the official negotiations invariably take place behind closed doors, and the real negotiations – the ones required for the self-serving compromise that will appear magically in the very last hour – take place in hotel rooms. Our presence as invited delegates from civil society makes us complicit in this deceit
the NGOs replicate the same inequalities as the larger process- the key decisions are made by a small clique of white specialists and presented to the unconsulted global representatives in the audience
Outside society may be permitted to speak in the streets around the conference- albeit in a suitably stage managed and marginal fashion – but the conference has absolutely no interest in how it speaks back.
these conferences occur in a constructed reality of concerned global citizenship and have no comprehension that the future of the world’s climate depends on winning over the voters of Oklahoma.
And so, looking back on Copenhagen, I have to ask: who were all those banners, posters, photo exhibits, polar bears, melting ice statues, video installations really talking to? Did they persuade the doubting heartlands that this was their issue, or did they reinforce the widespread suspicion that this is an inward looking and irrelevant faith? And why are we too absorbed by the pilgrimage to ever ask this question?
If the consensus disappears then it will be game over for the AGWer.
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A continuous struggle…
Reality is causing the Global Warming consensus to melt and what remains is thinner and more treacherous. AGWers need the consensus to hunt so they are having to travel further and further to reach their prey. As the consensus melts the area is also opened up to proper debate and free discussion and scientific exploration adding independent thinking to the many threats the AGWers already face.
Adult AGWer with two members of the public (AGWers-in-the-making)
Did you know…
…AGWers shelter the public from independent thinking in the safety of their “the debate is over” dens when they go hunting for skeptics. But as the consensus melts, these dens are collapsing – leaving the public vulnerable to skepticism and exposed to extreme discussion conditions.
…experts predict that Global Warming consensus could disappear completely in summer by 2011.
AGWer adoption/gift/present pack
Adopt an AGWer today…
…by adopting an AGWer you can help us save the AGWer and its home from the effects of reality and free discussion.
We must act now to try and save the AGWer from extinction.
Have to admit, having read an AGW blog about COP-15 I could not avoid committing the sin of wasting time reading the Copenhagen Accord. And yes, there is an interesting and quite telling concept after all. It shows that no scientist, AGW believer or otherwise, has likely participated to the writing of the Accord, or has even been involved in reviewing any of it.
I am referring to a concept that is repeated twice:
(point 1) “recognizing the scientific view that the increase in global temperature should be below 2 degrees Celsius“
(point 2) “reduce global emissions so as to hold the increase in global temperature below 2 degrees Celsius“
In there, “the increase in global temperature” is referred in absolute terms. A much more scientific, logical and legal thing to write would have been
“the increase in global temperature due to anthropogenic interference“
To understand the absurdity of the Accord as it stands, imagine the world of 2050, with giant emission reductions already achieved, and powerful models showing that “anthropogenic interference” amounts to +1.7C. Still, if by pure misfortune natural variability sums up to +0.4C, the Copenhagen Accord says we have failed (despite having achieved the wildest dreams of the average 2009 greenie).
Imagine now another world of 2050, with no emission reduction at all and “anthropogenic interference” running at +3C. Still, if by pure stroke of luck natural variability sums up to -0.9C (eg a series of giant volcanic eruptions from 2045 onwards), the Copenhagen Accord says we have succeeded (despite having done nothing at all).
Sadly, all of that shows how silly is the idea that there is something good in the Accord because it has followed the lead of scientists. In truth, the Accord has made the IPCC irrelevant apart than as a confirming body for whatever the USA and China would like to see agreed upon regarding “climate change”.
100% of the people all over the world agree that 45,000 humans travelled to Denmark and made a lot of fuss for about two weeks, and all we’ve got is a declaration that is not worth a single paragraph of commentary. Give me another UN conference like this and we’ll be back to the League of Nations.
There’s more one should think about and I am sure it will slowly surface in the next few days. One question is who are the losers out of that all, and by that I mean the “jokers” that were presumed to be able to achieve something, proceeded to huff and puff a lot but were then demonstrated able to achieve nothing at all. Among them:
Yvo De Boer
Rajendra Pachauri and the IPCC
Al Gore and (admittedly, in a considerably lesser amount) Jim Hansen
Ed Milliband, Gordon Brown and the whole UK government
France, Germany and all other EU countries (apart, one suspects, from the Czech Republic)
Japan
Greenpeace, Avaaz and a list of greenie organizations just too eager to jump on the AGW bandwagon
When push came to shove, the Powers That Be did not care at all about the opinions of those listed above.
I wouldn’t be too harsh with the Maldives, most of the African nations, etc. They do not have much power to do anything at UN level, anyway. Russia has lost a bit, by not being included in the final five signatories, and for the same reason Brazil, India, and (mysteriously) South Africa have gained a little.
But let me say very clearly, as UK taxpayer I find the performance of the Ed Milliband particularly awful, and the absolute unimportance of anything Gordon Brown had to say especially embarrassing. Go, go, Gordon go!!
Please!
ps looks like it’s high time to get US or Chinese citizenship…
Dipende da come uno se la voglia girare, suscitera’ sicuramente delle acrobazie linguistiche per dimostrare quando ci sia da essere comunque ottimisti sulla riduzione delle emissioni, ha gia’ provocato poco igieniche fughe nella paranoia da parte di alcuni commentatori…ma di una cosa tutti sono in fondo d’accordo: 45mila persone sono andate in Danimarca per due settimane piu’ o meno per parlare di cambiamenti climatici, hanno fatto una confusione incredibile, e sono riuscite a non arrivare assolutamente a niente.
Il documento finale firmato da USA, Cina, India, Brasile e (chissa’ perche’) Sudafrica non vale neanche la pena che sia commentato.
Un altro paio di Conferenze cosi’ e la Nazioni Unite fanno una strapessima fine.
A deal in Copenhagen? Hopefully. A meaningful deal in Copenhagen? Perhaps. Will there be substantive actions in order to stay within the 2C limit? Maybe. Is there going to be a plan to significantly reduce emissions? It’s a promise.
After all, what’s a President that is also the first preventative Nobel Peace Prize winner going to be good at selling? Hope, mostly hope.
Arriva il Presidente Obama e che succede al summit di Copenhagen? Forse, viene raggiunto un accordo globale. Si pensa, che sara’ un accordo significativo. Viene espresso il desiderio, che in futuro vengano messe in atto azioni effettiva per ridurre le emissioni. La soddisfazione e’ nel fatto, che viene compiuto un primo passo nella direzione di evitare un aumento delle temperature oltre i 2C.
D’altronde, cosa possiamo aspettarci dall’intervento del primo Presidente premiato preventivamente per (la) Pace? Speranze, soprattutto speranze. La vera audacia e’ nel mantenersi a galla contando soprattutto sul fatto che la speranza e’ l’ultima a morire.
A deal in Copenhagen? Hopefully. A meaningful deal in Copenhagen? Perhaps. Will there be substantive actions in order to stay within the 2C limit? Maybe. Is there going to be a plan to significantly reduce emissions? It’s a promise.
After all, what’s a President that is also the first preventative Nobel Peace Prize winner going to be good at selling? Hope, mostly hope.
An eye-opening “global cooling consensus” CIA document dated 1974 has just been re-discovered in the British Library by Yours Truly and is extensively mentioned today in the (printed) pages of The Spectator (UK) and Il Foglio (Italy).
(the (suitably degraded) scan of the Spectator article is at the bottom of this blog)
the most obdurate catastro-warmists (when they will notice that almost all AGW scares are a search-and-replace job from “cooling” to “warming”), and
the history deniers fixated on ‘demonstrating’ that a scientific consensus about Global Cooling in the 1970’s were a ‘myth'(*)
And there is more (much more), from ever-improving climate models promising to become good in a few years’ time to the unsettling apparent ease with which Government agencies then (as now) could get scientists to agree on whatever they needed them to agree on.
Nobody aware of the CIA document’s contents should be able to avoid a good chuckle after reading any of the current AGW reports on famine, starvation, refugee crises, floods, droughts, crop and monsoon failures, and all sorts of extreme weather phenomena; on climate-related major economic problems around the world; on Africans getting in climate troubles first; and so on and so forth.
Why? Because it is all too clear that those scares cannot be real, since they have already been mentioned verbatim in all their dramatic effect, but about Global Cooling.
The whole lot of them, they are just empty threats, instruments of doom-and-gloom policy manipulation with no relation to reality.
It is deeply ironic that it takes a 35-year-old document, available on the web so far only in title, to show the absolute vacuity of the vast majority of pre-COP15 reports and studies. It is time to ditch everything we hear about collapsing ice sheets, disappearing glaciers, species extinctions, and each and every “it’s worse than we thought” report by “scientists”.
It is time to become climate adults.
As I wrote for The Spectator:
This might be the most important lesson of the 1974 report on global cooling: that we need to grow up, separate climatology from fear, and recognise – much as it pains politicians and scientists – that our understanding of how climate changes remains in its infancy.
(*) Anybody thinking about Thomas C. Peterson, William M. Connolley, and John Fleck’s largely mistitled “The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus” (Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society Volume 89, Issue 9, September 2008, pp 1325-1337)? Well, think again after reading this little gem of theirs:
By the early 1970s, when Mitchell updated his work (Mitchell 1972), the notion of a global cooling trend was widely accepted, albeit poorly understood
As I wrote a little more than a year ago: “Widely accepted”: check. “Global cooling”: check.. There was a global cooling consensus among scientists, at least up to 1974. And it went on to appear in Newsweek, The Washington Post, The New York Times and many more media outlets around the world, at least up to 1976.
An eye-opening “global cooling consensus” CIA document dated 1974 has just been re-discovered in the British Library by Yours Truly and is extensively mentioned today in the (printed) pages of The Spectator (UK) and Il Foglio (Italy).
(updated 20091203 – 1042am GMT – the (suitably degraded) scan of the Spectator article is at the bottom of this blog)
the most obdurate catastro-warmists (when they will notice that almost all AGW scares are a search-and-replace job from “cooling” to “warming”), and
the history deniers fixated on ‘demonstrating’ that a scientific consensus about Global Cooling in the 1970’s were a ‘myth'(*)
And there is more (much more), from ever-improving climate models promising to become good in a few years’ time to the unsettling apparent ease with which Government agencies then (as now) could get scientists to agree on whatever they needed them to agree on.
Nobody aware of the CIA document’s contents should be able to avoid a good chuckle after reading any of the current AGW reports on famine, starvation, refugee crises, floods, droughts, crop and monsoon failures, and all sorts of extreme weather phenomena; on climate-related major economic problems around the world; on Africans getting in climate troubles first; and so on and so forth.
Why? Because it is all too clear that those scares cannot be real, since they have already been mentioned verbatim in all their dramatic effect, but about Global Cooling.
The whole lot of them, they are just empty threats, instruments of doom-and-gloom policy manipulation with no relation to reality.
It is deeply ironic that it takes a 35-year-old document, available on the web so far only in title, to show the absolute vacuity of the vast majority of pre-COP15 reports and studies. It is time to ditch everything we hear about collapsing ice sheets, disappearing glaciers, species extinctions, and each and every “it’s worse than we thought” report by “scientists”.
It is time to become climate adults.
As I wrote for The Spectator:
This might be the most important lesson of the 1974 report on global cooling: that we need to grow up, separate climatology from fear, and recognise – much as it pains politicians and scientists – that our understanding of how climate changes remains in its infancy.
(*) Anybody thinking about Thomas C. Peterson, William M. Connolley, and John Fleck’s largely mistitled “The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus” (Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society Volume 89, Issue 9, September 2008, pp 1325-1337)? Well, think again after reading this little gem of theirs:
By the early 1970s, when Mitchell updated his work (Mitchell 1972), the notion of a global cooling trend was widely accepted, albeit poorly understood
As I wrote a little more than a year ago: “Widely accepted”: check. “Global cooling”: check.. There was a global cooling consensus among scientists, at least up to 1974. And it went on to appear in Newsweek, The Washington Post, The New York Times and many more media outlets around the world, at least up to 1976.
A quick look at the websites about COP15 will reveal the level of organization behind it. But nobody would like to put up with so much work only to see the Conference fizzle away without a decision being actually taken.
The challenge to design a “Son of Kyoto” is recognized by all. And the solution is…the delegates will be put under pressure enormous enough to convince them.
The motto will be “Sign, or else!”.
Expect therefore an onslaught of climate-related disaster news between now and December 2009. No melting glacier will be forgotten, no summer temperature will be taken as normal or cold, no semi-idiotic model-based forecast of the climate in 2050 will be left out of Nature magazine.
The Queen will talk about climate change, the Pope will talk about climate change. Stunts will be performed in London and New York to highlight the cause of climate change. The Catlin polar expedition will try hard to take pictures of a melting arctic landscape perhaps from the plane that will carry them back home. New temperature reconstructions will surface just at the right time to confirm Michael Mann has always been right, even when he was wrong.
Scientific American, The Economist, The New Yorker will join up in the calls to “act now“. Even the WSJ will timidly join the chorus, just in case it does become a good political point. Football (soccer) will be enlisted to support the cause.
Corals will start bleaching again, and every tropical Atlantic cloud and wind will be classified as a category-2 hurricane. Intriguing new relationships between climate change and earthquakes are going to become big news, just like the in hindsight the “obvious” link between global warming and swine flu.
Unprecedented numbers of charities will jump up the climate bandwagon, and ever more absurdist claims about the consequences of global warming will surface, including a humankind-busting imbalance in the ratio of girls vs. boys, and an increase in the usage of paracetamol and aspirin.
Finally, anybody showing any doubt will be positively ignored, or otherwise described as having the good morals of a pedophile (pedophiles molest innocent children, climate deniers molest innocent Earth, the syllogism is just too obvious…)
=========
The only positive news is that whatever pressure we are going to see the buildup of, and whatever agreement will be reached at COP15, Joe Romm will be unhappy. Of that, we can be more or less certain.
What if (C)AGW is a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing? So they were asking at COP15 in Copenhagen, Denmark in 2009.
