Andrew Cockburn, who is not a conservative politically, has a few words about what is really behind the global warming scam. You will note that the piece appears on Counter Punch which is not in any way shape or form associated with American Conservative thought.

Shortly before the Copenhagen summit the proponents of anthropogenic - human-caused - global warming (AGW) were embarrassed by a whistleblower who put on the web over a thousand emails either sent from or received at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia headed by Dr Phil Jones, who has since stepped down from his post - whether temporarily or permanently remains to be seen. The CRU was founded in 1971 with funding from sources including Shell and British Petroleum. At that time the supposed menace to the planet and to mankind was global cooling, a source of interest to oil companies for obvious reasons.

Coolers transmuted into warmers in the early 80s and the CRU became one of the climate modeling grant mills supplying the tainted data from which the UN's Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC ) has concocted its reports which have been since their inception - particularly the executive summaries -- carefully contrived political initiatives disguised as objective science. Soon persuaded of the potential of AGW theories for their bottom line, the energy giants effortlessly recalibrated their stance, and as of 2008 the CRU included among its financial supporters Shell and BP, also the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate and UK Nirex Ltd, a company in the nuclear waste business.

Mr Cockburn continues with:

After some initial dismay at what has been called, somewhat unoriginally, "Climategate" the reaction amid progressive circles - 99 per cent inhabited by True Believers in anthropogenic global warming - has been to take up defensive positions around the proposition that deceitful manipulation of data, concealment or straightforward destruction of inconvenient evidence, vindictive conspiracies to silence critics, are par for the course in all scientific debate and, although embarrassing, the CRU emails in no way compromise the core pretensions of their cause.

Scientific research is indeed saturated with exactly this sort of chicanery. But the CRU emails graphically undermine the claim of the Warmers - always absurd to those who have studied the debate in any detail - that they commanded the moral high ground. It has been a standard ploy of the Warmers to revile the skeptics as intellectual whores of the energy industry, swaddled in munificent grants and with large personal stakes in discrediting AGW. Actually, the precise opposite is true. Billions in funding and research grants sluice into the big climate modeling enterprises. There's now a vast archipelago of research departments and "institutes of climate change" across academia, with a huge vested interest in defending the AGW model. It's where the money is. Scepticism, particularly for a young climatologist or atmospheric physicist, can be a career breaker.

Khabibullo Abdusamatov expects a repeat of the period known as the Little Ice Age. During the 16th century, the Baltic Sea froze so hard that hotels were built on the ice for people crossing the sea in coaches.

The Little Ice Age is believed to have contributed to the end of the Norse colony in Greenland, which was founded during an interval of much warmer weather.

Abdusamatov and his colleagues at the Russian Academy of Sciences astronomical observatory said the prediction is based on measurement of solar emissions, Novosti reported. They expect the cooling to begin within a few years and to reach its peak between 2055 and 2060.

"The Kyoto initiatives to save the planet from the greenhouse effect should be put off until better times," he said. "The global temperature maximum has been reached on Earth, and Earth's global temperature will decline to a climatic minimum even without the Kyoto protocol."

Rare blizzard strikes West Texas.

DALLAS -- In much of the rolling plains of West Texas, a blizzard has never been recorded.

There has been one now.

The region west and northwest of the Dallas-Fort Worth area saw blizzard-like conditions throughout the day Christmas Eve as up to 8 inches of snow fell in the region, according to the National Weather Service. Winds gusting at up to 65 mph drifted the snow as deep as 5 feet in some areas.

No blizzard warning had ever been issued for an area of Texas as far south as Interstate 20, said Jim Wingenroth, senior forecaster at the National Weather Service office in San Angelo.

There is a lot more bad weather going around. Compare the predictions of Britain's Meteorological Office to current reality.

And a look at how China is profiting from the AGW scare is instructive.

So you think giving developing countries all those free "carbon credits" is going to cut greenhouse gas emissions and save the planet? Think again.

Through a bizarre but wholly foreseen loophole in the UN's Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) system, payments are actually incentivising manufacturers in China and other developing countries to continue producing one of the most potent of all greenhouse gases, the ozone depleting substances (ODS) known collectively as CFCs, used for refrigeration and other industrial purposes - at a cost to British and other developed world consumers of over $18 billion.

The level of China's involvement, as a major beneficiary of the scheme, makes a nonsense of the commentators at Copenhagen who were predicting that China might sabotage a deal. With so much money at stake, there was no way China was not going to fall into line, showing up the much-reported spat between Obama and Chinese premier Wen Jiabao for exactly what it was - pure theatre.

Thus does Booker conclude that the part played at Copenhagen by all the tree-huggers, abetted by the BBC and their media allies, was to keep hysteria over warming at fever pitch while the politicians haggled over the real prize, to keep the Kyoto system in place.

The tree-huggers have been well and truly "had" - but then so have we. It is us that are going to pay, through our electricity bills, our taxes and living expenses, in increasing amounts for this hidden bonanza which the negotiators so diligently protected last week.

Trading in what amounts to thin air, on the farcical premise that life-giving carbon dioxide is a "pollutant", they have perpetrated the biggest heist in the history of mankind, all to protect "Big Carbon".

There is also another synonym for "Big Carbon". I like to call them The Climate Cartel.

You might find this book of interest: Red Hot Lies: How Global Warming Alarmists Use Threats, Fraud, and Deception to Keep You Misinformed. Lubos Motl of the Reference Frame did.

During my years in the U.S. Academia, I experienced a couple of events related to the global warming propaganda that I found stunning. Scientists around me (including myself) were subjects of intimidation and disciplinary proceedings - or they were instantly fired - because of their skeptical views about the climate change (or even for skeptical results of their work).

Chris Horner shows us that those events were not coincidences. Environmentalism has become a new ideology that has replaced Stalinism and that is beginning to take over the Western world - a world that has enjoyed freedom and democracy for centuries. You will learn that Greenpeace is reading from Horner's trash, in order to obtain materials that they could find helpful in their propaganda war.

Do you know what's happening to the children at schools? They are being indoctrinated. In fact, they are expected to revolt against their parents who "cause global warming". Because the children have to watch scientifically unrealistic horror movies related to the climate, such as An Inconvenient Truth, many of them don't sleep well at night.

Many politicians are scared of the "momentum" that they demand "action" against the climate change, too. Scientists who don't join this irrational hysteria are being threatened, likened to criminals or even Islamic terrorists. Journalists produce piles of lies and distort scientific findings that are already damaged by biased peer review or full-fledged censorship.

This whole scary machine is moving in the direction chosen by the environmental activists who are always "ahead" of their followers. Right now, they want the "dissidents" to be censored or even arrested. Are their today's dreams going to become reality on the day after tomorrow? Meanwhile, there is no climate crisis. In fact, there hasn't been any statistically significant global warming at least for 13 years. But the society seems to be choosing a direction that is disconnected from any observations or science.

The similarity of the environmentalists' techniques with those of the Nazis and communists are far too obvious. If you live outside the Academia or other sectors of the society influenced by this movement, and you are not certain whether there is a reason to worry, read this insightful and shocking book because it can tell you what you might expect tomorrow unless we manage to defeat this new ideological cancer bubbling in the society.

If we don't defeat these profiteers we are well and truly screwed. There is hope.

Via the Examiner we see a report in the Christian Science Monitor. It tells us that a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 50 percent of likely (US) voters now believe that global warming is caused primarily by long-term planetary trends.

One slightly false note - the Examiner says: "... the climate alarmists now have a long way to go to re-establish their credibility with the public at large." Nah! They've blown it. If after 20 years of propaganda, this is the best they can achieve, then they are going nowhere.

Interesting though how many of the media stories on the current vile weather fail to mention global warming (lack of) in their copy. You can bet that if there was anything that could be remotely attributed to their religion, it would be right up-front.

Cross Posted at Power and Control