Cancun, not Copenhagen

Several thousand people opposed to jet travel and profligate spending have flown to this Mexican resort to talk about how to make jet travel and any spending at all more difficult for everyone else.

Their hope, if not ours, is that they can get the whole global warming gravy train back on the track from which it was derailed by an icy blast of reality and RealPolitik at Copenhagen.

The reality is that the Climategate emails, the questionable behaviour of IPCC officials, the collapse of any market for carbon "offsets", and the climate’s failure to live up to the scariest IPCC predictions (not to mention a world in which economic reality has suddenly become far more important than climate fantasy) have between them conspired to make even confirmed warmists pessimistic about their chances of resurrecting their favourite scare stories.

Still, as Anthony Watts observes,

One benefit of meeting in Mexico is that the conference will avoid the embarrassment last year when the Copenhagen meeting ended in an unexpected blizzard. It’s harder to sell global warming to world leaders who have to flee the city before their flights are grounded by an ice storm. The worst the Cancun conferees will have to deal with is the threat of being kidnapped by heavily armed gangs of drug dealers.