Good Column on Global Warming

Roy Spencer, a scientist, writes about his culture clash with the attendees of the eleventh Conference of Parties (COP-11) climate meeting in Montreal.

As one of the very few scientists at the UN's eleventh Conference of the Parties climate meeting (COP-11), I feel like an outsider. That's because I am. The army of thousands in attendance (international delegates, NGOs, and all manner of stakeholders in the climate change issue), have little interest in knowing how certain or uncertain the science of global warming is. All these people know - or need to know - is that the "glaciers are melting," it's getting "hotter every year", and "climate change is killing people now" (all of these are direct quotes from presenters).

This New York Times article, sadly, bears him out, in both the levels of "discourse" and of hypocrisy among the participants.

[A] stream of participants hiked through the frigid night to a corner building on the far side of Chinatown that pulsed with light and thudding music. Inside, a local nonprofit group called Apathy Is Boring was giving a party.

There was no apathy in attendance - just 300 people, most in their 20's, who had come from as far away as Australia and Los Angeles to pester the "fossils" - the legions of gray-suited negotiators who, these young people said, were hijacking their future.

...

There is little time for leisure. While some delegates went shopping with the per diem money provided by the United Nations, the campaigners, wielding cellphones and laptops, continued pressing delegations for meetings. On Thursday, about a dozen young people trooped through a maze of corridors to a room used by American negotiators for confidential talks. There they sat around a rectangular table with Daniel A. Reifsnyder, the director of the State Department's office of global change.

(Updated below.) Ah! Enjoying the fruits of fossil-burning Western technology on per diem -- at least the kids know some Latin -- provided by the United Nations! That's par for the course for an organization founded in the name of promoting peace that refuses to condemn a terrorist attack against one of its member states (when it remembers at all that said state exists).

-- CAV

Updates

12-12-05: A commenter helps me realize that that my zeal for the clever one-liner blinded me to the fact that it wasn't the kids who were on per diem. Bleh. Still beats leaving Israel off the map....