A CLIMATE PACT THAT DOES NOT HURT AMERICA WILL NEVER SUIT THE GREENIES

Yesterday, the United States and five Asia-Pacific countries; Australia, India, China, South Korea and Japan reached an agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions which are largely viewed as contributing to global warming. Unlike the Kyoto Protocol this agreement to reduce emissions is purely voluntary. Reached after months of secret negotiations, the six countries agreed to develop technology to cut down on the amount of greenhouse gases that are currently being spewed into the atmosphere.

The major difference between the agreement that was reached on Wednesday and Kyoto is that China and India are part of the new agreement. Both these countries, which are major polluters, were exempted from requirement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions under the Kyoto Protocol because they are developing nations. The theory was that since the United States and other countries were allowed to pollute as much as possible to achieve first world status, the same rights should be given to China and India.

It didn’t take long for the environmentalists to come out against the six nation agreement to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Sky News in Britain quoted a spokeswoman from Greenpeace Australia as saying, "No doubt the Australian government has been cooking this scheme up for a while to cover up their failure to ratify Kyoto, and to try and prove that developing countries are abandoning Kyoto." Criticisms have also been levelled by environmental groups over the fact that the newly reached agreement is voluntary and that voluntary deals just don’t work.

The reaction of these leftist environmental groups is proof positive that their main objective is not the environment or "saving the planet" as they so lovingly like to claim. The point of the Kyoto Protocol is for developed countries such as Canada to be unable to meet their targets. Countries that cannot meet their Kyoto obligations will then be required to "buy" credits from countries that have met their targets; targets that are either low or non existent. The Kyoto agreement is nothing more than a scheme by the one worlders at the United Nations to redistribute wealth from the developed world to developing countries.

If reversing the global warming trend was really the goal of the environmental left, China and India would have to be included in any plan to reduce emissions. Both China and India are heavy polluters that are in a stage of relative rapid development. The notion that they should be able to pollute as much as is necessary because the United States and other first world nations were allowed to do so when they became heavily industrialized, makes no sense if the number one goal is to save the earth from the dangers of increasing temperatures.

The environmentalists are also in effect saying that China and India should not be reducing their carbon emissions even when both of these countries have now agreed to do so. By taking this position, the enviros are looking down on these backward nations and telling them that they should not be reducing carbon emissions. This elitist attitude is more proof that the main aim of the environmental left is not to reduce emissions; it is to cause economic damage to industrialized nations such as the United States; countries that the left detest for more than just the Iraq war.

There is nothing surprising in the fact that some radical environmentalists were so quick off the mark to condemn the climate pact. After all, to the left, hating countries such as the United States and Australia is a greater priority than protecting the environment.

Source





DO WETLANDS CREATE GLOBAL WARMING?

A fun email from a reader:

"If wetlands are the largest source of methane, which is a "greenhouse gas" several orders of magnitude greater than CO2 in effect, why are wetlands so fervently protected by the same persons who want CO2 emissions regualted and reduced? There are even advocates for massive increases in the size and extent of "wetlands" which would be funded by the US Goverment. In effect-the current "restoration" of the Florida Everglades is nothing more than a "wetlands" project."




A GOOD INTERVIEW WITH FRED SINGER

Fred is of course a pioneer in the development of rocket and satellite technology, he holds a Ph.D. in physics from Princeton and happens to be the guy who devised the basic instrument for measuring stratospheric ozone. He is the one giving the answers below

Q: Here’s a line from a recent Mother Jones article: "There is overwhelming scientific consensus that greenhouse gases emitted by human activity are causing global average temperatures to rise." Is that true?
A: It’s completely unsupported by any observation, but it’s supported by computer climate models. In other words, the computer models would indicate this. The observations do not.

Q: What’s the best argument or proof that global warming is not happening?
A: The best proof are data taken of atmospheric temperature by two completely different methods. One is from instruments carried in satellites that look down on the atmosphere. The other is from instruments carried in balloons that ascend through the atmosphere and take readings as they go up. These measurements show that the atmospheric warming, such as it is, is extremely slight -- a great deal less than any of the models predicts, and in conflict also with observations of the surface.

Q: An epic New Yorker series said unequivocally that the permafrost, the Arctic sea ice and the Greenland glaciers are all melting. Is that true and is it because of global warming?
A: The Arctic temperatures have been now measured for a long time. They vary cyclically. The warmest years in the Arctic were around 1940. Then it cooled. And it’s warming again, but it hasn’t reached the levels of 1940. It will continue to oscillate. That’s the best prediction.

Q: What is the most dangerous untrue "fact" about global warming that’s out there in the media-sphere?
A: The rise in sea level. Again, the observations show that sea level has risen in the last 18,000 years by about 400 feet and is continuing to rise at a uniform rate, and is not accelerating, irrespective of warming or cooling. In fact, sea level will continue to rise at a slow rate of 8 inches per century, as it has been for the last few thousand years.

Q: If you had a 12-year-old grandkid who was worried about global warming, what would you tell him?
A: I would tell them that there are many more important problems in the world to worry about, such as diseases, pandemics, nuclear war and terrorism. The least important of these is global warming produced by humans, because it will be insignificant compared to natural fluctuations of climate.

Q: How did you become "the godfather of global warming denial"?
A: That’s easy. Age. I organized my first conference on global warming in 1968. At that time I had no position. It was a conference called "The global effects of environmental pollution." At that time I remember some of the experts we had speaking thought the climate was going to warm and some thought it was going to cool. That was the situation.

Q: Climate is extremely complicated -- is that a true statement?
A: Immensely complicated. Which is a reason why the models will never be able to adequately simulate the atmosphere. It’s just too complicated.

Q: Give me a sample of how complicated just one little thing can be.
A: The most complicated thing about the atmosphere that the models cannot capture is clouds. First of all, clouds are small. The resolution of the computer models is about 200 miles; clouds are much smaller than that. Secondly, they don’t know when clouds form. They have to guess what humidity is necessary for a cloud to form. And of course, humidity is not the only factor. You have to have nuclei -- little particles -- on which the water vapor can condense to form droplets. They don’t know that either. And they don’t know at what point the cloud begins to rain out. And they don’t know at what point -- it goes on like this.

Q: Is this debate a scientific fight or a political fight?
A: Both. I much support a scientific fight, because I’m pretty sure we’ll win that -- because the data support us; they don’t support the climate models. Basically it’s a fight of people who believe in data, or who believe in the atmosphere, versus people who believe in models.

Q: Is it not true that CO2 levels have gone up by about a third in the last 100 years?
A: A little more than a third, yes. I accept that.

Q: Do you say that’s irrelevant?
A: It’s relevant, but the effects cannot be clearly seen. The models predict huge effects from this, but we don’t see them.

Q: Why is it important that global warming be studied in a balanced, scientific, depoliticized way?
A: It’s a scientific problem. The climate is something we live with, and we need to know what effect human activities are having on climate. I don’t deny that there’s some effect of human activities on climate. We need to learn how important they are.

Q: Why is it important that global warming be studied in a balanced, scientific, depoliticized way?
A: It’s a scientific problem. The climate is something we live with and we need to know what effect human activities are having on climate. I don’t deny that there’s some affect of human activities on climate. Cities are warmer now than they used to be. We have changed forests into agricultural fields. That has some affect on climate. We irrigate much of the Earth. That affects climate. And so on. We are having some influence on climate, at least on a small scale. So we need to know these things. We need to how important they are.

Q: And global warming is something we should study but not get panicky about?
A: The thing to keep in mind always is that the natural fluctuations of climate are very much larger than anything we can ascribe – so far – to any human activity. Much larger. We lived through a Little Ice Age just a few hundred years ago. During the Middle Ages the climate was much warmer than it is today. So the climate does change all the time. We need to understand the scientific reasons for natural climate change. Most of us now think it’s the sun that is the real driver of climate. It has something to do with sun spots, but the mechanism is not quite clear. That’s what’s being studied now.

Source





Foreign Policy has now made the debate between Bjorn Lomborg and the Green Pope freely available. I commented on the debate on 22nd.





NEW PAPER ON HURRICANES AND GLOBAL WARMING

"We heard earlier this week that a short paper we had started on during last year's hurricane season has now been accepted for publication in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society after successfully completing peer review. With the paper we seek to provide a concise, largely non-technical, scientifically rigorous, globally inclusive, and interdisciplinary perspective on the state of current understandings of hurricanes and global warming that is explicitly discussed in the context of policy. As new research findings are reported in peer-reviewed journals on tropical cyclones (hurricanes) and climate change (global warming), and a corresponding public debate undoubtedly continues on this subject, we thought that it may be useful to provide a forest-level perspective on the issue to help place new research findings into a broader context.

The paper can be found here: Pielke, Jr., R. A., C. Landsea, K. Emanuel, M. Mayfield, J. Laver and R. Pasch (2005) "Hurricanes and global warming" Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. (PDF). Below is an excerpt:

"... claims of linkages between global warming and hurricanes are misguided for three reasons. First, no connection has been established between greenhouse gas emissions and the observed behavior of hurricanes (IPCC 2001; Walsh 2004). Yet such a connection may be made in the future as metrics of tropical cyclone intensity and duration remain to be closely examined. Second, a scientific consensus exists that any future changes in hurricane intensities will likely be small in the context of observed variability (Knutson and Tuleya 2004, Henderson-Sellers et al 1998), while the scientific problem of tropical cyclogenesis is so far from being solved that little can be said about possible changes in frequency. And third, under the assumptions of the IPCC, expected future damages to society of its projected changes in the behavior of hurricanes are dwarfed by the influence of its own projections of growing wealth and population (Pielke at al. 2000). While future research or experience may yet overturn these conclusions, the state of knowledge today is such that while there are good reasons to expect that any connection between global warming and hurricanes is not going to be significant from the perspective of event risk, but particularly so from the perspective of outcome risk as measured by economic impacts.""

Source

***************************************

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.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

Comments? Email me here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

*****************************************