On March 30-31 there will be another climate conference, this time in Washington, D.C. After this conference, four panels of experts are supposed to release consensus reports in late 2009. Then, the Committee on America’s Climate Choices will issue a final report in 2010 that will integrate the findings and recommendations from the four panel reports.

My question is: how much money is put into these conferences, congresses, summits, meetings and seminars? Kyoto, Bali, Washington, Copenhagen? And what is the result? Evidently, millions of dollars are spent on conference facilities, speakers’ fees, travel etc etc. For what good? What have we accomplished so far? And what do we hope to accomplish in the future?

European cap-and-trade is a miserable example of how climate politics don’t work. Now, it may be time for the US to discover the beauties of carbon trading.

I am surprised that, while climate alarmists always call for the precautionary principle when speaking of the dire consequences of CO2-emissions, no one even mentions it when talking about climate politics.

James Hansen is combining his scientific career with a political one. On Thursday, he will once again take part in a massive climate protest in Great Britain. This time, Hansen will actually lead the whole thing. The protest is being organized by Christian Aid and will involve a New Orleans-style funeral march by “mourners” for future lost generations.

Obviously, James Hansen is not worried that his climate activism may harm the reputation of science. He’s by the way not the only one who, desperate for new climate policies,  turns to activism. Dr Simon Lewis, a Royal Society research fellow, at the Earth and Biosphere Institute at Leeds University, believes his understanding of climate change means he is morally obliged to become a climate activist.

Others, like Professor Kevin Anderson, director of the Tyndall Centre, use academic journals to post their views on climate politics. Anderson recently wrote the following in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society:

“Emissions are rising so fast that we are heading for a world that will be 4C-5C warmer than now by 2100. That would be catastrophic. (…) Unless economic growth can be reconciled with unprecedented rates of decarbonisation, it is difficult to foresee anything other than a planned economic recession being compatible with stabilising the climate.”

But if scientists start acting as politicians, what damage will that do to science itself? How can we trust scientific results? If science becomes distorted by politics, how will we be able to tell the truth about our world?

Read Christopher Booker’s column in The Telegraph.

“Mr Obama begins by saying that “the science is beyond dispute and the facts are clear”. “Sea levels,” he claims, “are rising, coastlines are shrinking, we’ve seen record drought, spreading famine and storms that are growing stronger with each passing hurricane season.”

Far from the science being “beyond dispute”, we can only deduce from this that Mr Obama has believed all he was told by Al Gore’s wondrously batty film An Inconvenient Truth without bothering to check the facts. Each of these four statements is so wildly at odds with the truth that on this score alone we should be seriously worried.

(…)

Alarming though it may be that the next US President should have fallen for all this claptrap, much more worrying is what he proposes to do on the basis of such grotesque misinformation. For a start he plans to introduce a “federal cap and trade system”, a massive “carbon tax”, designed to reduce America’s CO2 emissions “to their 1990 levels by 2020 and reduce them an additional 80 per cent by 2050″. Such a target, which would put America ahead of any other country in the world, could only be achieved by closing down a large part of the US economy.

Mr Obama floats off still further from reality when he proposes spending $15 billion a year to encourage “clean energy” sources, such as thousands more wind turbines. He is clearly unaware that wind energy is so hopelessly ineffective that the 10,000 turbines America already has, representing “18 gigawatts of installed capacity”, only generate 4.5GW of power, less than that supplied by a single giant coal-fired power station.

He talks blithely of allowing only “clean” coal-fired power plants, using “carbon capture” - burying the CO2 in holes in the ground - which would double the price of electricity, but the technology for which hasn’t even yet been developed. He then babbles on about “generating five million new green jobs”. This will presumably consist of hiring millions of Americans to generate power by running around on treadmills, to replace all those “dirty” coal-fired power stations which currently supply the US with half its electricity.

If this sounds like an elaborate economic suicide note, for what is still the earth’s richest nation, it is still not enough for many environmentalists. Positively foaming at the mouth in The Guardian last week, George Monbiot claimed that the plight of the planet is now so grave that even “sensible programmes of the kind Obama proposes are now irrelevant”. The only way to avert the “collapse of human civilisation”, according to the Great Moonbat, would be “the complete decarbonisation of the global economy soon after 2050″.

For 300 years science helped to turn Western civilisation into the richest and most comfortable the world has ever seen. Now it seems we have suddenly been plunged into a new age of superstition, where scientific evidence no longer counts for anything. The fact that America will soon be ruled by a man wholly under the spell of this post-scientific hysteria may leave us in wondering despair.”