More realism from Paris.

Britain and other rich countries face demands for $3.5 trillion (£2.3 trillion) in payments to developing nations to secure a deal in Paris to curb global warming. Developing countries have added a clause to the latest draft of the text under which they would be paid the “full costs” of meeting plans to cut emissions.

That’ll work. Even John Kerry was almost made to seem a man of sense:

The night saw an ugly brawl as US secretary of state John Kerry threatened that developed countries, including the US, would walk out of the agreement if it held up the wall of differentiation or if it was asked to commit to a road-map or a goal to deliver on its financial obligations in the Paris agreement. “You can take the US out of this. Take the developed world out of this. Remember, the Earth has a problem. What will you do with the problem on your own?” he said behind closed doors in negotiations to other ministers on the second revised draft of the Paris agreement.

He added, “We can’t afford in the hours we are left with to nit-pick every single word and to believe there is an effort here that separates developed countries from developing countries. That’s not where we are in 2015. Don’t think this agreement reflects that kind of differentiation.”

The debt and deficits everywhere make action on climate – that is, you known, tearing down our existing power grid while giving trillions to others – a bit unaffordable. So here’s the line up of issues that have delayed the agreement, which boils down to everyone demanding that someone else pays while they receive:

1. Should developed countries have a legal obligation to deliver finances against a road-map
2. Should developing countries that do not have historical responsibility for emissions also contribute to climate flows
3. Should the burden sharing in the agreement be based on self-differentiation based on current economic capacities or on both, historical emissions and current economic conditions
4. Should the actions of developing countries be linked, even if weakly, to the provision of finance and technology or should they be treated as par with developed countries during next ratchet up of emission reduction commitments
5. Should there be a periodic review of delivery of finance and technology by developed world or not
6. Should the long term goal of the agreement unambiguously be to keep global temperature rise below 1.5 degree by 2100 or should the agreement refer hedge on this goal
7. Should poor and vulnerable countries continue to hold rights to file for damages and liability against permanent loss and damage caused due to climate change

The only climate change there has been has been in the climate of opinion within the populations of developed economies.

Mark Steyn’s description of events before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation really needs to be read to get some idea of just how dense our political class is and especially in the US. You get a better idea of where a Donald Trump comes from by reading his entire post since it must be as close to impossible for virtually anyone to have an impact on their government especially if they are as dense as this chap. Here we have Steyn’s description of how he and Judith Curry took on the US Senate in which its rudeness, not to mention their profound ignorance, is the issue that he finds the most incredible and despicable.

There is another kind of basic rudeness, which I have never experienced in a real parliament. If you’re moderating a panel discussion on C-SPAN with five panelists, it’s generally considered polite to distribute the questions broadly. In this case, the Democrats asked no questions of anyone other than their guy – Rear Admiral Titley. For example, there was some extensive discussion of the satellite record: They have the scientist who created and developed the satellite temperature record sitting at one end of the table: John Christy. This is a remarkable scientific accomplishment. Yet they directed all their questions on the subject to the bloke down the other end – Rear Admiral Titley, who knows no more about the satellite record than I do. This is like inviting Sir Isaac Newton to a hearing on gravity and then only asking questions of Mr Timeserver sitting next to him. It may represent the “decorum” of the Senate but in any other area of life it would be regarded as insufferably ill-mannered.

So by the time Senator Ed Markey turned up, I’d had enough of it. Markey is the Massachusetts guy (whom I discussed on the radio with Howie Carr yesterday afternoon) and he began by comparing Rear Admiral Titley to Galileo – at which point I threw up my arms. I would have let this twaddle go, except that Markey then went on to insult the three scientists on my right. And, as with so many of the staffer-insulated ignorant bullies of the Senate, he did so with no intention of letting them respond. Dr Judith Curry is a very brave woman who has withstood an extraordinary onslaught from the ugly misogynist types that climate alarmism attracts. She was not cowed by this know-nothing senator and she wished to respond, as she indicated discreetly.

Markey ignored her. Again, we’re way beyond the rules of the Senate here. In the rules of life, a gentleman does not insult a woman and then stand on parliamentary dignity to deny her a reply. If that’s the “decorum of the Senate”, then Senator Markey puts the dick in decorum. Nevertheless, with characteristic pomposity, he sought to use the Senate’s crappy rules to prevent those he’d abused from responding to his crude insults:

Markey must have been a little shocked when climatologist Judith Curry demanded to be able to respond to his testimony trying to discredit her views on climate science.

“I did not ask you a question,” Markey, a Democrat, retorted when Curry asked if she could respond to his testimony during a Senate hearing Tuesday on the science behind global warming.

“Why can’t she respond senator?” Conservative author and columnist Mark Steyn shot back at Markey. “You impugned her integrity. I think she’s entitled to…”

“I was basically called a ‘denier’ — that I’m denying science,” said Curry, a climate scientist at Georgia Tech University. “Did you read my written testimony?”

Markey sought to discredit Curry in his testimony by framing her as ignoring the evidence humans are putting the planet at risk. Curry was not happy with essentially being labelled a global warming “denier” and pushed back against the senator’s remarks.

“Are you aware the IPCC and the consensus has no explanation for the increase of ice in the Antarctic?” Curry said. “Are you aware that they have no explanation for the fact the rate of sea level rise from 1920 to 1950 was as large, if not larger, as it currently is?”

“Are you aware that temperatures have been warming for more than 200 years, and, that in the 20th Century, 40 percent of the warming occurred before 1950 when carbon dioxide was not a factor in the warming?” Curry continued.

Curry highlighted even more uncertainties among climate scientists many Democrats and environmentalists are loathe to admit. For example, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has trouble explaining the recent “hiatus” in warming as well as the warming trend before the 1950s.

“Doctor, as I just said in my testimony — corroborated by Dr. Titley [another witness on the panel] — this is the warmest year ever recorded,” Markey shot back. “Last year was the warmest year ever recorded until this year. This was the warmest November ever recorded. October… was the warmest ever recorded.”

“You do not have an answer for that,” Markey said before going on to site Galileo and claim Curry was relying on “something that is perhaps God-made rather than dependent upon something that is man-made” and backed by science.

“Are you saying there’s no natural variability senator?” Steyn cut in. “There were alligators at the North Pole. What was that? Was that you in your SUV?”

Markey was forced to acknowledge the planet does in fact warm and cool on its own, but said natural variability is regional and the warming trend “is straight up.”

“Do you know what the little ice age was senator?” Steyn said to which Markey responded by claiming Boston’s record levels of snow are a product of global warming.

Perhaps it was ever thus, but then again, perhaps it was never before like this and we are the maddest generation who have ever lived.

The conclusion to Mark Steyn’s full testimony to the American Senate on climate change.

Climate alarmism is going nowhere. The two-decade global-warming pause, which no late 1990s climate model foresaw, led the public to doubt Big Climate’s confident predictions for the future. In response, federal bodies such as NOAA and NASA have adjusted the past to make the present appear hotter, and thus supposedly demonstrated that in fact there is no such “pause”. As a result, public opinion, which no longer trusts the Big Climate enforcers to tell them what the climate will be like in 2050, now no longer trusts them to tell them what it was like in 1950. A recent poll found that, notwithstanding the urgings of the President and the Secretary of State and others, only three per cent of Americans regard climate change as their major concern. Three per cent. There is your 97 per cent consensus, gentlemen.

At exactly the time when climate science needs to acknowledge its own failings, and the uncertainties of which Dr Curry speaks, and the inability of cartoon climatology and fraudulent gimmicks like the hockey stick to capture the complexities of the planet’s climate system, a narrow unrepresentative group of activists is demanding ever more brutal penalties against those who refuse to toe the line.

There is certainly a role for the state to play in this – not in prosecuting climate dissenters under RICO laws or in dumping taxpayer money into unwatchable propaganda musicals, or in having feckless lethargic judges in the District of Columbia reward serial plaintiffs for nuisance suits, but rather in standing firm for the most expansive definition of free speech, which is vital to scientific inquiry and sorely overdue in this particular field, and against the
abuse of government funds, which has been disastrous for it.

UPDATE: Steyn’s full statement to the Senate. A must read for anyone who feels in command of a subject. Anger and irony are an amazing combination with also having command of the facts. Via Rafe in the comments.