Richard Tol gets a kicking in the comments.

Via Plato Says; "Venal, secretive, sloppy environmentalists - staff at the CRU"

Professor Richard Tol writes: Public trust in climate science hit by 'Climategate'

"Climate change is a complex problem. We will need 50, probably 100 years to resolve it. We will need global co-operation. We will need to spend hundreds of billions of euro. This cannot succeed unless the debate is fair and based on rigorous scientific results that do not hide that there are still many things about which we simply do not have a clue."

In a nutshell this is policy based evidence making. You have decided that climate change *is* a problem based on nothing concrete. You have decided that much *must* be done based on that flim flam and worst of all, you have decided a great many people's living standards must fall to satisfy your position.

Is the science settled or not? The CRU science has not been replicated as required by the scientific method - this dictates that data and computer code is released so that other people (expert or not, qualified or not it does not matter - science is not meant to be a closed shop) can pick over the guts of your paper. It is a combative process and getting a paper published is only the start of it. CRU and other groups have proclaimed that peer reviewed science is settled science. It ain't. Worse than that they actively attempted to deny competing theories and deconstructions of their work being published. That is not the actions of grown-ups who are confident of their position but of bullies confident of their authority.

There two crucial facts that are glossed over. Firstly the bulk of the data CRU used comes from the self same data other climate science centres used to get surprisingly (or suspicously) similar results. The competing centres cannot be said to have independently confirmed the CRU output because their starting point was the same as CRU. Nor have they replicated the CRU method because they picked different sites, adjusted them differently and used their own computer code. Secondly there are quality and longevity issues over the data all these climate scientists use - stations are moved, instruments updated, stations drop off the network or have only recently been put on it. Adjustments for urban heat island are sometimes quite major despite the UNIPCC backed scientists proclaiming UHI is a minor effect. Other adjustments defy belief. There is a great lack of consistency in the data that underpins the science of climate reconstruction and prediction.

The precautionary principle holds a lot of sway here - that we must stop what we're doing unless we can prove it is safe. That is arse first thinking, anti-progress, anti-efficiency and plainly anti-human. If the science is uncertain logically we must take a course of action that does not put at risk competition, progress and wealth creation. A wealthier world is a more adaptable world. Even Nicholas Stern agrees with that. The politics of climate change appear to me to be a mechanism for goverments to regain some of the control they have lost through globalisation.

Look at what is being called for - a fund to move money from the productive to the unproductive at the whim of a priviledged, unaccountable few. Wouldn't it be better for poorer nations to trade their way to prosperity and to adapt to climate change on their own dollar? Free trade would redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor *by choice* without needing a Government at either end to cream off their fees. Our cost of living would fall. The living standards in producing nations would increase as the people (rather than their Governments) become richer. Richer populations are healthier and have fewer children - they are too busy to work to keep popping out sprogs, plan having children because it affects their ability to earn a living and they do not need a football team of offspring to ensure a couple or three survive long enough to care for the parents.

In the long term a richer world is a less populated one without the need for warfare or eugenics. Competition for resources will still drive up prices which continue to make people seek to be more efficient and look for alternatives. All without needing Government micro-managing.

People by and large make rational choices. When we spend our own money that is. Government spending is rarely good value or has the desired effect and an association of Governments deciding how much and on what a global climate fund should be spent will never be an efficient solution.

By far the most pernicious aspect of the things being discussed at Copenhagen is that it attempts to maintain the status quo. Poor nations reliant on handouts and rich nations paying to soothe the consciences of their politicians. All based on not much at all.

As a professor of the economics of climate change I assume you know that the computer model climate projections are based on the various families of economic predictions. We now know the climate science is very suspect. What if the economic assumptions that those computer projections are reliant on are wrong as well?