• Heh: So much wasted green for climate-change talks
• … meanwhile … Obama on defensive, US climate Bill in retreat
• Acorss the pond: Brown Says UN Climate Negotiations Were ‘Flawed,’ Need Reform
• While the UN fails: “My Eighth Grade Son Did Better Science”
• Why we can’t see the forest for the trees: U.N.’s Global Warming Report Under Fresh Attack for Rainforest Claims
• Disgusting: ‘Pachauri didn’t correct glaciers’ report despite being informed’
• It keeps going and going and going … Climategate scandal continues to unfold

Along with a Republican Governor “Virginia’s two U.S. senators on Wednesday urged the Obama administration to carry out a previous plan to lease almost 3 million acres (1.2 million hectares) in federal waters off the state’s coastline to oil and natural gas companies.”

“Climate chief was told of false glacier claims before Copenhagen”

UPDATE: As Glenn Reynolds says, Uh Oh. “Climategate: NOAA and NASA Complicit in Data Manipulation”:

A clear bias was found towards removing higher elevation, higher latitude, and rural stations — the cooler stations — during this culling process, though that data was not also removed from the base periods from which “averages,” and then anomalies, were computed.

The data also suffers contamination by urbanization and other local factors, such as land-use/land-cover changes and improper siting.

“The reason for the recent decline in water vapor is unknown? Hmmm. I wonder if there is anything else that the climate computer models on which we are relying to predict future climate change may have missed?”

– read the whole post.

Here’s a helpful crib sheet on recent scandals undermining the credibility of international bureaucrats pushing carbon control, courtesy of Investors Business Daily:

• In late November, thousands of e-mails from the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia were leaked to the public. The evidence strongly suggests that researchers colluded to prove the global warming scientific “consensus” by rigging, burying and destroying data that ran counter to their political agenda.

• Last week, the public learned that claims made by the U.N.’s International Panel on Climate Change were not based on science, but on speculation. Specifically, the IPCC’s 2007 report said the Himalayan glaciers will be gone by 2035 due to man-made global warming …

• Also in the last week, it was revealed that U.S. researchers working for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are excluding temperature data from cold regions for a database used by the U.N. in its global warming scare campaign.

And the survey says (Pew):

Dealing with global warming ranks at the bottom of the public’s list of priorities; just 28% consider this a top priority, the lowest measure for any issue tested in the survey. Since 2007, when the item was first included on the priorities list, dealing with global warming has consistently ranked at or near the bottom. Even so, the percentage that now says addressing global warming should be a top priority has fallen 10 points from 2007, when 38% considered it a top priority. Such a low ranking is driven in part by indifference among Republicans: just 11% consider global warming a top priority, compared with 43% of Democrats and 25% of independents.

It’s just the tip of the iceberg:

• Denial Is A Step In Grieving: UN’s rogue glacier claim ‘was just one page in report’, says IPCC deputy
• Hoax?: E. Michael Smith, a computer programming expert who worked with D’Aleo, said he found “patterns in the input data from NCDC that looked liked dramatic and selective deletions of thermometers from cold locations.”
• Another one? “Hide this…”
• Should be enlightening: Celebrity Insights on Climate Science
• Bill Gates: Don’t let climate change fight take money from health
• Global Warming and the Science Fair Test
• Giving climate change the cold shoulder
• FYI: China’s lead climate change negotiator has said he was keeping an “open attitude” as to whether global warming was man-made or due to natural cycles.

Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit points to one of our favorite writers, Ron Bailey, whose post at reason explains “Environmentalists spar over nuclear power.” It’s worth checking out on the simple merit of reading more about who’s pushing nuclear power and who’s trying to pull the plug.

But we have a much more basic reaction: governing is a heckuva lot harder than campaigning. Environmentalists have been running a multiyear campaign to get the public to buy into global warming and a no-coal/no-nukes agenda. Democrats were not in power, and they campaigned on not being George Bush.

So environmentalists helped back Democrats in a campaign — let’s call it 2008 for shorthand — saying that Bush was evil, Obama was Jesus, and we all needed salvation or we’d face a Gaia-tastic environmental apocalypse. Believe that or don’t, it’s up to you.

But you’d better believe that it’s awfully easy to sell “hope” and “change” than it is to deliver on promises that probably never should have been made nor did the promiser have power to accomplish. It’s because saying “there’s a problem” is easy but saying “everyone should agree with me on one policy” is infinitely more difficult, and sometimes practically impossible.

So we all want a cleaner environment, but not many people want to tax carbon or pass cap and trade. And some people want nukes, but others don’t. And some people think we need to regulate carbon, and many don’t. Others think there ought to be plastic-bag and -bottle taxes, and others think it’s silly.

Because energy and environment are such a big part of this president’s agenda, he was always going to have to make tough choices in the area. Cap and trade seems to have been made for him so he escaped any lasting political damage. It will be interesting to see how (or if) he moves ahead with EPA regulations on every breath we take.

Courtesy of The American Spectator and Paul Chesser.