SPIKED...right on the nail...

...while the left attempt to reclaim scientific legitimacy after the Climategate expose, and while they agonise over their failure to achieve victory in Copenhagen, commentators are relishing the passions of the conflict, and attempting to predict the way ahead. At the start of 2010 Ben Pile, writing in Spiked, adds his analysis...

...Copenhagen’s failure is the culmination of long-standing political incoherence. The government, opposition parties, special climate committees, NGOs, and activists, far from being united by their desire to save the world, only managed to deepen their differences. The government and its opposition use environmental crisis to rescue themselves from their own crisis of legitimacy. The institutions they create only serve to increase the distance between them, the public and the protesters. Sparse protest movements attract attention through absurd stunts, rather than by demonstrating their weight of numbers, further isolating themselves. One-time development NGOs abandon the notion of progress, to concentrate on mere ‘sustainability’, and through ill-conceived ideas such as ‘environmental justice’ and ‘climate poverty’, turn their campaigns against development itself...
The climate change camp cannot even agree on the reason for failure. Miliband and Brown accused China of derailing Copenhagen...Prescott chose to blame the USA, while complaining about climate activist Mark Lynas’ blaming China. As per usual Lynas’s comrade, George Monbiot, laid the blame squarely at the feet of Barack Obama, who was too busy representing ‘vested interests’ to save the planet...It was neither China nor the USA, said Martin Kohr, journalist and development economist; it was Denmark. The ‘Danish Text’ had proposed privileging industrialised countries over the developing world, causing the group representing them to walk out of the conference.
It seems that championing the climate cause precludes self-reflection. The climate crisis is but a proxy object for a much deeper crisis experienced by today’s politicians, who respond by seeking legitimacy through the environmental agenda. Defunct moral compasses point North towards melting ice caps and South towards ‘climate poverty’. But the crisis exists at home. Vacuity drives environmentalism’s ascendency, and the ever increasing incoherence of environmental politics has driven the search for authority beyond borders and above democratic politics and toward supranational institutions. The coming together of all those gripped by such crises in Copenhagen was a clumsy and blind attempt to turn disunity into something cohesive, and to turn aimlessness into direction. No wonder it failed; it was dead before it was even conceived...more here...

Without a doubt, we're winning...

...and by "we", I mean the "denialists" as the green left like to call us. And with that level of disdain they shoot themselves in their minute green brains, because Mr and Mrs Public have a keen sense for censorship of dissent...

A question...are the so-called climate skeptics so far out there that their views don’t qualify as within the realm of reason? Consider that the skeptics are holding their own, if not actually prevailing, in the battle for the hearts and minds of Americans on climate.
No significant federal legislation has passed and it’s not clear that any will any time soon. Polls indicate that Americans aren’t so concerned about global warming. Democrats on Capitol Hill have been advised to give up on global warming and, instead, to focus on “clean energy.” How powerful must the skeptics arguments be when this small, under-funded, rag-tag “band of brothers” has held off for more than 20 years the onslaught of the giant eco-industrial lobbying machine....Finally, consider Obama chief-of-staff Rahm Emanuel’s effort to denigrate and dismiss Fox News as a media outlet with a “point of view.” The White House may not like Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity, but at least those two don’t pose as unbiased journalists...more from GreenHell blog, here...

...and why are global warming/climate change sceptics winning ? For several reasons; the main one being that alarmists have overstated their case, and that the small kernel of truth in their argument has been hyperinflated to the point of farcical hysteria. Consider this...

...and this...it may well be that global warming is best tackled with a variety of cheap fixes, if not by pumping SO2 into the stratosphere then perhaps by seeding more clouds over the ocean. Alternatively, as "SuperFreakonomics" suggests, we might be better off doing nothing until the state of technology can catch up to the scope of the problem. All these suggestions are, of course, horrifying to global warmists, who'd much prefer to spend in excess of a trillion dollars annually for the sake of reconceiving civilization as we know it, including not just what we drive or eat but how many children we have. And little wonder: As Newsweek's Stefan Theil points out, "climate change is the greatest new public-spending project in decades." Who, being a professional climatologist or EPA regulator, wouldn't want a piece of that action? Part of the genius of Marxism, and a reason for its enduring appeal, is that it fed man's neurotic fear of social catastrophe while providing an avenue for moral transcendence. It's just the same with global warming...more from the Wall Street Journal here...