Over the coming days a curiously revealing event will be taking place in Copenhagen. Top of the agenda at a meeting of the Polar Bear Specialist Group (set up under the International Union for the Conservation of Nature/Species Survival Commission) will be the need to produce a suitably scary report on how polar bears are being threatened with extinction by man-made global warming.

This is one of a steady drizzle of events planned to stoke up alarm in the run-up to the UN's major conference on climate change in Copenhagen next December. But one of the world's leading experts on polar bears has been told to stay away from this week's meeting, specifically because his views on global warming do not accord with those of the rest of the group.

Dr Mitchell Taylor has been researching the status and management of polar bears in Canada and around the Arctic Circle for 30 years, as both an academic and a government employee. More than once since 2006 he has made headlines by insisting that polar bear numbers, far from decreasing, are much higher than they were 30 years ago. Of the 19 different bear populations, almost all are increasing or at optimum levels, only two have for local reasons modestly declined.

Dr Taylor agrees that the Arctic has been warming over the last 30 years. But he ascribes this not to rising levels of CO2 – as is dictated by the computer models of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and believed by his PBSG colleagues – but to currents bringing warm water into the Arctic from the Pacific and the effect of winds blowing in from the Bering Sea.

He has also observed, however, how the melting of Arctic ice, supposedly threatening the survival of the bears, has rocketed to the top of the warmists' agenda as their most iconic single cause. The famous photograph of two bears standing forlornly on a melting iceberg was produced thousands of times by Al Gore, the WWF and others as an emblem of how the bears faced extinction – until last year the photographer, Amanda Byrd, revealed that the bears, just off the Alaska coast, were in no danger. Her picture had nothing to do with global warming and was only taken because the wind-sculpted ice they were standing on made such a striking image.

Dr Taylor had obtained funding to attend this week's meeting of the PBSG, but this was voted down by its members because of his views on global warming. The chairman, Dr Andy Derocher, a former university pupil of Dr Taylor's, frankly explained in an email (which I was not sent by Dr Taylor) that his rejection had nothing to do with his undoubted expertise on polar bears: "it was the position you've taken on global warming that brought opposition".

Dr Taylor was told that his views running "counter to human-induced climate change are extremely unhelpful". His signing of the Manhattan Declaration – a statement by 500 scientists that the causes of climate change are not CO2 but natural, such as changes in the radiation of the sun and ocean currents – was "inconsistent with the position taken by the PBSG".

So, as the great Copenhagen bandwagon rolls on, stand by this week for reports along the lines of "scientists say polar bears are threatened with extinction by vanishing Arctic ice". But also check out Anthony Watt's Watts Up With That website for the latest news of what is actually happening in the Arctic. The average temperature at midsummer is still below zero, the latest date that this has happened in 50 years of record-keeping. After last year's recovery from its September 2007 low, this year's ice melt is likely to be substantially less than for some time. The bears are doing fine.

n the 1800s, DuPont’s first century as an industrial concern, it cashed in on the money to be made in explosives. In its second century, the 1900s, DuPont morphed into a money machine in chemistry and energy. In this, its third century, DuPont sees green in a new cash cow, one it projects will take it to unprecedented profitability — sustainable development.

This corporate strategy, explains chairman Chad Holliday, is both principled and fundamental: “DuPont’s sustainability commitments aren’t just good for business — they are our business.”

DuPont’s commitment to sustainability began in 1997 when it decided to abandon its membership in The Global Climate Coalition, a high-powered lobby created by the oil, gas, coal, automobile and chemical companies to counter fears of global warming. Although the coalition had been created in 1989, soon after the first meeting of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the coalition was losing the PR battle. DuPont switched sides and began to lobby for government to stop global warming.

In doing so, DuPont took a page out of its own playbook. In 1980, DuPont had spearheaded the creation of the Alliance for Responsible CFC Policy, a lobby group that would successfully fight off regulation of CFCs, a chemical that many companies manufactured. Then in 1986, with patented alternatives to CFCs in hand, DuPont had a change of heart.

In a move its Alliance partners considered a betrayal, DuPont switched sides, called CFCs a danger to the planet, and lobbied the Reagan Administration to ban CFCs. So successful was DuPont that Ronald Reagan became the world’s first head of state to personally push his government to ban CFCs. DuPont’s efforts culminated in the Montreal Protocol, a treaty Reagan described as “a monumental achievement.”

Others were ambivalent about what had transpired. As put by Mostafa Tolba, the Executive Director of the UN Environment Programme, “The difficulties in negotiating the Montreal Protocol had nothing whatever to do with whether the environment was damaged or not. It was all who was going to gain an edge over who; whether DuPont would have an advantage over the European companies or not.”

The advantage went to DuPont, which soon controlled the rich replacement market for CFCs. Du Pont’s Freon Division Director, Joseph Glass, laid out DuPont’s coup succinctly: “When you have $3-billion of CFCs sold worldwide and 70% of that is about to be regulated out of existence, there is a tremendous market potential.”

DuPont is now keen to duplicate its “monumental achievement” with other regulatory coups in the richest regulatory environment of all — that of global warming. To this end, it helped found the United States Climate Action Partnership (USCAP), a coalition of blue-chip business and environmental groups, to lobby the U.S. government for legislation that will suit their agenda. From DuPont’s point of view, USCAP has been another monumental achievement. Yesterday, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a global warming bill — largely a USCAP product — that represents the largest transfer of wealth from U.S. consumers to corporate interests in history. As DuPont’s Holliday told the committee with evident satisfaction, “we are pleased to see that many of the ideas we have developed are reflected in this bill.”

As well he should be. The mammoth bill’s cap-and-trade system not only gives DuPont and other major emitters a windfall in free emission allowances, but also boosts a host of the technologies that DuPont specializes in. As a cherry on top, DuPont will not only receive subsidies for upgrades and other investments it would have made regardless, it could even receive subsidies for such investments made before the bill was passed.

The bill, though endorsed by environmental groups happy with the grand bargain being made, is not without controversy. Greenpeace opposes the bill on numerous grounds, not least because of its corporate giveaways and because it would spur a new generation of coal and nuclear power plants. Other environmentalists deplore its boost to biofuels, and the effect that carbon offsets can have on the Third World’s environment. But though the bill’s environmental benefits are in doubt, there are no doubts as to its effect on DuPont’s bottom line.

After it helped found USCAP two years ago, DuPont predicted that by 2015 it would be able to grow its annual greenhouse-gas related revenues by at least $2-billion a year, and that its sales of renewable materials that displace fossil fuels would double to $8-billion. If the bill does indeed become law, DuPont’s estimates will look awfully sustainable. As will those of the legions of other corporations whose lobbying has made climate change the world’s largest industry with the world’s largest payoffs for those skilled at gaming the system.