The COP15 balloon appears to have lost all it’s air. Nobody’s signing up.
Excerpts from reports in the Guardian and the Financial Times
From the Guardian
The UN has dropped the 31 January deadline by which time all countries were expected to officially state their emission reduction targets or list the actions they planned to take to counter climate change.
Yvo de Boer, UN climate change chief, today changed the original date set at last month’s fractious Copenhagen climate summit, saying that it was now a “soft” deadline, which countries could sign up to when they chose. “I do not expect everyone to meet the deadline. Countries are not being asked if they want to adhere… but to indicate if they want to be associated [with the Copenhagen accord].
The timetable to reach a global deal to tackle climate change lay in tatters on Wednesday after the UN waived the first deadline of the process laid out at last month’s fractious Copenhagen summit.
From the Financial Times:
UN abandons climate change deadline
Nations agreed then to declare their emissions reduction targets by the end of this month. Developed countries would state their intended cuts by 2020: developing countries would outline how they would curb emissions growth.
…
Countries pushing for a new legally binding treaty on climate change will be disappointed, as The waiving of the deadline sets a bad precedent for efforts to finalise a deal this year. The next scheduled meeting is not until late May, in Germany, with another in late November, in Mexico but many officials say more will be needed.
…
The result of Tuesday’s Massachusetts senatorial election, which took away Barack Obama’s super-majority in the Senate, is likely to push climate change further down the US agenda. It was the latest in a series of setbacks that have caused efforts to push a cap-and-trade bill through the Senate to grind to a halt, making it harder for the White House to participate meaningfully in global climate negotiations.
Instead, the administration has been pressing ahead with steps to limit the US’s carbon emissions through regulation. The Environmental Protection Agency has unveiled new draft rules that would sharply tighten regulations on smog-building pollutants, or ground-level ozone, and has cracked down on greenhouse gas emissions by ruling that carbon dioxide and five other gases pose a danger to health.
h/t’s to WUWT readers Thomas Chisolm and Bruce Foutch
The Copenhagen accord deadline, for an unworkable solution to an imaginary problem that only makes sense in some fantasy world somewhere, has gone soft.
So to restore the fantasy and make the deadline hard again, take the blue pill.
(Copenhagen, The Matrix, and pharmaceuticals all coming together; one of the many interconnects that just keep “popping up” to persuade me that true randomness does not exist in this reality, everything is connected.)
Doug (22:34:34) :
“I’m willing to bet this push by the EPA to classify CO2 as a “pollutant” will further damage the Democrats in the eyes of independent voters. How the administration back tracks and extricates itself from this wrong turn will be fascinating to watch.”
Heck Brown’s election by the Peoples Republic of Taxachusetts show even the more sane democrats are waking up. The Democratic party has been a trojan horse for a long time, for example the 1913 Federal reserve Act was sponsored by a democrat. I wonder how many long time democratic Congress critters will lose their seats in November.
Michael (23:22:29) :
“NYT getting a little huffy about the COP15 failure. No carbon(CO2) tax or sunspots for you NYT.
“I don’t think that any political development in the United States means turning back nine years of political development on the climate change agenda,” de Boer said. “The change of one state from one party to another is not going to cause a landslide in the politics of the United States on the question of climate change.””
deBoer has absolutely no knowledge of Massachusetts. That state was so far down the socialist path over 20 years ago that a friend, a card carrying Communist – I kid you not, had to register as a republican in the city of Cambridge so there were enough “republicans” to work the polls and voting could take place. The state is not just democratic it is solidly socialist with a large communist population. You have to live there to really understand just how far to the left it really is.
The fact that a republican actually won is mind blowing.
E.M.Smith (23:38:21) :
Why Cap & Trade will fail, and why the USA will hand nothing to other countrys for “climate debt”:…..
Very well put.
Paul Craig Roberts former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury put it this way:
“I am amazed that the US government, in the midst of the worst financial crises ever, is content for short-selling to drive down the asset prices that the government is trying to support….The bald fact is that the combination of ignorance, negligence, and ideology that permitted the crisis to happen still prevails and is blocking any remedy. Either the people in power in Washington and the financial community are total dimwits or they are manipulating an opportunity to redistribute wealth from taxpayers, equity owners and pension funds to the financial sector.” http://www.countercurrents.org/roberts250209.htm
Stewart Dougherty, a specialist in inferential analysis, says it in one sentence. “It is now “statistically impossible for the United States to pay its obligations”. http://www.silverbearcafe.com/private/08.09/metastasis.html
The USA has been bankrupted by Congress and they are just trying to suck the last of our money from us. Hopefully China will not invade, or maybe that is why Obama has so many US troops half a world away….Time to start firing bureaucrats and Congress critters.
oxonmoron (00:05:03) :
Can someone from the US answer this question? Who funds the EPA? I mean if the EPA seriously goes against the wishes of congress, could congress terminate EPA’s funding? Interesting though.
The USA Federal government is broken up into three co-equal branches
– Congress (Legislative branch, consisting of the Senate and the House of Representitives)
– President (Executive branch, currently Obama)
– Supreme Court (Judaical branch, appointed (for life) by the President and confirmed by the Senate)
All of the agencies and departments, including EPA, are under the Executive branch. The president appoints the Agency heads and the Senate approves them.
Given that the executive branch and Congress are in the control of the same party it is currently unlikely that EPA is going against the wishes of the majority of the Congress. This doesn’t mean that the President and Congress aren’t both going against the wishes of the American people. Elections in November; stay tuned.
Congress has to pass a budget and yes, EPA could be stripped of funding by the Congress. The President could veto the bill at which point there is a lot of finger pointing until a compromise is worked out.
Mike Ramsey
oxonmoron (00:05:03) :
Can someone from the US answer this question? Who funds the EPA? I mean if the EPA seriously goes against the wishes of congress, could congress terminate EPA’s funding? Interesting though.
Actually I would like to see the whole department killed and let the states deal with the pollution problem. Now we have the feds AND the states. And yes Congress has to vote to fund each department.
nigel jones (08:50:41)
I live in the UK and I know there is no choice at the moment [apart from UKIP!]. I intend to email the leader of the party I usually support urging a rethink with measured arguments [Not in the Lord Monckton/Piers Corbyn way! They really do need some PR training to tone down their abrasive style!].
The Tories may switch if they see votes in it and the AGW case continues to be publically weakened. I think a BBC survey last November suggested over 50% of the UK were ‘non-believers’ in AGW, and that was before the recent weather. The main question is whether being anti-AGW is a vote LOSER.
I did think of standing as a candidate in my constituency on a purely anti-AGW platform, just to give a choice, but I am not sure about the costs or even how to go about it!
I was thinking of the Liberal party in Australia, and the Republicans in the US. I really did not want this subject to be a political one but evidence and common sense does not seem to be swaying the minds of those in power, so we have to get rid of them.
I am still intrigued that it was the Murdoch press which broke ‘Glaciergate’, on three continents! He is a US citizen for business reasons, he has a large UK business, and is Australian by birth, so if he believes AGW policies are harmful to those countries he may swing the might of his empire against it. It would be a very easy target and would be likely sell to sell newspapers [he is a businessman!]. People must be getting fed up being told they must make more and more sacrifices to save the world, if someone comes along and says ‘No you don’t, it’s a fraud, here’s how’ it’s going to sell well!
Andrew P (00:25:11) :
I am not sure how we in Scotland compare per capita, but the debt situation in the USA is truly staggering – http://www.usdebtclock.org/ – if I was a US citizen I would be very worried indeed, as you will soon be struggling to pay back the interest, let alone the capital. And this debt disaster stems from the Bush era, though Obama doesn’t appear to concerned about it either….”
The blame goes all the way back to 1913 and the Federal Reserve Act when Congress gave the EUROPEAN Central bankers (Paul Warburg) control of the US economy and money supply.
It was Bill Clinton who wrecked the economy beyond repair on November 2 ,1999 with the repeal of Glass-Stegall which tore down the wall between investment banks and S&Ls. Barney Frank (D-Mass) also has his fingerprints all over the mess with the passage of the Community Reinvestment Act which required lenders to make risky loans to low-income minorities to purchase housing. Clinton also ratified the World Trade Organization and exported US jobs and manufacturing overseas replacing them with cheap tariff-free imported goods. The USA had less manufacturing jobs in 2005 than it did in 1970 so we as a country stopped creating wealth.
Or you can go further back
“Of mergers and acquisitions each costing $1 million or more, there were just 10 in 1970; in 1980, there were 94; in 1986, there were 346. A third of such deals in the 1980’s were hostile. The 1980’s also saw a wave of giant leveraged buyouts. Mergers, acquisitions and L.B.O.’s, which had accounted for less than 5 percent of the profits of Wall Street brokerage houses in 1978, ballooned into an estimated 50 percent of profits by 1988… THROUGH ALL THIS, THE HISTORIC RELATIONSHIP between product and paper has been turned upside down. Investment bankers no longer think of themselves as working for the corporations with which they do business. These days, corporations seem to exist for the investment bankers…. In fact, investment banks are replacing the publicly held industrial corporations as the largest and most powerful economic institutions in America…. THERE ARE SIGNS THAT A VICIOUS spiral has begun, as each corporate player seeks to improve its standard of living at the expense of another’s.
Corporate raiders transfer to themselves, and other shareholders, part of the income of employees by forcing the latter to agree to lower wages.” January 29, 1989 http://www.nytimes.com/1989/01/29/magazine/leveraged-buyouts-american-pays-the-price.html?sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all New York Times
“The Grace Commission report notes that 100% of personal income tax goes to pay interest on the national debt, the lion’s share of which goes to the banking cartel that we know as the Federal Reserve.” http://www.bloggernews.net/17032
The Democrats and the Republicans are in bed with the central bankers just like the politicians in Europe. The name of the game is to tax the peasants to the point of revolt and hope you do not have to deal with madame guillotine. Since the powers behind the politicians are largely unknown they really do not care if the peasants revolt and take out some of the politicians, there are always more greedy fools like Al Gore around.
“John Sherman, quotes about Rothschild:
The few who could understand the system will either be so interested in its profits, or so dependent on its favours, that there will be no opposition from that class, while on the other hand, the great body of the people mentally incapable of comprehending the tremendous advantage that capital derives from the system, will bear its burdens without complaint, and perhaps without even suspecting that the system is inimical to their interests.” http://quotes.liberty-tree.ca/quotes_about/rothschild
Sharon (08:22:29) :
“…If healthcare reform, a much more publicized and important issue, is now apparently DOA for this Congress, Cap’n Trade (yo-ho-ho and a bottle o’ AGW Kool-Aid) has just fallen way farther down the priorities list, if not off the gang-plank altogether.”
The last economic suicide bill of the democrats is Waxman’s “Food Safety Enhancement Act” or the corporate food supply take over bill. I hope we can kill that one too.
This article gives the technical details of why this is such a bad bill. The Festering Fraud Behind Food Safety Reform. by Nicole Johnson: http://www.foodsafetynews.com/contributors/nicole-johnson/
rbateman. Ya lost me. I am one to follow the easily observed trail where it leads, not make lofty theories about the cosmos. What made today warm? And what made that happen? And where did that then come from? Just keep working backwards. Repeat. Day after day. Year after year. Decade after decade. Do this often enough, store the data, and weather variations as well as trends and patterns begin to form from which statistical probability statements can be made (and are made): given a set of atmospheric and oceanic conditions, weather will be generally “thus” till such a time as these conditions change.
In that context, the Sun is a steady state entity for the purposes of talking about the huge up and down swings of our global climate systems. The Earth is the source of the large changes in weather patterns because the mechanism is there and is verifiable. Find an equally strong verifiable mechanism emanating from the Sun and I will contemplate your opposing description. Otherwise your post was just a bunch of ill-explained “out there” theories that cannot be used with any kind of observable verification to explain the weather patterns we have had over the past 200 or so years.
I guess I like my science cooked up meat and potatoes style.
My post above can be expanded on by visiting the following website. I prefer statistical models over the dynamical models, and indeed, the dynamical models are being measured against what are considered the gold standard statistical models for weather and climate forecasting.
http://iri.columbia.edu/climate/ENSO/currentinfo/SST_table.html
“Dario (06:19:01) :
Here in Italy, we are still paying a fuel tax lasting from the Ethiopian war in 1935 (1-9-3-5 !!!) and antoher one after a 1951 catastrophic flooding, as well as a 1968 earthquake in Sicily and so on….”
Well, Italy did invade Ethiopia, and Italians did steal many cultural, religeous and historical artifacts from places like Axum (Ok, the largest Steele was returned in 2005 thanks to a Russian transport), so I don’t have a problem with that IMHO.
The sun’s output is not steady state. In all forms of energy output it is variable. The amount of variability is well now measured. However the sun’s effect on the earth’s weather and climate is in question and not settled science. Many of those in the study of the sun claim that there is not enough variability to explain the changes in earth climate. That is science. It is not settled yet.
Pamela Gray (17:44:00) :
The point is to get people to look for themselves, and stop allowing agendas to spoon-feed them. There is a lot both terrestrial and extra-terrestrial to look at and think about. ‘It’s the sun, stupid’ is a very good way to start the process of getting people out of thier comfort zone that says ‘science is just too hard for me’. Immediately, one thinks of ‘It’s the economy stupid’, and people begin to understand. They remember the ‘you can’t possibly understand’ excuse that was being peddled by the fallen financial wizards.
So it is with AGW’s proprietary and secret formulas.
‘It’s the Sun, stupid’ tells ordinary folks to dig in, they have been lying to you.
But, having said all that, if you can think of a better way to get people to dig in for themselves in a short, easy to remember phrase, let’s roll it.
@ur momisugly Pamela Gray (06:46:20) :
In all this yee-hawing I am reading in the threads, that old worn out “It’s the Sun stupid” mentality is creeping in again. “By gum we don’t know how she does it but I kin tell its that thar Sun ‘cuz when she go down I git right cool!”
People. let’s not go there, k?
I’ll go wherever I want, and I won’t be dictated to by scientifically illiterate fascists, especially not the crooked UNIPCC, and certainly not by people who come out with such stupidly prejudiced statements as you did. K?
NEW ZEALAND signed up last weekend about the 29/1/10.