Gerald Warner: Finally, the great climate change lie begins to unravel

COPENHAGEN Accord? Accordion, more like – a concertinaed agreement with carbon emissions restrictions unspecified, no legal sanctions and no international consensus. Altogether, a very satisfactory fiasco. But what better venue to devise a climate Danegeld than Copenhagen? Western taxpayers are to be mugged for $30bn over three years, then for $100bn in 2020 (we shall see about that).

Hans Christian Andersen was outclassed in his home town last week, in the fabrication of fairy tales. The Brothers Grim – Al Gore and Rajendra Pachauri – are possessed of imaginations so rich as to dwarf the inventive powers of conventional storytellers. "Once upon a time," Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change chairman Pachauri opened the proceedings by recycling all the much-loved, if long discredited, bedtime favourites.

Up it came, like the words of Widow Twanky's song at the climax of the pantomime – the notorious CRU East Anglia graph, the tortuous fabrication of which is now familiar worldwide, thanks to leaked e-mails and computer codes. There is not another room in the world where that tired imposture would not have provoked belly laughs; but neither is there one where Robert Mugabe would have received an ovation or "Two-Jags" Prescott been hailed as a crusader against carbon emissions.

Pachauri described his personal experience of sea-level rise in Bangladesh, which is curious since sea level in Bangladesh has fallen slightly, so that an extra 70,000 sq km of land surface is now exposed compared with 1980, as world expert Dr Nils-Axel Morner has described. When global warming zealots seek to discredit any sceptical commentator, they invariably sneer: "But he's not a scientist." Apparently the post of IPCC chairman is exempt from that stricture: Rajendra Pachauri is a railway engineer. The world's boiler is being damped down by the Fat Controller.

Carbon trading – Cecil Rhodes would have loved it. Rheumy-eyed retired sjambok-wielders thought the days when members of the pallid-skinned races could support a luxurious lifestyle by working Africans to death were gone for good. They reckoned without the invention of the carbon market, today's smarter, more profitable version of the slave trade. Al Gore could tell you that what Copenhagen was all about was increasing the price of carbon from $12 to $50 a tonne.

Last week, the wheels finally came off the global warming scam. In an ominous development for inventive "scientists", the US department of energy issued a Litigation Hold Notice, ordering the preservation of all e-mails, correspondence and even handwritten notes relating to "global warming, the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England, and/or climate change science". The lawyers are coming for the climate research manipulators, who have received millions of dollars of American money. Uncle Sam takes that sort of thing seriously: expect Congressional hearings and Grand Juries.

The shock of this move was still reverberating when the Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis made grave allegations against the British Met Office's Hadley Centre for Climate Change. It claimed Hadley had cherry-picked just 25 per cent of the data supplied by Russia, discarding the rest. None of the rejected material showed global warming; but urban meteorological stations did, because of the energy generated by cities. On Friday, opinion polls in the United States showed two-thirds of Americans do not believe in man-made global warming.

Barack Obama had no mandate at Copenhagen; Congress would have torn up any costly commitment he might have made; and in his negotiations with Chinese premier Wen Jiabao, the man who owns America, he had all the leverage of a debtor confronting his bank manager when he is into him for $800bn.

The distraught smellies outside the conference saving the health authorities an unpleasant chore by shaving their heads said it all. The "historic" deal was no deal at all. Now the tide has turned. By 2010, the pointy heads in America who have been crawling all over the Climategate computer data will be ready to release the decoded facts to the world.

The skids are under the climate scam: it is a tripartite project to enrich carbon speculators, enlarge state power and rob taxpayers. Time to take the offensive. Copenhagen was the high water mark of the manipulative alarmists; 2010 will be the year this lie is unravelled, its perpetrators are unmasked and complicit politicians are punished.