Politicians are gloomy about reaching climate deal in Copenhagen. Awwwwwwwwww! - 12-Nov-2009 - Generational Dynamics

Generational Dynamics Web Log for 12-Nov-2009

Politicians are gloomy about reaching climate deal in Copenhagen. Awwwwwwwwww!

It seems that this money and power grab is down for another year.

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According to news reports:

"No global climate change treaty likely for up to a year, negotiators admit

World's key industrialised nations say they have abandoned hope of legally binding deal at Copenhagen summit ...

A global treaty to fight climate change will be postponed by at least six months and possibly a year or more, senior negotiators and politicians conceded today.

In a day of gloomy statements, the world's key industrialised nations said they had abandoned hope of a legally binding treaty at the Copenhagen summit next month and had begun to plan only for a meeting of world leaders.

The stark statements follow weeks of pessimism and represent a significant downgrading of the summit's goal.

In London, Ed Miliband, the UK climate change secretary, became the first British politician to acknowledge publicly that Copenhagen would produce no legal climate change treaty.

Speaking in the House of Commons, he said: "The UN negotiations are moving too slowly and not going well." He went on to describe a "history of mistrust" between developed and developing nations with negotiators "stuck in entrenched positions", an impasse that prompted African nations to stage a walkout at the negotiations this week."

The "legal climate change treaty" that activists were hoping for was for a tax on all financial transactions in Western nations. That money would be diverted to the activists and their favorite causes. For some strange reason, that proposal even went too far for the Obama administration.

The "African nations ... walkout" in the above excerpt refers to a preliminary climate change meeting in Barcelona last week. The developing nations, including the Africans, threatened to walk out unless the US came to Copenhagen with a legally binding promise to pay billions of dollars to the developing nations.

It's a sign of the total craziness of our times that no one is debating where the technology is coming from to reduce carbon emissions. This sickness pervades everything, including the stock market and the health care legislation. It's always just a financial deal. The sickness is ignoring fundamentals, and thinking that all you need is a financial scam, moral outrage, and a smooth sales pitch to solve all problems.

Let's list some of the problems with the current global warming strategy.

The activists don't believe what they're saying.
I made this point a couple of years ago. These activists don't act like they believe what they say. They live in posh mansions, and jet around the world, to Bali and other trendy places, to lecture people on how everyone but themselves should use less energy. If these people believed a word of what they would saying, then they would adopt more restrained and austere lifestyles themselves, if only to serve as a model for the public.
I know this because I DO believe what I'm saying. I believe every word that I write on my web site. Since I've been developing generational theory and realized the consequences to myself and the world, I've changed my life enormously to prepare, and I've constantly urged web site readers to do the same, and many are doing that.
But not the environmental activists. They don't practice austerity themselves, nor do they urge their acolytes to do the same. So I see these activists talking the talk, but I never see them walking the walk. That's how I know that they're lying, and that they don't believe a word they're saying.

Activists always seem to have a money stake in what they're saying.
Take a look at Al Gore, for example. He lives a very wealthy, high-energy-usage lifestyle, and he makes huge amounts of money by selling climate change.
If there were new data that indicating that Al Gore's theories were wrong -- and there IS such data (see below) -- then Gore would lose millions of dollars if he acknowledged it. Therefore, Gore would be saying exactly the same thing, whether he believed in global warming or not, so you can't reach any conclusions from what he says.

The proposed treaties ignore geopolitical realities.
China and India are not willing to commit to any reduction in the production of carbon dioxide. In fact, China starts up a new coal-fired power plant every week, and both China and India put thousands of new cars on the road every week.
Developing nations in Africa, Asia and South America are not willing to commit to any reduction in the production of carbon dioxide. They're participating in this debate because they want United States and European money so that officials can pad their bank accounts, while their populations increase carbon dioxide production through such activities as cooking food, cutting down forests and driving cars.

The science is far from clear.
If you listen to the activists, then anyone who even questions the "global warming" concept is an idiot or a racist or evil. That's one more example of how crazy things are. In fact, there are plenty of doubts about the science.
There have been numerous reports lately that the global warming has turned into global cooling in the last ten years. Here's a graph that illustrates the situation:

Global cooling/warming since 1980

Now, activists dispute the interpretation of this graph, but the point is that you don't have to be evil to believe that there's a big debate about the validity of climate change claims.
In fact, there are specific doubts at all levels:
- Is global warming in fact occurring? The above graph raises the question.
- Even if it is occurring, is it preponderantly being caused by human activity? Or is it part of the Earth's normal life cycle, and would occur anyway?
- Of the portion caused by human activity, is there any currently known technology that would significantly reduce the human portion?
Activists don't like to hear these questions, because they're looking forward to padding their bank accounts with money from climate change treaties.

The proposed climate change treaties are based on invalid assumptions about the future.
For example, here's an excerpt from the World Energy Outlook 2009 Edition - Executive Summary, published by the activist International Energy Agency:

"Continuing on today’s energy path, without any change in government policy, would mean rapidly increasing dependence on fossil fuels, with alarming consequences for climate change and energy security. The Reference Scenario sees a continued rapid rise in energy-related CO2 emissions through to 2030, resulting from increased global demand for fossil energy."

This is what's called "the horsecrap argument." In 1900, someone might have drawn a graph of the increasing numbers of horse-drawn carriages and extrapolated the trend forward, and would have concluded that the U.S. would be buried in horsecrap by 1930. The predicted trends turned out to be irrelevant because of automobile technology.
Climate change activists are using the same invalid reasoning today. In fact, between now and 2030 there's going to be an explosion of new technology that can barely be imagined now, including super-intelligent computers and new forms of energy storage. This technology will invalidate the assumption of rapid rise in energy-related CO2 emissions.
An important fact is that the horsecrap argument in 1900 was not defeated by a "government policy"; it was defeated by self-correcting economic policies. There was no government policy that could possibly have succeeded, and the same is true today.

The proposed treaties ignore population growth and food shortages.
As I've written many times in the past, population has been growing faster than the food supply for decades. (See, for example, "Food - Green revolution v Malthus effect" and "Price of food is skyrocketing in India and China.")
The population issue impacts the global warming debate in several ways. First, it's exponential population growth that's causing exponential energy use, and the proposed treaties do not address the problem at all. Second, anything that restricts energy usage will only make food even more expensive, thus making the starvation problem even worse.
The growth of population faster than the growth of the food supply is one of several reasons why Generational Dynamics predicts a new world war, killing something like 2 billion people. This will reduce population significantly, thereby solving the climate change problem.
It's ironic that environmental activists say that anyone who ignores global warming trends is crazy or racist, but then the same activists completely ignore the much more obvious population trends that make the climate change treaties meaningless.

The proposed treaties ignore the Singularity.
The Singularity is the point in time, around 2030, when computers will quickly become much more intelligent than humans, and will displace humans as the most intelligent "species" on earth. Any scientific forecasts past the year 2030 are totally meaningless, since no one has any idea what will happen after the Singularity, or even whether the human race will survive.
(See "I, Robot is science fiction, but intelligent computers will soon be science fact." and Chapter 7 - The Singularity in the book Generational Dynamics for Historians.)

In about 1970, I remember reading in the leftist Ramparts Magazine an article predicting that ocean pollution would cause algae to cover the ocean worldwide by 1980. Obviously that never happened, but it shows that loony environmental claims seem to be a standard part of the leftist playbook.

Today we're supposed to worry about global warming, but in the 1970s, we were supposed to worry about global cooling.

Here's the text of a Newsweek article from April 28, 1975. Today, 35 years later, this article is hilarious:

"The Cooling World -- Newsweek, April 28, 1975

There are ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production – with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth. The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only 10 years from now. The regions destined to feel its impact are the great wheat-producing lands of Canada and the U.S.S.R. in the North, along with a number of marginally self-sufficient tropical areas – parts of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indochina and Indonesia – where the growing season is dependent upon the rains brought by the monsoon.

The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it. In England, farmers have seen their growing season decline by about two weeks since 1950, with a resultant overall loss in grain production estimated at up to 100,000 tons annually. During the same time, the average temperature around the equator has risen by a fraction of a degree – a fraction that in some areas can mean drought and desolation. Last April, in the most devastating outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded, 148 twisters killed more than 300 people and caused half a billion dollars’ worth of damage in 13 U.S. states.

To scientists, these seemingly disparate incidents represent the advance signs of fundamental changes in the world’s weather. The central fact is that after three quarters of a century of extraordinarily mild conditions, the earth’s climate seems to be cooling down. Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the cooling trend, as well as over its specific impact on local weather conditions. But they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century. If the climatic change is as profound as some of the pessimists fear, the resulting famines could be catastrophic. “A major climatic change would force economic and social adjustments on a worldwide scale,” warns a recent report by the National Academy of Sciences, “because the global patterns of food production and population that have evolved are implicitly dependent on the climate of the present century.” ...

Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change, or even to allay its effects. They concede that some of the more spectacular solutions proposed, such as melting the Arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot or diverting arctic rivers, might create problems far greater than those they solve. But the scientists see few signs that government leaders anywhere are even prepared to take the simple measures of stockpiling food or of introducing the variables of climatic uncertainty into economic projections of future food supplies. The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality."

The last paragraph is the funniest of all. I love that proposed solution of covering the Arctic ice cap with black soot, to force it to melt.

And the last sentence, "The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality," is exactly the same horsecrap argument that we're hearing today. It's a good thing that we didn't pay attention in 1975.

(Comments: For reader comments, questions and discussion, see the Climate Change thread of the Generational Dynamics forum.) (12-Nov-2009) Permanent Link
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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 12-Nov-2009 Politicians are gloomy about reaching climate deal in Copenhagen. Awwwwwwwwww!

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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 12-Nov-2009
Politicians are gloomy about reaching climate deal in Copenhagen. Awwwwwwwwww!