Denier taunts forum via video link

THE MOST outspoken climate-change denier in the US Congress, Oklahoma Republican senator James Inhofe, has said he was sorry he couldn’t come to Durban to join a party of like-minded colleagues in “celebrating the final nail in the coffin of UN global warming”.

In a recorded video message played yesterday at a press briefing hosted by a Washington-based lobbying group, the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, he described this as “good news” – two days before the UN climate conference is due to conclude. Senator Inhofe said climate change was “nothing but a lie” and warned that President Barack Obama and his “left-wing allies” were still trying to impose global warming regulations to allow the US Environmental Protection Agency to control carbon emissions.

Craig Rucker, the committee’s executive director, said his organisation preferred to describe themselves as climate realists and he blamed the “painful and ill-conceived” Kyoto Protocol for pushing up energy prices and causing the “economic turmoil” people were suffering.

Leon Louw, executive director of the South African Free Market Foundation, said the answer was “substantial industrial growth” to lift people out of poverty. This would “increase their carbon footprint enormously, generating the wealth to adapt to climate change”.

Dr Kelvin Kemm, who was introduced as a South African nuclear physicist, told the briefing that whatever climate change was taking place was more likely to have been caused by “cosmic radiation” and sun spots rather than the build-up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Marc Morano, a former Republican Party spin-doctor who now runs the denialist website Climate Depot, claimed that there were now “more than a 1,000 scientists, including some IPCC members, dissenting from its conclusion that climate change was a man-made phenomenon”.

“The scientific reality is that on virtually every claim – from A-Z – the claims of the promoters of man-made climate fears are failing and in many instances going in the opposite direction. The global warming-movement is suffering the scientific death of a 1,000 cuts.”

Also on the podium was Viscount Monckton, a prominent British denialist, who said there had been “no global warming for a decade”. The briefing was to launch a fresh denialist report The A-Z’s (sic) of Climate Change, which is at climatedepot.com