Sayonara Kyoto [update 4: Sayonara climate activism]

After two weeks of conferencing and a couple of late nights over the weekend, delegates to the Durban Climate Conference emerged yesterday bearing … something.

Actually, nothing. Nothing at all. Well, nothing except political folk trying to spin failure as success. A “historic agreement” to meet again later.

Don’t take my word for that. Even the warmists agree. Take Greenpeace International’s head man Kumi Naidoo, for example, who says,

“Right now the global climate regime amounts to nothing more than a voluntary deal that’s put off for a decade.”

This conference was the last chance to resuscitate the Kyoto agreement before it expires next year. Which means Kyoto is now dead.

And in a decade, Kyoto will be dead, buried, and have a large granite headstone over it.

What a shame.

The biggest news to emerge from the conference was the inclusion of developing countries like China and India in agreements. But what did they agree to? They agreed to meet again later. To take part in more talks to produce another agreement to met again, where they will no doubt agree to meet and talk again.

Because neither the Chinese nor the Indian politicians want to voluntarily put the heads of their own producers in a noose. They will leave that sort of stupidity to the idiots of the west.

In other news, carbon prices hit a record low on the European exchange (the only place where you can buy this sort of hot air), trading at a record low of 6.77 euros.

And Nick Smith has been demoted from the front bench.

UPDATE 1: I endorse this comment from Julian, below:

And Canada has just invoked its legal right and pulled out of Kyoto. Are you listening Mr Key? Why are you hampering NZ business?

UPDATE 2: [Hat tip G-Man]

Don't pretend we know what causes climate change – John Robson,  T O R O N T O   S U N
Not only is the Kyoto Protocol technically flawed, the so-called science behind it is utter twaddle. Never mind complicated things like non-linear mathematics or, indeed, mathematics of any sort. The alarmists can't possibly know how to predict the future of Earth's climate because they can't explain its past…
    Ask the warmers with their spuriously precise predictions of a "greenhouse effect" involving floods, famines, hurricanes a'blowin and a bad moon rising: Can you plug in known year 1000 data and have your computer model produce a Medieval War Period ? If not, why should anyone believe you can plug in year 2000 data and predict 2215 or 2875?
    It's not just the Middle Ages.… 
    [Even so] should we encounter sudden temperature change, the best defence would be wealth: productive resources able to replace failed agricultural systems, energy to heat or cool ourselves to survive new climatic patterns, new irrigation or drainage systems. The worst defence would be to inflict massive harm on our economies in pursuit of environmental phantoms.
    It's not just that Kyoto couldn't stop man-made global warming if it were happening. It's that the whole process is driven by fake science.
    If they can't explain the past they can't predict the future. And if they won't discuss the past, you know they can't explain it.

Long Faces in Durban – Jack Kelly, R E A L   C L E A R   P O L I T I C S
Unseasonable cold greeted delegates to the U.N. conference on climate change in Durban,South Africa, Nov. 28. They were chilled more by the impending collapse of one of the most brazen scams in the history of the world.
    The warnings of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that the world faced doom from anthropogenic (man-made) global warming were based on peer-reviewed scientific literature, the IPCC chairman claimed. But when Canadian writer Donna LaFramboise checked the 18,531 references in the 2007 report, she found 5,587 were newspaper and magazine articles written by non-experts, unpublished theses and pamphlets produced by environmental groups.
    IPCC reports supposedly were written by leading scientists. Ms. LaFromboise found many authors were graduate students selected more for political connections and "diversity" than for expertise. This explains, in part, why these reports contain so many factual errors.
    Fraud is a better explanation….
    In a review of Ms. Lafromboise's book … Judith Curry, chair of the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech, said she "feels duped" by the IPCC, which she supported until December 2009. That month someone posted on the Internet 1,000 emails in which prominent scientists discussed how to hide a decline in global temperatures, evade Freedom of Information Act requests and smear scientists who disagreed with them. The U.N. climate change conference a couple of weeks later then flopped, in part because of the flap those emails caused.
    Just in time for the Durban conference, 5,000 more emails have been leaked. In this batch, scientists admit the science supporting anthropogenic global warming is weak and depends on data manipulation.

UPDATE 3:

India Proudly Sinks the Durban Climate Change Talks – R E A S O N   M A G A Z I N E
America no longer is the only villain in the climate change melodrama. Canada this week formally withdrew from the Kyoto Treaty in order to avoid being slapped with $14 billion in fines next years for failing to deliver on its promised cuts. Canada’s environmental minister Peter Kent maintains that Canada would have to resort to extreme measures, like pulling all motor vehicles from its roads and shutting heat off to every building in the country in order to meet its targets. (He blamed the Liberal Party for agreeing to the treaty “without any regard as to how it would be fulfilled.”)
    This may or may not be hogwash, but with most of the major “polluters”—America, Canada, India and China—ducking and dodging, I think it is safe to start singing a requiem to a global climate change treaty. [Emphasis mine]

UPDATE 4:

The Great Global Warming Fizzle – Bret Stephens,  W A L L   S T R E E T   J O U R N A L
The climate religion fades in spasms of anger and twitches of boredom.
How do religions die? Generally they don't, which probably explains why there's so little literature on the subject…
     Consider the case of global warming, another system of doomsaying prophecy and faith in things unseen.
    As with religion, it is presided over by a caste of spectacularly unattractive people pretending to an obscure form of knowledge that promises to make the seas retreat and the winds abate. As with religion, it comes with an elaborate list of virtues, vices and indulgences. As with religion, its claims are often non-falsifiable, hence the convenience of the term "climate change" when thermometers don't oblige the expected trend lines. As with religion, it is harsh toward skeptics, heretics and other "deniers." And as with religion, it is susceptible to the earthly temptations of money, power, politics, arrogance and deceit.
    This week, the conclave of global warming's cardinals are meeting in Durban, South Africa, for their 17th conference in as many years…
    Yet a funny thing happened on the way to the climate apocalypse. Namely, the financial apocalypse.
    The U.S., Russia, Japan, Canada and the EU have all but confirmed they won't be signing on to a new Kyoto. The Chinese and Indians won't make a move unless the West does…
    Cap and trade is a dead letter in the U.S. Even Europe is having second thoughts about carbon-reduction targets that are decimating the continent's heavy industries and cost an estimated $67 billion a year. "Green" technologies have all proved expensive, environmentally hazardous and wildly unpopular duds.
    All this has been enough to put the Durban political agenda on hold for the time being. But religions don't die, and often thrive, when put to the political sidelines. A religion, when not physically extinguished, only dies when it loses faith in itself.
    That's where the Climategate emails come in…
    The reason they mattered is that they introduced a note of caution into an enterprise whose motivating appeal resided in its increasingly frantic forecasts of catastrophe. Papers were withdrawn; source material re-examined. The Himalayan glaciers, it turned out, weren't going to melt in 30 years. Nobody can say for sure how high the seas are likely to rise—if much at all. Greenland isn't turning green. Florida isn't going anywhere…
    Any belief system, particularly ones as young as global warming, cannot easily survive more than a few ounces of self-doubt.

UPDATE 4: 

Durban Climate Change Outcome Rubbished – Dr Richard McGrath, L I B E R T A R I A N Z
Libertarianz leader Richard McGrath today labelled freshly-demoted cabinet ministers Nick Smith and Tim Groser as "useful idiots in the farce that was recently played out in Durban, South Africa."
    "As is the norm for these Climate Change junkets, there was plenty of hot air, and - thankfully this time - little in the way of commitment to further crippling industry and productivity.”
    "The Libertarianz Party believes individual New Zealanders should be left free to respond to any perceived human influence on global temperature in their own way. They don't need failed politicians such as Smith and Groser to tell them what to do, to punish their attempts to better their lives, and to regurgitate the junk science of charlatans such as Jim Salinger and Phil Jones…
   "The Libertarianz Party calls for an end to the idiocy of the ETS, which unfairly and senselessly penalises New Zealand farmers and industry for no gain."