Copenhagen: the AGW druids at Copenhagen know they are on a losing wicket and it shows

By Gerald Warner at The Daily Telegraph

Wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen – or is it? For AGW fanatics this was supposed to be the climactic moment, the Machtergreifung that would initiate global government and penal taxes through which the hard-earned money of Western citizens would become a burnt holocaust to the religion of Global Warming, the few remaining heretics would be anathematised and the New World Order would commence.

But it is not working out like that. True, the thousands of parasites – politicians, safely bought scientists, civil servants, myth-compliant journalists and other free loaders have duly converged on the Danish capital. But, for the Climate Moonies, it has turned into a Barmecide feast. Even they know that something is wrong. They are frothing and foaming at the mouth more hysterically than ever – but the world is not listening.

Climategate is the elephant in the room, the skeleton at the feast. Scepticism was supposed to have been eliminated by now; instead, it has captured majority opinion. It is untrue to say that Britain is split 50-50 – though that, in itself, would be a defeat for warmists – close study of all the surveys shows that scepticism was running at closer to 60 per cent – before Climategate even broke. The script said that man-made global warming was to be regarded as an established fact, that sceptics should not even be given the courtesy of an argument.

Now the warmists are on the back foot, thoroughly on the defensive. Even six months ago, who ever thought that Energy Secretary Ed Milliband would be conceding, on the opening day of Copenhagen, that convincing people of global warming remains a “huge challenge”? Yet it goes beyond even that. I would be the last person on earth to minimise the importance of Climategate or to deny credit, in any way, to those scientists and journalists who have so tirelessly exposed it. And, of course, it has had an important effect.

But there is more than that to the irreducible scepticism of the public. Even before dodgy e-mails emerged, the public was realising that this was a scheme, not to save the planet, but to make Al Gore a billionaire. Gore was trying to charge $1,200 a time for people to shake hands and be photographed with him at Copenhagen. Is that the conduct of a man who urgently believes the planet is about to be scorched to a cinder? Is the United Nations a trusted institution?
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