Alarmists regroup: new strategy formulated

Climategate has taken such a toll on the global warming agenda that alarmists are taking a new tact. Academics urge radical new approach to climate change:

The UN process has failed, they argue, and a global approach concentrating on CO2 cuts will never work.

They urge instead the use of carbon tax revenue to develop technologies that can supply clean energy to everyone.

All this stems from a group of academics who have issued a paper, called the Hartwell Paper with this surprising admission (emphasis added):

The paper says that the outcome of December's UN climate summit, plus the "ClimateGate" affair and inaccuracies within the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2007 report, means "the legitimacy of the institutions of climate policy and science are no longer assured".

So, successfully tackling climate change initially means re-framing the issue.

In an article for the BBC's Green Room series, another of the authors, Mike Hulme, writes: "Climate change has been represented as a conventional environmental 'problem' that is capable of being 'solved'.

"It is neither of these. Yet this framing has locked the world into the rigid agenda that brought us to the dead end of Kyoto, with no evidence of any discernable acceleration of decarbonisation whatsoever."

They are advocating a new, non-United Nations approach towards "decarbonisation", which not surprisingly contains a "carbon tax" aimed at developing new "green" energy technologies while concentrating on short term reduction in carbon emissions.

Division in the ranks? Not all alarmists think this is such a good idea.

"The paper's focus away from CO2 is misguided, short-sighted and probably wrong," said Bill Hare from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.

The alarmists can regroup and reframe the issue all they want. Their problem is their junk science has been revealed and they no longer enjoy the blind faith following of the public in general.

We have all become skeptics.

And we have no appetite to commit a major portion of our economy to try to solve a problem that no one can prove exists.