block any web page found on the Internet Watch Foundation's list
• block specific undesirable sites (such as wikileaks)
• block specific kinds of traffic or protocols, such as any form of peer-to-peer
• throttle the bandwidth for particular kinds of service or to or from particular websites.

In short, pretty much anything.

I do not exagerrate. The definition of a "technical obligation" and "technical measure" are inserted by clause 10:

A "technical obligation", in relation to an internet service provider, is an obligation for the provider to take a technical measure against particular subscribers to its service.

A "technical measure" is a measure that— (a) limits the speed or other capacity of the service provided to a subscriber; (b) prevents a subscriber from using the service to gain access to particular material, or limits such use; (c) suspends the service provided to a subscriber; or (d) limits the service provided to a subscriber in another way.

This follows hard on the heels of a similar stunt in Australia by the leftist Rudd regime under the guise of child porn (which is not generally accessible on websites anyway), the well known case of China, and of course the still on the table NZ proposal under the guise of protecting "copyright". The latter, of course, would have been an ideal weapon to block publication of the Climategate emails had it been in force at the time.

Trust me on this one, these socialist numbnuts will use any stalking horse they can, and by the time they've spun it through the useful idiots of the mainstream media even we will feel like low-lifes for even considering opposing the plans. Because that's how the best propaganda campaigns work.

Alternatively, we could listen to the leftist bloggers who will jump in anytime now and call the mysterious emergence of similar legislative agendas around the world a mere innocent coincidence, and the rest of us are "conspiracy theorists" for even considering otherwise.

I know "coincidence theory" is popular with some people, but coincidences are governed by the laws of chance, and the more coincidences the higher the likelihood of design. Most investigative journalists will tell you they don't come across many genuine coincidence theory cases.

Common theme in this is that Rudd's Australian Labor Party, Gordon Brown's UK Labour, and NZ Labour who initially proposed the NZ law, are all senior members of Socialist International who, as previously revealed in Investigate this year, just coincidentally are heavy hitters in the "new world order" (their words) proposal.

Hat tip: James Delingpole

The funniest environmental political debate you'll witness

The set-up:

David Parker, a former Minister on Climate Change and now on the Opposition benches as shadow Conservation, tries to make political capital at the expense of Energy Minister Gerry Brownlee, who has recently suggested some of New Zealand's vast conservation estate could be opened up to mineral, oil and coal exploration.

Specifically, Parker asks a question in Parliament inviting the Minister to come tramping with him in the wilderness this Christmas. What follows is possibly the most amusing interchange you'll see this year in an environment debate.

hat tip: Kiwiblog

Front page news - 100 reasons why climate change is natural

Britain's Daily Express has gone big on the alternative view of climate change, a sure sign that the news media are getting steadily more annoyed with the hype and exaggeration and hypocrisy from global warming believers.

H/t: ClimateDepot

UN IPCC boss has fingers in carbon trading pie

UN IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri, who assured the world the Climategate emails disclosed nothing serious, turns out to have a whole set of business interests that directly conflict his role as chair of the UN climate science advisory unit.

Not only that, those great anti corruption lobbyists Transparency International, whom we busted here earlier this week, are in this up to their miserable little necks as well.

This from Richard North:

As reported by Reuters – with a slight correction: The head of the Asian Development Bank (ADP), Haruhiko Kuroda, warned governments that a failure to reach a climate deal in Copenhagen could lead to a collapse of the carbon market, which would hit efforts to deal with climate change make carbon traders very rich.

It helps of course to know that Mr Kuroda is best known in greenie circles for setting up the ADB Advisory Group on Climate Change – chaired by millionaire businessman Rajendra K. Pachauri, part-time chairman of the IPCC.

An interesting member of that Group is Dr Klaus Toepfer, Founding Director, Institute for Advanced Studies Climate, Earth System and Sustainability Sciences and former executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). And it was UNEP, of course, which set up the IPCC – which now has as its part-time chairman millionaire businessman Rajendra K. Pachauri.

One other member is professor Hironori Hamanaka, Chair, Board of Directors, Institute of Global Environmental Strategies (IGES). The IGES claims to be "a research institute that conducts pragmatic and innovative strategic policy research to support sustainable development in the Asia-Pacific region." It will come as no surprise, therefore, to learn that the organisation works very closely with TERI, whose Director-General is millionaire businessman Rajendra K. Pachauri.

Yet another is Ms Huguette Labelle, also a Board Member of the UN Global Compact organisation, the very same UN to which millionaire businessman Rajendra K. Pachauri belongs. Hilariously, Ms Labelle is Chair of Transparency International, the global civil society organisation "leading the fight against corruption." TI's mission "is to create change towards a world free of corruption."

The Board also includes professor Jeffrey D. Sachs, Director, The Earth Institute at Columbia University. This is the same Earth Institute which set up the Climate-Risk Center, inviting millionaire businessman Rajendra K. Pachauri to become its first Board Chairman.

One other interesting character is Dr. Emil Salim, an adviser to Indonesia's President on environment and sustainable development issues. But he is also a member of APFED – the Asia-Pacific Forum for Environment and Development. One of its major activities is sponsoring the "Partnership Initiatives for Knowledge Network and Capacity Building" – in conjunction with TERI as a major partner, the Director General of which is millionaire businessman Rajendra K. Pachauri.

And last but not least is Professor Dadi Zhou, Director General (Emeritus) of the Energy Research Institute, which of course is otherwise known as TERI, the Director General of which is millionaire businessman Rajendra K. Pachauri.

No longer, it seems, does Rome hold a pre-eminent position. In this brave new world of climate change and sustainable development, all roads lead to Rajendra K. Pachauri.

James Delingpole makes some significant observations as well:

Particularly interesting is Dr Pachauri's connection with the "not-for-profit organisation" TERI. As we learn from its website, this used to stand for Tata Energy Research Institute, but was renamed in The Energy And Resources Institute in 2003. Nothing sinister, I'm sure, in its decision to play down the Tata connection; nor in the fact that Dr Pachauri makes no mention of the fact that he is funded by Tata on his website. And obviously, it is quite normal that TERI makes no disclosure on its website – or in its downloadable annual report (all you get is a pie chart with no figures on it) – about its financial arrangements: the pay scales of its 800 staff members and its esteemed director general are quite rightly hidden from the world's prying eyes.

Nevertheless, as Christopher Booker has noted elsewhere, one of the global business interests which will make – and indeed already has made – large sums of money thanks to the climate doom scenarios of the IPCC, is the Indian giant Tata. By fingering CO2 as the primary driver of AGW, the IPCC has been primarily responsible for creating the market in carbon trading. Dr Pachauri was, of course, the lead author on the IPCC's second report which paved the way to Kyoto – which in turn ushered in the world's first carbon trading schemes.

This is nothing short of a major scandal. The corruption of Climategate appears to grow, and the stench from the Copenhagen organizers gets worse.

Question: can the mainstream media join the dots so helpfully sketched for them here?

Al Gore’s inconvenient goof

God has a sense of humour. That much as emerged as Copenhagen shivers during the global warming conference, and Al Gore gets caught making it up, yet again, but this time on the biggest stage of his not so illustrious career.

Gore told the Copenhagen summit that Arctic sea ice will be gone in five to seven years, only to be dumped on when reporters bothered to fact-check.

UPDATE: Hold the front page! Climate Depot backing Gore on this one - seems the climatologist who denied saying it did indeed say it. Read more here

Climate scientist Jim Salinger stoops to lowest debate level ever

Climate scientist Jim Salinger, who featured in the leaked Climategate emails, offended listeners to a national talk radio show last night by saying that, as a Jew, he regards climate change skeptics as morally the same as Holocaust deniers.

Sadly, for Salinger, emails to Newstalk ZB the following hour revealed how offensive listeners regarded the comment, especially one person whose family had been gassed by the Nazis.

The first hour of the ZB debate is here, and Salinger appears about 35 minutes in.

The second hour, including listener reaction, is here

If someone wishes to isolate the passages and upload them to Youtube, I'll embed them.

IPCC peer review ‘tantamount to fraud’ – IPCC official admits

Got alerted to this via Marc Morano's Climate Depot.

Essentially, we pick up the story as IPCC scientists are slugging it out in the letters column of South Africa's Business Day. The writer is Phillip Lloyd, and I have emphasized key points:

Prof Bruce Hewitson (Uninformed vitriol, November 19) pontificates on Andrew Kenny's assessment (Ideology and money drive global-warming religion, November 16). Unfortunately for him, there has been a reformation. The time for pontification is over. The critics must be answered. Instead Prof Hewitson stood in his pulpit and preached the gospel according to St IPCC.

He says he was a lead author for the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). That is not material — I was a co-ordinating lead author, but it gives me no mantle of infallibility. Instead, it gave me insight into the flaws behind the whole process.

The IPCC claims that it has thousands of scientists and almost as many reviewers of the scientists' work to produce their reports. There are two problems, however. In the scientific world I move in, "review" means that your work is scrutinised by several independent, anonymous reviewers chosen by the editor.

However, when I entered the IPCC world, the reviewers were there at the worktable, criticising our drafts, and finally meeting with all us co-ordinators and many of the IPCC functionaries in a draftfest.

The product was not reviewed in the accepted sense of the word — there was no independence of review, and the reviewers were anything but anonymous. The result is not scientific.

The second problem is that the technical publication is not completed by the time the IPCC reports. Instead, it produces a Summary for Policy Makers. Writing the summary involves the co-ordinators, the reviewers and the IPCC functionaries as before, and also various chairmen.

The summary goes out in a blaze of publicity, but there is no means of checking whether it represents what the scientists actually said, because the scientific report isn't published for another four months or more.

In the Fourth Assessment, the summary was quietly replaced several months after it was first published because some scientists who were involved complained of misrepresentation.

In the early years of the IPCC, there was a slightly different process. The Summary for Policy Makers and the scientific reports were issued at the same time. In those years, however, the Summary for Policy Makers bore a warning that it was the last current word on the subject, whereas the scientific reports were correctly identified as being subject to continuing development.

Someone smelled a rat about the "last word" story, so the process was changed, and now the summary is issued with no means of checking.

It isn't necessary to list all the changes I have identified between what the scientists actually said and what the policy makers who wrote the Summary for Policy Makers said they said. The process is so flawed that the result is tantamount to fraud. As an authority, the IPCC should be consigned to the scrapheap without delay.

Dr Philip Lloyd Pr Eng

MD: Industrial and Petrochemical Consultants

Big Climate likes to silence inconvenient journalists

Hard on the heels of my own brush with disgraceful censorship of the media, now comes this:

Soros propaganda machine gunning for Monckton

Reeling from the ongoing impact of Climategate and the revelations from both Lord Monckton and the book Air Con that the real agenda of Copenhagen may be to establish a de-facto world government organization, left wing lobbyists funded by billionaire and convicted criminal George Soros have lashed out.

The website 'Media Matters", which I named on pages 237 and 238 of Air Con as funded by climate billionaire George Soros, has now tried to bludgeon Monckton by inferring he has some deep dark secret from 1987 regarding AIDS patients.

Media Matters has attempted to smear Monckton for a suggestion that AIDS patients be quarantined for life, but blogger and fact-checker Mark Gillar has managed to skewer Media Matters nicely:

A Media Matters headline from Friday, December 10th 2009 reads BREAKING: Glenn Beck's climate czar called
for quarantining AIDS patients "for life".  Yes folks, breaking news from January 1987.  Media Matters claims
that the Media Matters Action Network (what a team of super sleuths this must be) "unearthed" this damaging
twenty-three year old information about Lord Monckton, The Third Viscount of Brenchley.  Lesson number one for  
Jeremy Schulman, who wrote this piece, should be that you can't "unearth" something that has been openly
discussed since 1987 by Monckton himself. The fact not mentioned by Media Matters is that Monckton rarely makes
a public appearance without discussing it.  Stating this information was "unearthed" strongly implies that Monckton
has been trying to keep it buried.  He has not. Here are just a few of the many examples of  Monckton openly
discussing the matter this year alone:

You can read the rest of Gillar's piece here.

Key global warming believer surrenders: Climategate catastrophic

New Scientist writer Fred Pearce, whose global warming articles I debunked in Air Con, appears to be running the white flag up the pole.

In an article for Rajendra Pachauri's climate unit at Yale, Pearce writes:

The media blizzard that has descended on climate science since the hacking of hundreds of e-mails held on the webmail server at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, is set to become a case study — in public relations disasters, in the folly of incontinent electronic communication, in the shortcomings of peer review, and, very probably, in "how not to save the world."

The e-mails, dating from the mid-1990s to early November this year, first surfaced online on Nov. 20. Within hours they were being described by a columnist in one national British newspaper, the right-leaning Daily Telegraph, as "the final nail in the coffin of anthropogenic global warming," adding for good measure that "this scandal could well be the greatest in modern science."

Follow that. Well, the world's media did.

Pearce laments how the leaked emails story gained legs so fast, intimating that Phil Jones being taken by surprise by a call from New Zealand may have been part of the problem:

These days, scientists need rules of engagement for what to do when outsiders come calling, whether those outsiders are Greenpeace activists or investigative journalists or trouble-making climate skeptics.

…But this saga has now gone far beyond discussion of the content of the e-mails. The failure of the University of East Anglia to respond substantially to the avalanche of invective from climate skeptics has been a PR disaster that undermined the reputation of science as well as the institution itself. One angry media insider says: "Their response will be taught in university communications courses. Because I'm going to make sure it is." The university's failure for a full fortnight to put up a single scientist to defend Phil Jones amounted to cruelty.

During this silence, many things happened that otherwise might not.

For one thing, in Britain, the liberal media had no idea what to do. The London-based Guardian began by holding its nose, quoting the hysterical coverage among skeptic blogs and hoping the affair would go away. The equally liberal-minded Channel 4 TV news held up to ridicule the inability of a Fox News presenter to pronounce East Anglia (he hesitantly settled on "Angila") and signed off.

Then the notably combative environmental writer George Monbiot declared in the Guardian that Jones should resign. That was a smoking gun for greens and liberals everywhere. What did Monbiot know? Still the university remained silent.

Viewers of the BBC watched a crashing of gears. For several years most of its coverage of climate change has been based on the scientific consensus that warming is real and that mankind is to blame. Did that still hold? The editors no longer knew for sure. Fearing for their impartiality, they abruptly reverted to the journalists' default. Equal time (or close to it) for the skeptics.

Much the same happened in the United States, with seasoned experts like Andrew Revkin at the New York Times feeling unwilling to defend people whose employers were leaving them to hang in the breeze.

Everyone was running for cover. Even environmental campaigners kept quiet – ostensibly because it was up to scientists to defend their own, but equally because they were unnerved by Monbiot and others apparently siding with the skeptics.

Welcome to reality, Fred. The emails and documents were, and remain, an utter scandal. Indefensible. It is only when people revert to their default climate science setting – the end justifies the means – that they can push aside the immorality and illegality in the emails and sweep it back under the carpet. For believers in the news media – and there are many – Climategate is a wake up call that their own credibility is on the line.

"We don't know how this will play out," says Ben Stewart, media director at Greenpeace UK. "It's not as if the Pentagon or the Chinese government will change their position as a result of these e-mails. The damage is being done in newsrooms." And the fallout from the newsrooms could well influence how the public and legislators back home receive whatever deal is reached in Copenhagen and what will happen to the climate legislation now before the U.S. Senate.

Indeed, newsrooms around the world have started to realize they were cast in the role of "useful idiots" by the global warming movement. Once that realization dawned, the possibility of full trust being restored receded.

Pearce, of course, maintains the content of the leaked emails is not serious, and that belief in AGW must continue. Nonetheless, he concedes the writing may be on the wall:

I have been speaking to a PR operator for one of the world's leading environmental organizations. Most unusually, he didn't want to be quoted. But his message is clear. The facts of the e-mails barely matter any more. It has always been hard to persuade the public that invisible gases could somehow warm the planet, and that they had to make sacrifices to prevent that from happening. It seemed, on the verge of Copenhagen, as if that might be about to be achieved.

But he says all that ended on Nov. 20. "The e-mails represented a seminal moment in the climate debate of the last five years, and it was a moment that broke decisively against us. I think the CRU leak is nothing less than catastrophic."

Global governance jigsaw pieces coming together

To operate a global tax, don't you require a global government?

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Any tax imposed on financial transactions would have to take effect internationally to keep Wall Street jobs and related business from moving overseas, U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on Thursday.

"It would have to be an international rule, not just a U.S. rule," Pelosi said at a news conference. "We couldn't do it alone, we'd have to do it as an international initiative."

Several House Democrats have proposed a Wall Street tax to pay for job-creating legislation they plan to pass in December. The tax, which could raise $150 billion per year, would tap into widespread public outrage at Wall Street in the wake of the financial crisis.

Of course, this had its genesis with Socialist International's Gordon Brown, now British PM, and Nancy Pelosi concedes there is growing support for it in the US

"It hasn't been developed to a high priority, but it has substantial currency in our caucus," Pelosi said.

Britain urged other governments earlier this month to consider a bank tax as a way to fund future bailouts, and France and Germany have also called for a bank tax. The International Monetary Fund is studying the idea.

That was back mid November. This week Pelosi had substantially pushed the idea forward:

Pelosi Endorses 'Global' Tax on Stocks, Bonds, and other Financial Transactions
Monday, December 07, 2009
By Matt Cover, Staff Writer

 

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi arrive for a press conference after House passage of the health care reform bill at the U.S. Capitol on Saturday, Nov. 7, 2009. (AP Photo/J. David Ake)

(CNSNews.com) – House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) endorsed the idea of a "global" tax on stock trades and other financial transactions, saying the estimated $150 billion in annual revenue from such a tax [in the US alone] could be used to help fund more stimulus spending…

…"The fact is, what we are talking about is a global transaction [tax]," she said, "something that we would do in conjunction with other G nations, whether it is G8, G20, whatever the current G number is. Because it is really a source of revenue that has really minimal impact on the transaction, but a tremendous impact on helping us meet our needs."

Taken on its own, maybe it's nothing [yeah, right]. But taken with this, perhaps it fits the overall jigsaw starting to come together…

For the record, here's the salient page from my book Air Con quoting a United Nations Development Program report from 1994:

"We must seek a new role for the United Nations so that it can begin to meet humanity's agenda not only for peace but also for development.

"There must be a 'New World Social Charter' where the world will redistribute wealth as it cannot survive one-quarter rich and three-quarters poor, and where the UN must become the principal custodian of global human security and help with basic education, healthcare, immunization, and family planning," states the report.

"A major restructuring of the world's income distribution, production and consumption patterns may therefore be a necessary precondition for any viable strategy for sustainable human development."

To fund this grand idea of world government requires money, but the UNDP (which as of April 21 2009 is being run for the first time by a political leader, in the form of NZ's globalisation powerhouse Helen Clark) had that sussed as well:

"Global taxation may become necessary in any case to achieve the goals of global human security. Some of the promising new sourcesinclude tradable permits for global pollution, [my emphasis] a global tax on non-renewable energy, demilitarization funds and a small transaction tax on speculative international movements of foreign exchange funds."

I know I'm being as subtle as a sledgehammer in a china shop, but follow me here for a moment. The year was 1994, and some kind of global tax on pollution emissions was already being mooted – not to save the planet from pollution but to fund the United Nations dream of governing the world.

Elaborating further on the funding options, the report notes:

"A second logical source of funds for a global response to global threats is a set of fees on globally important transactions or polluting emissions. This is probably some way off, but even at this stage it is worth considering some of the more promising options, two of which are discussed in chapter 4.

"One is a tax on the international movements of speculative capital suggested by James Tobin, winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics (special contribution, p. 70). Tobin suggests a tax rate of 0.5% on such transactions, but even a tax of 0.05% during 1995-2000 could raise $150 billion a year. Such a tax would be largely invisible and totally non-discriminatory."

It is worth noting that at 0.5%, the transaction tax would raise US$1.5 trillion a year in 1994 terms for the United Nations, or 150 times the amount of its 1994 budget of $10 billion.

In 2000, Boston Globe editor and global warming believer Ross Gelbspan delivered a speech also calling on introduction of the Tobin Tax:356

"Finally, I think we need to use a tax on international currency transactions to finance the transfer of climate-friendly technologies to the developing world. Virtually all developing countries would love to solar; virtually none can afford it. The currency transaction tax was conceived by Dr. James Tobin, a Nobel Prize-winning economist at Yale, as a way to stabilize volatile capital flows."

Spookily, and entirely 'coincidentally' no doubt, there is talk in 2009 of the Obama administration of introducing the Tobin Tax as a result of the financial market meltdown. The President's key economics advisers on the stimulus package are disciples of Tobin's ideas.

"After a three-decade run," reported Bloomberg357 in February, "the free-market philosophies of Friedman that shaped U.S. policy are being eclipsed by the pro- government ideas of Tobin, the late Yale economist and Nobel laureate who brought John Maynard Keynes into the modern era."

Not bad foreshadowing from the UN Development Programme 15 years ago. Another prediction on the money was carbon taxes:

"Another [option] is a global tax on energy: a tax of $1 on each barrel of oil (and its equivalent on coal) during 1995-2000 would yield around US$66 billion a year," said the UN report …