Via Reuters:
Merkel says EU should meet existing emissions aims, not set new ones
A proliferation of extreme weather events around the world provides ample evidence that climate change is a reality, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Sunday, but she rejected calls for more ambitious climate protection goals.
But Merkel said such calls, most recently from the European Commission’s climate chief Miguel Arias Canete, for swifter cuts to harmful carbon dioxide emissions would be counterproductive, adding that setting new goals made little sense when European countries were already struggling to meet their cuts targets.
“I’m not particularly happy about these new proposals,” she said of Canete’s call to increase from 40 to 45 percent the scale of cuts to target by 2030.
“I think we should first stick to the goals we have already set ourselves. I don’t think permanently setting ourselves new goals makes any sense.”
…
Merkel’s government has already faced criticism for abandoning emissions targets it had set itself for 2020 after concluding they were unachievable, while sticking to a target it had set itself for a decade later.
h/t to Charles the Mod
So she admits to tons of extreme weather events happening because of global warming. Then she says she’s doing nothing about it. That would suggest that she knows her first statement is BS.
No. She knows that CO2 reduction will not help. Nobody can deny that the world is willing to reduce CO2. They once have set their agenda, but now they are rowing back silently.
pointless either way…….it’s so obvious this is a scam…and amazing they keep getting away with it
They keep beating the drums waiting for the millennials to grow up and take power. They have bred them to believe Central Government can control the climate and therefore, should control the masses. No better hobgoblin than Man Made Global Warm…aahhh we really meant Climate Change all along and forget what we told your big brothers and sisters, that you cannot conflate climate with weather. This weather is all because of you, yes I am looking at you, you and your damn CO2
So, so, SAD but true. And let me add that they CHEER for the DEATH of all us olllllld people (like my “old” 62yo self) … as the Final Solution for we “deniers”. They had hoped Obamakkare would eliminate all that bothersome “end of life” medical care to hasten our demise … but that hasn’t worked out as planned.
Like your use of the term “Final Solution”, I use it all the time because that isprecisely what these loons want in population control & frighteningly, population reduction!!!! What do you think these millenials would use? Conventional gas or fracked gas?
Haha my 4 millennials are not exactly Merkel fans.
My 2 cents worth…Merkel is not alone, and she will “keep getting away with it” as long as she is in power.
We have a serious problem in that nearly an entire field of science depends on this issue (AGW) for its revenue. This issue has created a huge amount of money and the issue itself is what has driven many to enter this field of science over the past 30 years. If this issue “goes away”, so does the foundation for their chosen career. So this is still a very personal and emotional issue to many.
There are a lot of influential scientists, politicians, and various media/entertainment personalities who have put their personal credibility on the line by making statements on the absolute certainty of this issue. It is going to be very difficult for them to admit they were wrong as these people tend to be narcissistic. They believe they are smarter, better informed, and they believe their own judgement to be better than that of the average person. For them to say the skeptics were correct is not going to happen.
But it is even bigger than all of that. This issue causes a great synergy where a political group uses the issue to get buy-in for spending billions of dollars for their political objectives. Environmental groups use the issue to get buy in to spend billions of dollars for their objectives. People champion the issue and themselves are launched to celebrity status. And finally we have the people whose careers were built on the issue and maybe those careers would be at stake if it turns out the world needs fewer “climate scientists”.
So we will continue to have this great circling of the wagons with the celebrities, politicians and the “scientists” all working together to keep the issue that any changes in climate are due to human actions by people in industrialized countries.
Well put.
Cor blimey, his issue has not “created” a flippin’ farthing — But it has dissipated and wasted trillions of dollars, pounds and euros.
I wonder if the AGW Theory was not conceived by the same group as the Y2K, year 2000, “All computers will crash theory.” That mostly incorrect theory created the economic, boom that peaked in the year 2,000.
The Power company company I worked for had a normal staff of employees of just slightly over 2,000 in 1997. I worked at an electric company. To meet the regulatory requirements and assure that our customers would not suffer our company hired more than 300 software engineers, accountants, financial analysts and systems analysts. Their billing rate was more than three times my salary as a plant manager, Their salary was about twice mine. Multiply that by the number of power plants, financial institutions (from a small city bank to those as large as JPMorgan or Chase, and all of the other industries affected.
At Midnight 12/31/1999, Nothing Happened. I even had a PC I bought in 1983, it flipped over to 00:00 1/1/2000 just as I predicted it would, And proven half a dozen times before by testing it. and the “Consensus was much higher than 97% that the world would end. just like CO2 causes CAGW, AGW or whatever they call it in PC terms today.
Y2K was a genuine problem.
Nor could any one piece of amateur hardware demonstrate or exemplify the extent of the problem(s).
However, most fixes were relatively simple. That is, until the middlemen contractors got involved. Contractors selling specialist services, but using last year’s graduates, wasted millions per company causing trouble and solving few problems.
e.g. 1) One machine process used customised DEC hardware and software. Where that machines hardware was restricted to two integers for the date. As did every bit of upstream software that included revenue and debit accounting systems.
“Why in _ell, did these programmers hard code two digits into every bit of software?” was a common exclamation.
Software that required extensive code analysis, along with corrections to the standard code, plus added modules to handle financial calculations based on dates larger than 2 digits.
A problem felt across industry and government that caused the cost of COBOL programmers to rocket up; at least to the companies selling COBOL coders.
The archaic DEC hardware? A very simple shutdown before midnight and a reboot immediately after midnight was all that was needed.
However, virtually every bit of code between that machine, the company, their suppliers, their customers required careful analysis, correction, verification, debugging, testing and implementation.
Financial and operational calculations go bonkers when simple two digit code subtracts ’00’ from ’99’ in calculating costs, units processed or productivities.
All of those talking heads proclaiming the “end of civilization caused by Y2K”?
They’re obviously employed as global warming soothsayers nowadays.
Y2K problem was genuine, the alarmist versions of it were false.
Back in the early days of computers, going all the way back to the 60’s and even the 50’s, computer storage was hideously expensive and very limited.
Even mainframes had internal memory that was limited to a few hundred K, if that much. Long term storage was reel to reel tapes that themselves might hold 1 Meg, if you had the newer stuff. If you wanted to transfer data from one branch to the another, you couldn’t ftp it. You had to load the data onto onto a tape, then hire a truck to transfer the tape to where it needed to go. Shipping 9 tapes instead of 10 saved time and money.
As a result, programmers sought ways to reduce data storage where ever possible. Since the turn of the century was 40 to 50 years off, it seemed like an easy solution to only store the year as two digits.
Everyone knew that in a few decades it would be a problem, so they documented what they did and assumed that someone else would fix the problem when memory became less expensive.
Problem is Nuclear power plants had many procedures, tests, documentation, Quality Control and special emergency plans and reports for the NRC. All requiring several layers of review and approval both before and after performed, whereas many fossil powered power plants simply prepared to be ready to shut down, even plants with the same vintage equipment and same manufacture.
Actions taken by the coal fired plants in our utility, which were designed and constructed even twenty or thirty years after the NPP performed only minimal inspection.
Been there, done that and was a rather senior level participant responsible for assuring the NRC we were ready and nothing would happen. We even had a group of Amateure Radio Operators, some from plant staff thus in the control room, to provide emergency communication, with the Dispatcher, NRC, emergency response team, management, etc. Nothing happened at any fossil powered plant. Period. No problems with the Instrumentation systems, PLC’s, etc. Many of which were 1970’s vintage.
Hardware and hardware data capture systems were easy fixes.
Software feeding data streams were slightly harder, but still somewhat easy.
Try comparing that to hundreds of thousands of employees with incorrect paychecks.
Or accounts payable finding it impossible to properly calculate bills and to mail invoices.
Or business functions that measured and rigorously tracked productivity, literally to the minute.
Every one of those software functions can be seriously screwed up by calendar miscalculations, mistracked or miscalculated time functions.
Hardware Y2K problems were fairly simple and needed minimal effort to restart.
Large complex financial, productivity, billing, accounting, etc. systems were very vulnerable and required substantial rework.
1983 IBM XTs, 286s, Compaq IBM clones, and a host of other clones along with 1999s’ modern PCs, phones, beepers, refrigerators, etc. were virtually unaffected by Y2K. Especially the hardware and operating systems, with many working right through December 31st through January 1st without a glitch.
Our insurance software had 2 digit date with an offset so I think it was good until 2039 just after 32 bit epoch dates end.
Nobody ever said that all computers would crash.
Only programs that relied on two digit dates for vital date calculations would have a problem.
Did you ever consider the possibility that the reason your company had no problem was because they hired people to fix the problem?
I spent a few hundred hours fixing Y2K related problems for my company back in ’98 and ’99.
Financial companies had started working on the problem as early as 1970, when they found out that financial packages that tried to calculate 30 year loans were returning nonsensical answers.
Try explaining that to an NRC Inspector that does not know the difference between a PLC and a PC. to him both are computers.
Once upon a time, I believed that it was possible to be too cynical when viewing the actions of politicians.
You nailed it with the roster of crony recipients of Climate Change Cash and the pathological positive feed back cycle that perpetuates this fraud. I have a small thought to add to the categories of corrupt self-interested parties and the lack of checks and counter interests to curb the endless politicization of the scientific method. My small thought is prefaced by the fact that Leftist politics is now about identity politics. The original dialectic of class warfare, the conflict of Capitalism between proletariat and bourgeois, had to be modified when the Workers Revolution didn’t happen quite as Marx had prophesized by the close of the 19th C, a crisis of Marxist intellectuals hanging out in Paris, Vienna and Berne, and the Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist version of the Communist Revolution and the One Party, Centralized, Terrorist, Population Control through Fear, Police State also fell with the Berlin Wall and subsequent overthrow of Eastern European Communist regimes and the economic collapse of the Soviet Union itself, thus a second crisis of Marxist intellectuals ensued. So the modern Leftist up- date of Marxism perfected by those giants in Academe is the long list of identity classes of oppressor and victims: conservative, Christian, heterosexual white men oppressing women, Blacks, homosexuals, transexuals, the underclass, Hispanic illegal immigrants, etc. But despite their best efforts, the Leftist identity political gambit is not quite universal, so the AGW and CCC are perfect solutions in making all humanity victims of ever increasing CO2 levels, all are victims of the dread consequences of AGW and CCC, just you wait and see. Our GCM models of universal victimhood tell us this is inevitable. There’s 97% consensus. All must tremble in fear now, the panic growing day by day. But to the Leftist mind it gets even better- all victims are oppressors too, since all humans exhale CO2 in sizable quantities. Oppressors and Victims are one and the same, universal identity politics achieved. Marxist economics bushwa replaced by Climate Change bushwa.
Eventually the money will run out. That is inevitable given the waste . And while all those millennials probably do want some of us out of the way, they also want our estates. It’s going to be a shock when they realize governments plan to take that too to keep funding their climate “dream”. And that is when it will get really interesting.
I think it behooves us to bear in mind who it was that made Germany’s coal fired emissions target ‘unachievable’ by shutting down Germany’s nuclear plants thereby slamming the door on any new nuclear capacity.
“… on any new nuclear capacity.” Thereby keeping future electricity costs down because power from coal is way cheaper than nuclear power. Not such a silly idea after all. Especially if they all knew that global warming, climate change etc. was all a big hoax anyhow. And they knew that here in the UK we would keep on ‘saving’ the planet because our current crop of politicians appear to actually believe what they say they believe.
Sorry but it’s not ‘way cheaper’ than to continue to operate a fully commissioned operational facility.
Buiding is one thing…continuing to use a fully built reactor site is another.
well…how in this world do you convince people that 90% of the countries emit fairy dust CO2..that’s beneficial and is greening the planet
..and 10% emit CO2 that’s the equivalent of arsenic
As with the lessons from Obama and Jerry Brown, they will continue to milk a safe fraud bet until it dries up and they move on to something else to further their policy and fund raising agenda.
This may, perhaps, be a positive development, in that Merkel is not doubling down on failure. I do not know German politics well enough to have any idea of who could replace her, but it looks like she needs to go.
No. She should better run and stay away from politics for the rest of her life. May the Lord have mercy with her soul.
Ms. Merkel might be dumb but she is not stupid, and it looks like she met reality face-to-face. Early snows?
“Criticism for abandoning [unachievable] emissions targets”. That’s the difference between reality and an election campaign.
At least she is trying to do something about the weather instead of just compiling complaining about it. I don’t think she has a snowball’s chance in Hell of achieving anything, but surely it is the intent that counts, right?
I hear Germany’s CO2 emissions are up, not down 40%. True? The new lignite-fired power plants are coming on line about 2021-22 if I recall correctly. After that starts, there will be one new plant commissioned per 2 months for a couple of years.
Real Reductions? If Russia cuts off the natural gas, Germans will have to start burning wood on a large scale, which will be unsustainably harvested. That means net CO2 emissions so that won’t help either.
What they really need to succeed is a dozen or two dozen new nuclear power stations and a contract with Musk to send the waste into the sun. That would be cheaper than wind turbines.
Problem with sending nuclear waste into the sun is that something like 5% of all rocket launches fail, and their payloads come back down to Earth uncontrollably. If your payload happens to be high-level nuclear waste, the greens for once would have a real reason to complain about something.
…already on the “Wood Pellet Stove” strategy with No.Carolina exports keeping German warm in the winter. Let’m try putting up tariffs on wood pellet imports and see what happens,..
Nuclear waste, isn’t.
It’s nuclear fuel that just needs to be reprocessed to make it usable again.
Seems reality is setting in for Fr. Merkel…
In technical terms she’s kicking the can down the road so it becomes SEP.
” … calls, most recently from the European Commission’s climate chief Miguel Arias Canete, for swifter cuts to harmful carbon dioxide emissions”
Beneficial Carbon Dioxide emissions help to fuel the Carbon Cycle of Life, and all Carbon Based Life Forms participate in the Carbon Cycle of Life. Atmospheric CO2 is freely distributed throughout the globe and available for all to consume, including the Mid-Eastern fig trees, Mongolian grazing plains, and Asian fishing waters.
Now we just need to identify which CO2 emissions are ‘harmful’ and cut those?
hummm, … let’s shut down the nukes, build more coal plants, burn peat,… and virtue signal to the World how self-righteous sacrifice is somehow special.
It’s like having goals of hitting yourself on the head with a hammer. They want to increase the number of times, while she wants the number of head-hitting times to stay the same. Gee, how very rational of her. Well, it is GreenLogic, so I guess it makes “sense”.
To wit: the lefites won’t let us run any nuclear ourselves, but we can’t afford the labor-union backlash we would receive if we stopped burning lignite.
Moving the goalposts out a few years is always a good idea, Angie. Also, I suggest you read Bjorn Lonberg’ seminal study that proves the even if you hit your (moving) targets for greenhouse gas reductions, the effect on global temperatures will be virtually nil. So why bother?
If nothing else, this is proof of coordinated climate scare excuse messaging. In this case it’s for political deflection purposes.
I am not certain it is actually Merkel who is “speaking” here, it may well be her coalition partners forcing her hand.
It is said that Merkel does about 150 secret polls per year. So she can just decide what to tell the public what they like to hear.
This helps her to keep power, together with the help of the public founded and private Media.
Germany would go a long way toward reducing emissions if they would restart their nuclear power plants. Until they do, they aren’t serious.
Too late. They are dismantling them.
The really hilarious thing (or the most tragic, depending on pov) is that Miguel Arias Cañete (Arias is last name, not middle) is a Spanish conservative from the PP party that is an skeptic of anthropogenic climate change in disguise, that had strong ties to the oil industry, that since he was designated as EU Commissioner for Energy and Climate Action he has been playing the part as expected. But now that Germany is in deep shit with the Energiewende perhaps he’ll have to change the tune again.
“A proliferation of extreme weather events around the world provides ample evidence that climate change is a reality,” Not only does Merkel not specify what these extreme weather events are or why she thinks they are unusual, but fails to note that even the IPCC rejects the notion that extreme weather events has anything to do with global warming. Now,one might reasonably ask why Merkel doesn’t point to real evidence, namely rising temperatures, to provide evidence of global warming. But nooooo.. that would make sense.
I am surprised they have not thrown her out! She keeps messing up Europe.
Not that I support CO2 reduction policies, but shouldn’t Germany and other countries agreeing to these deals actually work harder to achieve those goals, despite whatever economic concerns there might be? Or are their words just wind, their beliefs just posturing? And yeah, this would include my country too.
Work harder to achieve economic suicide?
Basically, but it is not like they didn’t know that when signing up. Once again begs the question, are they serious about “preventing” climate change, or are they just posturing, making empty promises (which basically just proves how much their other promises, in other political areas, are worth).
When you discover you are moving down the wrong path, the wise thing to do would be to change direction and not continue further along the wrong path.
“A proliferation of extreme weather events around the world provides ample evidence that climate change is a reality,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Sunday, but she rejected calls for more ambitious climate protection goals.
FIXED IT HERE…
“A proliferation of mobile phones, social media, climate-theory-obsessed mainstream media, which creates a vastly increased sample of extreme weather events around the world, provides ample illusion that climate change is a reality.”
Jamie Spry …. You’ve left out ‘redefine the meaning of extreme’.
Forest fires are not. They are WILDFIRES!!!.
The occasional new record is not. It is UNPRECIDENTED!!.
A regular kind of heat wave is EXTREME TEMPERATURE!!!
Any dry spell is now DROUGHT!
They’ve been very very successful at this.
So the US remains the leader in CO2 reduction and is still the bad guy while China surpasses the combined reduction efforts of the world with their increases and is the leader. What about the children? What a farce, why isn’t the world aware of the scam?
This is sort of like the gun control advocates’ game in the USA. They scream and demand laws and regulations that they know will not work. Then when some tragedy, usually preventable, happens they can then demand even stricter regulations. When those don’t accomplish their goal then they hope to convince the electorate to disarm all law abiding citizens. Meanwhile, they fight enforcing the laws already on the books, e.g., Chicago. According the the police chief in Chicago even when they make an arrest of a previously convicted felon with a illegal firearm the local judges and district attorneys let them back on the street with in hours or days. Then the politicians blame the problem on adjacent states.
Don’t imagine this is off topic. It is about Progressive/ Leftist legal strategies. Just take out “gun control advocates” and substitute radical green politicos and their Leftist allies.
Oh well, a lot of those early-adopter solar panels and windmills will need replacing at a time when cyclical cooling in the climate is obvious. Good luck with all those dismantled power stations.
Germany’s squeaky clean green image is an illusion. There is an honest (though I’ll-informed) desire among Germans to “do the right thing” regarding the environment. However their industry – especially car manufacturing – is core to their way of life and will come first. That is why rising energy prices are born more by households than by industry. And is also why Germany conspicuously has declined to follow other countries such as Britain and France in decreeing electric only cars by 2030 or 2040. Germany will never do this. As such deadlines approach, Germany’s green consensus and Energiewende will crumble. Teutonic common sense will prevail.
More climate data by then showing cooling will help too
Why? Because Germany can meet ALL the goals of the Paris accord … if … they simply increase the amount of clean green NUCLEAR energy they import from France. Problem solved.
At what point will Germany’s sky-high power costs begin to exert a drag on economic performance?
In 2016, there were a bit more than 300.000 German households (out of ~ 40.000.000) that suffered from a shut-off of electric energy because they couldn’t pay the bill any longer. More than 1.500.000 reminders were sent out. Prices are still soaring.
If the Germans should ever try to start a revolution at a Railway station, you can be sure they will buy a platform ticket first. Many Watermelons there will fight until the “Endsieg der Energiewende”, fools they are and no matter what the cost, even if they get dragged under.
Am I wrong or is it not a FACT that all signers except China could cease all emissions of CO2 and the allowances given to China would still cause an increase over the next 15 year , or at least till they have an obligation to consider reducing CO2 emissions? That fact in itself tells me it is all for politics and “Globalization” efforts.
Extreme weather events are part of the current climate and have nothing to do with climate change. Even if we could stop climate change, extreme weather events would continue to happen unabated.
Based on the paleoclimate record and the work done with models, one can conclude that the climate change we have been experiencing is caused by the sun and the oceans over which mankind has no control. There is no real evidence that CO2 has any effect on climate and there is plenty of scientific rationale to support the idea that the climate sensitivity of CO2 is zero. There are many good reasons to be conserving on the use of fossil fuels but climate change is not one of them.
Economic reality has a way of smacking you in the face.
I thought we have been told hundreds of times it takes thirty years for it to be climate not weather so how can it be proof? We had a far hotter and drier year here in 76.
What harmful carbon dioxide emissions?
Goethe, Faust: the devil she called for –
Merkel’s government has already faced criticism for abandoning emissions targets it had set itself for 2020 after concluding they were unachievable, while sticking to a target it had set itself for a decade later.
Merkel — straight out of the Frankfurt School and adherent to Critical Theory. What a piece of work.
We have now the AfD in the parliament as the largest opposition Party. And now you can hear it in every debate when they tell that the Energiewende is futile. Its now all on Youtube.
Canete is almost ‘Canute’, now there’s some nominative determinism for ya
I wish they would list all the weather they are talking about and dates so we can see if more than usual. I think Al Gore had the arctic ice free now ten years ago. Some had NYC under water by now. I know Al Gore has made a fortune on his global warming spiel, not sure about the waterlogged NYC guy.