Newsbytes from The GWPF:
UN Climate Summit May Fail If Developed Nations Don’t Deliver, India Warns
For all their efforts to get 200 governments to commit to the toughest possible cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, climate negotiators have all but given up on creating a way to penalise those who fall short. The overwhelming view of member states, says Christiana Figueres, head of the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat, is that any agreement “has to be much more collaborative than punitive” – if it is to happen at all. To critics, the absence of a legal stick to enforce compliance is a deep – if not fatal – flaw in the Paris process, especially after all countries agreed in 2011 that an agreement would have some form of “legal force”. —EurActiv, 12 October 2015
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1) Climate Negotiators Give Up On Enforceable Paris Deal
For all their efforts to get 200 governments to commit to the toughest possible cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, climate negotiators have all but given up on creating a way to penalise those who fall short.
The overwhelming view of member states, says Christiana Figueres, head of the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat, is that any agreement “has to be much more collaborative than punitive” – if it is to happen at all.
“Even if you do have a punitive system, that doesn’t guarantee that it is going to be imposed or would lead to any better action,” Figueres said.
To critics, the absence of a legal stick to enforce compliance is a deep – if not fatal – flaw in the Paris process, especially after all countries agreed in 2011 that an agreement would have some form of “legal force”.
They warn that a deal already built upon sometimes vague promises from member states could end up as a toothless addition to the stack of more than 500 global and regional environmental treaties, while the rise in global temperatures mounts inexorably past a U.N. ceiling of 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit), with the prospect of ever more floods, droughts and heatwaves.
International climate court?
That fear finds its sharpest expression in a proposal from Bolivia’s socialist government for an International Climate Justice Tribunal with powers to penalise countries that break commitments.
Diego Pacheco, Bolivia’s chief negotiator, said anything less would be “dangerous to Mother Earth”.
But the idea is a non-starter with almost every other country going to the Paris talks, from Nov. 30-Dec. 11.
Even the European Union, which has long argued for a strong, legally binding deal, is increasingly talking about a “pledge and review” system under which national commitments would be re-assessed every five years against a goal of halving world emissions by 2050.
Elina Bardram, head of the European Commission delegation, insisted that strong compliance mechanisms were vital. “Weak rules would undermine the whole structure,” she said.
However, many developing nations oppose reviews of their goals, wanting oversight to be limited to the rich.
Nick Mabey, chief executive of the E3G think-tank in London, says a Paris deal is likely to be more like international agreements limiting nuclear weapons than accords under the World Trade Organization, which can impose sanctions.
A watchword of nuclear non-proliferation – “trust but verify” – could be the basis, he said.
Yvo de Boer, the United Nations’ former top climate official, said he remembers the moment when he realised that the principle of sanctioning countries for non-compliance was dead.
In 2001, as a senior member of the Dutch delegation, de Boer attended a closed-door meeting of environment ministers in Bonn, Germany, that was designing rules to enforce the U.N.’s 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which obliged about 40 rich nations to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
Empty pact
He recalled being struck by the strength of objections, even from once-supportive countries such as Australia and Japan, to any attempt to punish those who fell short of emissions commitments.
“The agreement was to be legally binding, but it became very clear that a lot of countries didn’t want sanctions,” he said.
Despite the opposition, a sanctions regime was agreed later in 2001. It required any developed country that missed its greenhouse gas targets between 2008 and 2012 to make even deeper cuts in the future.
But even those sanctions were an empty act of bravado by rich nations angered by U.S. President George W. Bush’s decision in March 2001 to stay out of Kyoto, said Jan Pronk, a former Dutch environment minister who chaired the Bonn meeting.
“There was a political feeling that the United States cannot just kill something that is so important internationally,” Pronk recalled. But now that even the flawed Kyoto agreement had expired, he added, “sanctions don’t mean anything any more”.
He noted that Japan, Russia and Canada – which was set to break its pledge – have simply abandoned Kyoto in recent years, without suffering sanctions.
“Kyoto was the high-water mark for the idea of sanctions in climate agreements,” said Alex Hanafi of the U.S. Environmental Defense Fund.
“Race to the top”?
Both China and the United States, the two top carbon emitters crucial to any effective agreement, made clear from the start of the current negotiations they would not agree to any form of international oversight. The U.S. position instead speaks of a collective “race to the top”, in which countries push each other to see who can be the greenest.
Nor do the loose commitments being made by countries lend themselves to easy enforcement. Russia’s pledge, for example, says only that limiting emissions to somewhere between 70 and 75% of 1990 levels by 2030 “might be a long-term indicator”.
All countries agree that that the emissions curbs pledged so far are too small to get the world on track to limit warming to 2 degrees Celsius.
That means a strong mechanism will be needed for ratcheting up pledges after Paris.
Critics say that simply shaming outliers will not ensure compliance and that, unless there are costs for non-compliance, any country can share in the global benefits of reduced temperature rises while leaving the hard work of emissions cuts to others.
But Figueres, the U.N. climate chief, believes that cuts in greenhouse gases can serve countries’ economic self-interests. China, for instance, can improve the health of millions by shifting from coal-fired power plants that cause air pollution.
2) Paris Climate Summit May Fail If Developed Nations Don’t Deliver, India Warns
Press Trust of India, 9 October 2015
Unless there is credible action from the developed nations with regard to the Green Climate Fund, the Paris talks may fail.
Ahead of the crucial climate summit in Paris, India on Friday said developed nations are “historically responsible” for global warming and must do “justice” to the developing countries by delivering on the Green Climate Fund (GCF) promised by them to deal with climate change.
“Green Climate Fund is only talked about (and) not materialised. (The) Developed world has committed itself $100 billion per year by 2020. It has to be paid by the developed world to developing nations,” environment minister Prakash Javadekar told PTI here.
Javadekar said French President Francois Hollande, who will be hosting the Climate Summit in Paris, has indicated that unless there is credible action from the developed nations with regard to implementation of GCF, the Paris talks may fail.
“Therefore, we are saying that unless there is credible action … and even French Francois Hollande (the host of Paris summit) has said if there is no clear progress on Finance, Paris (talks) may fail. … He has warned,” Javadekar said.
The Green Climate Fund was set up under the framework of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 2010 and developed countries had committed to raising $100 billion each year by 2020 to help developing countries deal with climate change.
Further, dismissing any suggestions that India is moving away from its role in protecting interests of poor and vulnerable nations in world summits, the Union minister said India is always at the forefront to ask for climate justice “which has caught up the imagination of the world, because it is a historical responsibility”.
Asked whether the bloc of newly industrialized countries – Brazil, South Africa, India and China, formed to act on climate change, is still relevant in the changing global political scenario, Javadekar replied in affirmative.
“BASIC is relevant,” he said.
“We had a very good meeting last year. I was the minister. India hosted the BASIC meeting. Then, now China is hosting. I am going there. We are part of all groupings plus some additional new friends. We have not walked out of it,” he said as the nations prepare for the Conference of Parties (COP21).
3) What Good Is an Unenforceable Climate Deal?
The American Interest, 12 October 2015
With just a little over a month and a half left to go until the world’s next big climate summit kicks off in Paris, every indication is that we won’t be getting a binding international treaty, much to the chagrin of the green movement. Reuters reports:
For all their efforts to get 200 governments to commit to the toughest possible cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, climate negotiators have all but given up on creating a way to penalize those who fall short. […] Nick Mabey, chief executive of the E3G think-tank in London, says a Paris deal is likely to be more like international agreements limiting nuclear weapons than accords under the World Trade Organization, which can impose sanctions…A watchword of nuclear non-proliferation – “trust but verify” – could be the basis, he said.
This is hardly surprising. Back in May, Christiana Figueres, the UN’s climate chief, told the world that negotiators would be concentrated on hammering out a deal focused on “enabling and facilitating” climate mitigation and adaptation policies, as opposed to (in her words) a “punitive-type” treaty. With one of the most important individuals involved in the push for a Global Climate Treaty essentially admitting defeat months ahead of time, the agreement could be worth less than the paper it will be printed on.
Figueres wasn’t wrong in attempting to deflate expectations this spring. Paris won’t produce a binding agreement and delegates won’t ultimately insist on one, because doing so would alienate important players at the negotiating table, chief among them the United States. It doesn’t seem likely that Congress would ratify any sort of internationally-enforceable deal.
That leaves us with a treaty focused more on “good vibes” than lasting policy changes, and, while that approach may be familiar to many greens, it has to be seen as a setback for a modern environmental movement that has invested so much in this quixotic GCT endeavor. The best-case scenario for Paris is the production of a kind of eco-version of the Kellogg-Briand Pact—a fact that’s long been evident but is just now starting to feel real for greens.
4) Paris Climate Summit ‘Heading For Failure’ Scientists Warn
Rebecca Morelle
The UN climate negotiations are heading for failure and need a major redesign if they are to succeed, scientists say.
The pledges that individual countries are offering ahead of the Paris climate summit in December are too entrenched in self interest instead of being focussed on a common goal.
The researchers say the science of cooperation is being ignored.
Instead, they say the negotiations should focus on a common commitment on the global price of carbon.
This means countries would agree on a uniform charge for carbon pollution, a scheme that would encourage polluters to reduce their emissions.
The comments from researchers at the University of Cambridge, UK, University of Maryland, US, and University of Cologne, in Germany, are published in the journal Nature.
Ahead of December’s United Nations climate meeting, individual countries have submitted their plans for cutting greenhouse gas emissions. These are called Intended Nationally Determined Contributions – or INDCs.
However, the researchers say that this approach will not work.
Prof David MacKay, from the University of Cambridge, who was former chief scientific advisor to Britain’s Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC), said: “The science of cooperation predicts that if all you are doing is naming individual contributions – offers that aren’t coupled to each other – then you’ll end up with a relatively poor outcome.
“We have the history of the Kyoto agreement as an example of this. Initially, the approach was to find a common commitment, but eventually it descended into a patchwork of individual commitments… and that led to very weak commitments and several countries leaving the process.”
The Paris negotiations, he warned, were heading in the same direction.
5) IEA: Southeast Asia’s Fossil Fuel Boom To Last For Decades
International Energy Agency, 8 October 2015
The energy landscape in Southeast Asia continues to shift as rising demand, constrained domestic production and energy security concerns lead to a greater role for coal, a sharp rise in the region’s dependence on oil imports and the reversal of its role as a major gas supplier to international markets.
“As Southeast Asia flourishes, it is moving to the centre of the global energy stage,” IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol said. “Countries in the region now have much in common with IEA members. We must all work together to build more secure and sustainable energy supplies and markets, as platforms for promoting economic development.”
The World Energy Outlook Special Report on Southeast Asia (WEO Special Report) presents a central scenario in which Southeast Asia’s energy demand increases by 80% in the period to 2040, though the region’s per-capita energy use remains well below the global average. Despite policies aimed at scaling up the deployment of renewable resources, the share of fossil fuels in the region’s energy mix increases to around 80% by 2040, in stark contrast to the declining trend seen in many parts of the world.
Rising imports sharpen the focus on the economic and security aspects of energy use. By 2040 the region’s net oil imports more than double to 6.7 mb/d, a level equivalent to the current oil imports of China. Southeast Asia’s oil import bill surges to over $300 billion per year by 2040, compared with around $120 billion in 2014, with increases in spending in almost all countries in the region.
Indonesia supports a continued expansion of Southeast Asia’s gas and coal output, but production is increasingly consumed within the region. As domestic natural gas demand outpaces indigenous production, intra-regional and intra-country trade increases, and Southeast Asia turns into a net gas importer of around 10 bcm by 2040, compared with net exports of 54 bcm in 2013.
The power sector shapes the energy outlook for Southeast Asia, as electricity demand almost triples by 2040, an increase greater than the current power output of Japan. The sector continues its shift towards coal due to its abundance and relative affordability. Although the average efficiency of Southeast Asia’s coal-fired power plant fleet increases by 5 percentage points throughout the projection period, less-efficient subcritical technologies account for 50% of the region’s coal power fleet in 2040, highlighting the need to accelerate the deployment of more efficient technologies in the region to reduce local pollution and slow the rise in CO2 emissions.
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I am sure the 50,000 or so delegates and hangers on will have a wonderful fortnight in Paris. I hope they have advance booked the Louvre to avoid the queue and also got tickets for Disney and Versailles organised in advance. It will be perishing cold; always is in December in Paris; so I hope they have warm clothes to stop the wind blowing up their Eiffel towers.
They will go home content, having quaffed a few jars, eaten more food than Eritrea consumes in 10 years, Burnt more fossil fuel than Sudan will ever get, let alone burn, and thrown away more rubbish than Governor Brown talks.
The blame for their lack of achievement will be placed squarely on the Rupublicans, Tories, Aussie Liberals, D****rs, Old Etonians, Democracy, “people who do not know what is good for them”, and the scumbags who actually would like a bit more heat on the planet to save on their electric bill.
Until the next great gathering.
Meanwhile the climate refugees will continue to go to Florida and Spain every year. The polar bears will thrive, especially if they can spice up their diet with a few eco-warriors on missions to prove that there is no ice. The temperatures will stay much the same and the weather will do its usual. Cook will do another survey, this time getting 99% of two scientists to agree with him and Lew will write another insane conspiracy theorists paper. Obarmy will get a job at the UN in the kitchens and Kim jong Un will be made Secretary General of the UN…I mean …there is a man who gets things done… all in perfect step as well.
It is no wonder that when the proletariat are actually asked not one of us give’s a tinkers cuss about climate change.
Ivor Ward:
I agree all you say, but I write to add that you are describing the movements of a corpse. And there is a deadly zombie which poses a threat.
The AGW-scare was killed at the failed 2009 IPCC Conference in Copenhagen. I said then that the scare would continue to move as though alive in similar manner to a beheaded chicken running around a farmyard. It continues to provide the movements of life but it is already dead. And its deathly movements provide an especial problem: they are creating a dangerous bureaucratic zombie.
Nobody will declare the AGW-scare dead: it will slowly fade away. This is similar to the ‘acid rain’ scare of the 1980s. Few remember that scare unless reminded of it but its effects still have effects; e.g. the Large Combustion Plant Directive (LCPD) exists. Importantly, the bureaucracy which the EU established to operate the LCPD still exists. And those bureaucrats justify their jobs by imposing ever more stringent, always more pointless, and extremely expensive emission limits which are causing enforced closure of UK power stations.
Bureaucracies are difficult to eradicate and impossible to nullify.
As the AGW-scare fades away those in ‘prime positions’ will attempt to establish rules and bureaucracies to impose those rules which provide immortality to their objectives. Guarding against those attempts now needs to be a serious activity.
The so-called ‘localisation’ activities mentioned by several in this thread are actions intended to establish the bureaucracies and rules at national and sub-national levels because – as the above article reports – it is now generally recognised that there is no longer any hope of a realistic international agreement similar to the defunct Kyoto Protocol.
I repeat, it is now very important to guard against attempts to impose rules and bureaucracies justified by assertions of AGW because that is where the totalitarians are already concentrating their efforts between junkets such as that to be held in Paris..
Richard
RC
Well done. The institutionalization of CO2 as a dangerous gas and the recent data from the OCO2 satellite are being combined in the US.
They will be busy identifying diparate impact zones where those who live in high fossil resource production areas will be encouraged to sue those that live in high CO2 consumption areas.
Localized mobilization.
Investigate which NGOs are being formed in those communities. Do your own homework. It’s already out there. You just have to look.
I get tired of people equating controls on real pollution to cuts in CO2. For example, above Figures is said to have stated that, “Cuts in greenhouse gases can serve countries’ economic self-interests. China, for instance, can improve the health of millions by shifting from coal-fired power plants that cause air pollution.” The cheapest way to control real pollution is to use scrubbers and other control devices, but these reduce the net output of the power plant. The result is less electricity supplied for the same amount of fuel burned (and CO2 emitted). Actually, on a recent trip to China, I asked if the power plants had modern pollution control devices and I was assured that they did. I also asked if the cars had pollution control devices and I was again assured that they did. I then asked why, if that was the case, was the air so polluted. I was told (I don’t know if it is true) essentially that there was no enforcement. Power plants run the control devices when inspectors visit but otherwise do not because it reduces output. There is also no incentive to keep catalytic converters etc on cars working and, in fact, an incentive to eliminate them since they again reduce “energy efficiency” (shades of the VW saga).
If there were any honest Q&A in presidential debates, the candidates would talk about the costs of climate change policy steps and international “agreements” aka world peace and harmony goals with special emphasis on whether the costs are just the first step in a multi-step hidden agenda to be revealed later.
Bring in the special ops communique writers to polish off the final documents with modified scaremonger terms and ‘dangerous world’ if you don’t pay up now warnings.
“UN Climate Summit May Fail If Developed Nations Don’t Deliver..”
Deliver the money that is.
Don’t give them any money and run like hell from their offended screaming . . .
John
SJ
Let’s assume in a literal (hard) sense you are correct. I’ll also assume you understand hard dollar, soft dollar, future costs terms. There are definitions of wealth (ie people who die to defend us), but let’s just keep it simpler.
I’m not sure, but it’s likely that if someone did the research, they’d find cushy loans at favorable rates headed toward Iran. Check.
The US joined with other UN nations to lift sanctions on a country that is eager to destroy the US and by extension, anyone representative of western culture. Do you see a cost associated with having to defend yourself from someone you just made stronger ? Check.
Would you expect empowering your neighbor to kill you costing you something ?
It’s a good thing there aren’t any real problems we humans should be spending our time and money on addressing, instead of the imaginary one of climate.
“China, for instance, can improve the health of millions by shifting from coal-fired power plants that cause air pollution.”
I have to wonder what the millions of Chinese would have to say about that. Would they vote to have cleaner air and improved ‘health’ while they starve and freeze to death, or would they vote for the affordable energy they need to create jobs, increase survival, and improve their lives generally?
Just send the bill from Paris or New Delhi. The message managers will find a way to explain it all later. But it might take some consulting contracts with Dr. Gruber on this one.
For all their efforts to get 200 governments to commit to the toughest possible cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, climate negotiators have all but given up on creating a way to penalise those who fall short.
In that case, I will personally pledge to cut my greenhouse gas emissions by 347 million-billion tons. There solved that problem.
But even those sanctions were an empty act of bravado by rich nations angered by U.S. President George W. Bush’s decision in March 2001 to stay out of Kyoto, said Jan Pronk, a former Dutch environment minister who chaired the Bonn meeting.
Bush’s decision or the 0-95 vote by the senate on pre-approval of the Clinton/Gore treaty.
The best-case scenario for Paris is the production of a kind of eco-version of the Kellogg-Briand Pact —a fact that’s long been evident but is just now starting to feel real for greens.
Look it up. The Kellogg-Briand Pact was an agreement to outlaw war signed on August 27, 1928.
On August 27, 1928, fifteen nations signed the pact at Paris. Signatories included France, the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India, Belgium, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Italy and Japan. Later, an additional forty-seven nations followed suit,
The first major test of the pact came just a few years later in 1931, when the Mukden Incident led to the Japanese invasion of Manchuria. https://history.state.gov/milestones/1921-1936/kellogg
Who-uh! It lasted three years, but something to shot for.
Correct me if I’m wrong on this
I was reading that Goldman Sachs is one of Obamas largest donators and that they are keen to promote Carbon trading which is touted will be in the Paris climate talks
Presumably this is why he spouts so much about climate change
Been paid and now has to deliver before he leaves office
Article here on Scientists want Carbon pricing http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-34489266
Trading in fresh air !
How can those termites ever pay for their output
Pearl
Follow the money.
https://www.opensecrets.org
Old Uncle Warren bought GS at 80ish during the crash. He now ships lots of oil w his RR.
If you dig too deep, you’ll start to get nauseous. Take a break. Breath.
Dirty money on multiple sides of any debate where a simple explanation is sitting on the table and nobody grabs it.
In the case of CAGW, the nonsense will stop when either the money runs out or the planet starts cooling. Even then you could have folks claiming alt energy saved the day.
It may well be the case that it is already cooling.
Nicholas
Perhaps perhaps.
For me, the best read on the subject was by John Casey, retired NASA. Cold Sun was the book. I see that he also is you tubed up.
Here’s one of the problems. If John is right and bad cold is coming, you now have a population that is fatigued by fraudster scientists. Bad timing to be issuing yet another call to fear.
I suspect that if we have substantial cooling, messaging will not be an issue.
Cooling has the potential to shutdown economic activity during winter months, impede navigation and, perhaps worst of all by far than anything else that could happen, it could lead to sudden and widespread crop failures, which then result in devastating famines, food riots, wars…worse things than the modern world has ever experienced.
I can easily describe a scenario whereby one ill timed cold snap could lead to a billion people starving to death.
Yes, odds are we are due for a bit of a cold period, but will the bridge in Mostar survive ?
Obama and Al Gore and GS CEO David Blood and IPCC co-founder Maurice Strong were involved in founding the Chicago Carbon Exchange. Gore founded Generation Investment Services; carbon credit trading. Did you think this has something to do with the environment or science?
matt cassidy: :…Obama and Al Gore and GS CEO David Blood and IPCC co-founder Maurice Strong were involved in founding the Chicago Carbon Exchange. Gore founded Generation Investment Services; carbon credit trading. Did you think this has something to do with the environment or science?”
What amazes me is how people are willing to discount this amazing fact as not being relevant. Politicians and financiers in positions to affect public opinion take the lead to tax what people breath and invest in and their motives are not questioned.
Marketers have discovered that people will believe it if you say a scientist said it.
What does that say about science ?
If the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference COP 21 (Paris in December) results in a non-binding agreement as feared/suggested by the 5 sources identified by the GWPF, then the AGW crusaders of alarm and exaggeration will (choose any that apply):
1) wildly claim a moral victory which will be loudly echoed by the media who have given them frantic sounding soliloquies in prime airtime for the last ~25 years
2) double down and explicitly endorse a cult of self-sacrifice shorn of any last vestiges of pseudo-climate-science trappings; such as trappings like those of the subjective IPCC assessment process
3) sulk in HotWhopperland and in their favored airline’s frequent flyer lounges
4) shift to a crusade of alarm and exaggeration about anthropogenic global cooling
5) retire to a warm climate
6) decide to no longer participate in their own non-debate
7) sing kumbaya mournfully
John
Thanks the GWPF for the update.
John
Please hope that Paris is a shambles. It gives some opportunity to regroup and spread the message that climate change/ global warming is a fraud. How convenient that the UN, the ones who promote the myth are the ones to profit most handsomely by way of their cut of ETS payments and politically( destroying the economies of free market nations.)
As for input from vested banking interests, Goldman Sachs is positively evil. They own our (unelected)Prime Minister in Australia, who will almost certainly go against the wishes of the electorate (we voted to get rid of carbon taxes) and sign up for some climate suicide.
As for Paris, hopefully the weather creates chaos as in Copenhagen. Better still if Muslim “refugee” gangs invade the proceedings and start invoking some of the passages of the Qur’an literally, eg Sura 2, v 191-193 – slay them as ye shall find them.
Even if the talks collapse, they will have had a great time in Paris- great little junket. Who cares about the carbon footprint.
No-one in Australia, other than party members, can vote for an MP to be a PM. No-one in the voting public in Australia can vote for a PM. Only those in Turnbull’s electorate can vote for Turnbull as an MP. The party can then vote for any party member to be leader and thus by default, become a PM.
But you are right. Australians voted on the policy of the LNP in 2013. Now Turncoat is in the driving seat, and I said all along in these pages that, if Turnbull becomes PM (Which was very likely anyway), it would be a disaster for Australia. The LNP may win again in 2016, but the puppet masters in the banking space who own Turnbull have placed their pawn in anticipation of an ETS soon after the 2016 election.
So the political pantomime continues in Australia. 5 PM’s in 5 years?
Rule of thumb here in Aus is that the unions control the ALP, the banks control the LNP. Voters? Who are they again?
“…with the prospect of ever more floods, droughts and heatwaves.”
As predicted using regional climate models that can not predict regional climate. Often embedded within global climate models that can not predict global climate.
Here’s the simple logic that will be used:
We must act now, according to the precautionary principle even though there is no substantial evidence that the world is threatened.
If we do not act now and the fears of the fearmongers are realized then it will be “too late” for action – for some usually unexplained reason.
Nobody will ever consider that people in the future are likely to have access to greater technology and capital resources than we currently possess.
Based on this drive towards “urgent climate action” – policy makers will be seduced into committing to doing a variety of useless things badly on the back of scant evidence.
However, in the process the freedoms of individuals will be curtailed and bureaucrats (mostly unelected) will expand their power.
THEN, in the future, the situation will be reassessed and it will almost certainly be understood, at least by some portion of the intellectual class, that policies were not justified by available evidence and that many schemes brought about unintended consequences which were more harmful than the problem that they claimed to “mitigate”.
Whilst, there may be some questions asked and some finger pointing at this later stage –
power will never be returned from the bureaucrats to the people. It never is.
And this is the key point.
This is why action must be taken prematurely, before clear evidence is revealed.
Because, what the bureaucrats fear most, is that the evidence will NOT justify their current power grab.
In other words, what they are most afraid of, is waiting 20 years and discovering no significant problems with rising temperatures, extreme weather or sea level rise.
These people are most terrified of – NO GLOBAL WARMING CRISIS.
It must keep them awake at night. Worrying that global warming may not really be a crisis, at all.
And that is why we must act now to gift control of industry and energy infrastructure to faceless policy makers.
The days of adjustments and fudging are coming to an end.
RSS, UAH. Argo, Satellite measurement of sea ice and sea level are screwing up the capacity of alarmists to paint a picture of total disaster.
Plus the newfound ability of Americans to count the number of CAT3+ landfalling hurricanes in the last decade. Since, almost all Americans can count to ZERO. Even Obama.
This is why we must act NOW on climate change.
We must act NOW, before more good quality data arrives and destroys the widely circulating vision of oncoming thermageddon.
Things are going from bad to worse for alarmists. Damned scientists keep coming up with instruments that make more and more accurate and reliable measurements. Damned statisticians keep coming up with ways to show that freak weather events are part of normal weather variability.
Damned paleoreconstructions of ice cores keep showing us that the climate has always changes and it changed far more significantly and alarmingly in the distant past, often for unknown reasons.
So, act now – to destroy your own economy and grant power to bureaucrats – NOW, before any more inconvenient science can be done – because whatever future science shows us – you will never get those freedoms back.
And then the children aren’t going to know what affordable and reliable energy is…
That’s my point really. Let’s screw up the developed world – for the children.
(I may have drifted into sarcasm at some point during the above rant.)
I could have read all that wonderful wordage or gone had a cup of tea…….
Bet you can guess which won.
James Bull
The people must suffer somehow, Greece plutocracy is the premier model.
What?
I think that the Paris Climate Summit should pay much more attention to the oceans, since they have the most important role in climate change, much more important than greenhouse gas emissions, in my oppinion!
smamarver,
The oceans are too difficult to tax. No sense discussing them in Paris.
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.
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And if you do think of an easy scheme to tax the oceans… shhhhh…! Don’t give the Parisites any ideas.
Yeap, you’re right…..
Beware.
They declare they’ve suffered a stinging disaster when they just manage to steal a $100 million off you when they were aiming for a billion.
And the moment they assure you that you don’t need to worry, is when they have the fix sown up.