The United Nations conference on climate change started in Paris on November 30 and will end on December 11.

About 750 delegates were expected to attend and, if previous years experience is anything to go by, about 70 of these would come from South Africa.

In a previous column I wrote the following: ”At the last meeting, in Peru, 84 South African delegates attended. Among the 84 were an intern from the University of Cape Town and a woman who has no recorded affiliation to any department. There was an office administrator from the Department of Environmental Affairs and the ‘registry clerk’ from the Department of Environmental Affairs. But there is an item of catastrophic disaster which will affect the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the world as we know it. You ready? For 222 months, since December 1996, temperature measurements indicate that there has been no global warming at all. And this is acknowledged by the IPCC. They call this ‘a pause’ and now we have a new record length for the pause, 18 years, six months . . .”

Years ago, some fool in America came to the conclusion that cancer was caused by power lines. For years, people rode this particular bandwagon until, finally, the UK commissioned a £12-million study, which found no evidence at all to suggest that this was true. The people who had benefited from the conferences, seminars and parties associated with this concept immediately started pushing another one – Y2K, that, by the year 2000, all computers would fail, unless you employed a specialist (at a high fee) to fix your computer. In my office, we had such a specialist, named Ben. For an agreed fee, he agreed to fix all our computers just by licking them. He was completely successful. His fee was a large meaty bone, since Ben was a rough collie dog. I was completely sure that he knew as much as any other Y2K specialist.

What is bad about the climate change scam is that it is very pervasive and involves very large sums of money. They are hoping to raise $100-billion. The blurb from the Climate Policy Initiative (CPI) site states: “The $100-billion scheme is an important aspect of the negotiations; guaranteeing developing countries that developed countries will uphold this commitment is essential in order to build the confidence needed to negotiate an agreement in Paris. As the holders of the Conference of the Parties presidency, France and Peru have, therefore, commissioned a report from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, in collaboration with the think-tank CPI, to assess the situation, taking into account efforts made this year regarding methods of recording the public and private funds that have already been mobilised, especially efforts made by . . .”

And if you can tease any sense from the above, then you are a better man than I am, Gunga Din

One thing that is even more depressing is the outright lies that are being spread around by US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) and South Africa’s Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR). Nasa has come to the conclusion that, where historical records of temperatures show a trend that is flat, the trend should actually be upwards to allow for Urban Heat Island Effect. They say that (and the CSIR agrees) back in the day, the area surrounding the point of measurement was not as hot as it is now. But now we have this Urban Heat Island Effect, so the modern yearly temperatures are artificially higher than they were before. So, instead of pushing the modern temperatures up, we push the earlier temperatures down and we end up with proof that temperatures are increasing. (See raw data at http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/station_data_v2/ – GHCN V3 and adjusted data at http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/station_data/ and select ‘GHCN’ under dataset. Thanks to Paul Homewood for the information.

Most spectacularly, the station at Calvinia, in South Africa, with a population of 9 000, is supposed to have Urban Heat Island Effect. What rubbish. But we shall see. One thing I predict as a certainty is that all the African nations will claim that they have had no part in global warming – they certainly were not industrialised 50 years ago. They will say it is the fault of the First World. And I am certain they will say, give us the hundred-billion dollars.