the meetings never end

[ivbinconned]

Lorne Gunter: For Kyoto's champions, the meetings never end


Lorne Gunter

If you want an indication of just how utterly meaningless the "historic" Bali global warming deal was, consider this: The UN climate change meeting that concluded on Friday was officially the 13th conference of the parties (COP) to the Kyoto accords. It was the 10th since the international greenhouse gas treaty was created more than a decade ago.

Every year, these same signatories meet. Every year, they go over (and over) the same territory. Every year, they dicker, blather, preach, assail, negotiate, draft and redraft (not to mention flying from one exotic location to another eating, drinking and living off fat publicly funded expense accounts). And every year, they leave claiming to have reached an historic consensus to save the UN climate change process.

There is never any "final" deal. The goalposts move at every conference, and often three or four times during the pre-negotiations that occur between COPs. Don't like a COP agreement? Wait a few months. It'll change.

You may remember that COP-11 was held in Montreal in December, 2005, during the first two weeks of Canada's last general election. It, too, was hailed as historic. Stephane Dion, then the Liberal environment minister, was praised as the saviour of the Kyoto process for having hammered out some last-minute deal that kept negotiations alive through COP-12. But just what bargaining catastrophe Mr. Dion is supposed to have averted can no longer be recalled -- just as the "historic" achievements of Bali will quickly be lost in the mists -- because the substance of the agreement was completely meaningless.

Achievement means little to the UN's climate crusaders. It's the appearance of activity that counts. Keep moving, keep meeting, keep the shrimp toast and single malts coming, and the need actually to accomplish some tangible environmental outcome becomes inconsequential.

The Kyoto process is the ultimate triumph of symbolism over substance.

Consider the reception for Kevin Rudd, the new Australian prime minister. He wins power on the eve of the Bali conference and announces his first act

as PM will be to sign the Kyoto accord and agree to deep emissions cuts --perhaps as much as 60% by 2020. He then flies off to the Indonesia resort where the 15,000 delegates and hangers-on welcome him as a conquering hero.

But three days into the UN gathering, Australia's electricity commission tells the new prime minister that his government's proposals will lead to a rise in electrical bills of at least 30%, perhaps more. Such an increase would almost surely stunt Australia's booming economy. So Mr. Rudd backs down. He announces his country will not agree to immediate cuts, but rather now favours cuts of 50-60% by 2050.

These are the same levels and deadline that have been advocated by Canada's Conservative government for more than a year. But because our Tories refuse to pay homage to Kyoto as the be-all and end-all of environmental compassion, they are vilified by delegates while the Rudd government is celebrated. Symbolism over substance.

Our own Liberals, while they were in government, presided over as large a percentage increase in greenhouse gas emissions as produced by any country with binding limits under the Kyoto accord. From 1997 through 2005, our emissions rose by more than 25%. The Americans, who everyone at UN climate conferences likes to malign as the world's climate baddies, raised theirs only 17%.

If the UN climate process were about results rather than rhetoric, the Americans would be praised for slowing the pace of their emissions, while our Liberals would be held up as the worst failures and hypocrites on the planet. Instead, of course, because our Liberals never failed to pledge fealty to Kyoto, they were heroes, while the Americans were bums. Form over function.

My sneaking suspicion is that this reality finally dawned on the Americans, who agreed to sign onto the process at Bali because they realized just how hollow the whole exercise is.

The "historic" Bali agreement is no agreement at all. Rather, it is a compromise on a promise to negotiate an actual deal within the next two years. It contains no emissions quotas on any countries, developed or developing.

All it does is assure onlookers that there will be a COP-14 and a COP-15, and a whole bunch of lavish sub-committee meetings in between, at which all these full-time cause-pleaders can indulge their canape-consuming addictions and bow down before the totems of Kyoto.

[ivbinconned]

Lorne Gunter: Manufacturing one crisis after another

Lorne Gunter

National Post



On Tuesday, UN scientists were forced to admit they had greatly exaggerated the AIDS crisis. Despite all the rhetoric and celebrity hand-wringing, political posturing and First-to-Third-World aid, AIDS has been on the decline for a decade.

That's right, AIDS cases are decreasing in number, not increasing as we have been told again and again and again by everyone from Bill Clinton to Jean Chretien to (insert name of professional Hollywood "carer" here).

Turns out UN scientists have been using flawed methodology to estimate cases worldwide. And on top of that, Third World governments have been taking a grab bag of diseases and labeling them all AIDS because they learned a long time ago that politicians and NGOs in the developed world will open their wallets faster and wider for AIDS than bilharzias, cholera and schistosoma.

As Jim Chin, a former World Health Organization researcher and now a professor of clinical epidemiology at Berkeley has written, the so-called AIDS epidemic is the perfect confluence of "science meets political correctness."

It seems UN scientists were taking rates for such high-risk groups as drug users and gay men and projecting them across entire populations, as if all the people in an entire country were as likely to contract AIDS as people who share dirty needles or hang out in bathhouses.

According to Daniel Halperin, an AIDS epidemiologist at Harvard, even the new lower numbers "are probably still on the high side."

Knowing how important AIDS funding is to some Third World governments, UN scientists seem unwilling to admit the crisis has past so as not to interrupt the inflow of developed-world grants.

It was the same five years ago when UN scientists had to concede they'd gotten the over-population crisis wrong. The world was not going to end up groaning under the weight of 12 billion or even 15 billion souls. Population would peak at around 8.5 or 9 billion in 2050 and thereafter start to decline.

By assuming as they had that fertility rates as high as 6.0 births per woman in some countries would continue unchecked forever, UN scientists had grossly overestimated the extent of the problem. Indeed, the crisis was mostly all in their minds.

It was also UN scientists that created the international panic over SARS in 2003 and the bird flu last year, neither of which materialized into the "pandemics" they assured us were lurking around the corner, ready to claim tens of millions of victims.

Are you beginning to notice a pattern here?

The lead UN scientists on any issue are often as interested in ideology and political change as sound science. Their conclusions are typically based on sound bites and pieces of research done by less cause-oriented scientists. It's in their wild extrapolations from those bits that their errors arise and their biases show.

So how come, given the UN's horrendous misuse of science on so many issues, so many people are prepared to give UN climate-change scientists so much credibility?

Last week the UN's conference on climate change produced what can only be described as a highly charged political document -- not a scientific paper -- known as the "Synthesis Report." Despite being hailed as the most "certain" document yet of mankind's deleterious impact on climate, the report is nothing more than another UN exaggeration only tangentially related to the underlying scientific evidence.

Canada's own Environment Minister, John Baird, congratulated the UN and pronounced once again that "the science is clear."

Yes, as "clear" as it was about AIDS, overpopulation and a whole host of other science-based UN crusades.

As the Natural Resources Stewardship Project pointed out (see www.nrsp.com), even the vaunted five-year UN climate report, released last winter, is a highly manipulated document. Of the 2,500 scientists the UN claims support its global warming conclusions, only 62 actually reviewed the chapter said to "prove" that man is causing catastrophic climate change.

Of the 62, 60% submitted critical reviews that UN scientists refused to include in the final document.

In other words, rather than being the unbiased consensus of more than 2,000 scientists, the UN's insistence that we are destroying the Earth is the heavily doctored conclusion of perhaps two dozen agenda-driven scientists and globalist bureaucrats.

At some point, we've got to stop listening.