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As I mentioned yesterday, winter hasn’t even started, and we have ice:
As I looked at the icy crust on the deck, the Beeb was interviewing a Friends of the Earth guy who travelled to Bali for the Conference. The 5-minute interview went like this:
BBC anchorwoman: question
FoE guy: Blame Bush, blame Bush, blame Bush, blame Bush, blame Bush…
BBC anchorwoman: question
FoE guy: Blame Bush, blame Bush, blame Bush, blame Bush, blame Bush…
and on and on for the full five minutes.
It’s starting to get repetitive: Al flew his private plane to Bali to do exactly that.
“Fresh from receiving the Nobel Peace prize”, let’s go to the videotape:
And it’s going to cost you money: Global Carbon Tax Urged at UN Climate Conference
The Bali roadmap is the new Kyoto treaty.
Meanwhile, 100 scientists urge the UN to give up the futile attempts to combat climate change:
“It is not possible to stop climate change, a natural phenomenon that has affected humanity through the ages. Geological, archaeological, oral and written histories all attest to the dramatic challenges posed to past societies from unanticipated changes in temperature, precipitation, winds and other climatic variables,” the scientists wrote.
The letter states, UN climate conference taking the World in entirely the wrong direction
The IPCC Summaries for Policy Makers are the most widely read IPCC reports amongst politicians and non-scientists and are the basis for most climate change policy formulation. Yet these Summaries are prepared by a relatively small core writing team with the final drafts approved line-by-line by government representatives. The great majority of IPCC contributors and reviewers, and the tens of thousands of other scientists who are qualified to comment on these matters, are not involved in the preparation of these documents. The summaries therefore cannot properly be represented as a consensus view among experts.
Contrary to the impression left by the IPCC Summary reports:
*Recent observations of phenomena such as glacial retreats, sea-level rise and the migration of temperature-sensitive species are not evidence for abnormal climate change, for none of these changes has been shown to lie outside the bounds of known natural variability.
*The average rate of warming of 0.1 to 0. 2 degrees Celsius per decade recorded by satellites during the late 20th century falls within known natural rates of warming and cooling over the last 10,000 years.
*Leading scientists, including some senior IPCC representatives, acknowledge that today’s computer models cannot predict climate. Consistent with this, and despite computer projections of temperature rises, there has been no net global warming since 1998. That the current temperature plateau follows a late 20th-century period of warming is consistent with the continuation today of natural multi-decadal or millennial climate cycling.
In stark contrast to the often repeated assertion that the science of climate change is “settled,” significant new peer-reviewed research has cast even more doubt on the hypothesis of dangerous human-caused global warming. But because IPCC working groups were generally instructed ( http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/docs/wg1_timetable_2006-08-14.pdf ) to consider work published only through May, 2005, these important findings are not included in their reports; i.e., the IPCC assessment reports are already materially outdated.
The UN climate conference in Bali has been planned to take the world along a path of severe CO2 restrictions, ignoring the lessons apparent from the failure of the Kyoto Protocol, the chaotic nature of the European CO2 trading market, and the ineffectiveness of other costly initiatives to curb greenhouse gas emissions. Balanced cost/benefit analyses provide no support for the introduction of global measures to cap and reduce energy consumption for the purpose of restricting CO2 emissions. Furthermore, it is irrational to apply the “precautionary principle” because many scientists recognize that both climatic coolings and warmings are realistic possibilities over the medium-term future.
Via Memeorandum, Ronald Bailey writes from Bali,
On December 11, Greenpeace distributed slices from a gigantic chocolate cake to participants at the U.N. Climate Change conference (COP-13) to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the adoption of the Kyoto Protocol. Since many Kyoto Protocol signatories are not meeting their obligations to cut greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to levels below those of 1990, I’m not sure what the festivities are all about. In fact, Japan, Canada and many EU countries are emitting more GHG than they did in 1990.
Oh, well. It’s the thought that counts.
One of the hottest topics being negotiated the COP-13 is technology transfer. I was under the impression that technology usually got transferred when one party sold it to another. That’s how I got the Sony Vaio on which I am typing this dispatch. Apparently that’s old-fashioned thinking. Under the new post-Kyoto climate treaty, poor countries are demanding that rich countries create some kind of tech transfer fund that would be used to subsidize their purchases of new low-carbon energy and carbon sequestration technologies.
If that weren’t enough there are rumblings among poor country negotiators that they want the right to simply seize the patents (nicely called “compulsory licensing” in trade talks) and make the equipment themselves. “If there is insistence on the ‘full protection of intellectual property’ in relation to climate-friendly technology, it would be a barrier to technology transfer,” declared Martin Khor, director of the leftist Third World Network. Is threatening to confiscate their patents really the way to encourage companies and inventors to invest in creating the innovative low-carbon energy technologies that world is being told are vital to stopping dangerous climate change?
More on Global warming’s icy roadblocks and Pope Benedict – follow the links.
UPDATE
Via Gateway Pundit, Arctic Sea Ice Re-Freezing at Record Pace
UPDATE, Saturday 15 December
Via Marzo, (PDF file) Carbon Emmissions Don’t Cause Global Warming
The Gore Effect – now it reaches your neck of the woods when he’s half-way across the planet!! Wait – maybe he’s channeling his Frosty the Snowman routine in a straight line through the earth’s core. That’s it! Because, after all, you know, he is a GOD. /snark
Your deck is only the latest victim of “Gore’s Tastee Freeze ’07”. He wins the Nobel for throwing some ice cubes at a few polar bears. What has this world come too?
Well, no doubt it will surely cast us off, as pennance for Bush stealing the 2000 election as he did. And for not preventing Israel from carrying out 9/11. You know, that’s when high ranking members of the Knesset hypnotized 19 Islamic Zealots (in the style of The Manchurian Candidate and Sirhan Sirhan) to hijack four American owned Boeing 757’s and crash them into three buildings and one field in Pennsylvannia.
What I can’t figure out is what that rural farm land in PA ever did to piss off Israel???
Those fukakta Jews!!!
In 1991, the Bush Administration asked the National Academy of Sciences for their opinion – are there discrepancies between the IPCC Report and the Summaries for Policymakers?
The Academy didn’t give a direct answer – but by studying the IPCC reports – the answer is, absolutely.
The people who wrote the 1991 report were for the most part honest – and didn’t pretend to say they could forecast the climate or say for certain humans were doing something to it.
But that is not what was advertised about the 1991 report.
In 2001, the IPCC was pretty much told what conclusion to come up with by the UN. But climate science disn’t advance enough to really change the 1991 report
But that is not what was advertised about the 1991 report.
And that’s what’s disturbing about the AGW issue: how the propaganda preempts the science.
Climate science is in its infancy. No computer available has the capability of doing the calculations necessary to predict the effect of rain, for instance, in long-term projections.
And yet in Bali the UN is talking about onerous policies.
Fausta – The fact is the science is rock solid – ask the National Academy of Sciences, the UK Royal Society or any other major body. We’re causing global warming. Stop kidding yourself, and let’s get to work.
And thanks for at least mentioning Greenpeace, but we’re doing a lot more at Bali than just handing out cake. Checkout our updates from on the ground to see…
http://weblog.greenpeace.org/climate/
Andrew, I appreciate your work and in fact I have supported Greenpeace in the past.
Unfortunately we must disagree – while you believe that the science is rock solid, I can not agree with that statement. The science is not solid enough to justify onerous fiancial burdens on the developed nations, burdens which would be administered by a cleptocracy like the UN.
No doubt that global warming is very debated. I, however, have never heard that man is causing global cooling. For this – all I can say is that I hope that the people that believe this is natural are not wrong. But if man is causing at least part of the problem then why not do all we can. One thing not in dispute is that we cannot continue to use non-renewable sources on energy forever.
Are you familiar with the ground floor movement to take solar to the masses by a company called Citizenre? They are trying market solar with an approach similar to satellite TV, cellular telephones, and alarm systems. That is to provide the customer a complete solar system with no upfront charges and make money from a service contract. In this case the service contract would be a rent agreement. They intend to put a complete solar system on clients home. When the system produces electricity, it will lower the bill from the current utility provider. In most cases the savings from the lower bill will more than cover the rent fee that the company intends to charge. The company currently has no product available but intends to deploy in the middle of 2008. They are currently taking reservations and have over 26,000 takers so far. I have written several articles on this company in my blog and even have a couple of videos that I have recorded at http://www.solarjoules.com. Feel free to take a look. I welcome comments. As in any start up business, a chance exists that they may never get off the ground and fulfill any preorders, but if this is the case – the potential client has not lost anything. If you cannot afford the upfront cost of solar today, this may turn out to be a great alternative. This solution would mean that we could produce at least a little less pollution and would be a great step “just in case”. And hey, the fact that you will save money on your electricity bill over time is a pretty good reason to look into it as well.
If anyone would like company information you can go to http://www.jointhesolution.com/razmataz.
Sounds like a cute idea, Raz, but I’m not real optimistic.
Obviously, the solar cells are producing next to nothing when the sun isn’t shining brightly. In most places of the US, folks all know what grey skies look like – over most of the year.
If you don’t have a lot of acerage to call your own, you might might not fit a wothwhile system on your lot anyway.
Menaing there will be a lonely few who find out that the fee + their electric bill is smaller than their current electric bill. Anyone in a good position probably has their own solar set up already anyway.
I don’t endorse these solar systems for any use except by the utility itself. The power out of most of these systems is low quality at high cost. With good power quality and reliability the cost is astronomical and affordable only by the utility itself, (which makes up for its losses on them with traditional electricity sources and Federal and local tax credits. The utility could never charge the true price because nobody could afford it).
Sorry to be such a wet blanket for your optimism!
By the way – to all Greenpeace supporters out there – point out to me, one positive thing that outfit has ever done for anyone. Name one – just one.
I can’t think of anything positive – unless you want to call habitual inflammatory language about things they don’t like a “positive” conribution.
Remember when these folks wanted to “eliminate” chlorine? How does one “eliminate” an element of the periodic table? Now it took some solid thinking to come up with that plan, didn’t it. In every gallon of sea water there is about half an ounce (about 15 grams) of chlorine in it. That’s a lot of chlorine to get rid of, don’cha think?
I guess it isn’t any wonder why they stumbled along their path to greatness