On Monday, the British House of Commons passed the Climate Change Bill, marking a solemn undertaking to reduce British emissions by 80% by mid-century (unless decided otherwise) by the clear majority of 403 to 3.
Today, the British Chancellor of the Exchequer (finance minister) demanded that oil companies reduce the price of gasoline.
There's "joined-up government" for you.
Snow fell as the House of Commons debated Global Warming yesterday – the first October fall in the metropolis since 1922. The Mother of Parliaments was discussing the Mother of All Bills for the last time, in a marathon six hour session.
China presents a unique problem for proponents of an international treaty to fight climate change. On the one hand, it’s the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, building three coal fired power plants every two weeks, and putting millions of newly affluent motorists on the road each year. On the other, there are still 300 million Chinese who live in wretched poverty, and economically harmful policies to fight climate change would retard growth, thereby prolonging their human misery.
For fifteen years, the U.S. and Europe disagreed on how to address this dichotomy. The EU wanted wealthy nations to act first on climate change, and set a moral example for developing countries to follow. The U.S., however, viewed China as a strategic competitor, and resisted any intentional climate commitments that would harm the U.S. economy but allowed the Chinese economy to grow unencumbered. The result was a stalemate: the EU would not act without the U.S., which refused to act without China, which prioritized economic growth over climate change. This dynamic is the fundamental reason why the Kyoto Protocol, the first international climate treaty, is such a debacle.
But everything changed last week, when the EU signaled that it expects significant greenhouse gas emissions reductions from developing countries before it signs onto an international treaty to fight climate change. It was a profound diplomatic shift, one that aligned the EU with the U.S., and it put China squarely on the defensive. Suddenly, there was no diplomatic gridlock to protect China from emissions commitments.
This week, China countered. On Monday, Chinese officials announced that China would cooperate, but only if developed nations spent 1% of their collective GDP—about $300 billion—on the transfer of clean energy technologies to developing countries. To lend urgency to this demand, China also released a white paper warning of the catastrophic impact that climate change has already had on the Middle Kingdom. China has long held that historical emissions from developed countries are responsible for climate change, so the not-so-subtle implication of the government study is that wealthy countries have harmed China.
China looks unlikely to budge, so it appears that the EU versus U.S. versus China gridlock will give way to an EU and US versus China gridlock. For climate realists, this is bad news, because it means that there is less room for maneuver. A party of three is much more conducive to wrangling and intrigue of the sort that leads to prolonged inaction, whereas a party of two is a more rigid interstate relationship.
"Going green" doesn't have quite the cachet it used to, at least on Wall Street.
China raised the price of its co-operation in the world's climate change talks yesterday by calling for developed countries to spend 1 per cent of their domestic product helping poorer nations cut greenhouse gas emissions.
Earlier this year, I wrote an eco-satirical column under the pseudonym Ethan Greenhart, in which I (or rather, Ethan) called upon Greens everywhere to pray for an economic downturn. The column argued that nothing would benefit our human-ravaged planet more than a “big, beautiful, stock-crashing, Wall Street–burning, consumer-baiting, home-evicting, bank-busting recession.”
On a visit to Tokyo, Prince Charles explained to reporters that while “the credit crunch is rightly a preoccupation of vast significance and importance," it shouldn’t trump the “climate crunch.”
Russia, Qatar and Iran met in Tehran last Tuesday to discuss the formation of a natural gas cartel. Although the three countries account for 60% of the world’s natural gas reserves, they would not be capable of manipulating the global market for natural gas in the same way that OPEC influences the global oil prices, because the logistics are markedly different: Whereas a barrel of oil is easily shipped across oceans, natural gas must first be compressed into a highly volatile liquid before it can be shipped in large volumes. Because natural gas is moved from producing countries to consuming countries mostly by pipeline, pricing is regional. That’s why a gas cartel made up of Asian countries would not immediately affect U.S. energy consumers, who get their gas from North American producers. Europe, however, gets a significant share of its natural gas from Russia and Iran, so European energy consumers would face the prospect of price manipulation. Accordingly, EU Commission spokesman Ferran Tarradellas Espuny told reporters that “the Commission may review its energy policy,” if such a cartel is created.
In the 1980s I found myself traveling all over the United States in the employ of a corporation’s quarterly newsletter. I visited many cities and places, discovering the unfailing courtesy and good will of Americans everywhere I went. One of my favorite places was San Francisco. It is picturesque, sits beside a bay spanned by a marvel of engineering, and has great restaurants, hotels, and other attributes.
Every fall I pray for global warming to intensify. I realize it is supposed to mean the doom of the planet, but I keep thinking about all of the ways in which warm weather is so much more pleasant than the cold. I know that is short-sighted, but despite all of the warnings of disastrous warming, WHERE IS IT? There’s been no warming over the last decade. So what does the concept of “global warming” mean if there is no warming?
In fact, an increasing number of scientists are doubting the alarmist case. Some even–shudder!–doubt that CO2 is driving temperature changes. Writes Lorne Gunther of the National Post:
Don Easterbrook, a geologist at Western Washington University, says, “It’s practically a slam dunk that we are in for about 30 years of global cooling,” as the sun enters a particularly inactive phase. His examination of warming and cooling trends over the past four centuries shows an “almost exact correlation” between climate fluctuations and solar energy received on Earth, while showing almost “no correlation at all with CO2.”
An analytical chemist who works in spectroscopy and atmospheric sensing, Michael J. Myers of Hilton Head, S. C., declared, “Man-made global warming is junk science,” explaining that worldwide manmade CO2 emission each year “equals about 0.0168% of the atmosphere’s CO2 concentration … This results in a 0.00064% increase in the absorption of the sun’s radiation. This is an insignificantly small number.”
Other international scientists have called the manmade warming theory a “hoax,” a “fraud” and simply “not credible.”
While not stooping to such name-calling, weather-satellite scientists David Douglass of the University of Rochester and John Christy of the University of Alabama at Huntsville nonetheless dealt the True Believers a devastating blow last month.
For nearly 30 years, Professor Christy has been in charge of NASA’s eight weather satellites that take more than 300,000 temperature readings daily around the globe. In a paper co-written with Dr. Douglass, he concludes that while manmade emissions may be having a slight impact, “variations in global temperatures since 1978 … cannot be attributed to carbon dioxide.”
Moreover, while the chart below was not produced by Douglass and Christy, it was produced using their data and it clearly shows that in the past four years — the period corresponding to reduced solar activity — all of the rise in global temperatures since 1979 has disappeared.
It may be that more global warming doubters are surfacing because there just isn’t any global warming.
National Post
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