Professor Andrew Watson – who bears an eerie resemblance to Richard Dawkins – is a professor in the University of East Anglia, School of Environmental Sciences; thus everything he says is weighed dispassionately in the scales of scientific methodology and evidence. In this exchange, Professor Watson demonstrates the clinical objectivity of a scientist by calling Marc Morano an “asshole’.

The least Watson could have done is use the Queen’s English and say “arshole”.

The Copenhagen climate summit is in disarray:

Developing countries react furiously to leaked draft agreement that would hand more power to rich nations, sideline the UN’s negotiating role and abandon the Kyoto protocol

The UN Copenhagen climate talks are in disarray today after developing countries reacted furiously to leaked documents that show world leaders will next week be asked to sign an agreement that hands more power to rich countries and sidelines the UN’s role in all future climate change negotiations.

The document is also being interpreted by developing countries as setting unequal limits on per capita carbon emissions for developed and developing countries in 2050; meaning that people in rich countries would be permitted to emit nearly twice as much under the proposals.

The so-called Danish text, a secret draft agreement worked on by a group of individuals known as “the circle of commitment” – but understood to include the UK, US and Denmark – has only been shown to a handful of countries since it was finalised this week.

The agreement, leaked to the Guardian, is a departure from the Kyoto protocol’s principle that rich nations, which have emitted the bulk of the CO2, should take on firm and binding commitments to reduce greenhouse gases, while poorer nations were not compelled to act. The draft hands effective control of climate change finance to the World Bank; would abandon the Kyoto protocol – the only legally binding treaty that the world has on emissions reductions; and would make any money to help poor countries adapt to climate change dependent on them taking a range of actions.

As everyone keeps saying, it’s all about science; politics has nothing to do with it. Not to worry, the private jets are still flying in, the limo companies are doing a booming trade, Danish prostitutes are busy, as are Anglican bell ringers and Dan Brown has the title for his next novel: The Circle of Commitment.

Al Gore is writing climate poetry. Its overall effect is much the same as that of Vogon poetry (the 3^rd worst poetry in the universe – Al Gore’s being the 4^th worst).

Here are some excerpts:

One thin September soon
A floating continent disappears
In midnight sun

Vapors rise as
Fever settles on an acid sea.

……

Snow glides from the mountain
Ice fathers floods for a season
A hard rain comes quickly

Then dirt is parched
Kindling is placed in the forest
For the lightning’s celebration

…….

The shepherd cries
The hour of choosing has arrived
Here are your tools

This reminds me that it’s back to the 60’s for the Copenhagen Climate Conference: the theme song is Bob Dylan’s A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall. Between that and Al Gore reading his poetry, delegates will be running from the auditorium shrieking and clutching their heads.

Some naughty scientists have been fudging the figures on global warming:

Last Friday it was revealed that someone as yet unknown had hacked into the computers of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) in Hadley, U.K. The CRU — or Hadley as it is often referred to — is the source of one of the four main temperature records used by the United Nations and environmentalists to claim that the Earth is on the verge of a global meltdown. It is also home to some of the most prominent climate researchers in the world.

Stolen and then released were over 1,000 emails and 3,000 research files that appear to show that those at the CRU and other equally well-known climate scientists around the world have been working together for years to “cook” the data about climate change. The emails seem to suggest that much of what the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change claims is “settled science” is based on data manipulated to confirm assertions that man is dangerously altering our climate. Recent decades may not have been exceptionally warm. The planet may not be warming as fast as these scientists have claimed publicly — and it looks as though they may have known it and tried to hide it.

If the emails are correct, CRU scientists also took glee in the death of a prominent skeptic and did their level best to keep those who disagreed with them from being published in peer-reviewed journals or invited to contribute to IPCC reports. There is even one exchange in which some of the CRU scientists and their colleagues elsewhere tried to have fired the editor of a peer-reviewed journal that dared publish contrary research.

One of the interesting aspects of all this is the light it sheds on the dishonesty of the scientists. Scientists tend to portray themselves as the High Priests of a secular culture: only they have the specialised expertise needed to make sense of our world: lesser mortals are enjoined to trust the findings of science – via the ministrations of a priestly intermediary – on the path to enlightenment. Richard Dawkins in particular exudes this kind of fanatical rabbinical piety in his dogmatic excursions into the meaning of existence; while attempting to smite Christians in the name of science, he himself has become the victim of an irrational fundamentalist religion – scientism. I wonder what we would discover if someone hacked into his emails.

What has become apparent is that scientists are fallen human beings just like everyone else: their besetting sin in this case has been to hold an ideological position with little regard for facts – and lie to protect it.

Church leaders have 60 ideas to prevent this world becoming hotter than hell:

Leaders of nine major faiths have presented 60 ideas to lessen carbon emissions to the United Nations after Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon singled out the religious community as key in fighting climate change.

The Norwegian Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations Development Plan in charge of development, Olov Kjoerven, on Nov.4 called climate change “the greatest threat that humanity has ever been up against”.

But they have absolutely no idea of how to keep people from being hotter than hell in the next.