Guest essay by Craig Rucker, CFACT.org
The UN is celebrating at COP 21, but what did they really achieve?
President Obama called the Paris climate agreement the best chance we’ve had to “save” the planet.
Not even close, Mr. President. We’ll put that bit of hyperbole right up there with your election being “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”
The good news is that the final agreement is substantially weaker than the drafts that led up to it. French Soclialist Laurent Fabius, who presided over COP 21, must have spent all of Friday night yanking the teeth out of it to come up with a document everyone would sign.
China and India will be pleased that this agreement permits them to go on burning coal and expanding their economies all they want. The President will be pleased that the agreement is weak enough that he can attempt to bypass Senate ratification.
You can read the whole thing at CFACT.org.
Marc Morano asked, “Does this mean we never have to hear about ‘solving’ global warming again!?” Marc’s full commentary was posted to the top of the Drudge Report.
CFACT senior policy advisor Paul Driessen warns that although he believes the final agreement is no more than “mush,” attempting to voluntarily abide by it will cause terrible economic harm and human suffering. You can read his full analysis at CFACT.org.
This agreement will not meaningfully alter the temperature of the Earth, even under the UN’s own computer models.
The bad news is that it plants the seeds of a new UN climate regime that left unchecked will swell into a bureaucratic behemoth.
The good news is that the agreement’s soft commitments, lack of penalties for noncompliance, and long dates buy time for more scientific data to come in.
The more scientific evidence we examine, the weaker the case for economy-wrecking global warming policies becomes.
Science may provide the way out.
If we can keep the data honest.
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This agreement merely puts the frog in the pot. Subsequent agreements (or amendments) will slowly turn up the heat. If you don’t recognize roles, we’re the frog.
When has better scientific data made a difference with these clowns?
Joshes 7 days of HOPES AND FEARS rings true then. See you at COP 22..23…24…25…26…27.. Wait it’s suddenly getting very cold!
It is an international climate treaty signed by all, gold dust to alarmists and those with agendas, way better than the 97% thing trotted out by politicians, this IS very dangerous, regardless of the lack of teeth.
Everyone got almost exactly what they wanted from this deal.
For all those sarcastically criticizing this deal as a sham that will accomplish nothing. you are wrong. It will accomplish exactly what it set out to do.
1. Establish in the public consciousness that CAGW is real, and the governments of the world are coming together to do something about it. Any discussion of the science itself has been swept aside and no longer matters.
2. Provide cover for the political elites of the free world to enact programs ranging from subsidies to crony capitalist green technology companies, to grants to to crony socialist lobbyists and researchers reinforcing the message. Not to mention a big tax hike or two…or five… on everything from gasoline to electricity. You can hear the sanctimonious response to anyone who objects already. “We had to, we signed an an agreement to save the world”.
3. For the crony capitalists and crony socialists, it provides more than sufficient cover for them to lobby heavily for their agendas which include a healthy dollop of putting your money in their pockets.
4. For the developing world, they get to do what they were going to do anyway, with the slim but real prospect that they’ll get some money from the free world to do it.
5. The oil producing nations of the 2nd and 3rd world will pump oil like mad without any repercussions. Only wealthy 1st world countries like US and Canada will be stupid enough to curtail their own production.
6. The rest of the world, made up mostly of dictatorships ranging in style from military to theocracy will be able to go home and pacify their populations by blaming all their problems on climate change caused by others. They will promise relief tat the 1sr world will probably never send, and which will be skimmed off by corruption if it is.
The only loser in all this is the common man, 99.9% of the population who had no effective representation at the meeting in the first place.
DH, tend to disagree although I understand your perspective. Kyoto accomplished the political goal of legitimizing CAGW, not Paris. This won’t end until the IPCC is forced by Ma Nature to recognize they and their models and their anthropogenic attribution were wrong. Then it might become possible to defund the huge bureaucacies that are accreting to UNFCCC. Also by then, a lot of the most vested ‘climate scientists’ will have retired or died. It is said that a subtle scientific paradigm shift proceeds one death at a time.
Also by then, a lot of the most vested ‘climate scientists’ will have retired or died. It is said that a subtle scientific paradigm shift proceeds one death at a time.
In this case the inverse is true. For every scientist guilty of selfish corruption of the science for their own personal aggrandizement and wealth, there will no be 10 to replace them who grew up with the CAGW meme as a fact since childhood and will pursue the same agenda with the blindness of youthful idealogues.
As for Kyoto, it was a far away thing that most people didn’t hear much about, regarding science about which they new little. Now we have the internet, and social media and instant MSM from anywhere and everywhere about anything and everything (except dreary science with all its facts and formulas and minutia that the MSM consumer has no interest in) and most people have heard about it, and despite their near instant access to information on the web, perhaps I should say disinformation since it seems to be prevailing, it regards science about which they no little.
Ristvan does Lomborg’s estimate of 0.05 C change by 2100 still hold after this nonsense? And could this best outcome be measured anyway? BTW what will the likely co2 emissions be by 2040 if every country follows this to the letter? EIA estimates that OECD countries emissions will nearly flat line ( about 13 GTs to 14 GTs ) while non OECD ( China, India etc ) will soar from about 19.5 GTs to 31 GTs. Any change?
DH – think you are probably right about the psychological effects. Actual discomfort to be inflicted on the population of any country will be entirely voluntary, however, although there are plenty of governments around with sado-masochistic tendencies.
What will it mean for each country? USD100bn per annum could be deemed to have been found rather painlessly if you try hard enough. Here in UK our Govt. has a foreign aid budget of around GBP12bn(USD18bn), some of which is already renewables-related. Mr Cameron has proven adept at announcing various extra ‘helps’ which it turns out in the end come from that aid budget, so that ‘finding’ say USD5bn-6bn, which on a pro rata GDP basis should be the UK’s share of the developed world’s penance, need not mean much change except a little re-labelling, which they are already good at.
The good thing seems to be the lack of urgency, giving time for the proper debate to continue, and for nature to give its verdict.
Mr Cameron has proven adept at announcing various extra ‘helps’ which it turns out in the end come from that aid budget, so that ‘finding’ say USD5bn-6bn
The $100 bn is a pittance in global economic parlance, but a pretty substantial pay off for a UN agency which will skim off a healthy chunk for “operational expenses” and the rest will be skimmed off by corrupt third world governments. But it is a pittance. The big numbers come from the academics lined up at the public trough to “study” climate science, which is in turn a pittance compared to the crony capitalists who will fill their pockets with subsidies raked from the common tax payer. How much has Britain spent on subsidies for wind farms in the last 10 years? Here in Canada an auditor’s report puts the number in a single province, Ontario, at 37 Billion. Just one province of one country!
The spending this will enable far exceeds the 100 Bn. The beneficiaries are easy to identify. The world’s poor, who they are supposed to be protecting will be hurt the worst by it.
“They will promise relief [that] the [first] world will probably never send…”
Thus justifying further anger and outrage towards the “first world” and the encouragement of committing acts of mindless violence by the mentally deranged/easily-fooled against those in the west. Perhaps.
I fear you are right David.
It is just another milestone down – or tombstone on – the Enlightenment that briefly captured mens’ minds and raised them above mere prejudice towards an understanding of what was real.
Now we see that ignorance prejudice and faith are as usual ruling the roost, and worst of all, its not even faith in some deity, but in a crazed concoction of social ‘seance’
Climate change is a sideshow: the real game is the complete destruction of independent inquiry into the state of the Universe, to be replaced by sponsored inquiry into the universe of the State.
Terri,
I note on the CFCT document linked to, there is a stern injunction – Recycle this.
Seems fair to me . . . .
As a first skim, it is really a non-binding kvetch.
Now, yes, there are bits that zealous (= deluded) politicos could use to cripple their own countries’ economies.
Most of them in fairness, probably don’t really want to do that.
Are there exceptions? – well, I have suspicions – certainly about souls who will not be in office for COP 22 in 2020, which, doubtless, will be in some agreeable location.
Judge them by their acts, and perhaps their speech – not by which gongs they get given [or claim to get, in a few cases!].
Auto
“This agreement will not meaningfully alter the temperature of the Earth, even under the UN’s own computer models.”
That’s because there is no global temperature!!! Stop speaking nonsense!!!
<If temps go down they’ll claim victory.
Yes, but that doesn't count if the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere would still be increasing. In that case, how could they tell that the decrease of the temperature is due to their action?
These people will never give up. They will strive to move forward with their agenda 1 salami slice at a time. And party on our dime while they do it. Win-Win for them. Lose or Lose more for the rest of us.
Eradication of bureaucracies is our only hope. It is them or us.
We Don’t Need Them…pg
Well at least at the present time there is still cheap energy available. I wonder how long this will last:
http://www.bloomberg.com/energy
Seems to me that the “agreement” which has been reached is a change of tack. The aim now, is to keep temperature rise to below 2 degrees by the end of the century. Like someone just found a control knob! It may be, if the planet continues to behave as it has in the past twenty years, that this “aim” will be achieved. So then it hasn’t been a scam. We were never lied to. The whole sorry bandwagon rolls on and no-one ever gets blamed or castigated. Mission accomplished!
In an abstract way, skeptics of the science won the day as these demagogues used their outside voices in public, but their inside voices to forge a document that gave them a ‘get out of jail’ card. Critically though, the science has taken a back seat to politics and power and money in these latter years. The entire notion of ‘climate change’ is less and less about global warming and sciencey concerns over emissions. It is more and more about Maurice Strong’s Agenda 21 initiatives. How long before our elected leadership agree to (essentially) lease our sovereign lands from a U.N. bureaucracy, as that bureaucracy determines how we will use our land and energy. Crazy thought? Maybe…
GWPF sums it up well:
“*) We would like to apologise to editors and correspondents as this is exactly the same statement we issued a year ago, with the sole change of Paris for Lima; but since there has been no substantive change in the COP21 deal there is no change in our assessment.”
http://us4.campaign-archive2.com/?u=c920274f2a364603849bbb505&id=95e8d96b05&e=fdc2942f24
Look, it’s working already!
Current Arctic sea ice extent:
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/plots/icecover/icecover_current.png
This graph is bogus, I referred to it in another post. Where are people getting this graph from? The right one is at
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/plots/icecover/icecover_current_new.png
There are a few details at http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/icecover.uk.php
If you had read your own link, you would have seen exactly where the first graph comes from. For your convenience, please allow me to quote the relevant portion: The plot above replaces an earlier sea ice extent plot, that was based on data with the coastal zones masked out. This coastal mask implied that the previous sea ice extent estimates were underestimated. The new plot displays absolute sea ice extent estimates. The old plot can still be viewed here for a while.
The earlier graph is the one I have bookmarked. Perhaps the new methodology is more accurate. I don’t know.
There was no indication in your image post that you had read the link I posted saying the old plot has problems.
Please check http://wattsupwiththat.com/reference-pages/sea-ice-page/ (from the Nav bar at the top of the page), it has other plots and pointers to plots that are close to the DMI new (and fixed) plot.
Thanks, Craig Rucker, CFACT.
This looks like a repreive.
It appears like we carbon-based creatures will live to see another day.
Shouldn’t Josh’s last “projection” of them trudging out through the snow to their CO2 producers been the title picture? 😎
China and India will be pleased that this agreement permits them to go on burning coal and expanding their economies all they want.
1935 Anglo-German Naval Agreement, anyone?
Piper Paul and others: I agree.
The COP21 has already accomplished its primary mission: perpetuate the Bully Travel Club. Those who have worked with UN/State Dept activities (e.g. being the “representative” of some agency involved) are quite familiar with this. The UN/State group never saw a meeting they didn’t like, especially in some desirable vacation spot.
How much did this cost the normal, taxpaying public of the world? Apparently 38,000 people registered for entry. Chalk up about $2,000 for a plane ticket, perhaps $300/day ($4,200 for two weeks) for lodging and food, then about $7,000 for two weeks loaded salary for “working” there. That works out to over $600 Million for the lot. That’s if the attendees paid more or less government rates and didn’t get too many waivers because, well, they were “saving the planet.”
Add that the agreement isn’t binding, the progress reporting is voluntary, and there is no way to tell if whatever it did is working or not, there is no way to tell if anyone who attended actually contributed anything, AND that there are guaranteed to be more meetings until forever. (Who wouldn’t want a job like that – unless of course one takes pride in actual achievement.)
A really Bully Travel Club. Largely for politically favored and their friends.
First 15 comments are all spot on. Well observed and dissected. The evidence it is nearly useless save as a way to bleat on for five more years is the cagey way the BBC is shameless over-selling it while avoiding the content. The usual shills are on the soap box with florid prose signifying, well, not much. Calving glaciers abound, as if they are supposed to stop and grow forever. I am amazed how effectively the major countries (by population and economy) eviscerated the Carbon Dream with ifs, buts and outs.
What I take away from COP21 is that the last happy generation of mankind is currently alive. What is to come will be born into a world of calculated misery.
I submitted the following to the Climate Science Blog of the Geological Society’s “Connected Community.” We’ll see if they post it. A shorter version appeared on my Facebook page:
The Paris COP-21 meeting on climate change has published its 31-page “Agreement” which can be read here:
http://unfccc.int/resource/docs/2015/cop21/eng/l09.pdf
I’ve read the agreement and got the impression, perhaps mistaken, that it is an advocacy document with feel-good intentions lacking rigor and enforcement mechanisms. Key provisions are voluntary with no oversight. In other words, each country is left to decide what it wants to do simply because no agreement was possible without such a provision rendering it meaningless.
The winners were the Indians and the Chinese who are increasing coal production. The Chinese also are selling coal-fired power plants to other countries! Even US Secretary of State Kerry admitted that any agreed mitigation the US might do won’t ameliorate Anthropogenic global warming significantly.
The Agreement also has an opt-out provision after three years from signing the agreement with a one-year waiting period after giving notice. However, failure of 55 countries to ratify the agreement by April, 2016, also is an opt-out mechanism that is four months away. The most critical part of the agreement appears in the “Annex” starting on p.19.
The Global Warming Policy Foundation in the UK has described the COP-21 Agreement as “non-binding and toothless” which pretty-well sums it up. Similarly, GSA’s distinguished invited speaker at the 2015 Baltimore annual meeting, Dr. James Hansen, has stated that the COP-21 meeting in Paris is a ”fraud.” (http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/dec/12/james-hansen-climate-change-paris-talks-fraud). Given his credentials and GSA’s high regard for his expertise, Dr. Hansen’s assessment should be taken seriously even if his language could be viewed by some as strong.
The 12 day venue appears to have been very costly. I estimated it cost over $1 Billion to arrange the Paris meeting. Using the US State Department per diem rate for Paris of $480/day, just this item for 40,000 delegates comes to $211,200,000. Travel costs, averaging $5,000 per delegate (probably a low figure because most travelled first class) would add $200 million. Add rental of the venue, security, special limousines, flying the US President’s security designed SUV, security detail and 500 person entourage, and the costs keep climbing. Add delegates’ salaries as an additional cost.
Did the world get its money’s worth? In the Southern USA, they say “time will tell.” In my view, the venue money could have been better spent helping the world’s poor improve their economic well-being and given them a chance for upward mobility. That’s a global goal worth striving for.
Writes George Devries Klein, PhD, PG, FGSA:
In yet more words, the politicians in each First-World government are left to decide precisely which economy-killing measures to inflict upon the productive sector of their respective societies as their “campaign contributors,” graft-payers, and other rentiers have commanded.
Twenty years later, it appears that it’s time to implement the ballistic solution. Pour encourager les autres if not to utterly eradicate the vermin.
Craig Rucker:
You write
Yes! That was inevitable and I warned of it five years ago. I then said what we needed to do and now still need to do.
Immediately after the IPCC Copenhagen CoP in December 2000 I wrote the following on WUWT and elsewhere.
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.
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.
Richard
I remember that, and it is very true.
The problem, of course, is how to kill the beats, given the MSM has swallowed it hook line and sinker.
Where are the troops, how are they rallied and how can they achieve their objective? Whilst what you said was prophetic, it is in practice very difficult for the ordinary citizen (who is not a rabble raiser) to do much about it.
I have long said (going back before Copenhagen) that this will only die a death when energy prices become so expensive that hit hits the consumer hard, and if that coupled with a severe winter leads to high numbers of premature deaths, the story might be picked up by MSM and run with.
It is the loss of jobs in the energy intensive industries (eg., steel and aluminium etc) and high consumer price of energy which will eventually mobilise enough people to shout loud enough that the politicians must take notice if they are to remain in office and/or be returned at the next election.
I very much welcomed Milliband’s intervention on capping energy costs since I thought that that would lead to a sensible and open debate on why energy is so expensive. Unfortunately, this never happened. The average electricity user does not realise that they are paying more than twice as much for electricity because of the push to renewables. The average gas user does not know how cheap gas is in the US, and how cheap it could be in the UK if shale fracking were to go ahead. The economics is never explained.
I think that we have a long way to go. Whilst I do not want to see a cooling globe, it would obviously help the cause (not The Cause as referred to in the Climategate emails) if the globe was to cool over the next decade.
In fact, if there is no long lasting step change in temperature coincident with the current 2015/16 strong El Nino, as there was a long lasting step change in temperature coincident with the Super El Nino of 1997/98, it will make AR6 very difficult to write since without such a step change in temperature, the ‘pause’ will be over 21 years in duration during which time nearly 40% of manmade emissions will have taken place. This will mean that Climate Sensitivity must be lower than suggested in AR5, and the discrepancy between model projections, which is already embarrassing, will be even more stark and even more difficult to explain.
I really think that we need to see a cooler globe, with increasing Arctic ice, to drive the point home, namely that Climate Change is natural in origin, and that man has little or no impact (other than on micro regional level such as urbanisation, damming, deforestation, farming and irrigation etc). .
richard verney:
Thankyou for your thoughtful response to my comment.
Firstly, and for clarity, my comment was certainly not intended to say “I told you so”: I am fully aware that one is often forgiven for being wrong and rarely forgiven for being fright.
I wrote to say it has been clear for a long time that there was a need to avoid what has happened in Paris. And contrary to many comments here, the Paris agreement provides a serious long-term problem that is difficult to overcome.
As you say, it is very difficult to overcome the problem of a policy to establish rules and bureaucracies intended to provide immortality to the objectives of AGW promoters.
The job losses in energy intensive industries and the high fuel costs have not overcome it. In fact, when the UK fuel escalator became intolerably high it was adjusted to be just below the level at which it induced civil disorder.
Also, cold as well as heat is (illogically) asserted to be a result of ‘climate change’ from GHG emissions. So, I doubt that global cooling will overcome the problem especially when ‘global temperature’ data can be adjusted to be anything desired.
And prior to AR6 there four more years to establish the rules and bureaucracies intended to provide immortality to the objectives of AGW promoters and now agreed in Paris. Therefore, whatever AR6 says may be irrelevant because – as I keep saying – bureaucracies are difficult to eradicate and impossible to nullify.
I write in hope of inciting suggestions on how to solve the problem because I have none.
Richard
‘Science may provide the way out’. There’s plenty of science showing that AGW is all bull, and so far nobody has paid any attention to that. What makes anyone think that a load of fresh data will make any difference? Whatever hidden agenda going on behind the scences, their minds are made up and that’s that.
You have to love Article 28:
“Article 28
1. At any time after three years from the date on which this Agreement has entered into force for a Party, that Party may withdraw from this Agreement by giving written notification to the Depositary.
2. Any such withdrawal shall take effect upon expiry of one year from the date of receipt by the Depositary of the notification of withdrawal, or on such later date as may be specified in the notification of withdrawal.
3. Any Party that withdraws from the Convention shall be considered as also having withdrawn from this
Agreement”
I see lots of “recognise”, “urge”, “encourage” but no “commit”, “legally bind” or similar. Is this really just an agreement to “do your best”?
Great! The planet has now been officially saved by the alarmists. They can take all the credit they want. Can we now move on to more important issues?
Jbird:
The problem is not what alarmists have done or what credit they want to take.
The problem is that they have officially decided to establish rules and bureaucracies intended to provide immortality to the objectives of AGW promoters. Implementation of their decision needs to be opposed at each locality in each country.
Richard