China Translates 1,200-Page Rebuttal to Climate Change Agenda

Breitbart News can exclusively report on Tuesday night that the Chinese Academy of Sciences has translated and published a Chinese edition of two massive climate change volumes originally published by The Heartland Institute in 2009 and 2011.

The volumes, Climate Change Reconsidered and Climate Change Reconsidered: 2011 Interim Report, are chock full of 1,200 pages of peer-reviewed data concerning the veracity of anthropogenic climate change. Together, they represent the most comprehensive rebuttal of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change findings, which have been the basis of the climate change legislation movement across the planet.

The Chinese Academy of Sciences is set to present the publication on June 15 at a major ceremony in Beijing. The Academy employs approximately 50,000 people and hosts 350 international conferences each year, and is one of the most prestigious scientific academies in the world, ranked ahead of every Ivy League school save Harvard

Jim Lakely, director of communications at the Heartland Institute, told Breitbart News, “Translating and publishing nearly 1,300 pages of peer-reviewed scientific literature from English to Chinese is no small task, and indicative of how important CAS considers Climate Change Reconsidered to the global climate change debate. That CAS has invited the authors and editors of Climate Change Reconsidered to a conference this Saturday in Beijing to introduce the studies is yet another indicator of how important it is to get this information out to a wider audience.”

A December 2012 UN meeting designed to provide climate change regulations ended in failure after China refused to sign a global climate change treaty. China was joined by the United States, as well as Canada, India, Japan, Russia, and Brazil. “Opposition to a new climate treaty is justified based upon the real science presented in Climate Change Reconsidered,” explains Heartland Institute President Joseph Bast.

While some critics have charged that China may be fostering research on climate change that facilitates its political positions, Lakely pointed out, “China doesn't need an excuse. The country can (and is) doing what it thinks is in its best interests — as are many countries in the developed and developing world.”

The New York Times noted this week that global CO2 emissions have “accumulated in the atmosphere at a record pace” over the last 15 years, but global temperatures have remained flat. The Times notes “the slowdown is a bit of a mystery to climate scientists,” but Lakely said, “it becomes less mysterious when one reads Climate Change Reconsidered. The timing for CAS publishing its translation could hardly be better for the advancement of climate science understanding.”

Lakely said that this could mark the turning point in the climate change debate, and that a global consensus was beginning to form against regulation of emissions. “The latest observable climate data, new studies from scientific academies around the globe, the peer-reviewed studies one can find in Climate Change Reconsidered, and its translation and publication by the prestigious Chinese Academy of Sciences is making life difficult for those who declare with certainty that man is causing catastrophic global warming,” he explained. “That's the way it should be. No scientific discipline is ever ‘settled’ — especially a discipline as young, as complicated, and as diffuse as climate science. The Heartland Institute is proud to support and promote the pursuit of the classic scientific method that follows the data and continually asks questions about what is happening to the climate of our planet.”

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UN climate talks collapse amid acrimony in Bonn

A vital track of the UN climate talks in Bonn has collapsed after nations failed to resolve a dispute over the meeting’s agenda.

Eight days into the two week meeting, a proposed addition by Russia to the agenda of the session dealing with the UN’s decision-making process was not accepted.

A compromise deal presented to governments in the Subsidiary Body for Implementation (SBI) meeting this morning was rejected by Russia, Ukraine and Belarus.

It means sensitive discussions on climate compensation, adaptation and finance will now not be discussed within the process until the main summit in Warsaw this coming November.

The issue stems from the Doha meeting last year when an extension to the Kyoto Protocol was pushed through despite concerns from those three countries. Russia now wants to reappraise the talks’ rules of procedure. In an interview with RTCC, Russia’s negotiator Oleg Shamanov said the process was “nonsense” if it ignored the rules.

Following a short break delegates returned to the hall to hear Russia compare the process to a “melting glacier” and a “haunted house”.

Governments have less than three years to agree a new universal climate treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol, the world’s only binding climate agreement.

A sit became clear no compromise would be found, Chair of the SBI Tomasz Chruszczow reminded delegates that the UN’s climate change convention’s main objective was to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

“This was agreed 20 years ago. We are no closer to this goal today. I won’t let this process jump from one obstacle to another. The Chair is in the service of the Parties, but it is up to the Parties to save the world,” he said.

The session will resume on Friday with the sole purpose of officially closing it.

UN climate chief Christiana Figueres said she hoped the experience would be remembered when they next met so that talks could progress and delegates could “improve the manner of their work”.

Anger

Russia, Ukraine and Belarus’ refusal to accept the compromise propose triggered a series of frustrated, angry and impassioned pleas for progress.

Singapore and India stressed that a similar situation at the Durban COP meeting was resolved by pressing ahead with the talks and settling the agenda later.

Fiji and Tuvalu, both acutely vulnerable to rising sea levels and keen for the swift adoption of an effective deal, called on the Chair to push through a resolution without consensus.  “We’re getting the impression these three countries are not interested in climate change,” the Tuvalu delegate said.

In an emotional intervention Fiji’s Sai Navoti urged Chruszczow to push through the agenda.  “Can’t the principle of necessity be urged? Don’t tie a noose around our neck because of a procedural issue that we are the master of,” he said.

Next steps

Negotiations in other parts of the UN climate process, including the new 2015 treaty, have enjoyed a successful session in Bonn but are being overshadowed by the SBI stalemate.

“It’s important to stress that this is one element of a set of negotiations and the others have been going really well,” said Liz Gallagher, senior policy advisor with E3G who remains confident that a solution to the agenda dispute can be found in good time.

“It was a bit unexpected so it’s still unclear what happens next. I’m sure it will get resolved but it’s unclear how that could get done during this session. There might need to be cooling off period but it is still a long time till Warsaw.

“It’s the politics not the process that’s at fault here. They [Russia] are using the process to politicise their point,” added Gallagher.

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Denmark  backtracking

Should the Liberal Party (Venstre) form the new government after Denmark’s general election, it will abandon current energy policies. And one of the first to be removed would be the financial support for onshore wind turbines.

Photovoltaics subsidies show that current energy policy is unsustainable, the party’s energy spokesman, Lars Christian Lilleholt, told this newspaper.

“We need to stop the current regime and instead use the market as an instrument so that we promote those energy sources that are the cheapest,” he says.

Soon after the summer, the Liberal Party plans to launch a discussion on post-2020 energy policy.

Lilleholt stressed specifically that the Liberals will drop support for onshore wind turbines which, in a few years time, are expected to be able to cope with market conditions.

The party’s plan is backed by the Danish People’s Party and the Conservatives.

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Superstitious "Spiegel" Devolves To The Dark Ages, Blames Floods On “Deniers”

When the Little Ice Age brought widespread crop failures, mass starvation, and disease in populated Europe some centuries ago, the enlightened ones blamed the climate-related misery and misfortune on the black magic of sorcerers and witches – who were promptly tried and burned at the stake. In other cultures, people performed rain-dances, human sacrifices, or other bizarre rituals, all in a futile attempt to appease the weather gods. Of course the victims of these rituals were often political opponents.

Today nothing has changed apparently, as Spiegel poignantly demonstrates with its latest online round of hysterics titled: Flut-Drama in Deutschland: Wir sind schuldig!  In English: Flood Drama in Germany: We’re to Blame! by Jakob Augstein.

According to Augstein, today’s German flooding is a result of man’s sins against the climate. Climate deniers are mostly to blame for the “Katastrophe“. He writes:

    "High water of the century is rolling across southern and eastern Germany. Now is an opportunity to take the deniers of climate change for a tour of the dikes, and to take the preachers of growth to Magdeburg. But they would just say they are not to blame. And we would all agree!”

If you thought Augstein sounded like some zealot inquisitor from the Dark Ages who zealously prosecuted at witch trials, you wouldn’t be far off. His hysterical language and mindset are the same. In publishing his ridiculous commentary, Spiegel looks like it is stuck in the Dark Ages. Little wonder that renowned astrophysicists like Murry Salby are calling climate science a ”cult science“.

In describing the flooding disaster in his commentary, it’s clear for Augstein:  ”Our way of living is not coming without a price.”  He adds:

    "The question is: What proof do the climate change deniers need before they open their eyes? What is it going to take to get the preachers of growth to learn?"

Like during the Dark Ages, weather misfortunes are proof enough for the high priests and witch-trial seeking prosecutors like Augstein. Who needs scientific data when we have Maxeiner, Miersch and Magdeburg?

Today modern climate statistics show that hurricanes/accumulated cyclone energy (ACE) are near lows, tornadoes show no trend, and global temperature has been flat 15 years. Worse, ALL the crystal ball warming projections of the “renowned” scientists have been completely wrong from the start.

Yet, Spiegel thinks we should just ignore all the hard data and simply accept a single spring flood as a “moment of clairvoyance“.

In his tirade, Augstein singles out pro-growth economics professor Karl-Heinz Paqué, who he says is to be thanked for making sure the Enquete Commission Report to the German government of last week became a “document of failure“. He goes after skeptic journalists Michael Miersch and Dirk Maxeiner for discrediting the results of climate science in the “right-wing corner” of a leading daily, saying that the German government was correct in singling them out and slandering them as infidels.

Augstein sees little hope that people will adopt the green religion (good news!) and warns us by bringing up the downfall of earlier human civilizations.

    "Those who follow old ways under new living conditions will end up extinct. That’s what did in the people of Easter Island, the Vikings in Greenland, and the Mayans. We should not be surprised if we are next.”

Ironically, all of those earlier civilizations perished because of natural climate change, and for some extinction came because they tried to solve their climate problems precisely with neurotic rituals like human sacrifices, and rain-dancing. Today Augstein and Spiegel are advocating we do the same, but with different rituals: changing light bulbs, going by foot and buying locally. Ask the people whose homes were flooded in Magdeburg if their energy saving lights, carbon credits and buying locally kept the waters back. Human rituals, no matter how righteously and ceremoniously carried out, aren’t going to control the weather.

Science is not about accepting what “renowned” scientists insist we believe, and not daring to question their authority. To the contrary, it is precisely about not accepting what they insist we believe, and it is about scrutinising and putting what they tell us to rigorous test. Anything else is just the superstition of fools, which belongs to the dustbin of history - to join the Dark Ages, witch-hunters, and Augstein.

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The NYT wonders: So, what’s up with this warming plateau?

That the planet has not warmed significantly in going on fifteen years is a fact that has become pretty much impossible to deny across all fronts; back in March, longtime climate fearmonger The Economist had out with it, and on Monday the New York Times opened up about some of the inconvenient truths facing the many ‘climate scientists’ whose decades of catastrophic climate models are all spectacularly failing to bear out. Granted, it was couched in the usual high-handed dismissals of those who they categorize as dismissive of their climate-change concerns, but it did include several important admissions:

    "The rise in the surface temperature of earth has been markedly slower over the last 15 years than in the 20 years before that. And that lull in warming has occurred even as greenhouse gases have accumulated in the atmosphere at a record pace.

    The slowdown is a bit of a mystery to climate scientists. True, the basic theory that predicts a warming of the planet in response to human emissions does not suggest that warming should be smooth and continuous. To the contrary, in a climate system still dominated by natural variability, there is every reason to think the warming will proceed in fits and starts.

    But given how much is riding on the scientific forecast, the practitioners of climate science would like to understand exactly what is going on. They admit that they do not, even though some potential mechanisms of the slowdown have been suggested. The situation highlights important gaps in our knowledge of the climate system, some of which cannot be closed until we get better measurements from high in space and from deep in the ocean."

Read on for much more parsing of the facts and excusing of poor policies, but here’s the really important gist: We don’t conclusively know all of the causes and effects of climate change, and we might not even know what we don’t know. This isn’t to say at all that greenhouse gases are not a thing, nor that carbon dioxide emissions are definitively unimportant, nor that we don’t have serious environmental issues that we need to consider going forward. But how is it, exactly, that the community of diehard eco-radicals and the self-proclaimed party of “science” has been proclaiming for decades that we are a heartbeat away from global catastrophe, and treating dissenting scientists as heretics, and insisting that we need to forcibly curtail our economic growth to deal with it and that people who aren’t one hundred percent on board are knuckle-draggers and/or greedy extremists, is surprised and angry that anyone is “dismissive” of them when it turns out they actually can’t be sure about it all? Because, science. I’ve often wondered why it is environmentalists interpret gloom-and-dooming as the most effective strategy for endearing people to their cause, when it actually seems to be pretty counterproductive.

In other climate-related news, self-anointed environmental messenger Al Gore, after lamenting on Tuesday that that scientists “won’t let us yet” link tornadoes to climate change, once more pushed on President Obama to hop to it on getting more forceful about a global-warming agenda, reports Politico:

    "The former vice president used a Google+ plus video chat Tuesday to tell supporters that Obama needs to go beyond his “great words” on the topic, and to lament that the president has yet to assemble a team to spearhead his second-term climate agenda.

    “I hope that he’ll get moving on to follow up on the wonderful pledges he made in his inaugural speech earlier this year and then soon after in his State of the Union,” Gore said. “Great words. We need great actions now.” …

    “He does not yet have a team in the White House to help him implement solutions to the climate crisis. He hasn’t staffed up for it,” Gore said, adding, “He’s got one person who hasn’t been given that much authority.”

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Happy little Greenies in Massachusetts

In his quest to become the next senator from Massachusetts, Democratic Rep. Edward Markey is doing something that’s never been done before: campaigning for national office on the signature issue of climate change.

To be sure, it’s not risky or unusual to run for office in the liberal Bay State on an environmental agenda. Markey’s opponent in the June 25 special election, former Navy SEAL Gabriel Gomez, calls himself a “green Republican” who believes human activity contributes to climate change.

But Markey has made climate change his political raison d’etre. In his relentless focus on the issue, he is emerging as something new: a climate candidate.

In his 37 years in Congress, Markey has worked on many legislative issues—he was a big player on telecommunications policy in the 1990s, for example.

And while he’s noted those accomplishments, he has spotlighted his work on a bill that never actually became law: In 2009, Markey teamed with Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., to push a historic climate-change bill through the House. It squeaked by but failed in the Senate.

Markey was also the only chairman of the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, which was established when Democrats took control of the House in 2007 and dismantled when Republicans regained the majority in 2011.

Markey’s message now is that if he is elected to the Senate, he’ll see the mission through and be a national voice for action on climate change.

On Markey’s campaign website, climate change is listed as the No. 1 issue. The top issue in most other congressional campaigns—jobs and the economy—is listed sixth on his site. It’s the reverse of the way voters in most polls rank the issues.

“Dangerous greenhouse gases are warming our planet at such a rate that we can only look at Hurricane Sandy ... and say, there but for the grace of God went the entire Massachusetts coastline,” Markey said in one campaign speech. “I want to go to the Senate to make sure we pass meaningful climate-change legislation,” he said in another.

Environmental groups see Markey’s campaign as a watershed moment and are pouring resources into electing him. To date, Markey’s campaign has drawn about twice as much outside spending as Gomez’s, primarily from national environmental groups. Data from the Center for Responsive Politics show that outside groups have spent $1.7 million in advertising and other activities to support Markey and about $843,000 to support Gomez. The vast majority of that spending--$1.2 million--has come from environmental groups, including the League of Conservation Voters; 350.org, which has led protests around the country opposing the Keystone XL oil pipeline; the Sierra Club; and the NextGen Committee, which was founded by Tom Steyer, a Silicon Valley billionaire and Obama donor who helped fund a campaign to save California's climate-change law.

The GOP is pouncing on Markey’s green bucks. “Ed Markey’s biggest accomplishment during his four decades in Washington has been cozying up to radical environmental special interests, causing Massachusetts union workers and their representatives to worry about how extreme Markey actually is,” wrote Brook Hougesen, spokeswoman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, in an e-mail to National Journal Daily.

Polls show Markey maintaining a comfortable lead over Gomez, although it may be narrowing a bit. A June 1 New England College poll found Markey leading Gomez by 52 percent to 40 percent, while a Suffolk College poll released over the weekend found Markey’s lead at 48 percent to 41 percent.

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