Climate & Climate Change

Australia has ratified the Kyoto Protocol. This was Kevin Rudd’s first official act as the new Australian Prime Minister.

But according to an international law expert, Donald Rothwell, without domestic legislation in place the new government could be in breach of its international legal obligations.

According to the Professor, the normal method for ratifying treaties is not a speedy process but rather involves the preparation of a national impact analysis, then a parliamentary inquiry and enacting new domestic laws.

No national impact analysis had been undertaken on Kyoto – but we have ratified nevertheless.

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Thanks to Ian Mott for the story.

Reality seems to be obstructing any meaningful deal in Bali – looks like another holiday, sorry, I mean conference, will be needed, somewhere else ‘nice.’

In public, climate scientists and European politicians are generally optimistic that rising carbon dioxide levels and temperatures can be curbed. In private, some are less sanguine; but there has been a widespread unwritten code of optimism to avoid being accused of scaremongering or creating despair. Now, science advisors to two governments with claims to leadership in global climate politics, Germany and the UK, have told BBC News it is unlikely that levels of greenhouse gases can be kept low enough to avoid a projected temperature rise of 2C (3.6F).

Meanwhile, the UK still plans a huge airport expansion, there is not the slightest hint of a deal that would see rich nations pay poor nations to capture their emissions from coal and even Democrats in the US Congress want to postpone any tough action on emissions until after 2020. That may be why the scientists’ mask of optimism is beginning to slip.
Roger Harrabin, BBC News, 10 December 2007

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has ruled out endorsing proposed short-term greenhouse gas emission targets of up to 40 per cent by 2020 but says that does not mean the Bali climate change conference will be a failure. Mr Rudd ruled out endorsing a draft proposal from conference organisers for drastic cuts to emission levels of between 25 and 40 per cent over the next 12 years for developed nations
The Age, 10 December 2007

Washington rejected stiff 2020 targets for greenhouse gas cuts by rich nations at U.N. talks in Bali on Monday as part of a “roadmap” to work out a new global pact to fight climate change by 2009. Other countries such as Japan are also opposed, fearing such stiff goals would choke economic growth.
Reuters, 10 December 2007

The head of Japan’s biggest business lobby warned Monday that another set of ‘irrational’ greenhouse gas emission targets like those in the Kyoto Protocol would weaken Japan Inc’s competitiveness. ‘If irrational regulations of total emissions are set, as it was the case under the Kyoto Protocol, we cannot avoid a weakening of our international competitiveness,’ said Fujio Mitarai, who is the head of the Japan Business Federation and also chairman of Canon Inc.
Forbes, 10 December 2007

Britain is responsible for hundreds of millions more tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions than official figures admit, according to a new report that undermines UK claims to lead the world on action against global warming. The analysis says pollution from aviation, shipping, overseas trade and tourism, which are not measured in the official figures, means that UK carbon consumption has risen significantly over the past decade, and that the government’s claims to have tackled global warming are an “illusion”.
David Adam, The Guardian, 10 December 2007

On ‘global warming’, the only thing in which Britain leads the world is in the illusion of its political rhetoric.
Philip Stott, 10 December 2007

Rio. Kyoto. Bali. [Hawaii]. That’s environmental conferences for you. They always occur in sunlit places ending in vowels, and with a consonantal component of no more than 50%. They’re never in vowel-light locations like Nitvinggen or Bblarrgh or Quivdansk, where summer lasts a few hours some time in June, and where the locals spend their long winters rummaging through their clothing of animal pelts, popping lice with gnarled, nutshell fingernails, and musing vowellessly. For, there is almost a defined UN Green Meridian, where conferences To Save The World must always be held.
Kevin Myers, Belfast Telegraph, 7 December 2007

If you thought global warming hysteria couldn’t get any worse, think again:

A WEST Australian medical expert wants families to pay a $5000-plus “baby levy” at birth and an annual carbon tax of up to $800 a child.

Writing in today’s Medical Journal of Australia, Associate Professor Barry Walters said every couple with more than two children should be taxed to pay for enough trees to offset the carbon emissions generated over each child’s lifetime.

Baby tax needed to save planet, claims expert

In terms of climate change and variability on the regional and local scale, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports, the Climate Change Science Program (CCSP) report on surface and tropospheric temperature trends, and the U.S. National Assessment [of Climate Change] have overstated the role of the radiative effect of the anthropogenic increase of carbon dioxide (CO2) in relation to a diversity of other human climate- forcing mechanisms. Indeed, many research studies incorrectly oversimplify climate change by characterizing it as being dominated by the radiative effect of human-added CO2. But while prudence suggests that we work to minimize our disturbance of the climate system (since we don’t fully understand it), by focusing on just one subset of forcing mechanisms, we end up seriously misleading policymakers as to the most effective way of dealing with our social and environmental vulnerability in the context of the entire spectrum of environmental risks and other threats we face today.

What is your criticism of the IPCC?

Mainly the fact that the same individuals who are doing primary research into humans’ impact on the climate system are being permitted to lead the assessment of that research. Suppose a group of scientists introduced a drug they claimed could save many lives: There were side effects, of course, but the scientists claimed the drug’s benefits far outweighed its risks. If the government then asked these same scientists to form an assessment committee to evaluate their claim (and the committee consisted of colleagues of the scientists who made the original claim as well as the drug’s developers), an uproar would occur, and there would be protests. It would represent a clear conflict of interest. Yet this is what has happened with the IPCC process. To date, either few people recognize this conflict, or those that do choose to ignore it because the recommendations of the IPCC fit their policy and political agenda. In either case, scientific rigor has been sacrificed, and poor policy and political decisions will inevitably follow.

Read the entire interview at ECOworld

No change in atmospheric CO2, but:

THE drought-breaking La Nina weather pattern has finally kicked in, bringing flooding rains along the eastern coast and filling the tributaries that feed into the dying Murray-Darling river system.

Forecasters are predicting a wet summer and autumn but remain unwilling, at least officially, to call the end of the worst drought in living memory. And they warn it would still take rains of “biblical proportions” to fill the dams of cities and towns.

Drought-breaker La Nina kicks in for wet summer

Dr. Nils-Axel Mörner is the head of the Paleogeophysics and Geodynamics department at Stockholm University in Sweden. He is past president (1999-2003) of the INQUA Commission on Sea Level Changes and Coastal Evolution, and leader of the Maldives Sea Level Project. Dr. Mörner has been studying the sea level and its effects on coastal areas for some 35 years. He was interviewed by Gregory Murphy on June 6 for EIR.

“Then, in 2003, the same data set, which in their [IPCC’s] publications, in their website, was a straight line – suddenly it changed, and showed a very strong line of uplift, 2.3 mm per year, the same as from the tide gauge. And that didn’t look so nice. It looked as though they had recorded something; but they hadn’t recorded anything. It was the original one which they had suddenly twisted up, because they entered a ‘correction factor,’ which they took from the tide gauge” in an area of Hong Kong that had been subsiding, or sinking.

Morner says that the claim that salt water invasion of a fresh water aquifer indicated a sea level rise ignores the more likely cause due to draining the aquifer for the pineapple industry.

Sea level in the Maldives actually fell during the 70’s according to Morner, but the area is cited as evidence of a sea level rise. He accuses Australian global warming advocates of knocking down a tree on one island to attempt to prove sea levels were rising.

Telegraph article here

Full interview here