When the Guardian, that champion of everything “green” says it, you know it was a failure.
Excerpt:
The UN climate summit reached a weak outline of a global agreement last night in Copenhagen, falling far short of what Britain and many poor countries were seeking and leaving months of tough negotiations to come.
After eight draft texts and all-day talks between 115 world leaders, it was left to Barack Obama and Wen Jiabao, the Chinese premier, to broker a political agreement. The so-called Copenhagen accord “recognises” the scientific case for keeping temperature rises to no more than 2C but did not contain commitments to emissions reductions to achieve that goal.
American officials spun the deal as a “meaningful agreement”, but even Obama said: “This progress is not enough.”
“We have come a long way, but we have much further to go,” he added.
The deal was brokered between China, South Africa, India, Brazil and the US, but late last night it was still unclear whether it would be adopted by all 192 countries in the full plenary session.
The agreement aims to provide $30bn in funding for poor countries to adapt to climate change from next year to 2012, and $100bn a year after 2020.
But it disappointed African and other vulnerable countries who had been holding out for far deeper emission cuts to hold the global temperature rise to 1.5C this century. As widely expected, all references to 1.5C in previous drafts were removed at the last minute, but more surprisingly, the earlier 2050 goal of reducing global CO2 emissions by 80% was also dropped.
The agreement also set up a forestry deal which is hoped would significantly reduce deforestation in return for cash. It lacked the kind of independent verification of emission reductions by developing countries that the US and others demanded.
Obama hinted that China was to blame for the lack of a substantial deal. In a press conference he condemned the insistence of some countries to look backwards to previous environmental agreements. He said developing countries should be “getting out of that mindset, and moving towards the position where everybody recognises that we all need to move together”.
Read entire story at the Guardian here
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Now compare what the Guardian has written, to what Obama says:
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My summary of the Copenhagen Climate Conference is just a bit less wordy.
Hip! hip!…
Ohhh, I love this photo and headline on the front page of Drudge now:
http://www.drudgereport.com/
+20 million hits per day will be seeing that
So Question.. Who is worse .. Jimmy Carter or Bazza Obamalamadingdong?
All I would say is:
The Guardian Newspaper goes to print before the negotiations would have been over.
Let’s wait 24 hours before making judgements. Because until then we won’t know what decisions have been taken.
Obama states they have agreed to cap the temperature rise to 2C. How? Have I missed somehting? Did some one invent a climate control machine? Is it based on HAARP (High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program) which has been claimed to have an ability to control at least the weather? It’s certainly nothing to do with cutting CO2 emissions for two reasons. One, the scientific data that has been used by the IPCC to support their claims have all been proven to be false. Two, no one has stated how we are going to make this 2C cap work by setting emission reduction targets so ridiculously low, which by themselves will make absolutely no difference to the climate. Even the AGW believers have stated this.
I bet there’s some diappointed executives at Mercedes-Benz, Sukhoi & MiL. No money heading into the despots’ pockets for them to spend on their type of executive toys!
What we are seeing is the destruction and discrediting of the environmental movement by people who supposedly are its most fanatical supporters.
We have seen hysteria about CO2 lead to the wilful ignoring of much more pressing environmental concerns, we’ve seen the movement urging the conversion of food crop lands to the growing of gasoline, thus increasing both air pollution, traffic deaths and food prices, hence hunger. We’ve seen collusion with the windmill lobby for the large scale industrial development of the few protected wild areas we have left in the name of conservation. Its total nonsense.
Its time to close the thing down and reinvent it. We do need an environmental movement, its just that we need one which is devoted to sensible goals that will improve the environment, not a bunch of hysterics who think its a real contribution to fly over to Denmark and start attacking the police. This is how to cool the planet? This reduces CO2? Even if reducing CO2 would make the slightest difference?
Give me a break!
It is not over yet; even that deal is not going down well:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/copenhagen-climate-change-confe/6842789/Copenhagen-climate-summit-confusion-as-historic-deal-descends-into-chaos.html
Obama did the clever thing and ran away.
Lord Monckton’s take is that the BRIC countries have NOT agreed to any emission reductions except if the West pays, and if the West doesn’t pay – well, they may or may not reduce emissions as they see fit. And if they don’t reduce emissions, there may not be any tariffs imposed by countries that do reduce emissions on countries that don’t. Thank you, come again.
OT, but related to CO2 emissions, I saw this reported recently on SBS here in Aus.
Largest recorded under-sea volcanic erruption:
http://www.itwire.com/content/view/30166/1066/
Add to this the volcano named “Beautiful” in the Phillipines about to blow it’s top:
http://www.smh.com.au/world/volcano-called-beautiful-turns-very-ugly-20091217-kzgz.html
I wonder how our “leaders” will off-set these emissions and prevent climate change. With more international love-ins, group-think sessions, taxes and documents?
This is certainly change that I can believe in. NONE
I am happy to hear that nationalistic politics and economics got in the way of climate politics and economics.
They are still at it.
‘Who the God’s destroy they first make mad’. After several decades of manipulation, lies, group think, and worse, the inevitable result was bound to be chaos at Copenhagen. I long for us to get back to really caring for the planet (its lakes, rivers, forests, oceans and glorious varieties of species) and its people, instead of trying to tax carbon and establish a low CO2 based new world political order. Fortunately God’s mercy exceeds the stupidity and rapacity of the emerging international poltical elite.
Yesterday morning after reading an article in the guardian about Copenhagen,
I noticed quite a few skeptic comments ridiculing the AGW nonsense, some of these comments received up to 80 “recommendations” whilst alarmist comments received far less.
By late afternoon all skeptic comments had been “removed by a moderator”.
Sean Peake (00:04:55):
I couldn’t agree with you more. They’ll be back, even worse’n Arnie.
We may feel we had some good luck with Climategate and the ignored Russkie climate stations surfacing at just the right time. But were these even significant factors to those bozos? Or more: we may think those revelations were the unquestionable game-changers, but does your next door neighbour agree? Does he/she even know about them?
We had a victory (I think). But this is not the time to get stinkin’ drunk in wild celebration. This is the time to force the momentum (if we truly have any, and let’s suppose we do) and work even harder.
To our more excitable allies (and I am one of you, at times): perhaps now we should tone down our rhetoric to some more thoughtful and sober level. That can be very persuasive. Instead of louder, let’s try for more. Much more. We all have lots of neighbours, as yet untouched, who might respond to clear, non-threatening debate.
Now here’s a breakthrough the BBC giving sceptics a voice. True the questions posed are each countered by an AGW statement, and not all the questions are what this particular sceptic would have posed. Now we if we can get them to put the questions the other way around, the sceptics could counter their argument. The have at last conceded that CO2 rises after temperature (something that was denied on the Royal Society web site a year ago), but the AGW response that this time temperature is following CO2 goes unchallenged. They fail to put the sceptic view that there is no relationship in the geological records other than CO2 rising after temperature to indicate that temperature and CO2 levels are in any way related.
I guess it’s a start even if it’s a blatant attempt to rebuke the sceptics.
I have been reading comments from CAGW NGO-activists and they think this is the end of the world, a bigger failure than what they could have imagined in their worst nightmares. A step back from Kyoto with no binding agreements, no commitments, nothing, just promises. But the promises we already had before Copenhagen. So this is NOTHING, zero, nilch, nadda. This summit was a great victory for the skeptic side. It gives time, another 3 years at least to make the scientific case to the “world leaders” before any drastic sums of climate money start changing hands. And if “mother nature” lends us a helping hand with cooling temperatures, it can be done. This was the beginning of the end for climate alarmism.
John Page (11:01:57):
Yes, it’s about money. But even more, it’s about power. The two are not exactly the same.
The science, and the logic of the science, are all we have to fight with. It might be enough. But I would welcome any thoughts you and Sean Peake may have on other weaponry, strategy, tactics. It’s time to think hard and deep, and if possible present our own people with a strong plan.
Remember this?
Brown: “50 days to save world”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8313672.stm
“PM warns of climate “catastrophe”
The UK faces a “catastrophe” of floods, droughts and killer heatwaves if world leaders fail to agree a deal on climate change, the prime minister has warned.
Gordon Brown said negotiators had 50 days to save the world from global warming and break the “impasse”.
He told the Major Economies Forum in London, which brings together 17 of the world’s biggest greenhouse gas-emitting countries, there was “no plan B”.”
…He said that 62 days ago.
And there was a “plan B”, which he was embarrassing himself trying to promote at Copenhagen, which was the original plan but excluded China. He was running around attempting this last-minute deal, but by then the gathering was already breaking up, and the Japanese were on their way home.
And they wonder why we don’t believe them, anymore.
From weather is not climate department:
Frankfurt/Germany has it’s coldest Dec 19th today (data since 1949),
last minimum record for today is -7.10 °C from 1963-12-19.
Currently, 11:30 CEST here, it’s: – 12.00 °C.
…and now after an all night session, the Copenhagen “Deal” has been officially
“noted”:
http://apnews.excite.com/article/20091219/D9CMAJU80.html
Just before the “Deal” was announced, there was a fast shuffle, the deck was
stacked, and calling for the ante froze out the little nations.
The politics seems a lot like the science in this “Deal of the Decade”.
Manhattan island & Washington D.C. area both under official “blizzard” warnings.
Copenhagen marks the high water mark of AGW. Thank goodness we’ve got passed it without any legally binding treaty to try to rearrange the entire global economy. There will not be another conference for a number of years, by which time the world may well have cooled a bit more, the reality of what Climategate means with regards to the science will be self evident. Next time round (and there will be a next time, too many careers are at stake) there will be many more dissenting voices.
Thank God the turkeys didn’t vote for Christmas!
savethesharks (19:36:19) :
From the Guardian:
“But he [Obama] said he would not be staying for the final vote because of weather constraints in Washington.”
From the DC NWS Broadcast:
… Record breaking December snowfall for Baltimore-Washington
metropolitan areas bringing hazardous winter weather to the region
overnight and Saturday
Is this climate change? Then it must be due to excess carbon emissions. Hey! Heads I win, tails you lose.
michel (01:48:05) “We’ve seen collusion with the windmill lobby for the large scale industrial development of the few protected wild areas we have left in the name of conservation.”
This makes me irate. Do you have any related links?
Shameful. A lot of corrupt leaders and their cronies probably spent days before the conference setting up Swiss bank accounts in anticipation of getting billions and now they have to return empty handed. And it is Christmas. What are they going to tell all those relatives that were promised expensive cars, holidays and lots of loot.