Copenhagen: socialism’s wet dream

The Copenhagen ‘climate change’ conference is a bold initiative on the part of the world’s socialists to spread the wealth, as Barack Obama promised when campaigning for President. The disclosure that many leading climate scientists ‘cooked the books’ and attempted to actively hide data contrary to their hypotheses could theoretically derail the conference, but I don’t think it will.

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The reason I think it won’t is because in recent years more and more proponents of global climate treaties have only paid peremptory lip service to the supposed catastrophe that is threatening the survival of the planet and focused more on the idea of making western nations pay for their carbon outputs and giving developing nations a free ride. Additionally, the concept of the catastrophic, anthropogenic climate change has now assumed religious proportions and many non-deniers are looking at climate change as an article of faith. There are many rational people who believe in the possibility of climate change who object to the wholesale economic devastation that global governance of carbon emissions will bring about. Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish statistician and self-described “skeptical environmentalist” believes that the earth’s climate is changing, but doesn’t necessarily see that as a bad thing. In his book Cool It, Lomborg thinks there are issues that are a lot more pressing than climate change and lays out a statistical analysis that shows treaties such as Kyoto or what they’re attempting to cook up in Copenhagen cost a lot more and do a lot less good than say, combating AIDS or eliminating malaria. But somehow that just doesn’t have the same sex appeal that controlling the behavior of every man, woman and child in the Western hemisphere offers, nor would Lomborg’s solutions result in a massive redistribution of wealth. Other so-called skeptics include Tom Fuller of Examiner.com, who believes that some of the IPCC’s climate scientists have been less than honest in their findings and believes that global warming is a threat. Fuller recently posted this gem, “Even if there is no hockey stick, there is still global warming.” But the prevalent attitude of bureaucratic apparatchiks and the nomenklatura is that the ice caps will melt and the oceans will inundate all low-lying areas on the planet with a sea level rise of up to 30+ feet. And proponents of global governance over carbon emission insist that the science is settled. Britain’s High Commissioner, Baroness Valerie Amos, expressed this sentiment recently when she claimed to be ''surprised that the science itself is being questioned. These are things where there have been debates over a long period of time in other countries and where we have reached conclusions and moved on.” This comment was made barely a week before it was revealed through hacked emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit that prominent climate scientists conspired to keep findings that disagreed with their hypotheses from being published and admissions that some of the data were fudged. Why would scientists want to falsify their findings and keep dissenters from publishing? For the same reason the grand bouffe in “Hopenhagen” is being held—money. The Climate Research Unit’s scientists wanted to ensure that their nests would continue to be feathered by the IPCC, so they gave that UN body what they wanted; a scenario scary enough to force the citizens of developed nations into paying for the development of the Third World. But regretfully, all the socialists will be able to accomplish through this massive transfer of wealth is to lower the standard of living in Western nations without raising that of the Third World, which is all socialists have ever been able to achieve any place they’ve ever held sway. Creating wealth takes a lot more than taking cash from Americans or Europeans and giving it to poor countries. The most important ingredient in the creation of new wealth is democracy. Without a functioning democracy no nation is able to create the conditions under which entrepreneurs will risk everything to succeed. And that’s the one thing the simpletons currently meeting in Copenhagen will never understand.