GLOOM IN BUENOS AIRES

The Kyoto treaty is pointless without a follow-up and the combination of the USA, China and India ensures that there won't be one

When Paula Dobrianksy, the State Department's senior official on climate change, presented Washington's partnership programs on climate change this week during the Buenos Aires conference on climate change, alongside her on the platform were the representatives of China, India and Italy. This is who is now in charge of UN climate change negotiations. No wonder NGOs looked glum.....

The EU and the NGOs came to Buenos Aries to celebrate the entry into force of the Protocol. The UN Secretariat had festooned is administrative offices at La Rural, the international conference centre in Buenos Aries with posters carrying the message, "Ten years in partnership". The posters listed the NGOs who had campaigned for Kyoto. The European Commission offices were emblazoned with the message "Combating Climate Change for Ten Years". This message was unintentionally ironic. There is little to show for Commission effort. The Kyoto Protocol will have no impact on levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and would probably slow growth in the world economy a little if it is fully implemented. Climatologists would say, "What would you expect? Ten years is a nanosecond in climate time".

The commitments in Kyoto run out in 2012. They only apply to industrialized countries. The writing was on the wall last year in Milan at the 9th Conference of Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Developing countries had already made clear they would not make commitments in the future to cut emissions. This made the European Commission, Greenpeace, the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) and Friends of the Earth edgy in Milan. Despite 10 years of agitation with exaggeration and unsubstantiated claims of calumny and doom about global warming, the Kyoto Protocol was the best they could do and it fell far short of their expectations. To make the best of a bad situation, they started justifying Kyoto as "just the first step", arguing Kyoto itself did not have to make a difference, it would just begin a process where progressively tougher and tougher terms would be adopted in subsequent "steps".

The Environment Directorate of the European Commission has been cocky about Kyoto. The Bush Administration's refusal to support Kyoto had been lambasted in Europe as one of the defining examples of US "unilateralism" (the other being invasion of Iraq) which undermined the multilateral system of international affairs. In Buenos Aires, the Bush Administration showcased peerless multilateral diplomacy. Here it was working publicly hand in glove with China, a leader of the developing country group, and India, another leader in that group. It even was working with Italy, immediate past President of the EU. The European Commission is isolated and casual slights against the US have ceased, except among the NGOs who haven't twigged to the change.

They are simply sullen and puzzled. One confessed he couldn't work out why the mood was different. This was typical. By and large NGOs have failed to understand the capacity of the UN to work conscientiously on colossal white elephants which have no prospect of working and, when finally reality bites -- usually when Governments work out the cost -- discarding them or reshaping them into something else. The US and the developing countries decided in Buenos Aires to discard the Protocol......

The developing countries are not just following the US lead. They appreciate that the Kyoto strategy of regulating reductions in emissions of carbon dioxide will flatten growth. The Greens accuse them of ignoring the impending threat of greenhouse warming. They are not stupid. They evidently find the case of global warming and the science adduced to support it unconvincing.

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SCIENCE, THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD AND GLOBAL WARMING

Louis Hissink has a reply here to a critic who accuses him of not being a proper scientist. One excerpt:

"I am professionally paid as a diamond exploration geologist. My work involves searching for orebodies, specifically diamond bearing orebodies, and in order to do this we do some extremely unusual things - we frame hypotheses, collect samples to test them, and if the sampling is negative, we dump the hypothesis and start on another tack. This practice is done often. It is called the “Scientific Method". My critic insinuates that I don’t understand this - the first lie.

I think it would be truthful to suggest that of all the scientists in professional employment, exploration geologists are probably the most intensive practioners of the scientific method, partly because if we don’t find anything we don’t get paid. This is a serious incentive to actually getting it right, and from many years of experience, we have developed an extremely good ability to discern scientific bullshit when we come across it; human induced global warming is one such instance.

Anthropogenic warming was first mooted by Callender, cited by Jaworowski in his submission to the US Senate in March this year (2004). full text here. As Jaworowski notes in his figure 2, Callender selectively extracted that data to support his hypothesis - hardly a scientific method, but my critic and his/her fellow travellors have yet to contradict this evidence. They have also not countered the fraud committed described in Figure 1 presented by Jaworowski, cited above. Of course they can’t, scientific fact is hard to counter".

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

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