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The Real Copenhagen Fraud?
Submitted by Leo Kolivakis, publisher of Pension Pulse.
Johann Hari reports in the Independent on the truths Copenhagen ignored (hat tip Tom Naylor):
So
that's it. The world's worst polluters – the people who are drastically
altering the climate – gathered here in Copenhagen to announce they
were going to carry on cooking, in defiance of all the scientific
warnings.
They didn't seal the deal;
they sealed the coffin for the world's low-lying islands, its glaciers,
its North Pole, and millions of lives.
Those of us who watched this conference with open eyes aren't
surprised. Every day, practical, intelligent solutions that would cut
our emissions of warming gases have been offered by scientists,
developing countries and protesters – and they have been systematically
vetoed by the governments of North America and Europe.
It's
worth recounting a few of the ideas that were summarily dismissed –
because when the world finally resolves to find a real solution, we
will have to revive them.
Discarded
Idea One: The International Environmental Court. Any cuts that leaders
claim they would like as a result of Copenhagen will be purely
voluntary. If a government decides not to follow them, nothing will
happen, except a mild blush, and disastrous warming. Canada signed up
to cut its emissions at Kyoto, and then increased them by 26 per cent –
and there were no consequences. Copenhagen could unleash a hundred
Canadas.
The brave, articulate Bolivian
delegates – who have seen their glaciers melt at a terrifying pace –
objected. They said if countries are serious about reducing emissions,
their cuts need to be policed by an International Environmental Court
that has the power to punish people. This is hardly impractical. When
our leaders and their corporate lobbies really care about an issue –
say, on trade – they pool their sovereignty this way in a second. The
World Trade Organisation fines and sanctions nations severely if (say)
they don't follow strict copyright laws. Is a safe climate less
important than a trademark?
Discarded Idea
Two: Leave the fossil fuels in the ground. At meetings here, an
extraordinary piece of hypocrisy has been pointed out by the new
international chair of Friends of the Earth, Nnimmo Bassey, and the
environmental writer George Monbiot. The governments of the world say
they want drastically to cut their use of fossil fuels, yet at the same
time they are enthusiastically digging up any fossil fuels they can
find, and hunting for more. They are holding a fire extinguisher in one
hand and a flame-thrower in the other.
Only
one of these instincts can prevail. A study published earlier this year
in the journal Nature showed that we can use only – at an absolute
maximum – 60 per cent of all the oil, coal and gas we have already
discovered if we are going to stay the right side of catastrophic
runaway warming. So the first step in any rational climate deal would
be an immediate moratorium on searching for more fossil fuels, and fair
plans for how to decide which of the existing stock we will leave
unused. As Bassey put it: "Keep the coal in the hole. Keep the oil in
the soil. Keep the tar sand in the land." This option wasn't even
discussed by our leaders.
Discarded Idea
Three: Climate debt. The rich world has been responsible for 70 per
cent of the warming gases in the atmosphere – yet 70 per cent of the
effects are being felt in the developing world. Holland can build vast
dykes to prevent its land flooding; Bangladesh can only drown. There is
a cruel inverse relationship between cause and effect: the polluter
doesn't pay.
So we have racked up a climate
debt. We broke it; they paid. At this summit, for the first time, the
poor countries rose in disgust. Their chief negotiator pointed out that
the compensation offered "won't even pay for the coffins". The cliché
that environmentalism is a rich person's ideology just gasped its final
CO2-rich breath. As Naomi Klein put it: "At this summit, the pole of
environmentalism has moved south."
When we
are dividing up who has the right to emit the few remaining warming
gases that the atmosphere can absorb, we need to realise that we are
badly overdrawn. We have used up our share of warming gases, and then
some. Yet the US and EU have dismissed the idea of climate debt out of
hand. How can we get a lasting deal that every country agrees to if we
ignore this basic principle of justice? Why should the poorest restrain
themselves when the rich refuse to?
A deal
based on these real ideas would actually cool the atmosphere. The
alternatives championed at Copenhagen by the rich world – carbon
offsetting, carbon trading, carbon capture – won't. They are a global
placebo. The critics who say the real solutions are "unrealistic" don't
seem to realise that their alternative is more implausible still:
civilisation continuing merrily on a planet whose natural processes are
rapidly breaking down.
Throughout the
negotiations here, the world's low-lying island states have clung to
the real ideas as a life raft, because they are the only way to save
their countries from a swelling sea. It has been extraordinary to watch
their representatives – quiet, sombre people with sad eyes – as they
were forced to plead for their own existence. They tried persuasion and
hard science and lyrical hymns of love for their lands, and all were
ignored.
These discarded ideas – and dozens
more like them – show once again that man-made global warming can be
stopped. The intellectual blueprints exist just as surely as the
technological blueprints. There would be sacrifices, yes – but they are
considerably less than the sacrifices made by our grandparents in their
greatest fight.We will have to pay higher
taxes and fly less to make the leap to a renewably powered world – but
we will still be able to live an abundant life where we are warm and
free and well fed. The only real losers will be the fossil fuel
corporations and the petro-dictatorships.
But our politicians have not chosen this sane path. No: they have
chosen inertia and low taxes and oil money today over survival
tomorrow. The true face of our current system – and of Copenhagen – can
be seen in the life-saving ideas it has so casually tossed into the
bin.
You can watch Johann
explaining some of the appalling loopholes being smuggled into the
Copenhagen treaty below.
You can watch Johann explaining some of the appalling loopholes being smuggled into the Copenhagen treaty below. Also, listen carefully to this CBC interview with James Hansen.
He's widely regarded as the most influential climate scientist in the
world and rightly dismisses cap & trade as pure "gimmickry".
It's a shame but it looks like Copenhagen was
another climatic bust, just like Kyoto and Rio were. Next up, the
global pension bust.
»
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Winisk,
I agree with your assertion on peer review, to a specific point. The difficulty comes when either side becomes so fixated upon their positions that the peer review process itself becomes politicized. On one side you have the oil companies funding research into debunking the science, while on the other hand you have environmental groups trying to do the same.
Moreover, what you have at this stage with the global warming side of the equation is the presentation of hypotheses as facts. When Bush was in office, I was frustrated because there was effectively no grant money being supplied to study the question in a way that wasn't obviously biased towards the energy companies. With Obama in office, the bias has shifted (somewhat) in the other direction, again with politicians attempting to "prove" their particular ecologic political beliefs (their Green Credentials) by cherry picking the data.
So far I've seen very few hypotheses that suggest alternatives to greenhouse gas emission as being the primary culprit in global warming, and over the space of the last decade I've begun wondering whether in fact what we're seeing is simply large scale (either 78-year or 240-year) solar cycles at work here as effectively being the primary culprit in that warming.
I'd make one other fairly radical observation here. How long does it take for a glacier to melt, especially if helped along with particulate soot? Most glaciers existed in stasis for a long time because the rate of precipitating water turned to ice during the winters was roughly equivalent to the amount of ice that melted during the summers. Those glaciers that didn't reach that stasis eventually melted before we were aware of them. Add in soot and other anthropogenically created particular matter and those glaciers get thrown out of stasis.
The point I'm making here - and I've made it before in this thread - is that this, as a mechanism, can be seen to explain the "melting" of everything from Arctic ice to glaciers without necessarily requiring there to be a gaseous carbon dioxide component to it. I work with a number of oceanographers and climatologists here in Victoria, BC, and I find that most are impatient with the global warming debate because frankly they also have real questions about both the politicization involved and the lack of credible evidence from either side of the aisle. Most believe that more data is necessary, and few believe that we're at a tipping point stage that carbon sequestration or similar pie in the sky technologies we'll ameliorate one way or another. They want more evidence, and an untained peer review of both evidence and hypotheses, and both are increasingly hard to come by.
Winisk,
I agree with your assertion on peer review, to a specific point. The difficulty comes when either side becomes so fixated upon their positions that the peer review process itself becomes politicized. On one side you have the oil companies funding research into debunking the science, while on the other hand you have environmental groups trying to do the same.
Moreover, what you have at this stage with the global warming side of the equation is the presentation of hypotheses as facts. When Bush was in office, I was frustrated because there was effectively no grant money being supplied to study the question in a way that wasn't obviously biased towards the energy companies. With Obama in office, the bias has shifted (somewhat) in the other direction, again with politicians attempting to "prove" their particular ecologic political beliefs (their Green Credentials) by cherry picking the data.
So far I've seen very few hypotheses that suggest alternatives to greenhouse gas emission as being the primary culprit in global warming, and over the space of the last decade I've begun wondering whether in fact what we're seeing is simply large scale (either 78-year or 240-year) solar cycles at work here as effectively being the primary culprit in that warming.
I'd make one other fairly radical observation here. How long does it take for a glacier to melt, especially if helped along with particulate soot? Most glaciers existed in stasis for a long time because the rate of precipitating water turned to ice during the winters was roughly equivalent to the amount of ice that melted during the summers. Those glaciers that didn't reach that stasis eventually melted before we were aware of them. Add in soot and other anthropogenically created particular matter and those glaciers get thrown out of stasis.
The point I'm making here - and I've made it before in this thread - is that this, as a mechanism, can be seen to explain the "melting" of everything from Arctic ice to glaciers without necessarily requiring there to be a gaseous carbon dioxide component to it. I work with a number of oceanographers and climatologists here in Victoria, BC, and I find that most are impatient with the global warming debate because frankly they also have real questions about both the politicization involved and the lack of credible evidence from either side of the aisle. Most believe that more data is necessary, and few believe that we're at a tipping point stage that carbon sequestration or similar pie in the sky technologies we'll ameliorate one way or another. They want more evidence, and an untained peer review of both evidence and hypotheses, and both are increasingly hard to come by.
Thank you for an informative reply without the hypebole. I've noticed that money is flowing into any study that has global warming attached to it in Ontario and particularily in the north where warming is evident. I personally have worked with some very well respected research scientists who have been working on Arctic ecosystems for most of their careers. Global warming is real for them and this from folks who were researching it's effects long before it became the trendy issue and have no political or financial motivation. When I read what is being discussed here, I always weigh these opinions with those who are some of the brightest, most passionate, unpoliticized professionals I know. That good science is being dragged through the mud is unfortunate. I can't help but think that the objective here is to project out into the future. Naturally there will be speculation involved in this. Yes more research is warranted.
Excuse me folks, how ever monied or political party's wish to frame this debate the issue is good old fashion *pollution* and yes its killing people, animals, fauna and any thing else that lives on our little ball we call home. SOOO ya all can nit pick over your favorite points, but when you add all the nasty shit we create to live our wonderful life styles its just one big ball of death.
LOL if doesn't kill you on the spot it cant be to bad eh!
You are right, pollution and climate change are two seperate issues. This is why "they" gave up on presenting this as an environment issue, or as a global warming issue ... Because people realized the BS.
The two issues are still being confused.
"Climate Change" is intentionally vauge thus allowing any desired defintion at any moment.
The fact that clean energy production is denied every step of the way is all the proof that is needed. People need to realized the scam of trying to act like pollution and "climate change" are the same thing. They are not.
Nor will any of Copenhagen's action stop chicken farms from dumping illegal levels of salmonella into nearby lakes and streams with the EPA ignoring this. And there are a massive number of other example. Nor will any action at Copenhagen reduce my fear of toxins in dog food killing my dogs, or the mercury level in fish being reduced so I can eat them again. I was extremely sick from mercury poisoning some time ago and had to undergo a couple YEARS of detox to reduce the problem.
As I said in another thread, someone please tell me the date that Copenhagen says fish will one again be safe for me to eat. Thanks!
MORE GOVERNMENT, MORE REGULATIONS , MORE GOV. BUREAUCRACY,
MORE TAXES , MORE LEGISLATION, MORE DEBT , MORE LAWS , WILL SOLVE EVERYTHING
UTOPIA ,WERE ALMOST THERE
Earth and it’s inhabitants need more, not less, CO2.
More CO2 means:
* More Plant Growth
* Plants need less water
* More food per acre
* More robust habitats and ecosystems
CO2 is Earth’s greatest airborne fertilizer. Without it – No Life On Earth!
www(dot)co2isgreen.org
www(dot)plantsneedco2.org
- – - -
Global warming or global governance?
- -Interviews of climate scientists and biologists from numerous sources who explain, step by step, why Al Gore and the global warming alarmists are incorrect. In some cases, blatantly so. It also provides evidence that the global warming agenda is being funded with tens of billions of dollars as a mechanism to create global governance. Hear from congressmen, experts and even well-known news broadcasters how global governance puts global institutions that are not accountable to the American people in control of every aspect of our economy. The U.S. government is very close to making this a reality.- -
video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3069943905833454241
or
video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4860344067427439443
www(dot)globalwarmingglobalgovernance.com
- – - -
Lord Christopher Monckton, former science adviser to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher says UN-climate Treaty when ratified will create A WORLD GOVERNMENT
youtube.com/watch?v=stij8sUybx0
Short part of the presentation:
youtube.com/watch?v=PMe5dOgbu40
- – - -
*****CLIMATEGATE – EXAMPLES OF FRAUD*****
nocapandtrade.com/climategate
- – - -
I HAVE NOTICED FOR SEVERAL WEEKS NOW
THAT EVERY DAY IS SLIGHTLY SHORTER THAN THE DAY BEFORE. EACH NIGHT IS LONGER THAN THE PREVIOUS ONE. THE SUN RISES A LITTLE LOWER THAN THE DAY BEFORE.
AT THIS RATE EVENTUALLY THE SUN WILL
CEASE TO APPEAR ALLTOGETHER.
WE MUST HAVE A LIVE SACRIFICE AT THE AZTEC
ALTAR TO APPEASE AL GORE THE CARBON WHORE & THE GOD OF SCIENTIFIC FRAUD : )
Sacrifice to occur on December 21, 2012.
Saying that co2, a life giving gas by the way, is a problem to mankind is a lie.
They chose c02 because by controlling it they controll humanity. We are carbon based beings and everything we touch and use involes carbon.
It's criminally genius.
www.climategate.com
A tactic often used to add legitimacy to a lie is to repeat it.
The propogandists will use emotive images to stir and control the primal instincts within.
Will try to get the varying socio-economic groups on board with the lure of bread.
Will use their corporate news organs to saturate the minds of the targets.
Will use the need for capitol to pervert "grant money" dependant education centers.
Saying that co2, a life giving gas by the way, is a problem to mankind is a lie.
They chose c02 because by controlling it they controll humanity. We are carbon based beings and everything we touch and use involes carbon.
It's criminally genius.
You must also control the narrative. Here is an overview of how the Green Party's William Connelly ruled the Wikipedia entries with a carbon fist. I think these bastards would skip Stalin and go straight to Kim if given the chance.
http://www.financialpost.com/opinion/columnists/story.html?id=62e1c98e-0...
Yes indeed.
Also I did not mention the propagandizing taking place in public school centers.
Thanks for adding.
Leo, its great to profit from this inevitable trend towards greener energy but you don't have to drink the koolaid and jump on the bus to hysteria. You might want to adapt to new information. Climategate is unfolding like Watergate did, and that started slowly too. Its not just about the words in the emails. It also revealed their methods.
Here's one IPCC 'trick' for cooking the books, With a nice steady rise, Madoff style. Or is it Enron style? You be the judge.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/08/the-smoking-gun-at-darwin-zero/
Here's another one. Oops, lost some inconvenient data!
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/BOMBSHELL.pdf
Here's a little social context,IPCC style:
http://climateaudit.org/2009/12/10/ipcc-and-the-trick
There's much, much more coming from Climategate.
A little trivia. We all know that Al Gore is a greasy used planet salesman but... but... surely the head of the IPCC isn't... is he?
blogs.telegraph.co.uk/.../climategate-monckton-kebabs-pachauri
There's much, much more coming from Climategate. No point becoming some crazy climate change fraud denier.
The truth about whether CO2 is a cause or merely correlated with a global mean temperature, T, rise, can be addressed by ice core measurements of oxygen isotope ratios O(18)/O(16) and C(14)/C(12) ratios in trapped gasses (oxygen, CO2) as a function of earth age (ice core depth) as pointed out by dnarby. Such data shows CO2 increases lag increases in T by several hundred years over many cycles of solar flux changes. These flux changes are the primary driver of long term heating and cooling cycles. Why is this? Simple, the ocean is the greatest repository for CO2 (plants, including ocean algae are a close second) and the solubility of CO2 (or any gas) decreases with increasing T. So, as the earth atmosphere heats up due to various complex reasons, but primarily effective solar flux changes, the oceans slowly heat up and then just like boiling water forces dissolved gasses to leave (scientists call this "degassing" a fluid), all the dissolved gasses, CH4, O2, CO2, N2, Ar etc increase in the atmosphere. If you didn't understand this simple fact, the consistently rising CO2 levels always lagging T increases over hundreds of thousands of years would be puzzling. As dnarby points out, a most inconvenient fact not discussed by those positing CO2 as the most important or only factor factor in heat trapping and global T.
In fact, CO2 is indeed a minor green house gas as pointed out by other commenters and is over a hundred times less effective in absorbing/trapping IR radiation than methane, CH4, for example. The major green house gas is water, which forms more clouds at higher T, in response to increased surface water evaporation. So, greater cloud formation can increase T, but is a complicated issue since more clouds both increase solar flux reflectivity in the visible (i.e. less heat reaches the earth) but also trap more of surface reflected IR wavelengths (green house effect). So, one cannot really know how the extra CO2 due to release from the oceans + fossil fuel combustion will push the mean global T. Also, more CO2 and higher T increases plant growth which fixes or removes more the CO2 giving negative T feedback. But, more plants also absorb more sunlight giving positive T feedback. In short, as in all complex non-linear systems with multiple feedback loops, (think prices on the stock market), no model can capture all this complexity nor make T (or price) predictions-especially far into the future. And such predictions could never be based on only a few decades of T measurements, which from what I've seen have enough uncertainty and normal fluctuations to hide any obvious heating or cooling trend. The data shows basically no change, within error of the global mean T from the 1940s to the present. We just don't know what's going to happen in the next centuries.
Just one scientists skeptical opinion. And as Richard Feynmann was fond of reminding scientists-skeptism is the most important characteristic of all sound scientific theories (e.g. quantum mechanics and general relativity).
Also, more CO2 and higher T increases plant growth which fixes or removes more the CO2 giving negative T feedback.
No, not quite accurate. Plants require a bit more than just CO2, yes?
Any farmers/agriculturists here? OK, I won't wait for a response, so, I'll just continue on...
Plants require, in addition to the obvious (CO2, sunlight and water), minerals. Hang in here with me... Further, many plants require symbiotic relationships with organisms like mycorrhizae to function. Both need active LIVE soil in which to do so. Trash the soil and you have a difficult time of growing plants: unless, of course, you have modern agriculture's "fixes" available to you (a myriad of fossil-fuel derived inputs). Soil errosion is soil trashing. What holds topsoil? Plants! Strip away plants and you've set things up for a runaway negative feedback loop.
OK then, what were we talking about? Oh yeah, CO2 uptake by plants. Well, it's a bit hard for plants to slurp up CO2 when they are, you know, not there. Deplete the soils and you lose the plants, you lose their CO2 storage facility.
None of what I'm saying speaks to "climate change" one way or another. It's all indisputable fact (OK, if someone wants to dispute it I'd be happy to take his/her money).
Now, the next big fact (and all the big names don't seem to disagree on this point), and that's that we've been through all of this before. Well, the planet has. The planet is in fact a self-regulating system (yes, some external iputs and outputs, but these tend to stay fairly consistent I'd guess). It then follows to reason that the planet has experienced deviations in climate that aren't deviations that we'd find healthy for human habitation. OK, I'm drifting a bit here... Given significant enough deviations it is clear that the planet has "reset" itself. I would argue that the CO2 issue isn't the main trigger, though it comes into play later on after the reset is basically in play.
And here's where I return to the plant and soil part... The earth's water cycles constantly errodes top soil (minerals plus live stuff, plus near-live stuff [decomposing organic material]) to a point in time in which there isn't enough biomass/plant life to regenerate it. It's the cycle of life and death. Somewhere after/around this point CO2 is looking for some place to go (hanging out in the ocean and the atmospere; given that there's this notion that "life crawled out of the oceans" I'd think that perhaps the oceans play a bigger role, but that's just humanistic bias).
Whether it's coded into the planet (as in defined by the laws of physics) or not, glacial activities end up being excellent mechanisms for expediting the "re-creation," or more correctly "dispersal," of minerals with which new topsoils are built. At this point I don't know what happens, the CO2 and the minerals interact and then a big flurry of life starts up again. Farmers pretty much understand this stuff. The system is very simple, though it has lots of interactions. If anyone has watched "Being There" with Peter Sellers it's pretty much as he sees things: and, the political interactions are likewise similar to our reality.
So, sometimes having one's heads up in the clouds causes them to not be down to earth :-) What's under your feet is slowly slipping away. Sorry about this bit of bad news.
Thanks for playing!
Yes, glaciers are a big part of the process of recreating the soil, but keep in mind that most such glacial activity within the modern Holocene era has been confined to high altitude regions that are fairly inhospitable to large scale plant production - we're benefitting from soil laid down about 12,000 years ago from massive glaciers covering much of the Northern hemisphere, not from contemporary glaciers that are found primarily at mountain elevations, near-Arctic fjords and the glacial (sub)-continents of Antarctica and Greenland.
The erosion problem is very real, but the assumption that contemporary organic activity is building this is (mostly) flawed. There is some organic growth of forest floors, but mostly that activity just maintains the status quo - the amount being added by organic decay is, in a purely natural setting, roughly what gets lost due to erosion and depletion. The massive Lloss moraines were built up by organic material getting felled by slowly advancing glaciers which then incorporated the matter into its matrix while simultaneously scouring the land ... in this case the glaciers were phsically being pushed south by the creation of new ice to the north, which drove the bulldozer effect, but when the ice "retreated" it did so by melting, with the result that the particulate matter dropped in place. A mile high wall of ice can contain a lot of dirt and decayed vegatable matter, nicely mulched into good humous.
In the long run I worry more about using up and destroying that topsoil than I do peak oil - we can adapt to a lack of oil far easier than we can adapt to a lack of agricultural capability.
It does not matter what anyone may utter about the climate, or any other garbage for that matter that we float up to the top of the public agenda every now and then. All of you vermin will be driving bicycles, live in the projects, and eat food stamps anyway. Charles.
The Photo is Priceless! -dark brown black Soot.
CO2 is colorless, odorless, and goes well in fizzy drinks.
And, if I inject it into your blood stream you die. Your point?
sshhh... don't give any ideas or they will ban the evil carbonated drinks.
leo is obviously a few cards short of a full deck.
first of all, he won't accept any serious argument unless you give him your full name and ssn. "anonymous cowards" wtf asshole, are you 100% invested in lifelock, too, on top of your solar panels?
second, please someone, anyone, post me a link to ONE single agw study that doesn't involve some sort of untenable trend extrapolation
"Global Warming" is such a patently ridiculous idea only idiots and thieves "believe" in it. Some days I find it hilarious that so many people actually took this nonsense seriously. Other days I think of the cost and usually that makes me sad and angry. The scariest thing about this is that the same type of idiot/thief cabal is orchestrating various stimuli and bailouts. These days, if you assume that anyone arguing for spending some real money for public good whose opinion actually matters is a thief you will be proven right sooner or later.
To the zealots of the Global Warming religion:
1) What is the "ideal" temperature for the planet?
2) If we fall below that "ideal" temperature, would you advocate GENERATING carbon emmissions to get the planet back into your "ideal" range?
3) Given the VAST resources that have been or will be dumped into this charade, don't you think those resources could be better utilized by actually REDUCING actual pollution? You know- stuff that WE KNOW is killing people and harming the environment (PCB's in the Great Lakes, groundwater contamination, all of the NASTY emissions that come out of buses that have 2 passengers on them, invasive species that are choking our lakes, etc...)?
4) What was responsible for the end of the ice age? If you had lived in the Ice Age, would you have advocated to keep it that way?
5) Your change from "Global Warming" to "Climate Change" is just another slippery way of saying you don't know what hte hell is going on, but that something will be different, and by-golly, it must have been us evil humans that did it.
Note to Global Warmers: Weather means change. Weather happens. You can't change the weather. Deal with it, and find some other "cause" to make yourselves feel important- like actually DOING something that will make a difference.
Carbon subprime? Another excellent interview from CBC:
The Debate Over Cap and Trade
If you heard the program yesterday, you'll recall that we spoke with James Hansen. He is the Director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies at NASA and one of the most respected climate scientists in the world. And as you might have guessed already, he's no fan of the carbon cap-and-trade approach to dealing with greenhouse gas emissions.
But despite James Hansen's protests, a cap-and-trade system is one of the options on the table at the United Nations' Climate Change Summit in Copenhagen. Washington is moving forward with cap-and-trade legislation. It is already befor ethe U.S. Senate. And Jim Prentice -- Canada's Environment Minster -- says Ottawa will have to consider whatever the Americans do.
So we wanted to delve deeper into cap-and-trade to look at how it would work and who stands to benefit. And also why the debate is pitting environmentalists against one another. Daphne Wysham is a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC. And David Doniger is the Policy Director of the Climate Center at the Natural Resources Defense Council. He was in Copenhagen this morning.
Listen to Part Three:
http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/2009/200912/20091217.html
Politically connected scientists, such as Dr. James Hansen, think it's about them. AGW is instead the "Next Big Thing", it represents $2.5 Trillion in potential profits from exchange traded new issues; not construction and clean energy projects, simply financial derivatives for CO2.
Don't you people get it? Come on read the report again.
Leo posted a brilliant piece of satire. It was hilarious. Obviously, no one could utter such drivel with a straight face. Leo, Al Gore and crew have punked you guys and you didn't even know.
Excellent Leo. ROTFLMAO
This was a tax scheme from the very beginning and if anyone thinks that making Al Gore and the rest of these con artists rich is going to change the climate needs their head examined.
Climate gate, it won't go away.
Hide the decline.
Make the medevil warm period go away by altering the data. Greenland was green.
Add a bias to the data by averaging it.
Create a trend line in any direction you want to by choosing the start date and end date of your data.
Cherry pick 10 trees that show warming.
Cherry pick your data collection sights.
Use data sights that do not conform to regulation.
Hoard your data.
Destroy your data.
Blackball and bully other scientists.
Appeal to peoples emotions.
Use scare tactics on children.
Bad science is bad science.
Show me the data and how you collected it and I will show you the truth.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the earth atmosphere is .04%. The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is 90%.
And more and more....
Leo, just for the sake of argument, suppose you, Hansen, et al are correct about the climate.
So review the Independent article you linked and ask yourself:
What kind of hegemon could possible effect such a severe renunciation of wealth, such a vast transfer of wealth?
Only the most terrible kind of tyrant.
You are shrilly and self-righteously decrying the refusal of a billion people to impoverish themselves voluntarily. Short of a millenarial expansion of human consciousness, this is not going to happen.
And any agent of raw power able to so strictly constrain the developed world would - absent this same epochal evolution of consciousness - become so corrupted by that power as to make the Nazis look good.
You cannot simultaneously have your democracy, compensation for all the pollution the west has ever emitted, and renunciation of fossil fuel. Cannot - despite whatever Star Trek physics and googoo smurf politics some shyster might foist on you.
Choose.
Well said and better than I said it below. I especially agree with the notion that the kind of centralized, raw power which could by fiat impose this epochal change would be, by nature, 100% self-corrupting. Find Plan B.
OK, for starters, I'm an anachist, so you an rule out any hidden objectives about wanting some new world order (or even ANY State).
This notion that we're under the threat of a new world order is absurd. Yes, it's an idea, but no, it'll never happen. There are plenty of reasons, though only one really needs to be pointed out: energy.
As the right-wing types like to point out, and I totally agree with them on this point, government sucks resources/capital, which means that it sucks energy, which is how things should really ultimately be measured (as does nature). At a time in which energy stocks are depleating is like thinking one is going to make out by selling at the bottom of a market (or buying at the top, take your pick): from an energy standpoint it's all down hill from here. And this leads me to the actual driver of world events, which people just refuse to acknowledge...
No, it's not really climate (like the rich would make concessions for the poor anyway), but rather it's about energy.
Those in power are in power because of the heretofore abundance of (cheap) plentiful energy. If they lose the ability to command energy (which is, after all, power), they lose their power/control.
Maybe the climate stuff is or isn't really a threat, but it sure is a means by which to hide the bigger threat. Misdirection is a great tool by the powerful... ("buy, buy, buy!" and then the stock collapses!)
There are sheep, and then there are sheep that don't think that they are sheep.
Thanks for playing!
"OK, for starters, I'm an anarchist,"
great, have a lovely time in college, and get back to us in 10 years or so
Cheapness and abundance doensn't enable control; cost and scarcity does. Whatever power the world elites enjoy currently will pale to that they will command by making energy scarce and costly.
Actually, while I agree with your point, there is a balance that has to be achieved. Subsidized oil in the US is a direct beneficiary of US military policy. The US needs inexpensive oil in order to run the military; that it has benefits to the general populace is a nice side-effect, but it is key to understand that in the event that oil reaches a critical level of scarcity, military stockpiles of petroleum will be filled before civilian ones are. Military aviation, trucks, troop transport, non-nuclear ships, and so forth will not go electric any time soon because electric vehicles have comparatively little motive power, and because if you're in a hostile country you really don't want to have to stop at the local terrorist's house and ask to borrow their wall socket. This is why the US has, until comparatively recently, encouraged companies like GM to stay oil based - in the event that they need to ramp up the production of military vehicles, they want to make sure that they are in fact oil-based.
Oil producers know, however, that if the cost of that oil becomes too high, then the US will develop alternatives if it has to. This is why the oil companies in general have had to learn the fine art of not being too greedy, or they run the risk of destroying their own industry. It's also why the oil companies are taking things like algael fuels seriously, even if the science is still out on their production viability - as peak oil has led towards nationalization of oil resources (in 1960, 72% of all oil globally was proprietarily held, in 2010, it's closer to 18%), the oil companies are beginning to become very worried about not having the raw stock for processing at a price level which doesn't move people off their products altogether, where "people" in this case is largely the US government and its military.
One final point - remember supply and demand curves in basic economic classes; even with a comparatively inelastic commodity such as oil, as prices rise, demand falls, and there is a very definite maximum point of return beyond which any increase in price actually decreases the net profit of the transaction. There are alternatives - its just a question of whether money is invested in making those alternatives cost effective or whether that money goes into oil profits. At some point, when the risk to national security (i.e., risk to the military's capabilities) reaches a critical stage, it will become more cost effective to switch the billions paid for oil into R&D efforts instead. So I'd be careful in assuming that scarce oil necessarily benefits oil producers.
///it will become more cost effective to switch the billions paid for oil into R&D efforts instead.///
already happening ::
http://www.nationalhomelandsecurityknowledgebase.com/cln/news/090909a.aspx
*) “Climate change” is the mantra for a collection of anti-human, anti-capitalist, anti-American, redistributionist schemers and screwballs, and the weasels who seek to profit from it. It is a hoax of epic proportions.
*) If Ted Turner gives you a billion dollars, you do what you're told. The IPCC was not created to provide scientific evidence of AGW. The IPCC charter proclaims AGW to be real. Their mission is to decide what to do about it.
"The role of the IPCC is to assess on a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis the scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant to understanding the scientific basis of risk of human-induced climate change, its potential impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation."
*) IPCC Researchers Admit Global Warming Fraud
http://www.thenewamerican.com/index.php/tech-mainmenu-30/environment/237...
“The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't.”
~Dr. Kevin Trenberth, Head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
It doesn’t take a genius to recognize that their models are wrong. Period.
From a series of interviews with Christopher Monckton (by Michael Coren):
”As the Earth warms it radiates more heat into space. Why is that important? The entire case of the AGW Alarmists is based on one false assumption that is built into all models is that as the world warms then less outgoing radiation will escape into space. That is contrary to reason and elementary physics. The computer models are told this wrong assumption. The Earth Radiation Budget Experiment (ERBE) Satellite measured that more radiation gets out into space when the Earth warms. We now know that more radiation escapes and if it escapes it’s not heating the Earth.”
*) Can anyone at New Scientist find that one mystery paper with empirical evidence showing that carbon causes major warming? Just ONE? That’s major warming, not minor; and that’s empirical, by observation — not by … simulation.
http://joannenova.com.au/2009/12/new-scientist-becomes-non-scientist/
*) Climate Change and the Death of Science (written before Climategate)
http://buythetruth.wordpress.com/2009/10/31/climate-change-and-the-death...
What is going on is that science is no longer what we thought it was. It is now a tool in the hands of socialists, and the smart money is flowing into the pockets of ‘scientists’ who will serve their agenda. Follow the money. Whilst traditional physics and chemistry departments are closing in British universities, and there is a shortage of science teachers, there is an abundance of cash being poured into departments that will serve socialist ends, and no shortage of acolytes desirous to use this as a route to power. Once there was modern science, which was hard work; now we have postmodern science, where the quest for real, absolute truth is outdated, and ’science’ is a wax nose that can be twisted in any direction to underpin the latest lying narrative in the pursuit of power. Except they didn’t call it ‘postmodern’ science because then we might smell a rat. They called it PNS (post-normal science) and hoped we wouldn’t notice. It was thus named and explicated by Silvio O. Funtowicz and philosopher Jerome R. Ravetz, who in 1992 wrote the paper The good, the true and the postmodern, and in their 1993 paper Science for the post-normal age, where they promoted the idea that:
“…a new type of science – ‘post-normal’ – is emerging…in contrast to traditional problem-solving strategies, including core science, applied science, and professional consultancy…Post-normal science can provide a path to the democratization of science, and also a response to the current tendencies to post-modernity.”
(Note: PNS was invented by Silvio Funtowicz and Jerome Ravetz, and characterizes a methodology for cases where “facts are uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high and decisions urgent”. Funtowicz and Ravetz are Marxists, and the tactics of “post-normal” science are taken directly from Marxist theory and thought.)
Mike Hulme, founding director of the Tyndall Centre, and Professor of Climate Change at the University of East Anglia (UEA), prepared climate scenarios and reports for the UK Government (including the UKCIP98 and UKCIP02 scenarios, and reviewer for UKCP09), the European Commission, UNEP, UNDP, WWF-International and the IPCC, and was co-ordinating Lead Author for the chapter on ‘Climate scenario development’ for the Third Assessment Report of the IPCC, as well as a contributing author for several other chapters. Hulme has been a champion and exponent of post-normal science for some years to serve his own socialist agenda, and this is what he has to say about post-normal science (emphasis added):
“It has been labeled “post-normal” science. Climate change seems to fall in this category. Disputes in post-normal science focus…on the process of science – who gets funded, who evaluates quality, who has the ear of policy…The IPCC is a classic example of a post-normal scientific activity.”
“Within a capitalist world order, climate change is actually a convenient phenomenon to come along.”
“The largest academic conference that has yet been devoted to the subject of climate change finished yesterday [March 12, 2009] in Copenhagen…I attended the Conference, chaired a session…[The] statement drafted by the conference’s Scientific Writing Team…contained…a set of messages drafted largely before the conference started by the organizing committee…interpreting it for a political audience…And the conference chair herself, Professor Katherine Richardson, has described the messages as politically-motivated. All well and good.”
"…‘self-evidently’ dangerous climate change will not emerge from a normal scientific process of truth-seeking…scientists – and politicians – must trade truth for influence. What matters about climate change is not whether we can predict the future with some desired level of certainty and accuracy."
"The function of climate change I suggest, is not as a lower-case environmental phenomenon to be solved…It really is not about stopping climate chaos. Instead, we need to see how we can use the idea of climate change – the matrix of ecological functions, power relationships, cultural discourses and materials flows that climate change reveals – to rethink how we take forward our political, social, economic and personal projects over the decades to come."
"The idea of climate change should be seen as an intellectual resource around which our collective and personal identifies and projects can form and take shape. We need to ask not what we can do for climate change, but to ask what climate change can do for us…Because the idea of climate change is so plastic, it can be deployed across many of our human projects and can serve many of our psychological, ethical, and spiritual needs."
From what Hulme has admitted, the climate change debate is not about truth and physical reality, but a way of making it the “mother of all issues” in order to achieve socialist and Marxist aims, including de-capitalizing the West, and bringing about global governance by an elite. Hulme is delighted to be in the vanguard, and it is paying him handsomely.
*) If you follow the money, all roads read to millionaire businessman Rajendra K. Pachauri:
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100019821/climategate-...
"Last year, on official figures, buying and selling the right to emit CO2 was worth $126 billion across the world. This market, now enriching many of our leading financial institutions (not to mention Al Gore), is growing so fast that within a few years it is predicted to be worth trillions, making carbon the most valuable traded commodity in the world. Forget Big Oil: the new world power is Big Carbon. Truly it has been a miracle of our time that they have managed to transform carbon dioxide, a gas upon which all life on earth depends, into a “pollutant”, worth more than diamonds, let alone oil. And many of those now gathered in Copenhagen are making a great deal of money out of it."
*) James Hanson is either a duper or a dupee, and a very dangerous one at that:
http://97.74.65.51/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=34198
"Specifically, Hansen said, "large energy companies are guilty of crimes against humanity, if they continue to dispute what is understood scientifically and to fund contrarians, and if they push us past tipping points that end up destroying many species on the planet and having a huge impact on humanity itself."
*) This latest leftist ploy (AGW) dovetails with the agenda of “overpopulation” eugenicists, from Malthus and Madame Blavatsky, to Adolf Hitler and Margaret Sanger, to Ehrlich and Holdren, to Ted Turner, and Al Gore…
"In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill…. But in designating them as the enemy, we fall into the trap of mistaking symptoms for causes. All these dangers are caused by human intervention and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy, then, is humanity itself."
~Club of Rome, The First Global Revolution, 1991
From pages 942-943 of Ecoscience, a book John Holdren (Osama’s “Science Czar“)co-authored with fellow nutcase Paul Ehrlich:
"Perhaps those agencies, combined with UNEP and the United Nations population agencies, might eventually be developed into a Planetary Regime—sort of an international superagency for population, resources, and environment. Such a comprehensive Planetary Regime could control the development, administration, conservation, and distribution of all natural resources, renewable or nonrenewable, at least insofar as international implications exist. Thus the Regime could have the power to control pollution not only in the atmosphere and oceans, but also in such freshwater bodies as rivers and lakes that cross international boundaries or that discharge into the oceans. The Regime might also be a logical central agency for regulating all international trade, perhaps including assistance from DCs to LDCs, and including all food on the international market.
The Planetary Regime might be given responsibility for determining the optimum population for the world and for each region and for arbitrating various countries' shares within their regional limits. Control of population size might remain the responsibility of each government, but the Regime would have some power to enforce the agreed limits."
Attaboy Loup Garou!!! Given it a little thought and time have we?? Just coincidence that Ecoscience envisioned all this international bureaucracy and EPA brownshirting. Obama's even spouting 10 year agreements ("plans"-soviet style). Thank You for the extensive quotes--especially Hulme. WTF?
Worse than Eugenics.
we are not worthy,
EUCLID
Actually, what will happen is that Man will have figured out long before how to live productively and happily, with three feet of water on the ground.
Give yourself some credit: you're not as stupid as you think!
Man won't do anything about pollution until the day he steps out of his house and he is in three feet of water and he cannot grasp a breath of fresh air then he will panic.
Carbon is not pollution. Life is carbon based. Everything we are, eat, excrete, etc. is carbon (or water, another "greenhouse gas"). 95% of our activity as advanced humans requires carbon (nuclear is the exception). Get the picture? Calling carbon "pollution" is idiocy.
Bad logic. X is good therefore no amoung of X could be bad.
Pollution isn't about the thing, it's about the concentration of that thing. Pollution could be stated as the point in which a thing is past a concentration level under which other things can reliably operate.
Oxygen could be a pollutant given oversaturation: granted, it's hard to kill someone this way. Yet, you'd hardly find anyone claiming that oxygen is a pollutant (yet, there are more than plenty of people who would claim that oxygen isn't a pollutant, unaware that in effect it could become one given sufficient concentration).
George Washington (the post-er, not the President) recently published an interesting piece on ZH on soot (mostly uncombusted particulate hydrocarbons, and similar pollutants) contributing to glacial melting, a point that I've believed for some time. While the melting glaciers and ice flows at the poles make for visually distracting press, I think its very much unlikely that emitted gaseous CO2 by itself is the cause, while soot makes perfect sense in that role - it absorbs solar radiation rather than reflecting it, as ice does, and then reradiates it slowly as heat, melting ice around it. Thus it's perhaps unrealistic to make the assumption that carbon in and of itself isn't a pollutant, it most certainly is, just not in the way that most policy makers are currently promoting.
What do you do about particulate soot emissions? You put scrubbers on smoke stacks, require better filters and catalytic burners on cars, reduce the efficiency of jet turbines, and other things along those lines. Planting "compensatory forests", while perhaps beneficial from other standpoints, really does nothing for soot - most plants are not designed to convert solid carbon into much of anything, save perhaps the occasional venus fly trap, and most particulate hydrocarbons just act to clog up CO2 intake respirators in trees. Certainly these things are expensive for oil companies, but overall their impact upon the general populace is effectively to increase the cost of filtration systems.
Others on this thread have pointed to external factors that likely have far broader impacts - solar cycles (which, despite what the press may highlight does in fact have a fairly broad correlation with large scale temperature patterns), the weakening of the Earth's magnetic field (yup, we're about ready to flip - though by all indications this is a process that will take about 3,000 years or so), interstellar magnetic fields due to "frozen" shock waves emitted after ancient supernovae (my personal favorite, and somewhat at least hinted at by the very irregular looking magnetic shockwave that the pioneer spacecraft is recording as it flies into the Oort cloud), normal cyclic variations due to El Ninos and the ENSO climactic patterns, and so forth.
On the flip-side, I've found that a lot of the supposed "major" climactic changes underway were, once really examined, explainable in other terms. One of the big ones was the North Atlantic Conveyor, which in the 1990s was supposedly slowing down in response to the weakening salination of the N. Atlantic/Polar region because of the melting of the ice. This was the basis (weak as it was) for The Day After Tomorrow with its massive cold wave and tornadoes in Los Angeles. It was good theatre, but the reality was that the supposed slowing of the conveyor was in fact due to sampling error, and that, once a more complete set of samples was made, it was a case of apparently seasonal turnover between two different water layers.
I don't think you can let the oil companies off the hook here; they've certainly done their fair share to fund "favorable" research and bury the unfavorable. However, overall the research is far murkier on both sides, because, as pointed out, its a very complex subject, and as such, it's often difficult to discern whether a given effect is causal or simply correlative.
Water levels are rising. They have in fact been rising for centuries, with brief drawbacks during periods such as the Maunder Minimum in the 18th century. In Japan, there are the remains of villages from roughly 2000 years ago that are 200 feet below the surface; while global sea levels haven't risen by quite that much (there was some settlement that occurred as well) they have risen fairly dramatic (there are a number of similar sites globally).
In most cases, this change occurred well below the level of human perception. During the great Polynesian migration of the last 2000 years, sea peoples would find relatively large islands that seemed to have good sustainable environments, or they wouldn't have settled there. Over the years, sea levels would rise, and the islanders would break down the dwellings that were too close to the sea and move them further inland - or would just abandon them if it wasn't worth the effort. Meanwhile, rich biospheres became increasingly salinated and fragile, and eventually reached a point where people became aware, all of a sudden, that their island was "sinking". Volcanic islands like Hawaii were self-sustaining because the volcanoes were making up for the land lost to the sea, but between erosion and global sea rise those that didn't have a replenishment mechanism were definitely falling into the sea.
Is this due to global warming? Yes, in a long term sense, it certainly is, but that's warming that's characterized much of the Holocene. Is it due to anthropogenic global warming? Ah, that's the rub. We don't know ... and unfortunately we won't know until after the fact. My own take is that we are a contributing factor, but that factor is comparatively small. We're going into a 35-40 year decline in temperatures globally after a dramatic rise in the 1990s and a leveling out in this decade. Given the recent long solar minimum, this could be pretty dramatic - to the extent that temperatures may in fact fall globally to a level on par with some of the harsher winters that we knew in the 19th century, if not down to the level of the mini-ice age, but we don't know that for sure.
I think, once we have about 300-400 years of readings with contemporary or post-contemporary tools, then we'll have a pretty good fix on broad climatic factors, but until then we're having to make do with fairly unreliable proxies - ice cores, tree ring data, insect distribution patterns, weather records taken with poorly calibrated instruments and the like that can provide a rough sense of historical temperatures, but which don't give us an hour by hour view of the environment globally that we currently have.
To me the current climate mania is much akin to being in a hotel late at night and observing very few people, then coming out the next day and seeing lots of people, and concluding from that that population density worldwide is dramatically rising and soon we will end up being crushed to death by the expanding population. Yes there are problems out there, and yes there are almost certainly anthropogenic factors at play in the global climate environment, but the solutions being proposed (and even the statement of the problem as it exists right now) strikes me as being just another form of power grab.
Your post and many others point out the large number of factors interacting in many ways changing our climate.
ClimateGate is a fraud. Follow the money and who benefits. Hmm, that would be Goreman Sachs, Third World dictators and .gov.
"We're going into a 35-40 year decline in temperatures globally after a dramatic rise in the 1990s and a leveling out in this decade."
Oh crap, now we will have to move south when we retire in a few years, it was just starting to get nice around here.
some sidenotes to curt's wonderful comment:
"most plants are not designed to convert solid carbon into much of anything"
yes, but bacteria & microrganisms in soil can. with some understanding of the carbon cycle, much of the filtered soot can be composted with organic waste and transformed into natural fertilizer.
and on the tinfoil tip, there is a possibility that the Great Pyramid was once a water pump:
http://sentinelkennels.com/Research_Article_V41.html
Since the science is "settled" someone should have no problem telling me:
The precentage of warming due to Co2 is x% ???
And the part due to nature is 100-x, so lets have it what is the value of x?? and what is the confidance interval. And how do you know the answer is right?
Stop that hate speech. Since the science is settled there is no reason to answer those pesky questions. You are so mean spirited
here's my investment recommendations, three wheeled bicycles, small gas powered scooters, and woodstoves. greenhouses, and chicken coops, and mason jars