OUR VIEW: Another failed climate summit

There’s reason to celebrate the failure of last week’s Copenhagen climate summit. Prosperous nations weren’t willing to commit economic suicide while ostensibly subsidizing climate-change mitigation for less prosperous nations.

The summit futilely sought a binding, international agreement for 193 participating countries to vastly cut carbon emissions over time at great economic cost, while transferring equally vast sums of money from nations that have it to nations that want it.

Something was rotten in Denmark. For example, India intends to triple its carbon emissions by 2030, but insists nations like the U.S. reduce theirs. As with all socialist schemes, it’s all about wealth transfer.

“Mother Earth ... (is) now the slave of capitalist countries,” Bolivian President Evo Morales explained to cheers, which says a lot about the gathering.

Not even President Barack Obama’s last-ditch plea for action to avoid alleged ecological disaster could break the deadlock. Neither did Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s pledge to “help mobilize $100 billion a year in public and private financing” for India and its ilk.

In the end, President Obama wasn’t willing to go beyond what Congress already can’t get enough votes to pass — its own curb on greenhouse emissions.

To his credit, Obama didn’t offer cutting U.S. emissions more than the 4 percent by 2020 he already pledged, compared to 1990s level.

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Inconvenient climate facts were lost in the hype. The Russian think tank Institute of Economic Analysis alleged last week that data for Russian temperatures is suspect, based on analysis of newly available information from the U.K.-based Hadley Center for Climate Change, which is affiliated with the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, the center of the recent “Climategate” controversy.

The British scientists posted data they used to calculate global warming. But think tank founder Andrei Illarionov said it includes only 25 percent of Russian’s measuring stations, typically those closer to large population centers rather than in rural areas.

The excluded data reportedly show no substantial warming. Using cherry-picked data artificially increased readings 0.64 degrees Celsius, he said.

With Copenhagen’s phony deadline behind us, climate scientists should re-evaluate the global warming premise. Illarionov says the distorted data from Russia, which amounts to 12.5 percent of the world’s land mass, is enough to significantly alter the widely assumed global temperature increase 0.76 degrees Celsius over the past century.

Everyone deserves honest numbers before more discussion of imposing greenhouse gas reductions or transferring billions of dollars. — From the Orange County Register, a Freedom Communications newspaper.

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