Civil Defense Perspectives January 2012, Vol. 28 No. 2 [published April 2012]
The Kyoto Protocol is due to expire in 2012, and the 17th annual Conference of Parties (COP-17) in Durban, South Africa, which was supposed to extend it, appears to have reduced it to an empty shell.
After two weeks of partying at luxury hotels, some 10,000 delegates left with an agreement to meet again, writes Benny Peiser (CCNet 12/14/11). The BASIC countries—Brazil, South Africa, India, and China—achieved their goal of delaying any agreement on a replacement for Kyoto until at least 2015, and any actual actions to cut emissions until at least 2020.
India’s environment minister Jayanti Nataraj demanded to know: “How do I give a blank check signing away the livelihood rights of 1.2 billion members of our population?”
Within days after Durban, Canada became the first country to exercise its legal right to withdraw from Kyoto, which “could jeopardize any gains made at the Durban meeting,” according to an Indian official (India Today 12/14/11).
Withdrawing would save Canada about $14 billion in penalties for failing to meet its Kyoto target of reducing greenhouse gases by 25% to 40% below 1990 levels by 2020.
According to Canada’s environment minister Peter Kent, “to meet the targets under Kyoto for 2012 would be the equivalent of either removing every car, truck, ATV, tractor, ambulance, police car and vehicle of every kind from Canadian roads or closing down the entire…agricultural sector and cutting heat to every home, office, hospital, factory and building in Canada” (ibid.).
Peace for All Time?
The objective is world government, writes Lord Christopher Monckton, who arrived at the meeting by parachute (http://tinyurl.com/7nsrb64), after initially being excluded. Monckton called attention to the 1,000 permanent bureaucracies established since Cancun, and the now 138-page draft treaty (http://tinyurl.com/6ocelap).
The Canute-like goal is to limit “global warming” to 1 °C above pre-industrial levels, which would “take us halfway back to the last Ice Age.” The CO2 concentration target could be as low as 300 ppmv CO2 equivalent, including all greenhouse gases, compared with current 560 ppmv. This implies reducing CO2 itself to 210 ppmv, the level at which plants begin to die.
The proposed treaty (http://tinyurl.com/6r5ytu8) would disband military forces: “…all Parties shall cease all destructive activities that contribute to climate change, in particular the activities of warfare, production of materials and services that support warfare, and to divert associated financial resources and investments into the shared global effort to combat a common enemy: climate change” [§81].
The amount of funds to be made available annually to the developing Parties “shall be equivalent to the budget that developed countries spend on defence, security, and warfare” [§47].
The UN would be the global army and police. An “International Climate Court of Justice” would enforce the treaty. This kangaroo court would require Annex 1 (Western) countries to pay ever larger sums to UN bureaucrats, who would distribute the money as they saw fit. “Developing” countries could not be brought before the Court, no matter what.
Monckton predicted that eco-lunatics would send in troops to shut down entire industries for noncompliance with their UN treaty. He stated that they had sent goons into certain regions of Uganda, killed off the population, and declared the areas “carbon-free zones” (Ileana Johnson Paugh, Canada Free Press 12/13/11, http://tinyurl.com/7cyo6ss).
Starting in 2013/14, the world government will require extensive reports from Western nations on “greenhouse-gas emission inventories” and on financial contributions, which are viewed as reparations for climate crimes, to aid climate mitigation efforts by Third-World countries. Monckton notes that “the inexorable increase in compulsory reporting was one of the mechanisms by which the unelected Kommissars of the anti-democratic European Union acquired absolute power over the member states.” EU advisors, he states, have been coaching the UN in the use of similar techniques to centralize global power.
De-railing the Train
A few things happened on the way to the climate apocalypse. First, the financial apocalypse: “The notion that rich (or formerly rich) countries are going to ship $100 billion every year to the Micronesias of the world is risible, especially after they have spent it all on Greece” (Bret Stephens, WSJ 11/29/11).
Then there was Climategate, with its “watered-down” predictions. A new religion “cannot easily survive more than a few ounces of self-doubt” (ibid., quoted in TWTW 12/3/11). “Climategate did for the global warming controversy what the Pentagon Papers did for the Vietnam War 40 years ago. It changed the narrative decisively.” writes Steven Hayward (Weekly Standard 12/12/11). And the sequel “is as ugly as the original.”
A handful of dubious messages might be explained by “context,” he writes. “But they are so numerous that it doesn’t require an advanced degree in pattern recognition to make out that these emails constitute not just a ‘smoking gun’ of scientific bias, but a belching howitzer.” More so than the 2009 batch, “these emails make clear the close collaboration between the leading IPCC scientists and environmental advocacy groups, government agencies, and partisan journalists.”
“It. Isn’t. Happening.” But…
Monckton reports that plopping these three pebbles into conversations at Durban produced ripples of aghast silence: No statistically significant warming for 15 years; rebounding Arctic sea ice; little 30-year trend in global sea ice; five times as many polar bears as 70 years ago; and a growing Kilimanjaro glacier, which had been losing ice since 1880.
Monckton warns against complacency, however. Those cashing in on the scam will not just fade away. They want to turn the billions now flowing into trillions. Failure of a treaty will not stop inside operators, who are putting together potent, costly side agreements that will allow them to work around obstacles such as the U.S. Senate (CFACT 12/2/11, http://tinyurl.com/8yzu269 and http://tinyurl.com/7j82xtf).
Post-Durban Christmas Ditty
On the first day of Doomsville, alarmists gave to me:
12 Days in Durban
11 Journos hyping
10 Temps-not-Leaping
9 Mann’s-a-Dancing
8 Economies-busting
7 Seas-not-rising
6 Carbon phobias
5 thousand e-mailed things [Climategate II]
4 Absurd reports
3 Skeptic “birds”
2 Climate-gates
And a message entirely fact-free!
Peter C. Glover, Energy Tribune 12/13/11
Global Warming Windfalls
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has counted up 641 programs in place at 130 federal agencies in 2010 to prop up windmill technology and underwrite solar panel manufacturers. It could not provide a reliable estimate of cost to the taxpayers from the loans, tax credits, purchase of “green” vehicles, and regulations (Washington Times 3/19/12).
Gems from the 5,000 Emails
“I also think the science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run” (Peter Thorne of NOAA to Phil Jones, 2005).
“We’ve picked up a number of people from developing countries so IPCC can claim good geographic representation…. As CLAs [contributing lead authors]…we are working with about 50% good people who can write reasonable assessments and 50% who probably can’t” (Phil Jones, 2004).
“It seems that a few people have a very strong say, and no matter how much talking goes on beforehand, the big decisions [about the IPCC’s summary for policy makers] are made at the eleventh hour by a select core group” (Timothy Carter, Finnish Environmental Institute, 2000—Hayward, op. cit.).
“The data does not matter. We are not basing our recommendations on the data. We’re basing them on the climate models” (Chris Folland, Hadley Centre).
“The models are convenient fictions that provide something very useful” (David Frame, climate modeler, Oxford University).
“No matter if the science of global warming is all phony… climate change provides the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world” (Christine Stewart, former Canadian Minister of the Environment—CFP op. cit.).
“The important thing is to be sure they’re [climate skeptics] are losing the PR battle” (Michael Mann).
Nobelist Quits APS in Protest
Dr. Ivar Giaever, 1973 winner of the Nobel Prize in physics for his discoveries related to tunneling in superconductors, resigned from the American Physical Society because of his objection to the APS position on global-warming fears. The APS insists on calling evidence that anthropogenic emissions of CO2 are warming the planet “incontrovertible.” This word is rarely used in science, Giaever said, “because by its very nature, science questions prevailing ideas.”
He writes: “The claim…is that the temperature has changed from ~288.0 to ~288.8 degree Kelvin in about 150 years, which (if true) means to me that the temperature has been amazingly stable, and both human health and happiness have improved in this ‘warming’ period.”
Worst Ever Climate Story
The weather is becoming more erratic by the year, reported Justin Gillis (NYT 12/24/11), with three or four disasters each year whose costs exceed $1 billion. A major question is whether extreme events are linked to human-caused global warming—now often called “climate change” or “climate disruption.”
Benjamin Santer claims that “we are changing the large-scale properties of the atmosphere—we know that beyond a shadow of a doubt.” And “you can’t engage in this vast planetary experiment…and have no impact on the frequency and duration of extreme events.” We could find out more if Washington would fund more research, but money is tight, and “the political environment for new climate-science initiatives has turned hostile.”
Even though he thinks that the media overall does a good job on climate reporting, Roger Pielke, Jr., thinks this story is “breathtakingly bad” (http://tinyurl.com/7wv3u6r). He notes:
- $1 billion in 2011 is about the same as $400 million in 1980. After adjusting for inflation, damage in 1980 was about the same as in 2011.
- The most powerful tornadoes, which cause almost all of the damage, have decreased in the past 50 years.
- NOAA has a robust climate attribution effort, ignored in the article. It has found no evidence of causality from increasing greenhouse gases. The IPCC also contradicts much of what the article says on climate extremes.
How Science Works
“In general we look for a new law by the following process. First we guess it. Then we compute the consequences of the guess to see what would be implied if this law that we guessed is right. Then we compare the result of the computation to nature, with experiment or experience; compare it directly with observation, to see if it works. If it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong” (Richard Feynman, cited by William Happer, WSJ 3/26/12). Happer writes that when observations fail to conform to the UN IPCC models, “Feynman has told us what conclusions to draw about the theory.”
The Durban Delusion
By Feb 28, 2012, countries around the world were supposed to submit their follow-up reports to Durban, on a “work plan on enhancing mitigation ambition.” By mid-March only 19, including the U.S., had done so. “Gone is the spirit of compromise,” laments Sonja van Renssen (European Energy News 3/26/12, http://tinyurl.com/6w2dhr9). China has returned to the “rhetoric of old.” The bottom-up approach is proving to be insufficient. A “top-down” approach, like in the EU, is needed: a legally binding, enforceable treaty.