Tomorrow we’ll dive back into the rapids and face the increasingly crazed wingnut masses once again, but tonight it’s time for something beautiful.

Dominionist Senator and hardcore climate change denier James Inhofe went to the Copenhagen climate summit to subvert the Obama administration’s policies, but nobody was interested.

COPENHAGEN — Sen. Jim Inhofe flew across the Atlantic and — on little sleep — braved the snow, the cold and the dark to deliver his skeptical message at the international climate conference.

What he found when he got here: a few aides and a single reporter. “I think he’s going to be a little disappointed,” one of his aides remarked. …

But Inhofe’s aides eventually rustled up a group of reporters, and the Oklahoman — wearing black snakeskin cowboy boots — held forth from the top of a flight of stairs in the conference media center. …

A reporter asked: “If there’s a hoax, then who’s putting on this hoax, and what’s the motive?”

“It started in the United Nations,” Inhofe said, “and the ones in the United States who really grab ahold of this is the Hollywood elite.”

One reporter asked Inhofe if he was referring to California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Another reporter — this one from Der Spiegel — told the senator: “You’re ridiculous.”

It was beginning to look like Copenhagen would be a wash, but news is now coming in that a tentative deal has been reached.

Reporting from Copenhagen - Key international leaders have reached a tentative deal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and curb climate change, the Los Angeles Times has learned, after the United States and China agreed to a method for recording developing nations’ pledges to limit emissions and ensuring those pledges are carried out.

Details of the agreement were approved in an evening meeting with President Obama, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, sources said.

Obama has scheduled a press conference in the host Bella Center to unveil the agreement.

A senior administration official said following the meeting that the parties had reached a “meaningful agreement.”

“It’s not sufficient to combat the threat of climate change but its an important first step,” the official said.

If the Guardian is upset with President Obama’s speech in Copenhagen, he must have done something right: Barack Obama’s speech disappoints and fuels frustration at Copenhagen.

The “frustration” they feel comes from the fact that Obama didn’t cave in, didn’t give away the store, refused to compromise US sovereignty, and is sticking to his guns about other nations doing their part to stop climate change.

In other words, the Guardian is frustrated and angry because Obama is the President of the United States, not President of the World.

Here’s the full text of Obama’s speech.

The leader of the neo-Nazi British National Party is a climate change “skeptic.”

The leader of the British National Party and MEP is at the international summit as a representative of the European Parliament.

But he said global warming was a “hoax” designed to impose tax increases on the citizens of the world through putting up the price of energy. He said world leaders and advocates of action on climate change such as Al Gore are “mass murderers” by supporting biofuels.

He said land for growing food is being taken to grow fuels for crops and it will cause starvation greater than the famines caused by Russian dictator Stalin during the 1930s and Chairman Mao in the 1950s.

“It is a crime against humanity which in future will be seen as an enormous man-made famine. Under Stalin 20 million people died, under Chairman Mao 30 million died. This will be the third and the greatest famine of the modern era and I regard that as a crime.”

Fascists and Islamic supremacists agree — global warming is a hoax.

Someone at the United Nations thought it would be a great idea for us to hear what thugs, dictators, and religious fanatics think about global warming.

COPENHAGEN –Iranian Prime Minister Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe plan to address negotiators at international climate talks in Copenhagen next week. 

This, of course, disproves the Great Climate Change Hoax. Come on, people, it’s another piece of the puzzle! CRU emails, Ahmadinejad, Chavez … don’t you see the New World Order conspiracy?

_{Yes, that’s sarcasm, in case you had any doubt.}

I seem to remember the right wing getting very, very upset when people like Nancy Pelosi and John Kerry went overseas to subvert the policies of the Bush administration.

So how is this different? Republicans Plan to Form Counter-Delegation at Climate Conference.

And of course, they’re going to continue hyping the phony “Climategate” scandal for all it’s worth.

A GOP counter-delegation is forming to undermine the Obama administration’s work on an international climate change agreement in Copenhagen, warning that the president is poised to make commitments he can’t keep and drawing heightened attention to controversial leaked e-mails.

Who’s leading this “counter-delegation?” Who else? The head GOP climate change denier and Dominionist religious fanatic member of The Family, doing the bidding of his energy industry sponsors, as usual: James Inhofe.

Young environmentalists crash a climate change denier’s conference in Copenhagen organized by industry front group Americans for Prosperity, and Lord High Denier Christopher Monckton (fresh from his appearance on the bat guano crazy Alex Jones conspiracy radio show) goes ballistic, calling them “Hitler youth:”

A senior member of the IPCC is charging that Russia mounted a sophisticated operation to discredit the Copenhagen climate change summit: Was Russian secret service behind leak of climate-change emails?

The news that a leaked set of emails appeared to show senior climate scientists had manipulated data was shocking enough. Now the story has become more remarkable still.

The computer hack, said a senior member of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change, was not an amateur job, but a highly sophisticated, politically motivated operation. And others went further. The guiding hand behind the leaks, the allegation went, was that of the Russian secret services.

The leaked emails, which claimed to provide evidence that the unit’s head, Professor Phil Jones, colluded with colleagues to manipulate data and hide “unhelpful” research from critics of climate change science, were originally posted on a server in the Siberian city of Tomsk, at a firm called Tomcity, an internet security business.

The FSB security services, descendants of the KGB, are believed to invest significant resources in hackers, and the Tomsk office has a record of issuing statements congratulating local students on hacks aimed at anti-Russian voices, deeming them “an expression of their position as citizens, and one worthy of respect”. The Kremlin has also been accused of running co-ordinated cyber attacks against websites in neighbouring countries such as Estonia, with which the Kremlin has frosty relations, although the allegations were never proved.

“It’s very common for hackers in Russia to be paid for their services,” Professor Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, the vice chairman of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change, said in Copenhagen at the weekend. “It’s a carefully made selection of emails and documents that’s not random. This is 13 years of data, and it’s not a job of amateurs.”

I don’t know if Russia was responsible, but this has never looked like a simple case of computerized vandalism to me. After looking through the stolen data, it’s very clear that whoever did it spent a lot of time picking out the bits that would look the most incriminating, specifically to sabotage the Copenhagen summit.

Twenty-six climatologists from around the world have released a new report in advance of the Copenhagen climate summit titled The Copenhagen Diagnosis, with startling findings based on the latest peer-reviewed research, suggesting that sea levels are rising much faster than even the IPCC has projected.

The executive summary of the report is more than a little alarming:

Surging greenhouse gas emissions: Global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels in 2008 were nearly 40% higher than those in 1990. Even if global emission rates are stabilized at present –day levels, just 20 more years of emissions would give a 25% probability that warming exceeds 2^oC. Even with zero emissions after 2030. Every year of delayed action increase the chances of exceeding 2^oC warming.

Recent global temperatures demonstrate human-based warming: Over the past 25 years temperatures have increased at a rate of 0.190C per decade, in every good agreement with predictions based on greenhouse gas increases. Even over the past ten years, despite a decrease in solar forcing, the trend continues to be one of warming. Natural, short- term fluctuations are occurring as usual but there have been no significant changes in the underlying warming trend.

Acceleration of melting of ice-sheets, glaciers and ice-caps: A wide array of satellite and ice measurements now demonstrate beyond doubt that both the Greenland and Antarctic ice-sheets are losing mass at an increasing rate. Melting of glaciers and ice-caps in other parts of the world has also accelerated since 1990.

Rapid Arctic sea-ice decline: Summer-time melting of Arctic sea-ice has accelerated far beyond the expectations of climate models. This area of sea-ice melt during 2007-2009 was about 40% greater than the average prediction from IPCC AR4 climate models.

Current sea-level rise underestimates: Satellites show great global average sea-level rise (3.4 mm/yr over the past 15 years) to be 80% above past IPCC predictions. This acceleration in sea-level rise is consistent with a doubling in contribution from melting of glaciers, ice caps and the Greenland and West-Antarctic ice-sheets.

Sea-level prediction revised: By 2100, global sea-level is likely to rise at least twice as much as projected by Working Group 1 of the IPCC AR4, for unmitigated emissions it may well exceed 1 meter. The upper limit has been estimated as – 2 meters sea-level rise by 2100. Sea-level will continue to rise for centuries after global temperature have been stabilized and several meters of sea level rise must be expected over the next few centuries.

Delay in action risks irreversible damage: Several vulnerable elements in the climate system (e.g. continental ice-sheets. Amazon rainforest, West African monsoon and others) could be pushed towards abrupt or irreversible change if warming continues in a business-as-usual way throughout this century. The risk of transgressing critical thresholds (“tipping points”) increase strongly with ongoing climate change. Thus waiting for higher levels of scientific certainty could mean that some tipping points will be crossed before they are recognized.

The turning point must come soon: If global warming is to be limited to a maximum of 2^oC above pre-industrial values, global emissions need to peak between 2015 and 2020 and then decline rapidly. To stabilize climate, a decarbonized global society – with near-zero emissions of CO₂ and other long-lived greenhouse gases – need to be reached well within this century. More specifically, the average annual per-capita emissions will have to shrink to well under 1 metric ton CO₂ by 2050. This is 80-90% below the per-capita emissions in developed nations in 2000.