Michael Kile
To grasp what is going down at the COP26 ‘last chance saloon’ in Glasgow besides Scotch whiskey, it is worth revisiting the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s most ambitious creation, the Green Climate Fund. In climate politics, the devil resides in the detail and the history.
The Green Climate Fund is to become the main instrument for multilateral climate finance in the future. It will channel a significant share of international climate finance needed to keep global temperature increases to below 2° Celsius. GCF statement, Bonn, September 9, 2014
On November 14, 2014, the White House announced a ‘unique development in the U.S.-China relationship’. The ‘carbon pollution’ targets trumpeted that day would be torn up and replaced by the rhetoric of NetZero in less than a decade. Another case of climate déjà vu all over again.
The G20 Brisbane Summit kicked off the next day. Paragraph 19 of the Summit Communiqué reads:
We support strong and effective action to address climate change. Consistent with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and its agreed outcomes, our actions will support sustainable development, economic growth, and certainty for business and investment. We will work together to adopt successfully a protocol, another legal instrument or an agreed outcome with legal force under the UNFCCC that is applicable to all parties at the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP21) in Paris in 2015……We reaffirm our support for mobilising finance for adaptation and mitigation, such as the Green Climate Fund.
Despite much media excitement, there was little new. UNFCCC’s search for ‘another legal instrument or an agreed outcome with legal force’ for ‘mobilising’ developed world finance had been going on – with increasing urgency – since the 2009 Copenhagen COP15 debacle.
How did we get to this point?The UN climate-control and ‘climate-protection’ racket began in earnest in Mexico four years earlier at the Moon Palace Golf and Spa Resort, Cancun. More than 15,000 delegates danced to the COP16 theme song: ‘Let’s put the CAN in Cancun!’ This event in early December, 2010, still sticks in the mind, if not the gullet, for some people.
It was here that UNFCCC’s new Costa Rican executive secretary, Christian Figueres, first warned that ‘the environmental stakes are high, because we are quickly running out of time to safeguard our future.’
The stakes were high too. Ms Figueres wanted the ‘multilateral UN climate change process’ to remain ‘the trusted channel for rising to the challenge’. To protect its ‘effectiveness and credibility’, GCF was conjured up as the mechanism for transferring eagerly anticipated billions of dollars from the developed to the developing world.
The ‘world’s poorest and most vulnerable’ were already facing nasty – invariably assumed to be human-induced – climate impacts. They urgently needed assistance – payment of ‘climate debt’ – to tackle ‘a problem that they did not cause’. Translation: Every extreme, random, unusual or destructive weather – or climate – event in the developing world was, is and would be – by dodgy definition – conveniently attributed to carbon dioxide emissions by the developed world.
Ms Figueres urged attendees to embrace the wisdom of Ixchel – a Mayan goddess with a writhing serpent headdress and crossed bones embroidered on her skirt. It worked. Governments – with the exception of the US under President Trump – continue to promote the novel notion that a huge bureaucracy – should, could and can – control the planet’s elusive thermostat; while demanding billions of dollars for ‘climate reparations’ and future ‘climate protection’ money from the developed world by demonizing – and monetizing via ‘carbon credits’ and grants on a grand scale – an invisible atmospheric trace gas crucial to global plant photosynthesis and all organic life, including homo net zero.
Four years later, Ms Figueres described the challenge of driving the greatest wealth transfer in history as:
probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model , for the first time in human history. We are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the industrial revolution. February 3, 2015)
For some, it was a shrewd eco-Marxist tactic designed to solve other challenges, such as population growth and poverty. Saving the planet was an easy sell in a world awash with slogans and young eco-worriers.
On March 15, 2011, a decade ago, UNFCCC released The COP16 Cancun Agreement” (FCCC/CP/2010/7/Add.1, Decision 1/CP.16). Under Clause 103, GCF would be governed by a 24-member Board comprising equal numbers from developing and developed countries; representatives of relevant UN regional groups, small island developing States and least-developed countries.
Clause 98 spelt out the key commitment:
developed country Parties [shall] commit, in the context of meaningful mitigation actions and transparency on implementation, to a goal of mobilizing jointly USD100 billion per year by 2020 to address the needs of developing countries.
Yet many developed countries remain reluctant to share with their electorates precisely why, how – and for how long – they intend to fund multi-billion dollar ‘climate-resilient development pathways’ in the developing world – and help it ‘adapt’ to all the ‘adverse impacts of climate change’.
How the West came to agree to this goal — to pay the developing world annual ‘climate reparations’ of a ‘meaningful’ USD100 billion from 2020 remains a mystery. Was it the Tequila Effect or the Ixchelian spell of the Moon Palace Golf and Spa Resort? Whatever it was, President Obama woke to the occasion.
There’s one issue that will define the contours of this century more dramatically than any other. And that is the urgent and growing threat of a changing climate. — President Obama, September, 2014
What, then, of the President’s USD3 billion pledge at the University of Queensland that week, which had local climate-crusaders urging Australia ‘to lead on the front foot’? An article in the Times of India described it (correctly) as ‘just peanuts’. Likewise the developed world’s total early pledges of about USD7.5 billion – USA ($3 billion), Japan ($1.5 billion), Germany ($1 billion), France ($1 billion), Sweden ($500 million), Netherlands ($125 million) South Korea ($100 million) and Mexico ($10 million).
Yet the UN’s grand decarbonisation mission powers ahead at the ‘make or break’ COP26, driven by the hope this COP will deliver finally a very big bag of money: ‘climate finance’.
It is clear from statistics that we need to re-channel trillions from the existing assets entrenching today’s unsustainable economy into greener growth. However it is less clear where the necessary finance to deliver the change will come from and how to mobilize it to enable this transition. — United Nations Environment Program
In early September 2014, the GCF held its second Initial Resource Mobilization (IRM) meeting in Bonn, just weeks after Germany pledged up to USD1 billion. At the informal consultation, Ms Figueres told representatives
the Green Climate Fund is up, but it is not yet running. In order for that to happen, governments need to move from words to deeds. Between now and the next Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC in Lima, Peru, the capitalization of the Fund must begin. Initial funding of US$ 10 billion would be a good start and a good signal of intent as the world looks forward to a new climate agreement in 2015 that is both universal and meaningful.
Once GCF is ‘appropriately capitalized’, it will make grants and loans ‘for projects and programmes that enable developing countries to boost sustainable development, whilst curbing greenhouse gas emissions and adapting to climate change’.
What formula was used to determine the GCF’s annual dollar pledges and targets? There are clues in how the UN’s approach or ‘architecture’ has evolved over the past two decades – and, crucially, in the contraction-and-convergence ideology that informed its early development. That ideology is now imbedded with another core concept in the agency’s quest for global peace and happiness: ‘sustainability’.
The COP16 Cancun Agreement preamble reaffirmedthat:
climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our time and that all Parties share a vision for long-term cooperative action in order to achieve the objective of the Convention under its Article 2, including through the achievement of a global goal, on the basis of equity and in accordance with common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities; this vision is to guide the policies and actions of all Parties, while taking into full consideration the different circumstances of Parties in accordance with the principles and provisions of the Convention.
All signatories – including Australia – continue to commit to that ‘global goal’ based on ‘equity’. They accept the notion of ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’. For those who came in late, the first principle of the 1992 UNFCCC Agreement (Article 3) states:
The Parties should protect the climate system for the benefit of present and future generations of humankind, on the basis of equity and in accordance with their common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities. Accordingly, the developed country Parties should take the lead in combating climate change and the adverse effects thereof.
When Presidents Obama and Xi made their joint announcement in late 2014, it was not about a formal agreement. They merely referred to future targets that have turned out not to be achievable. Nevertheless, they threw a much-needed bone to a UN climate bureaucracy anxious about another crisis of credibility – and a grenade into the procrastinator-camp.
The world’s two largest emitters – China then with 26 per cent and the US 17 per cent – did something else. They publicly endorsed the contraction – of US and developed world’s emissions – and their convergence – with China’s and the developing world’s emissions. They provided specific targets for the first time, even if they were provisional and lacked ‘legal force’.
This was indeed consistent with the Cancun Agreement, where signatories reaffirmed their intention to
cooperate in achieving the peaking of global and national greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible, recognizing that the time frame for peaking will be longer in developing countries, and bearing in mind that social and economic development and poverty eradication are the first and overriding priorities of developing countries and that a low-carbon development strategy is indispensable to sustainable development; in this context, further agrees to work towards identifying a time frame for global peaking of greenhouse gas emissions based on the best available scientific knowledge and equitable access to sustainable development.
The key date in the 2014 Obama/Xi announcement was 2030. This is the year when China’s national greenhouse gas emissions – and population – were projected to peak and reach ‘parity’ with the US. Last week it became 2060 for China and Russia, and 2070 in the case of India.
If one accepts the UN’s climate alarmism – ignoring for the sake of argument its many flaws – how are carbon dioxide emissions to be shared between countries – equitably and sustainably – in a world where the human population continues to grow and is expected to exceed nine billion people by 2050?
For contraction-and-convergence fans, the best way would be by convergence on an agreed per person amount of emissions by an agreed date, according to an agreed global contraction budget and schedule (see graph). Developed world wealth transfers, they argue, are required to settle past ‘climate debt’ and to fund urgent ‘adaptation’ projects forced on vulnerable societies by the West’s profligacy.
If last century’s Utopia was populated by Soviet Man, he has been superseded this century by Green Person and Net Zero, yet with eerily similar yearnings – this time for a ‘sustainable’ world free of ‘inequity’.
Paradoxically, the contraction-and-convergence concept’s surprise creator, Aubrey Meyer, is not a UN climate bureaucrat. He is a musician (viola) by training and former member of the UK Green Party. Now a climate campaigner and composer, he co-founded the Global Commons Institute in 1990.
Both the UN Charter and the US Declaration of Independence declare everyone is born equal. This proposal takes equity as the starting point for the whole world to resolve the twin problems of global warming and global inequity. Contraction and Convergence, along with the practice of Allocation and Trade, can be used to provide a structure for human societies to reach sustainability with the earth and its ecosystems. Without a plan of this sort, there will be an increasingly visionless future and many people will perish. — Aubrey Meyer, Pacific Ecologist, Summer 2006/07
According to Mr Meyer’s site, his first public “Contraction & Convergence” statement was published in The Guardian on June 18, 1991, with 250 signatories, including 50 UK Parliamentarians. The following year, he presented what appears to have been an influential paper on it — ‘The Unequal Use of the Global Commons’ — to Policy Working Group Three of the IPCC Second Assessment Report.
Meyer later said the world must collaborate with musical discipline to avert runaway climate change: that is, play his “contraction-and-convergence carbon reduction score in time, in tune and together”.
Was someone in the UN at that time tempted to put the dollar-cart before the dangerous climate-horse? Surely not. Yet Mr Meyer’s concept appeared years before UNFCCC’s emphatic reliance on attribution pseudoscience, the surge in activist “blah-blah-blah” waffle and the pandemic of climate anxiety that has led us to where we are today.
But that’s another story, perhaps one titled with a proverb: ‘The road to hell is paved with good intentions’.
This essay first appeared in Quadrant Online on November 8, 2021.
Michael Kile
I tend to write off anything the UN does as placating the waBenzis.
“Musical discipline”?
A military march no doubt
A militant march, at the least.
The “Climate Fund” is code for ‘give me your money and our appointed bureaucrats will spend it as we please’ like everything else the UN does. No accounting. No specific plans. No follow up. If you don’t we’ll publicly shame, bully, and ostracize you on the world stage. I say so what. It’s worth it to be excluded from the club of fools.
I will respect the discussion at an interest level when they count everything inside the box.
If you burn a forest in a coal fired power station include the residence time at a minimum. the zero carbon passes indicate that this is all pure sophistry.
Nobody burns forests. It’s just the “junk wood” from thinnings and slash. Only a propagandist would call that burning a forest. Removing and using that “junk wood” makes it easier to properly manage forests. In the US southeast, if they can’t chip that wood- they’ll just make big piles of the stuff and burn it in the open- releasing far greater real pollution than comes out of a well engineered biomass power station.
Ummm… Amazon?
That’s what they tell you…
If you believe that then I suggest you find and watch C4’s programme “The Real Cost of Green Energy”. They researched where the wood came from for Drax power station. Clear cut hard wood forests in Virginia USA transported across the Atlantic. They requested a university to assess how much C02 was released/KW compared with the coal wood had replaced. Wood released more CO2.
But because wood is sustainable, by a green calculation the CO2 released by Drax isn’t counted in the UK’s emissions (I suppose the planet is impressed by that).
Ohh just before I go, the UK taxpayer pays Drax £800 million/year in subsdies to burn wood rather than coal.
Why do you give a dam about carbon emissions? And, Jesus Christ almight- how many times do I need to say it here- THEY DON’T CLEARCUT FORESTS JUST FOR CHIPS. Can you read that? Most of the wood goes to other outlets, so guys like YOU can live in a wood home with wood furniture and TOILET PAPER and other paper products. Only the dregs go to chips. Good hardwood timber is worth a 1,000 times more than wood for chips. It may be that the burning of coal releases more carbon- but the forests recapture it- something the lame biomass haters here can’t understand. The forests of the American southeast have more wood in them every year- more carbon- they’re growing faster than they’re being cut. How long does it take the Earth to create more coal? You can’t just count the carbon going up the chimney- that’s extremely STUPID. What really counts is how much carbon is in the forests- and that’s assuming you’re a climate cry baby.
The approach on this is entirely consistent with how totalitarians have always operated –
knowing that that they can’t mount a compelling or convincing proposition to PERSUADE people to follow / adopt their totalitarian dystopian objectives (cost:benefit presentation), they resort to ways & means to REGULATE people to COMPLY.
As always when the citizenry is still unmoved, totalitarians are then easily tempted to utilize the handiest tool in their kit –
FORCE / VIOLENCE.
(The only surprising development in all this is that we are at all surprised by this behavior. I mean, it’s not as if we haven’t seen these antics many many times before over millenia)
For those who want to watch 90 minutes of hilarious climate comedy from Louder with Crowder from this morning’s show, check out the Youtube link below. The Greta skit is hilarious.
https://youtu.be/keZnn4-Ec3Q
The subjects ‘Climate change’ and the ‘Green Scams’ are 100% contradictions.
Parking the fact that the increase in atmospheric CO2 did not cause the warming and humans did not cause the majority of the increase in atmospheric CO2. The climate science is also 100% incorrect, at the level of imagination.
The Green scam solution cannot work (get a country to zero CO2 emissions) regardless of the amount of money spent. There are dozens of impossible to solve problems to get a country to zero CO2 emissions.
All of the manufacturing and the production of high energy goods/materials like aluminum has moved to Asia. The plan is we are going to go broke making our electricity super expensive and unreliable…. It is all so pointless as the plan will never work.
China’s ‘plan’ is to convert all of their coal fired power plants to high efficiency high temperature coal plants and to continue to promise to destroy their economy sometime after our economies collapse.
“The UK electrical grid power supply output (and the output of ever other country following the ‘plan’ that cannot work) would be required to INCREASE by a factor of THREE (with zero emissions) as all heating, manufacturing, and transportation, is going to be powered from electricity”
http://www.ukfires.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Absolute-Zero-online.pdf
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/11/22/shocker-top-google-engineers-say-renewable-energy-simply-wont-work/
“The key problem appears to be that the cost of manufacturing the components of the renewable power facilities is far too close to the total recoverable energy – the facilities never, or just barely, produce enough energy to balance the budget of what was consumed in their construction. This leads to a runaway cycle of constructing more and more renewable plants simply to produce the energy required to manufacture and maintain renewable energy plants – an obvious practical absurdity.
A research effort by Google corporation to make renewable energy viable has been a complete failure, according to the scientists who led the programme. After 4 years of effort, their conclusion is that renewable energy “simply won’t work”.”
Green Jobs Collapse in Germany and Go to China Instead. What a Surprise!
https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2021/02/09/delingpole-green-jobs-collapse-in-germany-and-go-to-china-instead-what-a-surprise/
https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/01/business/germany-inflation-eurozone/index.html
German inflation hits 29-year high as energy costs spike across Europe
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-climate-change-china-coal/china-generated-over-half-worlds-coal-fired-power-in-2020-study-idUSKBN2BK0PZ
China generated over half world’s coal-fired power in 2020: ● Chinaʼs coal fleet grew by net 29.8 GW in 2020, while in the rest of the world net capacity decreased by 17.2 GW.
● China initiated 73.5 GW of new coal plant proposals in 2020, over five times the 13.9 GW initiated in the rest of the world combined.
● Chinese provinces granted construction approval to 36.9 GW of coal power projects in 2020, over three times the capacity permitted in 2019 (11.4 GW).
● China now has 247 GW of coal power under development (88.1 GW under construction and 158.7 GW proposed for construction) – a 21% increase over end-2019 (205 GW), and nearly six times Germanyʼs entire coal-fired capacity (42.5 GW).
Decades of wasted effort, time, lives, and Trillions of dollars wasted – Ugh! The profound failure of communists writ large yet again.
A nitpick:
There is no such thing as Scotch Whiskey. The stuff we make is Whisky. The other spelling, with an “e”, is used for inferior foreign imitations. (The worst I have found was made in Egypt and was called Queen Victoria very fine whiskey. The bosun wouldn’t even use it to strip varnish.)
Good paper, though, Mr. Kile.
Whiskey is…. Irish
Also American, Indian, Japanese, Welsh and several other places; in fact everywhere but Scotland.
One wonders why you try them?
I grew up in various locations around Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
One of the things Philadelphia is well known for are their cheesesteak and steak sandwiches. Thinly sliced beef ribeye, fried with onions, add some cheese before taking the meat off the grill and serve with an Italian roll.
Cities and tourist spots outside of Philadelphia environs imitate or synthesize their own variations. It’s amazing how many places think frying an inexpensive chewy piece of beef and stuffing it into some white bread constitutes a Philadelphia steak sandwich.
If some place’s version of a Philadelphia steak sandwich looks real enough and the kitchen odors are frying onion and quality beef, I might try one.
Mostly, I skip the pleasure.
In the case of whisky, whiskey, bourbon, cognac, tequila, brandy, sherry, port, Pinot, cabernet, chardonnay, porter, stout, dark ale and thousands of additional versions, I would’ve stop ordering inappropriate knockoffs long ago.
Life’s too short to buy inappropriate knockoffs. Especially when whiskys’ involved.
Why you try them?
When you are in a foreign port and your Agent or Chandler gives you a present, it can be challenging to find a reason to refuse it.
You say tomatoes . . .
And I would direct you away from whisky and towards Omerto tomato wine, Moletto tomato gin, Black Tomato spirit or 72 Tomatoes brandy. Some people will make alcohol out of simply anything!
Yes, duplicating machine fluid was the most “exotic” tipple ingredient I’ve ever read about.
And lethal.
Who would have thought?
Darwin Awards for all imbibers.
Many years ago when I was a resident we reviewed some slides from the kidneys of prisoners incarcerated in an Indiana prison. They followed the rumor that filtering methyl alcohol through bread was drinkable. Big mistake!
Im fascinated – where did they get the methanol from? I can see how they may have fermented something to get ethanol, but not meths.
“Both the UN Charter and the US Declaration of Independence declare everyone is born equal.”
How convenient that they’re willing to reference the US Declaration of Independence & UN Charter as if the rest of the world lives/is governed by the documents.
We may be born equal, but in no way, shape or form are we governed equally. Pure nonsense.
We are not born equal. Perhaps the wording intended was “born equal under the law”….and/or “born equal under God”.
Despite having almost no funds to disperse, the GCF has a HQ staff of 220 based in Korea, with a 2021 operating budget of $84 million, in a new office building contributed by Korea that cost $40 million. That is how all climate stuff ‘works’.
If they have almost no funds to disperse, where does the operating budget of $84M come from?
Like all of these bureaucratic white elephants, it’s siphoned off from other UN projects and boondoggles. Obviously if they have enough loose change to fund these silly projects, then they’re obviously way overfunded.
No they need those funds to keep them in the manner to which they are accustomed so they can continue pumping out the reports saying other people need to provide the funding.
The Green Climate Fund is to become the main instrument for multilateral climate finance in the future. It will channel a significant share of international climate finance needed to keep global temperature increases to below 2° Celsius. GCF statement, Bonn, September 9, 2014
Includes a “nominal” channeling fee.
90% ?
Ah, a newcomer !
For “climate scams” the consensus view used to be that the standard “GCF administrative fee” was (at least) 97%.
This has now risen to (at least) 99% (see : Lynas et al, 2021).
Anyone else think this sounds a lot like the Southern “fixin’ to get ready”?
Bureaucratese for “we ain’t gonna do shlt”
The irony is that all this fuss about burning fossil fuels (CO2 increase) is a huge mistake.
The only greenhouse gas that has a significant effect on climate is water vapor. Global WV trend has been increasing about 1.49% per decade which is about twice as fast as possible from just temperature increase of the planet (net effect of all forcings and feedbacks). WV has increased about 7 molecules for each molecule of CO2 increase. The WV increase can account for all of climate change attributable to humanity. This graph, which has no contribution from CO2, is Fig 10.6 from the recently refined analysis at http://globalclimatedrivers2.blogspot.com
That’s interesting.
Is it ever asserted by CO2 alarmists that increases in atmospheric CO2 produces increases in water vapor content?
Alarmists have fooled a lot of people with that assertion (which is a mistake). Their entire theory is based on the false assumption that warming was initiated by CO2 increase and water vapor increased as a feedback to the temperature increase. Apparently they never actually checked or they would have discovered that WV has increased far more than possible from just temperature increase (the relevant feedback).
The simple algorithm to calculate WV increase from temperature increase is included in Sect 8 of http://globalclimatedrivers2.blogspot.com with the results for UAH temperatures shown here. The results for temperatures reported by HadCRUT4 are graphed in Sect 7 of https://watervaporandwarming.blogspot.com
I just submitted an article to CFACT on a wee fact that might destabilize the alarmism. According to IEA the commitments made to date are (if kept) enough to keep the temp at 1.8 degrees. This is well within the Paris target so no one has to do anything more! The planet has been saved. The alarmists should be celebrating, not demonstrating. Much fun this.
I remember Christiana Figueres spouting off in 2011 about climate and other subjects. On one of the latter, one I am well familiar with, she spoke utter hogwash. She is certainly deficient in careful, cohesive and critical reasoning. This is also reflected in her climate utterances. I would challenge her to apply in her life – for the next decade – what she expects others to do and prove that it is worth following her example.
A common misconception. Terry Pratchet told us that it is actually paved with frozen used car salesmen, and the imps go skating on it on the weekend.
Quote:“intentionally transform the economic development model , “
Into what though?
OK take money off the rich western folks and give to poor ‘eastern’ folks but what do they do with it – if not go off and spend it?
What do they buy if not the exact same things the westerners were buying.
How does that ‘transform the model’
what am I missing…….
Ok. The point isn’t that we give them some money to spend, it’s that we keep giving them money to spend. The whole model involves the rich West giving all of its money to the poor ‘global south’ until we’re all equally poor – except for the UN, of course. It’s really, really badly thought out – the idea that the money will get to where it’s needed is pure fantasy, given the corruption in most of those countries and that’s only if the rich West agrees to give up its money. It’s ridiculous, unworkable and stupid – why am I not surprised the UN is so very keen on it.
Well, while we’re talking politics, and Jerry Brown sure could, here’s a slightly off-topic view from the wet ground caused by an enormous downpour that went through the Bay Area last night, in California drought land.
https://apnews.com/article/climate-wildfires-business-forests-fires-295c1d3a1993b8580b395cca2fff270d
Although the usual stupid-ass references to “climate-shite”, now walking back on how to solve the problem of mismanaged forests.
I’m following the CDEC reservoir report daily now, so I can tell how hard Gav and the boys are lying to us all in our one-party system. So far, so good.
Would that be the Newsome who hasn’t been in the public eye since getting the vax booster October 27th?
Aubrey Meyer’s outfit made this declaration in 1990.
In the subsequent thirty years globally life expectancy at birth rising from 64 to 74 and the trend in extreme poverty falling from about ~2 billion to ~500 million with Sub-Saharan Africa standing out where fossil-fuelled development is most needed.
If Mr Meyer and his co-signatories had their way in 1990 the trend would have been in the opposite direction.
Similarly if the nut jobs at the IPCC et al. get their way with their net zero by 2050 nonsense the graph will reverse direction ‘j curve’ style in the next thirty years.
Will it look like a hockey stick?
Why can’t they say CO2? Carbon is not a GHG. This whole sham is just embarrassing.
The UN has become a dangerous enterprise.
Democratic governments meet their makers every election cycle. That is a good thing. There will be a good number of trade unionists in Victoria, Australia wondering why they funded Premier Daniel Andrew’s election campaign.
I am not convinced Joe Biden won the popular vote in the USA but I will be surprised if Biden/Harris get a second term.
UN is unanswerable. Look at the Covid mess. Giving this body any significant role in world affairs is dangerous. No individual in the UN should have tenure beyond 8 years. Clean out half the staff every 4 years to give complete turnover every 8 years.
And then there is France..
France to build new nuclear reactors to meet climate goals – ABC News
Most large nations already have mature departments for the granting of foreign aid to needy countries. This UN proposal appears to be a takeover bid for that function. Of course, questions arise as to whether the UN or the individual countries have the best paths to success.
In Australia, we have some indications. For example, our Prime minister announced at COP26 that “Australia’s funding for neighbouring nations will increase to $2 billion over the next five years. … the government would boost Australia’s climate finance commitment, to help Pacific and South-East Asian neighbours with the effects of climate change, by $500 million to a total of $2 billion.”
Scott Morrison, at COP26, pledges funding to support neighbouring Pacific, Asian nations dealing with climate change – ABC News
So, we can take this money to be in the “climate reparation” class, not your usual foreign aid.
Here, we see a fundamental weakness. There is little to no scientific evidence that said Pacific Islands are in a crisis from climate change. For these islands, cyclones are not becoming more frequent, measured sea level has not changed abnormally, most islands are stable or becoming larger, there is little mention of other crises said to be caused by climate change.
We therefore see what is wrong. This type of grant in the Green Climate Fund style is a political virtue signal, not based on the special needs of the Islanders.
Australia, for one, badly needs a Department of Climate Claim Validation to stop these wealth transfers from being illegitimate. Geoff S
Geoff S,
Your comments are spot on.
However, one point of clarification.
Scott Morrison’s pledge to increase “funding for neighbouring nations” in the Pacific from $1 billion to $2 billion is a climate finance commitment directly to these countries and not, as I understand it, a contribution to the GCF.
In 2016 under Turnbull PM there was a contribution of some A$350 million by Australia to the GCF but to my knowledge no further monies have been promised since and (hopefully) none at Glasgow.
Perhaps I am wrong in this view and the money will be channeled through the GCF.
It is bad enough that Australia is being sucked into “climate reparation” to Pacific nations but it would be far worse if we renew contributions to the Green Fund.
I recall that the GCF went broke in May 2019 when an Australian Chairman resigned over the internal bickering.
Of course UN bodies never actually “go broke”, they just temporarily have nil funds.
Thanks, Herbert.
Yes, I was aware of the distinction between funding source labels, but the words of the PM are such as to make me believe that he might not know the difference. But, that is a belief, not a proof. Geoff S
Well said Geoff S.
There is no climate emergency and there sure is no emergency in the Pacific islands .
Yes some low lying coral atolls could be threatened in the distant future with the current sea level rise of 150 to 160 millimeters ,6 or 7 inches in the next 100 years .It is well documented that most coral islands are growing in size
As you say Geoff the climate is very stable in the Pacific Islands .I have not seen any long term data but the afternoon thunder showers cool down any excess heat .
New Zealand and New Zealanders have helped out when cyclones have hit .Samoa and Fiji come to mind .
New Zealand employs a lot of Islanders for fruit picking and pruning and and a lot of money is sent back to their communities where it is put to god use .
Wood is net zero and is available today. it provides steady, reliable power 7×24. There are zillions of acres of beetle killed pine in North America that could deliver the same energy as 1000 years to renewable energy. And the bonus is, unlike solar panels and windmills, no fossil fuels are required to manufacture wood!
“Meyer later said the world must collaborate with musical discipline to avert runaway climate change:”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yjza5xjAH8M
Adios Amor
Wood is net zero, today. unlike solar and wind, it is a 7×24 net positive source of energy. wind and solar barely break even. if you provide a backup for wind and solar, they do not even break even.
The important point is this. It is ridiculous to try and run the world on wood, yet the wood is collecting solar energy from millions upon millions of acres.
So ask yourself this question. If forests are collecting energy from such a vast area but cannot meet the earth’s energy needs, how the heck can solar or wind hope to do so over an almost infinitesimally small percentage of the area occupied by forests.
That is why we should propose wood burning to provide net zero, because it won’t work. which shows that renewables cannot work. All this effort to install renewables. It is doomed to failure before it starts.
Ed Fox,
Wood is not net zero any more than coal is.
It is only used today in places like Drax because of a person-made definition.
It still pumps CO2 into the air, just like coal does.
Because it sits on a coal deposit, it is utterly stupid to change from coal to wood.
Just because someone said the definition was ok. Geoff S
I have to disagree with you Geoff S.
All trees absorb CO2 from the atmosphere and when they are burnt the CO2 is returned to the atmosphere which adds no additional CO2 to the atmosphere as it is a cycle.
I have written here at WUWT about our New Zealand Governments stupidity of encouraging investors to buy up perfectly good sheep and cattle farms in our rolling to hilly back country and plant them up in pines that will never be harvested.
The theory is that our native bush will take over but before that happens these pines will become fire hazards and old pine trees blown over burn very well.
The investors will earn carbon credits and a lot of this money will flow to overseas investors , instead of earning overseas funds producing lamb mutton and beef for export to feed the world .
A great scheme to bankrupt the country .
Though a popular term, I take issue with one of the fundamentals of the daily dose of lies propping up the catastrophist narrative. I refer to the very simplest point:
“Every extreme, random, unusual or destructive weather – or climate – event in the developing world was, is and would be – by dodgy definition – conveniently attributed to carbon dioxide emissions by the developed world.”
There are no “climate events”. The term is an oxymoron. Climate is defined as the 30 year average of “weather”. As such, a “climate” has no “events”; it is an averaged series of weather events.
The subtle message is, I believe, to have the term “weather event” such as cold and blustery days be interpreted by the public as referring to what happens today and tomorrow. The term “climate event” we should interpret as “human-caused” in some manner and perhaps by some unstated means. “Human-caused” events are of course, all bad: hot weather, droughts, floods, hurricanes, spring melting of snow, ice dams, the onward march of glaciers falling into the oceans and of course, still wind that fails to spin the turbines.
You can notice the relentless division of weather events into these two categories on a daily basis by certain key media – particularly the national broadcasters – ABC, BBC, CBC, NPR etc.
It is my hope that the woke up will wake up to the sheer scale of the onslaught being made on the minds of the younger generation to accept an undemocratic and illogical future in international politics. It is the same old ladies in the same old skirts pimping their failed 1850’s ideologies, communism and capitalism. All they want is the money and the power. Is that too much to ask? Huh?
Yeah. It is.
If we are going to have an individual allocation of CO2, we must also limit everyone to an allocation of “stupid” so no one is permitted to emit more than their share or either. The Green Climate Fund will evaporate like morning dew if the rational light of wisdom and equity shines upon it.
Of course developing and poor countries deserve budget support from the global fiscus, but we don’t have to lie about why. It is not because of “climate events”.