The UN Climate Change Conference is scheduled to begin its meetings in Copenhagen in two weeks, and conference leaders are busy trying to scale back expectations; with the U.S. Senate apparently having given up on passage of “cap and trade” before the conclusion of the conference, selling the massive redistribution of wealth that is a fundamental element of the conference’s agenda has become extremely difficult.
The heart of the conference’s proposed plan of action had been that the world’s industrialized nations should transfer hundreds of billions of dollars from their economies to those of the Third World, ostensibly to support expanding the use of "green technologies" in those nations. At the same time, those same developed nations would be expected to scale back their own economies through a reduction in carbon-dioxide emitting industries (such as power production).
Attempting to salvage some of the conference agenda, Yvo de Boer, Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change recently listed four “essentials” for a Copenhagen agreement:
1. How much are the industrialized countries willing to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases?
2. How much are major developing countries such as China and India willing to do to limit the growth of their emissions?
3. How is the help needed by developing countries to engage in reducing their emissions and adapting to the impacts of climate change going to be financed?
4. How is that money going to be managed?
“If Copenhagen can deliver on those four points I’d be happy,” says Yvo de Boer.
De Boer’s happiness at such a prospect should be no surprise, since it would mean that the internationalists have gained everything they desired in principle, leaving only the details to be worked out later. None of these four elements are actually addressing measurable environmental goals — they are economic in nature, aimed at manipulating the global economy.
Meanwhile, hysterical rhetoric is flooding various media outlets, even as the scientific facts are debunking “global warming.” Thus, for example, an article for RedOrbit.com distilled some of the shrillest hype into a few brief paragraphs:
Since the 1997 international agreement to address global warming, climate change has seen its ups and downs, including extremely bleak warnings.
So far, the world’s oceans have raised an inch and a half, serious droughts have plagued parts of the world, temperatures everywhere are warmer, and several endangered species continue to be threatened.
"The latest science is telling us we are in more trouble than we thought," said Janos Pasztor, climate adviser to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, to AP News.
It is suspected that since the original agreement signed in Kyoto, Japan, in December 1997, is that the amount of carbon dioxide in the air has grown 6.5%. Officials will meet in Copenhagen next month to seek [to] create a new pact, which President Barack Obama says "has immediate operational effect ... an important step forward in the effort to rally the world around a solution."
From 1997 to 2008, world carbon dioxide has leapt up 31%. Emissions from China have doubled since 1997.
"Back in 1997, the impacts (of climate change) were underestimated; the rate of change has been faster," noted Virginia Burkett, leading scientist for global change research at the U.S. Geological Survey. This scares former Vice President Al Gore, who helped create a last-minute pact in Kyoto.
"By far the most serious differences that we've had is an acceleration of the crisis itself," Gore said to The Associated Press.
Such an "analysis" is short on facts (featuring apparently contradictory assertions regarding the carbon dioxide levels), and long on fearmongering. The unchecked assertions of Al Gore, who has made a personal fortune off his investments in "green" technologies, are far from credible. Pasztor’s assertions dovetail with Ban’s agenda, of course, but also do not constitute relevant scientific facts.
What do the facts tell us? That “global warming” has stalled.
According to an article at the online edition of Der Spiegel, the temperatures are not behaving according to the computer models, to the chagrin of environmental extremists.
The planet's temperature curve rose sharply for almost 30 years, as global temperatures increased by an average of 0.7 degrees Celsius (1.25 degrees Fahrenheit) from the 1970s to the late 1990s. "At present, however, the warming is taking a break," confirms meteorologist Mojib Latif of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in the northern German city of Kiel. Latif, one of Germany's best-known climatologists, says that the temperature curve has reached a plateau. "There can be no argument about that," he says. "We have to face that fact."
Even though the temperature standstill probably has no effect on the long-term warming trend, it does raise doubts about the predictive value of climate models, and it is also a political issue. For months, climate change skeptics have been gloating over the findings on their Internet forums. This has prompted many a climatologist to treat the temperature data in public with a sense of shame, thereby damaging their own credibility.
"It cannot be denied that this is one of the hottest issues in the scientific community," says Jochem Marotzke, director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg. "We don't really know why this stagnation is taking place at this point."
Such outbursts of honesty are quite instructive. The reliance on computer modeling is of limited utility, even for the purpose of tracking individual storms; what is the measure of the hubris that believed it was possible to predict the entire global environment from a shocking small number of data points gathered over a few years? The article continues:
Just a few weeks ago, Britain's Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research added more fuel to the fire with its latest calculations of global average temperatures. According to the Hadley figures, the world grew warmer by 0.07 degrees Celsius from 1999 to 2008 and not by the 0.2 degrees Celsius assumed by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. And, say the British experts, when their figure is adjusted for two naturally occurring climate phenomena, El Niño and La Niña, the resulting temperature trend is reduced to 0.0 degrees Celsius — in other words, a standstill.
The differences among individual regions of the world are considerable. In the Arctic, for example, temperatures rose by almost three degrees Celsius, which led to a dramatic melting of sea ice. At the same time, temperatures declined in large areas of North America, the western Pacific and the Arabian Peninsula. Europe, including Germany, remains slightly in positive warming territory.
A key point is that the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is making assumptions with regard to climate change — assumptions that the facts are demonstrating are unwarranted. With the freedom and economic vitality of the world at stake, the flawed assumptions of an international body with a definite political agenda are no basis for risking the future of our nation.