The decay of the Climate Change movement has reached the point where those of us politely pointing to some of its deep contradictions are no longer the ‘denialists’. Rather the denialists are those who insist that the wheezing pantechnicon must roll onwards even as its wheels start to fall off.

It all got just too dodgy:

Likewise, in the years since Syed Hasnain “speculated” about glacial melt, the BBC, the CBC, CNN and thousands of newspapers around the world have hired specialist Environmental Correspondents on lavish salaries. Yet not one of them gave any serious examination to the claims of the IPCC report, or the “science” on which they rested…

… By 2008, Syed Hasnain’s decade-old casual chit-chat over the phone to a London journalist had become “settled science,” so Dr. Pachauri’s company TERI (The Energy & Resources Institute) approached the Carnegie Corporation for a grant to research “challenges to South Asia posed by melting Himalayan glaciers,” and was rewarded with half a million bucks. Which they promptly used to hire Syed Hasnain.

In other words, professor Hasnain has landed a cushy gig researching solutions to an entirely non-existent global crisis he accidentally invented over a 15-minute phone call 10 years earlier.

As they say in the glacier business, ice work if you can get it.

The problem remains simple. To generate the ‘global concern’ needed to achieve ‘global action”, political leaderships in a number of key countries (UK to the fore) frothed up the issue beyond all reasonable political and scientific limits.

This, by the way, is another reason for the problems now facing the FCO in London. It fleetingly had as Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett, who made up for her inexperience in international relations by trying to turn the place into a campaigning organisation for Climate Change, skewing resources and achieving a step-change in dumbing down proper foreign policy work.

Sooner or later this project was bound to collide with reality, in one shape or form:

For better or worse, the global political system isn’t capable of producing the kind of result the global warming activists want.  It’s like asking a jellyfish to climb a flight of stairs; you can poke and prod all you want, you can cajole and you can threaten. 

But you are asking for something that you just can’t get — and at the end of the day, you won’t get it.

Note! All of which is not to say that there is no long-term problem with the impact human economic development has on the environment.

Insofar as that is demonstrated and accepted, the best chance to do something about is to be totally transparent about the science, create incentives for investment in lower energy products and processes, and be a lot less insistent on unfeasibly large ‘global’ collectivist schemes involving state-to-state financial transfers which will end up creating waste and corruption.

Update: a neat analysis from Tim Worstall who (as usual) cuts through a lot of blather:

We’ve also read our Bastiat you see: look for what is hidden, not just what is in plain sight.

Our argument, the rational one, is not that we should do nothing: it’s that what is being done is the wrong thing.