BRUSSELS (Reuters) – European Union government leaders declined on Friday to set tougher targets for fighting climate change, dashing hopes they would inject momentum into a United Nations climate conference in Chile in December.
At a two-day EU summit in Brussels, which was largely dominated by Brexit, discussion on climate was relegated to the last agenda item and took less than 15 minutes.
“The existential threat posed by climate change requires enhanced ambition and increased climate action by the EU and at global level,” read the final statement by the leaders.
The bloc aimed to “finalize its guidance on the EU’s long-term strategy on climate change at its December meeting.”
That means the EU will not bring more ambitious climate change-fighting objectives to the U.N. gathering in Santiago on Dec. 2-13, part of a process to check signatories’ progress toward implementing the 2015 Paris accords.
Beyond the cautious wording of Friday’s EU communique lurks deep divisions over climate strategy within the 28-nation bloc, whose standing goal is to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 40% by 2030 compared to 1990 levels.
HT/Willie Soon
Is that horse finally dead?
No, it’s a cat and has more than 9 lives.
That won’t stop them flogging it …
It’s dead, but it won’t lie down.
It’s not dead – It’s resting
It’s an ex-agenda. Gone to meet its maker.
Nope. It’s a zombie. It’s slow, characterised by jerks left and lefter, and leaves its victims brainless.
— Accidental surreal irony. If they really believe climate change poses an existential threat to them [AKA threat against their existence], they would actually have done something.
‘Existential’ is a “humptyword”. Look up Humpty Dumpty in Alicecin Wonderland for full context!
When you argue with a SJW and point out the inconsistency of their position, they will counter that you can’t use the dictionary definition of words.
When you point out that a white male can be the victim of racism (in Japan for instance), they will deny that that is possible. Mere logic will not move a SJW.
But there is an existential threat which is the proposed ‘mitigations’ for the twisted obsession about fake climate change caused by CO2 emissions. To avoid this threat, the best way forward is to do nothing, which is what they’re doing.
At least in this case, bureaucratic incompetence is a good thing …
So the co2 seeing devil wants XR to break more laws as pre her twitter post, XR’s leader wants to over throw governments and has stated that XR has nothing to do with climate change, sorry I meant the weather, and now the EU doesn’t really care about the u.n. Scam. Maybe its because they know co2 is good for the planet, or that the billions wasted on wind and solar has given no gains only economic losses?
Most likely the pooh bas of the EU have finally figured out that they cannot make millions of Euros for themselves with the climate. There is no money to be had in wind or solar power, at least not on the scale that would interest several thousand people that are already wealthy. If the climate is changing there is no money to be had in trying to change it back. Since we don’t yet know what causes changes in the climate it’s doubly hard to make money by trying to change it.
And finally, the poor people who do need help also know(through cultural knowledge) that the climate where they live has a long, long history with no changes.
It is also possible that they may finally realizing that the way to make more money is to find ways for the remaining poor people to earn a lot more and pay taxes.
Greta won’t be pleased with this news. Prepare to incur her wrath.
Perhaps she’ll swim back to Europe in order to give them a piece of her mind.
How dare they 🙂
Ineffective.
Kamilkazedave
HOOOOOOW DAAAARRRRREEEEE YOOOOUUU 😂😂
Better.
However, you need to use that font with the acid, bile, and blood dripping from the letters to truly capture the sentiment.
Yes – and the extinction rebellion crowd will fume and feel justified initiating further sabotage and mayhem. I note Greta is encouraging them to break the law. They most likely will now – which will finally make it possible to snuff out their “rebellion”. About time.
Actually, creating a Public Nuisance is a criminal act, so they already are.
Why don’t they get a tank filled with fake blood and a fire hose and get a couple of guys to carry it atop a train on the Jubilee line to spray commuters? What could go wrong?
Greta’s an idiot. She sailed to NYC in a boat made of oil byproducts. She likely ate food that was grown, harvested, canned and prepared using oil and coal for energy. She wore clothes that are an oil byproduct.
I also understand that two crew members had to fly to New York in order to have a full crew to sail the boat back across the Atlantic.
I am sure they offset their emissions by having bananas transported to Alberta, Canada, in their borrowed Tesla (That don’t work too well in real cold).
They aren’t meeting their current goals. Why would they make tougher ones?
They have still got one foot without a bullet hole, you really have to balance things up.
There are many problems in the EU but none of them is even remotely linked to CO2.
Agreed. Brexit, with possibilities of other countries to follow in near future, is an “existential” threat to the EU as currently configured and governed. That is a good thing.
The EU needs anti-bureaucratic reform. Brexit will, if it ever happens, get them into a serious frame of mind. Climate Change will look like an irrelevant policy concern to them then—-especially given the CO2 belching out of China, India, etc, making any moves by Europe useless.
From the article: “That means the EU will not bring more ambitious climate change-fighting objectives to the U.N. gathering in Santiago on Dec. 2-13, part of a process to check signatories’ progress toward implementing the 2015 Paris accords.”
I’m real curious about China and India’s contributions to fighting human-caused climate change. They don’t have any CO2 requirements to meet before the year 2030. Until then China and India can pretty much do whatever they want as far as generating CO2 is concerned. There are no restrictions.
So the Alarmists are not serious about CO2 killing off humanity, otherwise they would be acting completely differently than they are. They would focus on the really big producers of CO2 and they would focus on nuclear power generation. Instead, the Alarmists’ focus is on controlling the Western democracies’ policies and has created an artificial crisis blamed on CO2 as the method of control of the economy and the population.
If China and India are not the number one priority on the alarmist’s list, then that tells us that increasing CO2 production is not their primary interest.
China and India promised that in 2030 they would “assess the situation”. That is all. And if their “assessment” is that they need to keep doing what they’ve been doing, they will.
Germany will not let Brexit happen. They have worked too hard to rule over the British. Global warming…I mean climate change…I mean Climate Extinction will have to wait.
Winning wars is useless if you then lose the peace.
The climate shenanigans are pretty much over. The XR’s and the Greta’s have lost.
It’s time to deal with real problems, especially the rise of China (which just signed a deal for Iraqi oil in exchange for massive construction projects).
China aims to surpass the US as the dominant global power, and has had tremendous success thus far through it’s “Belt and Road” initiative, through the adoption of Hwawei 5g around the world, and via the build out of Chinese naval and missile forces.
The climate and related culture wars amount to an elaborate exercise in naval-gazing. We must stop this and focus and the actual threat at hand.
Adam
Nice to know Iraq is getting back to business, after the usa and europe nearly destroyed its economy.
Iraq is an Iranian vassal state. Iran is a Russian vassal state. Russia is a Chinese vassal state.
Syria and Lebanon are Iranian vassal states. Since Iran is a Russian vassal state, and Russia is a Chinese vassal state, China has gained back door control of large chunks of the ME. Also, Turkey is quickly becoming a Chinese vassal state, thanks to infusions of Chinese cash.
Europe is about to become dependent on Hwawei 5G and Russian natural gas. Europe will sing from the Chinese hymn book.
While we’re arguing about “climate change” and transgender rights, China is quietly spreading its tentacles far and wide.
“Adam October 20, 2019 at 9:56 am
China has gained back door control of large chunks of the ME. Also, Turkey is quickly becoming a Chinese vassal state, thanks to infusions of Chinese cash.”
Large chunks of the Pacific, Australia and Africa.
Also large chunks of the NBA.
Hmmm…even if the shenanigans are over, there is still the balance of the malarkey, hogwash, bafflegab, inanity, codswallop, blather, hooey, tommyrot, twaddle and plain old jackassery to wade through, just yet.
And there may even still be an odd unspent shenanigan here and there.
With any luck at all, the worst of the piffle, tosh, guff and claptrap are in the rearview though.
In days of yore we called it “The yellow peril”
Just this week Russia called off any carbon action, and only an audit will pass. What insubordination!
So it is obvious – Russian interference in the EU !
So when a German AfD politician accuses Putin of funding Greta, and Hilary accuses Tulsi Gabbard of being Putin’s puppet, and Pelosi accuses Trump in the Oval Office of worse, it is time to get Ursula’s European Defense Union tanks rolling.
Brexit has no effect on the European Defense Union, which includes an Africa Corps.
Deja vu?
Ummm, note that the UK hopes to leave the EU and we are the prats who are signed up to do more harm to ourselves than the rest. You couldnt make it up
Germany has essentially ended all onshore wind generation with “market-based auctions” (see Oct. 1 auction results) and will soon tire of building more solar than they can use or dump on their neighbors. Japan will be ending it’s FIT program for renewables in 2020. China talks renewables and builds coal. Brexit will end UK folly. Recent natural gas reserve additions is the US make expensive renewables “less competitive”. Yes, the horse is dead….but the Green’s will continue to beat it for a couple more years.
Germany is still building offshore wind and if you look at its electricity export figures, its neighbours are taking all they can get
You mean this?
https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/news/germanys-wind-industry-in-bad-health/
Dennis G Sandberg
What a depressing few years that will be… I can’t take any more talk of the CO2 seeing devil child.
From the article: “At a two-day EU summit in Brussels . . . discussion on climate was relegated to the last agenda item and took less than 15 minutes.”
It is nice to see CAGW finally getting the respect that it deserves. Hopefully, much less to come.
The EU has enough problems to worry about without taking actions to cripple members’ economies. Italian banks, Spanish unemployment, German GDP, brexit, general low level public dissatisfaction, gas, Greek debt, Polish shan’t, why is it still functioning?
even the German politicians are getting windy at this madness as it harms industry.
If they get windy enough, Richard, perhaps they can be tethered to a turbine and produce something useful for a change.
From the article, with minor typo corrected:
Missed a couple of keystrokes. Happens to all of us now and then.
The reality is that the climate change we are experiencing today is caused by the sun and the oceans over which mankind has no control. Despite the hype, 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. But even if we could somehow stop the Earth’s climate from changing, extreme weather events and sea level would continue because they are part of the current climate. We do not even know what the ideal global climate is let alone how to achieve it. It is all a matter of science and reality.
“existential threat”
Where?
Winter is coming to the Northeast. My father is packing to become a climate refugee. He can feel it in his bones, that existential threat of climate change. His condo in Fort Myers awaits…
He estimates this “climate anomaly” will last about six months and plans to be back in May.
The upcoming climate conferences in Santiago 2 – 13 December could be entertaining. Now that rioters have destroyed several subway stations, supposedly over a 3.5% increase in the fare, some conference participants may need to do a lot of extra walking.
https://unfccc.int/Santiago
The EU countries haven’t voluntarily met the set of standards and goals they proposed in 2015. What meaning would new, stricter goals have? Complete garbage.
Furthermore, I found it funny protesters were impeding a mass transit train in Britain recently. They now have a problem with mass transit? I thought that was the green method of commuting.
Yet another indication of the Climate Change fraud losing support and momentum. CO2, the essential plant food, is not an ‘existential threat’! MCO2GA!
If they aren’t going to make new rules or changes, then what is the point of the “conference”? I am pretty sure that prostitution is illegal in Chile.
But I guess the booze and coca will help calm their fears. Of global weirding or something.
Speaking as the citizen of a “not so poor” Southern Hemisphere country, I am entirely in sympathy with the poor Eastern European countries whose economies rely on coal.
As our “target” under Paris is an emission reduction of 26-28% from 2005 levels by 2030, Australia is reliant on coal and resources revenue for some A$ 68 billion annually.
As the activists are pushing for a target of net zero emissions by 2050, there is shall we say a considerable scepticism that green jobs will miraculously appear to keep the country solvent.
The reality is that the climate change we are experiencing is caused by the sun and the oceans over which mankind has no control. Despite the hype, 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. So all effort expended to stop the Earth’s climate from changing is wasted effort. But even if we could somehow stop the Earth’s climate from changing, extreme weather events and sea level would continue so there is nothing to be gained. We do not know how to stop extreme weather events from happening.
There was NO EU SUMMIT last week. It was a meeting of the EUROPEAN COUNCIL which is part of the governance on the European Union. Along with the European Commission and to a lesser extent the European Parliament, the European Council runs the EU. The programme for the Council meeting is set by the General Affairs Council 2 days earlier. The next Council meeting is in December along it is likely a special Council will be convened this month for Brexit – hopefully to reject the request for yet another extension delay.
Some European leaders start to understand that if they slap more of the same crap onto their electorate, they won’t be leaders for long anymore. The very people they represent will give them the boot. In Austria, we have seen lately through an affair that has nothing to do with Climate Change how quickly things can change and one of the most popular politicians of the country became one of the most reviled in mere months.
It’s not difficult to show that CO2, although increasing, has little to do with our current warming. It’s also easy to show that the Medieval Warming Period (1.000 years-ago) was global and at least as warm as it is now, and this can be demonstrated without controversial models or dubious statistical machinations. Alarmists, rather than recognizing the value of historical data (earlier global warming information), have for unexplained reasons based their computer projections on a cherry-picked short-term correlation between CO2 and temperature from 1975 to the 2000s. (That warming period is bracketed by a cooling between 1945 and 1975 as CO2 was steadily increasing, and by the IPCC acknowledgement that there was a temperature “hiatus” in the 2000s while CO2 continued to increase.)
The only other indication favoring CO2 as causing warming is related to experiments showing that when CO2 is added to a closed container, the container temperature increases somewhat. However, the open atmosphere is hardly a closed container. Satellites detect heat escaping to space and closed containers do not experience planetary-level feedbacks.
The proponents of anthropogenic-caused global warming invariably DENY that the Medieval Warming Period was global and likely warmer than it is now. The alarmists acknowledge only that Europe experienced the MWP. (They had no choice – climate in that region during the MWP is too well documented!) Alarmists apparently take this unjustifiable position because their computer models cannot explain any of these earlier global warmings. Their computer models depend heavily on increasing CO2 level, even more so on yet another ASSUMPTION – that water vapor feedback is the actual culprit, causing 2 to 3 times the temperature increase supposedly brought on by the increase in CO2. They also apparently ignore the fact that the supposed heating influence of CO2 diminishes very quickly as CO2 level increases and CO2 has already doubled 8 times.
The global temperature increase during the MWP, as well as during the earlier global warmings, was not due to CO2 because there was no increase in CO2 during those periods. The problem for alarmists is that it becomes obvious that perhaps our current warming (such as it is) may also be due to NATURAL climate variation. That, of course, conflicts with Mann’s hockey stick graph. Mann recently lost a suit he brought against Dr. Tim Ball years ago. Ball had apparently implied that some of Mann’s work was fraudulent. Mann succeeded in delaying dismissal of that suit by agreeing to provide his “work”, on or before the revised termination date, but apparently did not supply his data by the extended date. Man has been ordered to pay Ball’s $700k in legal expenses. (How does this suit differ from a legal harassment suit?) The top IPCC paleoclimatologist agrees that Mann’s hockey stick papers are wrong! Mann claims some of his work is proprietary but there are a few others who claim to have matched Mann’s hockey stick. Presumably their “work” is available, so what’s proprietary about Mann’s work? Why should anyone believe a supposed scientist’s work if he with-holds the basis for his conclusions?
https://motls.blogspot.com/2019/10/top-ipccs-paleoclimatologist-agrees.html
Without bothering to argue further about the dubious (and controversial) process employed by Mann to generate his hockey stick graph it can be debunked by demonstrating that the MWP was indeed global and at least as warm as now. While that proves nothing directly about the cause of our current warming (such as it is) it speaks loudly about the credibility of the folks who continue to DENY that the MWP was global and at least as warm as now. The link below provides, among other things, an MWP global study. It also rebuts the various alarmist “talking points”.
https://principia-scientific.org/empirical-evidence-refutes-greenhouse-gas-theory/
The question remains. Why in the world did the alarmists choose CO2 as the culprit when there is no evidence that CO2, a trace gas, has ever, even over geologic periods when CO2 was 10 to 20 times higher, had any impact on our planet’s temperature? There was obviously some uncertainty. There was almost immediate skepticism voiced by credible researchers about Mann’s process. Phil Jones, one of the prominent alarmist early players, publicly stated that if the MWP was global and as warm as now, then that was a “different ballgame”. Nonetheless, alarmists decided instead to blame human activity and that pretty much necessitates denying that the MWP was global and at least as warm as now.
It’s obvious now, if not then, that a more thorough investigation of the earlier global warmings was necessary, particularly the MWP, before resorting to pure speculation about CO2.
Some time ago Henrik Svensmark, a Danish physicist and his associates, offered a theory which makes use of, and explains, the historical data. Svensmark’s theory proposes that sun activity modulates the level of a relatively steady stream of cosmic rays intent on penetrating the lower atmosphere. (CERN certified some time ago that cosmic rays may influence the level of cloud cover.) Until very recently we have, for some time, been experiencing a high level of sun activity. During such an active period the level of cloud coverage drops because fewer cosmic rays penetrate the solar wind. With less cloud cover more sun energy reaches the earth surface so it becomes warmer. However, a very low level of sun activity is now underway. If the sun remains inactive for a significant period, Svensmark’s theory predicts more cloud cover, hence a cooler earth. CO2 plays no part in Svensmark’s theory.
At this stage of the game, whether or not Svensmark’s theory holds up, it appears that serious attention needs to be directed to historical data. If earlier global warmings cannot be explained why should we believe speculation about future climamte? Since CO2 increase was the only possible link between human activity and global warming, it appears that human activity (apart from its impact on Urban Heat Islands) plays no part in global warming. The matter of increasing CO2 should be left to such disciplines as botanists and health researchers rather than climatologists.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/10/07/what-if-there-is-no-climate-emergency/