American Interst;

Overall what came out of Paris was the diplomatic equivalent of a New Year’s resolution to go on a strict weight loss regime involving no more than six chocolate eclairs between meals. But the negotiators did pay some attention to one green concern: The goal has been lowered. Instead of pretending to take actions that will hold the total temperature increase down to 2 degrees Celsius, we will now, in the words of the document, solemnly pretend to “[pursue] efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 °C.” There was, however, no mechanism specified to reach this target; nobody volunteered to adopt more aggressive decarbonization policies to implement this change in the real world. In other words, the world announced that it intends to lose weight on the same six eclair diet as before.

Via Judith Curry, who has more.
Update

So now India and Norway have basically dropped out of the historic climate agreement. https://t.co/ZObV6ODbgK

— Megawatt Herb Drench (@mdrache) December 14, 2015

Climate Audit;

The Canadian government posted up a briefing by “renowned climate scientists Dr. Gregory Flato (Environment Canada) and Mr. Alain Bourque (Ouranos)” to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Cabinet Ministers, and provincial and territorial Premiers – see here.
I was particularly interested in their argument on how the “threat” to Canada manifested itself. How exactly does “science” show that a modest increase of temperature would severely damage Canada?

I won’t spoil it for you with further quoting. (h/t Bad News Quillan)

The Heartland Institute;

Heartland and the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) are leading a delegation of scientists and policy experts to Paris to hold a “counter-conference” during COP-21 called the Day of Examining the Data on Monday, December 7 to demonstrate there is strong and informed opposition to Obama’s plans and to expose the agendas and true costs of the agreement being negotiated there.
We have reserved meeting space and rooms at a hotel in Paris where we will hold a series of media events with scientific experts explaining the compelling evidence that humans are not causing a global warming crisis. We have made our space available to allies being sent by other organizations, such as the Heritage Foundation, CFACT, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and allied groups in Europe. We will live-stream presentations from our meeting space so the whole world will know we are there, even if the mainstream media boycott us. To watch the live-stream — and auto-archived videos of our activity December 1-10 — visit Heartland.org.

I’d settle for a blizzard.

Clean your glasses;

… a new Dartmouth-led study shows that degrading satellite sensors, not soot or dust, are responsible for the apparent decline in reflectivity of inland ice across northern Greenland. The study’s results suggest the ice sheet hasn’t lost as much reflectivity as previously thought, and that black carbon and dust concentrations haven’t increased significantly and are thus not responsible for darkening on the upper ice sheet.

It's come to this: the last, best hope for freedom in the world rests with … Putin. https://t.co/b9RhGyVnVk

— Katewerk (@katewerk) November 2, 2015

Related: U.N. planning court to judge U.S. for ‘climate justice’

Harper’s climate change betrayal.

A rising tide evicts all Democrats;

If we’re seriously worried about flooding from higher sea levels, then we want to make sure that areas that will be flooded in the future won’t be developed now. We want to limit the investment in buildings that will be swamped, and we want to limit the number of people who’ll have to move. And we want to encourage people who live in those areas now to move away in the near future, before they’re flooded.
How do we do that? Well, we could do a lot of things: Limit construction in lower-lying coastal areas, ban rebuilding after hurricane damage, etc. But probably the favorite tool of politicians out to regulate behavior is to tax people for doing things the politicians don’t like. So that’s my proposal: Tax the blue zones. That is, put a large and steeply-increasing tax on property located in areas scientists say are likely to be flooded because of global warming.

2015, the year we were promised an ice free arctic…

(I amuse myself.)