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In addition to the 30% credit, my valley area traps particulates. So the EPA gave our area $1,000 vouchers to people who traded in their old wood-stove for a new one. So my $2,000 woodstove - $1,000 voucher (city permit though gave $75 back).
It's either burn the wood that grows on my land, or burn more oil for heat. I've seen a few houses blow-up with propane, whereas oil is safe enough to keep in the basement.
Thank you for that wonderful piece of info. Meeting up with some ex-colleagues soon, a few of whom seem to think that Obama, Gore and God are interchangeable. Must give them the good news about burning wood being carbon neutral.............then sit back and watch.
er...................it's not though, is it ? :confuse:
My understanding from studies. It takes about 90 years to be carbon neutral when old growth trees are cut down and new crops are planted. We are thinning a population of Eucalyptus trees which is more for aesthetics than need. Older Eucalyptus become brittle and big branches break off in high winds. We got a quite a bit of damage around my area from falling trees and limbs in the last storm. Next to Live Oak, which only an infidel would cut down a living one, Eucalyptus is the best firewood in our area. The last two big fires did leave a lot of dead Oak trees in the National forests and they are available for cutting to try and avoid future fires. The Alpine area is also one of the few places that any Engelmann oak still survive. We harvest the good acorns and send them to a society that is trying to keep them from extinction. We have several on our property.
I feel that burning wood has up and down sides. I don't believe in carbon neutral. Or mitigating a huge carbon footprint by planting mango trees in the desert and seeing them die. That is just another Al Gore myth.
"That conclusion [wood burning will therefore have no effect on climate] is unwarranted because there are more climatic effects involved than just the release of carbon dioxide from the actual wood burning. Among them is the consumption of fossil fuels to cut the tree and chop it up as well as in the trucking of the wood to the burners stove. Clearly that consumption should be included in the carbon balance."
burningissues.org
On their home page is a little tidbit about CT considering "An Act Establishing Wood Smoke to be a Public Nuisance."
from: http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100020126/climategate-goes-ser- ial-now-the-russians-confirm-that-uk-climate-scientists-manipulated-data-to-exag- gerate-global-warming/
Climategate goes SERIAL: now the Russians confirm that UK climate scientists manipulated data to exaggerate global warming
By James Delingpole Politics Last updated: December 16th, 2009
Climategate just got much, much bigger. And all thanks to the Russians who, with perfect timing, dropped this bombshell just as the world’s leaders are gathering in Copenhagen to discuss ways of carbon-taxing us all back to the dark ages.
Feast your eyes on this news release from Rionovosta, via the Ria Novosti agency, posted on Icecap. (Hat Tip: Richard North)
A discussion of the November 2009 Climatic Research Unit e-mail hacking incident, referred to by some sources as “Climategate,” continues against the backdrop of the abortive UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen (COP15) discussing alternative agreements to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol that aimed to combat global warming.
The incident involved an e-mail server used by the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA) in Norwich, East England. Unknown persons stole and anonymously disseminated thousands of e-mails and other documents dealing with the global-warming issue made over the course of 13 years.
Controversy arose after various allegations were made including that climate scientists colluded to withhold scientific evidence and manipulated data to make the case for global warming appear stronger than it is.
Climategate has already affected Russia. On Tuesday, the Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) issued a report claiming that the Hadley Center for Climate Change based at the headquarters of the British Meteorological Office in Exeter (Devon, England) had probably tampered with Russian-climate data.
The IEA believes that Russian meteorological-station data did not substantiate the anthropogenic global-warming theory. Analysts say Russian meteorological stations cover most of the country’s territory, and that the Hadley Center had used data submitted by only 25% of such stations in its reports. Over 40% of Russian territory was not included in global-temperature calculations for some other reasons, rather than the lack of meteorological stations and observations.
The data of stations located in areas not listed in the Hadley Climate Research Unit Temperature UK (HadCRUT) survey often does not show any substantial warming in the late 20th century and the early 21st century.
The HadCRUT database includes specific stations providing incomplete data and highlighting the global-warming process, rather than stations facilitating uninterrupted observations.
On the whole, climatologists use the incomplete findings of meteorological stations far more often than those providing complete observations.
IEA analysts say climatologists use the data of stations located in large populated centers that are influenced by the urban-warming effect more frequently than the correct data of remote stations.
The scale of global warming was exaggerated due to temperature distortions for Russia accounting for 12.5% of the world’s land mass. The IEA said it was necessary to recalculate all global-temperature data in order to assess the scale of such exaggeration.
Global-temperature data will have to be modified if similar climate-date procedures have been used from other national data because the calculations used by COP15 analysts, including financial calculations, are based on HadCRUT research.
What the Russians are suggesting here, in other words, is that the entire global temperature record used by the IPCC to inform world government policy is a crock.
As Richard North says: This is serial.
UPDATE: As Steve McIntyre reports at ClimateAudit, it has long been suspected that the CRU had been playing especially fast and loose with Russian – more particularly Siberian – temperature records. Here from March 2004, is an email from Phil Jones to Michael Mann.
Recently rejected two papers (one for JGR and for GRL) from people saying CRU has it wrong over Siberia. Went to town in both reviews, hopefully successfully. If either appears I will be very surprised, but you never know with GRL
Cheers
Phil.
And here at Watts Up With That is a guest post by Jeff Id of the Air Vent
And here is what one of the commenters has to say about the way the data has been cherry-picked and skewed for political ends:
The crux of the argument is that the CRU cherry picked data following the same methods that have been done everywhere else. They ignored data covering 40% of Russia and chose data that showed a warming trend over statistically preferable alternatives when available. They ignored completeness of data, preferred urban data, strongly preferred data from stations that relocated, ignored length of data set.
One the final page, there is a chart that shows that CRU’s selective use of 25% of the data created 0.64C more warming than simply using all of the raw data would have done. The complete set of data show 1.4C rise since 1860, the CRU set shows 2.06C rise over the same period.
Not, of course, dear readers that I’m in any way tempted to crow about these latest revelations. After all, so many of my colleagues, junior and senior, have been backing me on this one to the hilt .
Oh, if anyone speaks Russian, here’s the full report.
Tags: Climategate, Russia
from: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8387737.stm
Himalayan glaciers melting deadline 'a mistake'
By Pallava Bagla in Delhi
The UN panel on climate change warning that Himalayan glaciers could melt to a fifth of current levels by 2035 is wildly inaccurate, an academic says.
J Graham Cogley, a professor at Ontario Trent University, says he believes the UN authors got the date from an earlier report wrong by more than 300 years.
He is astonished they "misread 2350 as 2035". The authors deny the claims.
Leading glaciologists say the report has caused confusion and "a catalogue of errors in Himalayan glaciology".
The Himalayas hold the planet's largest body of ice outside the polar caps - an estimated 12,000 cubic kilometres of water.
They feed many of the world's great rivers - the Ganges, the Indus, the Brahmaputra - on which hundreds of millions of people depend.
'Catastrophic rate'
In its 2007 report, the Nobel Prize-winning Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said: "Glaciers in the Himalayas are receding faster than in any other part of the world and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate.
"Its total area will likely shrink from the present 500,000 to 100,000 square kilometres by the year 2035," the report said.
It suggested three quarters of a billion people who depend on glacier melt for water supplies in Asia could be affected.
But Professor Cogley has found a 1996 document by a leading hydrologist, VM Kotlyakov, that mentions 2350 as the year by which there will be massive and precipitate melting of glaciers.
"The extrapolar glaciation of the Earth will be decaying at rapid, catastrophic rates - its total area will shrink from 500,000 to 100,000 square kilometres by the year 2350," Mr Kotlyakov's report said.
Mr Cogley says it is astonishing that none of the 10 authors of the 2007 IPCC report could spot the error and "misread 2350 as 2035".
"I do suggest that the glaciological community might consider advising the IPCC about ways to avoid such egregious errors as the 2035 versus 2350 confusion in the future," says Mr Cogley.
He said the error might also have its origins in a 1999 news report on retreating glaciers in the New Scientist magazine.
The article quoted Syed I Hasnain, the then chairman of the International Commission for Snow and Ice's (ICSI) Working group on Himalayan glaciology, as saying that most glaciers in the Himalayan region "will vanish within 40 years as a result of global warming".
When asked how this "error" could have happened, RK Pachauri, the Indian scientist who heads the IPCC, said: "I don't have anything to add on glaciers."
The IPCC relied on three documents to arrive at 2035 as the "outer year" for shrinkage of glaciers.
They are: a 2005 World Wide Fund for Nature report on glaciers; a 1996 Unesco document on hydrology; and a 1999 news report in New Scientist.
Incidentally, none of these documents have been reviewed by peer professionals, which is what the IPCC is mandated to be doing.
Murari Lal, a climate expert who was one of the leading authors of the 2007 IPCC report, denied it had its facts wrong about melting Himalayan glaciers.
But he admitted the report relied on non-peer reviewed - or 'unpublished' - documents when assessing the status of the glaciers.
'Alarmist'
Recently India's Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh released a study on Himalayan glaciers that suggested that they may be not melting as much due to global warming as it is widely feared.
He accused the IPCC of being "alarmist".
Mr Pachauri dismissed the study as "voodoo science" and said the IPCC was a "sober body" whose work was verified by governments.
But in a joint statement some the world's leading glaciologists who are also participants to the IPCC have said: "This catalogue of errors in Himalayan glaciology... has caused much confusion that could have been avoided had the norms of scientific publication, including peer review and concentration upon peer-reviewed work, been respected."
Michael Zemp from the World Glacier Monitoring Service in Zurich also said the IPCC statement on Himalayan glaciers had caused "some major confusion in the media".
"Under strict consideration of the IPCC rules, it should actually not have been published as it is not based on a sound scientific reference.
"From a present state of knowledge it is not plausible that Himalayan glaciers are disappearing completely within the next few decades. I do not know of any scientific study that does support a complete vanishing of glaciers in the Himalayas within this century."
Pallava Bagla is science editor for New Delhi Television (NDTV) and author of Destination Moon - India's quest for Moon, Mars and Beyond.
That's a bit of good news; buys some more time for the people downstream if nothing else.
Professor Cogley also says:
"There is no room for reasonable doubt that glaciers in the Himalayas and Karakoram are losing mass, and it is quite probable that the rate of loss has accelerated recently."
‘Climate Is Like Unwashed Dishes In My Kitchen’ (Outlook India)
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That may be just like that link that I posted a few months ago that had the Swiss glaciers starting to recede in the 1860's, right? :P There were quite a few less people and industrialization prior to 1860, wasn't there?
Regarding the mixup in the years of 2035 and 2350 in that report, that is just like my grocery store. 99% of the time they make an error in pricing, it so happens to be to their benefit.
It was also interesting to see that the guy didn't pooh-pooh global warming in his comments (but that stuff from my link wasn't widely reported was it? - just the stuff about the "huge" error).
In case you missed it, Cogley said:
"The number of sceptical scientists is negligible. The scientific way of doing things is self-correcting, which means that further studies are always required." (emphasis mine).
Cherry pick what you like.
If you believe in learning from history, then you understand the greatest scientists of every era have typically been wrong, and occassionally advance science and math. It is no different today; man has not made some great genetic advancement in the last generation.
If we want to go thru the history of science I'll show you time-after-time where mainstream science was way-off-base, despite the assurances that they were near positive of how things worked. The Greeks didn't quite have the 4 elements of the universe correct did they? The world was known to be flat pre-1500? The Earth was the center of everything? Then in the early 1900's it was found that the Milky Way was 1 of billions of galaxies (what a surprise to find the universe is 1 billion times larger!). And then what a shock to the great physicists of the 1980's and 1990's to learn that a Grand Unification Theory of all forces and matter wasn't so close ... as it was found regular matter and energy are but a small part of the "dark" energy and matter of the universe - which is not in the form of photons, known radiation, or regular matter!
GW may be true; if not I'd guess Global Cooling is occurring, as the climate has always changed. MMGW is certainly not proven to any extent. The data certainly isn't accurate enough, and the reasons for the climate change are not understood enough to draw that conclusion. The conclusion that MMGW is significant is being done for careers, money, fame, and environmental groups using that to achieve environmental goals that otherwise would have no popular support.
MMGW isn't quite like science was under Stalin or the [non-permissible content removed] where scientific studies were conducted to support what the state wanted proved. But I certainly think that the $$ and peer-pressure have swung the pendulum is in that direction, of biased science. I would liken it to scientists who were employed by the tobacco industry who ran experiments showing that smoking was beneficial to the user's health. Bought and paid for science. Any negative results were thrown out, and anything you liked was kept, or the data massaged.
"Science" was bought and paid for by the Catholic Church to support their views for many years, tobacco companies bought science and many other examples exist. This current situation with this group in Copenhagen looks like the same duck to me.
"Is this the end of the world? No," he said. "Does it mean there's a premium on reducing the level of greenhouse gases as fast as reasonably possible? Yes."
Greater sea-level rise from warming predicted (Washington Post)
We'll probably see a flurry of new studies get published this week and next.
Secretary "Clinton said America would sign on to a proposal – originally offered by Gordon Brown several months ago – for industrialised countries to provide $100bn a year from 2020 to help developing countries cope with climate change."
Clinton arrives in Copenhagen to stake US claim in deal of the century (Guardian UK)
Cherry Pick? If you call this cherry picking I think you have had too much GW cool aid...or you are being disingenuous. It is not really cherry picking if you report a persons death...but leave out the fact that he had coffee for breakfast. The salient point has been covered.
This info goes to the heart of the debate and involves the very information that the GW folks base their claims on...and it is not only flawed, but deliberately slanted and biased. This behavior from scientists is just not acceptable. IMO anyone who has any degree of objectivity should be able to understand that.
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Then I searched his name and found a story of about ~4 paragraphs quoting him as saying that the error should be fixed but he still thinks the climate is warming.
Not exactly thorough coverage imho from the first link, and the first story was slanted so that you'd think the guy was so disgusted with the data that he was going to immediately charter a jet to Copenhagen so he could picket in person.
That's not the most convincing of plots. But what is the deeper message? The message is that what is the truth is what the powerful and wealthy feed to the media as the truth. Go back 40 years and "the truth" was that the N. Vietnamese were the Communist devils and that the U.S. absolutely needed to help S. Vietnam or else SE Asia would collapse into darkness. What's the truth now?
What was the truth in the 80's with the Afghans and the noble freedom fighters, and what truth do you get now?
What truth did we get from the George W. Bush and all his PAID experts on WMD in Iraq. Wasn't the truth then they the WMD absolutely existed and all the paid-for experts and scientists analyzing the evidence were brought forward? Didn't anyone in the intelligence community have doubts? and question that the photographs could be other things? were they allowed to speak, or were they told to be quite or interpret data to prove the truth they wanted.
The fact is that people with money and power, can pay to build quite the case for the truth they want.
When you start hearing story after story around the globe of data lost, data manipulated, data ignored, then just like when more than a few women come out against Tiger Woods I tend to believe there's more there, then the public front we're being given.
And when I hear of all the $$ that would be transferred and the power to control people's lives - there's the MOTIVES.
“The US is prepared to work with other countries toward a goal of jointly mobilizing $100 billion a year by 2020 to address the climate change needs of developing countries,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said.
Included in the conditions for the US' contribution, Clinton demanded that China's emissions reductions be scrutinized independently and that 193 countries sign a climate deal tomorrow. This would keep the US and other rich nations on top of developing countries who want them to increase emission cuts, the AP reports.
Clinton revealed that the U.S. would not be decreasing emissions by 2020 beyond the 4 percent it committed to in 1990.
While she would not disclose how much the U.S. would be contribution to the climate fund, Clinton said there would be a fair amount contributed to the pot that would be made available in 2020. The finances will reportedly be raised partially by taxing aviation and shipping, as proposed by the European Union.
Money for Nothing and the Chicks are Free
Somewhere in there is a clause that says all the money will be filtered through the Clinton Charities Fund. At least that is my guess.
Some of you may not be aware that there have been five distinct panics regarding global cooling and warming from 1900 to 2000.
Leading scientists and intellectuals were convinced that we were entering a new ice age in 1975. See time magizine cover.
Many of you do know that fear is the most powerful way to influence human behavior, thus the world is ending again. Demogogues throughout history have used this sales presentation to control our liberty and property.
Cant these people find something useful to contribute? How about getting a real job and serving people.
There really are only three types of people in our society:
1. Producers
2. Looters
3. Moochers
2 and 3 are now in charge unfortunately.
Fellow passengers on the 10.45 First Capital Connect service to King’s Lynn couldn’t quite believe their eyes as the Queen stepped on board a first class carriage.
‘The Queen on a First Capital Connect – unbelievable!’ exclaimed Andrew Smith, who was making the same journey for a business meeting.
‘My wife will never believe me.’ Relatively speaking there was minimal fuss, although some travellers reacted angrily when police shut off the area without warning five minutes before the train was due to leave.
The monarch, with a few attendants, sat at the rear of the train in an eight-seat section of a carriage which was separated from the rest of the seats by a sliding glass door.
As the train pulled out she took her place by the window next to one of her protection officers and looked out at the scenery.
The Queen, 83, appeared perfectly relaxed as she chatted with her aides for the first leg of the 100 mile journey to King’s Lynn, the nearest station to Sandringham.
But after the train’s stop at Cambridge a secretary opened a briefcase and the Queen spent most of the rest of the journey opening and reading her Christmas cards.
A first class open return bought on the day costs £86, but the guard joked: ‘It was probably a super saver advance – and she does get a discount as an OAP, remember.’
An advance first class ticket, without the seniors’ discount, costs £44.40.
A First Capital Connect spokesman confirmed the Queen had not been given any special treatment and that her tickets had been purchased in advance.
A Buckingham Palace spokesman added: ‘Members of the Royal Family, including the Queen, frequently use scheduled train services.
‘We have to look at issues such as cost effectiveness and security but do try to when it is appropriate.’
The Queen does, of course, also have use of the Royal Train – but that costs taxpayers £57,142 each time it is taken out of its sidings.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1236632/Your-commuter-carriage-awaits-Th- e-Queen-catches-train-journey-Sandringham-Christmas.html
Too bad King Barry does not care that much about the tax payers money.
Obama: 'Time for talk is over'
Emerging from a multinational meeting boycotted by Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, Obama warned delegates that U.S. offers of funding for poor nations would remain on the table “if and only if” developing nations, including China, agreed to international monitoring of their greenhouse gas emissions.
"I have to be honest, as the world watches us ... I think our ability to take collective action is in doubt and it hangs in the balance,” Obama told the COP-15 plenary session as hope faded for anything more than a vague political agreement.
Overnight reports that world leaders had agreed to a tentative final climate change deal in Copenhagen were greatly exaggerated — and the outcome of the COP-15 conference was still very much up in the air when Air Force One touched down at 9:01 a.m. local time.
“What’s on the table still has large gaps and unanswered questions," said David Waskow, climate change program director at Oxfam America. "The United States must get more specific to make a real deal possible.”
They warned that none of the several drafts circulating in Copenhagen represented even the bones of a final deal, with many key issues still in flux and time running out. Moreover, U.S. predictions that roadblocks could be thrown up by smaller countries seemed to be coming true, with last-minute objections voiced by Venezuela, Bolivia, Sudan and Saudi Arabia, according to people familiar with talks.
Time for Tax Payers to give a sigh of relief. Hopefully we dodged the bullet on this gigantic Scam. :P
Well the weather here in NH was -2F when I got up this morning. Other parts of the state were -15F, and it's still just Fall. The wind is coming down from Canada and the Arctic; I'm sure larsb will tell me that the Arctic is warming and this is just a fluke area of the Arctic where my weather's coming from. :P Oh yes I forgot this weather year after year, isn't climate. :P I'm picking up some more gasoline for my 3rd running of the snowblower this weekend.
I wonder how far Copenhagen is from Waterloo? Between the transparency of the e-mails which should be public-record if supported thru U.S. taxpayer money, even if funneled thru the U.N., and the pettiness of Copenhagen, this may be the Waterloo of these charletans.
Explain to the public the occurrances of the various increased global temps that have come and gone BEFORE man was industrialized.
Also, I used to go to a website titled "The other side of the global warming debate" for over a year. It mysteriously disappeared in early September. (Hmmm...when did the Cyber Czar come into existence?) Thank God I have a cached pages and the links are still active. Over 31,000 scientists, physicians, and engineers from the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine have signed a petition against the Kyoto Treaty. If you are one of the above you can sign also:
http://www.petitionproject.org:80/
There are well over 150 links to papers from academics with chapter, verse, and empirical data. I'm watching this in my watched items so if anyone wants a HTML ccopy of the cached page, reply to this thread with your email address and I'll be alerted and send it on.
Here are only a few of the subheadings:
The Myths Concerning the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warm Period. (The IPCC claims they either didn’t occur or were just local events)
The Myth that the Recent Rise in Carbon Dioxide is Abnormal and Unprecedented.
The Myth that Global Temperature is Rising Unnaturally and is in a Runaway State.
The Myth that All the Glaciers Are Melting.
There are fully twenty one of these "Myth" categories with the refuting links to academic papers, Some of them have 25 and more refuting links under each "myth".
_
"Consensus is the business of politics. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period."
Dr. Michael Crichton M.D., author of "Jurassic Park" and creator-producer of "ER,"
"I am leaving before the final vote," he said. "We feel confident we are moving in the direction of a final accord."
If the countries had waited to reach a full, binding agreement, "then we wouldn't make any progress," Obama said. In that case, he said, "there might be such frustration and cynicism that rather than taking one step forward we ended up taking two steps back."
Obama spent the final scheduled day of the climate talks meeting with world leaders, including Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, in a bid to salvage the global warming accord amid deep divisions between rich and poor nations.
In announcing the five-nation deal, Obama said getting a legally binding treaty "is going to be very hard, and it's going to take some time."
"We have come a long way, but we have much further to go," he said.
The president said there was a "fundamental deadlock in perspectives" between big, industrially developed countries like the United States and poorer, though sometimes large, developing nations.
When the going gets tough, the tough jump on Airforce ONE and get out of Dodge.
This is a great line. The next president will have a tough job restoring the prestige of the office of the POTUS. To think that Obama goes to Copenhagen twice and accomplishes absolutely nothing other than to spend and promise to spend more taxpayer money, is infuriating. At least the queen took the train home for Christmas saving British taxpayers 50,000 pounds. Not only is he dissipating the prestige of the office, accumulated over two hundred years, but he's emptying the treasury as well. Dare I mention the "I" word?
Not only are autos not the cause of global warming, human activity isn't either. Common sense tells me that if scientists were telling us we were headed for an ice age in the 70's but now are telling us that the polar ice is melting away, and that it's our fault, a little skepticism is called for.
Hopefully Divine Providence will bury DC in a few feet of snow and keep the annointed one off of Air Force 1 for a while.
Regards, DQ
This afternoon, the US president and his secretary of state Hillary Clinton called another meeting with China, but were snubbed again when only three low-level Chinese delegates arrived.
Is it possible that China does not want to loan US money to throw down the GW Rat Hole?
Low Life Prez meets with low level Chinese.
But when I see our leaders on the newsclips bundled up and hustling through the cold and snow, I do have to wonder if they too are asking "Where's the warming?". Certainly not even in the Carolinas, which are enjoying a white Xmas.
Well off to burn some wood and give my oil-burner a rest in the house. It seems I heat my house for the better part of 8 months, but still don't even own a window AC. So I'll join Barack today for a hot chocolate.
I guess this is on the same theory that the left has been using that if you tell a lie loud enough and long enough it becomes the truth. Sorry, ain't happening !!
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You should go for the breakfast buffet offered to tourists at the White House. :shades:
Though Barry might not be in the best of moods this morning. He did not get his picture taken with all the leaders.
A house divided: Family photo ditched at climate summit
An official statement at the conference said the portrait had been postponed and it was hoped to be rearranged before the leaders leave Copenhagen.
"The president (Danish Prime Minister Lars Loekke Rasmussen) has made the negotiations and efforts to reach an agreement the priority," it said.
But Russian President Dmitry Medvedev was already on a plane out of Copenhagen, while US President Barack Obama and Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama were scheduled to fly out on Friday night, sources said.
Maybe they can give all the uneaten caviar to the poor people for Christmas. I imagine, Ahnold, Prince Charles & Al Gore hung around to eat all the leftovers. I think this best describes the leaders at Copenhagen.
If there were not $45trillion of Western citizens’ money at stake, this would be the funniest moment in world history. What a bunch of buffoons.
When your attempt at recreating the Congress of Vienna with a third-rate cast of extras turns into a shambles, when the data with which you have tried to terrify the world is daily exposed as ever more phoney, when the blatant greed and self-interest of the participants has become obvious to all beholders, when those pesky polar bears just keep increasing and multiplying – what do you do?
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/geraldwarner/100020279/copenhagen-climate-summ- it-most-important-paper-in-the-world-is-a-glorified-un-press-release/
This whole drama show actually turned out as well as it could have. The one worlders were stopped, any agreement is non-binding, non-enforceable, and without very specific demands. The power-grab was derailed. I don't support why the Chinese weren't on board, but I am glad they helped to crash the party.
"If there were not $45trillion of Western citizens’ money at stake"
That's what it all comes down to, and it's no coincidence.
It's just a shame Europeans don't have easier access to firearms.
I could go with another 5 degrees on average and about 30 more inches of rain per year. If the climate folks are doing designer climate these days.
This is part of the thinking behind the OPT’s call for Britain to cut population to 30m — roughly what it was in late Victorian times.
Britain’s population is expected to grow from 61m now to 71m by 2031. Some politicians support a reduction. UK needs to eliminate 30 million residents
Canada may have the solution:
Asbestos It is the deadliest workplace substance in history, killing more workers in Canada than any other cause. And the deaths are increasing every year. Stephen Harper has explicitly declared himself the champion of Quebec asbestos and has dedicated himself to ensuring that asbestos is not declared a dangerous substance under the Rotterdam Convention. Thousands of workers in developing countries will die as a result. Canada challenged France’s ban on asbestos through the WTO and lost, making the French environmental law one of the few to survive such a challenge and reinforcing the science declaring asbestos a class one carcinogen.
http://canadiandimension.com/blog/2648/
I guess the US will need to eliminate about 150 million people to keep up with the UK. I don't personally think that Asbestos or even DDT are up to the job. This calls for a Stalin or Hitler. From what I saw at HopenChangen many of our world leaders could fill the bill very easily. We live in a world controlled by some real sickos. :sick:
As an Englishman I think this is admirable idea. So, let's start at the opening of the next session of the parliament in Westminster. Any Scottish, Welsh or Irish politicians still there will be reduced.........they all have their own local assemblies. GO HOME. All members of NGOs and Quangos will be reduced.......to their component parts. 50% of all government dept staff will be removed to Tuvalu or Kiribati. All Jonathon Porritts will be removed to Antarctica. All pro-ACC/AGW gurus and followers will be given the option to move to Siberia, (shirley it's getting warmer - isn't it ?), or to leave the planet. All illegal immigrants will be returned to France; which was where they mostly arrived here from. The French can figure out where to send them to ............. as they should have done originally, rather than just turning a blind eye to them getting to U.K. All BBC staff getting paid more than £75k per annum will be shipped to California .........they want Hollywood salaries ? Move to Hollywood. All government advisers will be shipped off with the ACC/AGW folks; their Marxist views, (but not lifestyles), should make then feel right at home. All degree courses in Media Studies, Social Science, Sport Psychology, Political Science, Tantric Knitting etc will be ceased forthwith and all former students will be appropriately equipped and put to mending roads, building affordable housing, caring for the elderly sick and publically apologising for formerly being a leech on society. Or they can go and live in Antarctica with the Porritts.
Not bad for the first 10 minutes. Think this might be a real vote-catcher.
http://www.usatoday.com/travel/world/2009-12-20-eurostar-cancel-travel_N.htm
It's foolish to want the world 1) to stay so cold, and 2) have to rely on someone else to get you to where you're going when you can drive yourself.
alltorque - this is exactly what many here in the U.S. are afraid our country is becoming with the expansion of socialism. We need some leaders who are not afraid to kick some butt, and tell people they need to work and work hard to support society. Our society is becoming obese and the schools are producing illiterates, and people expect the government to support them in various ways by going deeper into debt, not realizing that is unsustainable.
We have 434 members of the House and 100 Senators that would be a good start. Of course if we sent them to Siberia or Antarctica, all the hot air would for sure melt the ice in a hurry.
Services have been suspended since late Friday, when a series of glitches stranded five trains inside the Channel Tunnel and trapped more than 2,000 passengers for hours in stuffy and claustrophobic conditions.
Some panicked passengers stayed underground for more than 15 hours without food or water, or any clear idea of what was going on — prompting outrage from travelers and a promise from Eurostar that no train would enter the tunnel until the issue had been identified and fixed.
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http://www.usatoday.com/travel/destinations/2009-12-18-the-cat-maine-nova-scotia- -ferry_N.htm
I wish our government would make public transport like buses and subways revenue neutral = fares pay 100% of the service.
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Now to see some Brits take action with those thoughts.
Much as I, and my beloved, would love to move to the USA - and would have done so some years ago - being white English Anglo-Saxons we're not welcome. Your Immigration policies are geared to favour "ethnic diversity" and we are not classed as ethnically diverse, so not welcome. Made enquiries some years ago and was informed by an honest lady at the US Embassy in London; "Sir, do not bother applying. You are virtually disqualified by virtue of your ethnicity. But don't quote me on that". I can trace my family back to around 1700 and my wife can trace hers to pre-1530 so it's not like we're marginally English. Too old now, anyway.
As a friend in Texas recently remarked; "Why not get yourselves Afghanistani Passports, you'd been over here in minutes".
Sorry, way off topic.
Vis-a-vis the Channel Tunnel, (Did ya spot the petit Francais there ?); I am surprised. Have used the service many many times, sometimes twice a week, and have always found it superb. The Eurostar service, (normal passenger-carrying trains going London-Brussels or -Paris), would certainly have had food and drink on board but the Eurotunnel service is trains that carry either cars or trucks and you sit in your own vehicle for the 30 minute journey, so no supplies whatsoever, other than those you may have with you. Not fun for 15 hours. French railways are generally excellent, as are the German variety. UK's railways are all privatised and swing between brilliant and comically inept.
Oh heck, still off topic.
Time for bed.
As Col. Ffanshawe-Windsocke might say :
"Action ? Action ? Good heavens no ! We're British, dontcha know ? Action is for Johnny Foreigner. Can't be having all that action stuff; frighten the horses and then where would we be ! No. Far better to just stiffen the old upper lip and trust that it'll sort itself out. Usually does, in the long run. Didn't get where we are to-day by taking action. I remember back in '37.................. What ? Yes, don't mind if I do, but just a small one. Where was I ? How's the cricket coming along ?"
We're not good at "action" and even when we are, our government just ignore us. The French have "action" down to a fine art. Anything upsets the masses and they blockade the Channel ports with trawlers, (stop the ferries from UK), or block the roads from the Channel ports with tractors, (stop UK trucks getting off the ferries), or set fire to UK trucks carrying exports of British lamb. Starting to see a pattern here ? Thought you might, but they are good at "action".
Some politicians support a reduction.""
I suggest that these advisors and politicians do us all a big favor by taking the 'affirmative action' of committing suicide!! They always want to do to others, but, of course, exempt themselves!! Like flying off to Copenhagen in a private jet to talk about forcing me to ride a bicycle!!
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from: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/6847227/Questions-over-business-deals-of-UN-clim- - - ate-change-guru-Dr-Rajendra-Pachauri.html
Questions over business deals of UN climate change guru Dr Rajendra Pachauri
The head of the UN's climate change panel - Dr Rajendra Pachauri - is accused of making a fortune from his links with 'carbon trading' companies, Christopher Booker and Richard North write.
Published: 8:30AM GMT 20 Dec 2009
No one in the world exercised more influence on the events leading up to the Copenhagen conference on global warming than Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and mastermind of its latest report in 2007.
Although Dr Pachauri is often presented as a scientist (he was even once described by the BBC as “the world’s top climate scientist”), as a former railway engineer with a PhD in economics he has no qualifications in climate science at all.
What has also almost entirely escaped attention, however, is how Dr Pachauri has established an astonishing worldwide portfolio of business interests with bodies which have been investing billions of dollars in organisations dependent on the IPCC’s policy recommendations.
These outfits include banks, oil and energy companies and investment funds heavily involved in ‘carbon trading’ and ‘sustainable technologies’, which together make up the fastest-growing commodity market in the world, estimated soon to be worth trillions of dollars a year.
Today, in addition to his role as chairman of the IPCC, Dr Pachauri occupies more than a score of such posts, acting as director or adviser to many of the bodies which play a leading role in what has become known as the international ‘climate industry’.
It is remarkable how only very recently has the staggering scale of Dr Pachauri’s links to so many of these concerns come to light, inevitably raising questions as to how the world’s leading ‘climate official’ can also be personally involved in so many organisations which stand to benefit from the IPCC’s recommendations.
The issue of Dr Pachauri’s potential conflict of interest was first publicly raised last Tuesday when, after giving a lecture at Copenhagen University, he was handed a letter by two eminent ‘climate sceptics’. One was the Stephen Fielding, the Australian Senator who sparked the revolt which recently led to the defeat of his government’s ‘cap and trade scheme’. The other, from Britain, was Lord Monckton, a longtime critic of the IPCC’s science, who has recently played a key part in stiffening opposition to a cap and trade bill in the US Senate.
Their open letter first challenged the scientific honesty of a graph prominently used in the IPCC’s 2007 report, and shown again by Pachauri in his lecture, demanding that he should withdraw it. But they went on to question why the report had not declared Pachauri’s personal interest in so many organisations which seemingly stood to profit from its findings.
The letter, which included information first disclosed in last week’s Sunday Telegraph, was circulated to all the 192 national conference delegations, calling on them to dismiss Dr Pachauri as IPCC chairman because of recent revelations of his conflicting interests.
The original power base from which Dr Pachauri has built up his worldwide network of influence over the past decade is the Delhi-based Tata Energy Research Institute, of which he became director in 1981 and director-general in 2001. Now renamed The Energy Research Institute, TERI was set up in 1974 by India’s largest privately-owned business empire, the Tata Group, with interests ranging from steel, cars and energy to chemicals, telecommunications and insurance (and now best-known in the UK as the owner of Jaguar, Land Rover, Tetley Tea and Corus, Britain’s largest steel company).
Although TERI has extended its sponsorship since the name change, the two concerns are still closely linked.
In India, Tata exercises enormous political power, shown not least in the way it has managed to displace hundreds of thousands of poor tribal villagers in the eastern states of Orissa and Jarkhand to make way for large-scale iron mining and steelmaking projects.
Initially, when Dr Pachauri took over the running of TERI in the 1980s, his interests centred on the oil and coal industries, which may now seem odd for a man who has since become best known for his opposition to fossil fuels. He was, for instance, a director until 2003 of India Oil, the country’s largest commercial enterprise, and until this year remained as a director of the National Thermal Power Generating Corporation, its largest electricity producer.
In 2005, he set up GloriOil, a Texas firm specialising in technology which allows the last remaining reserves to be extracted from oilfields otherwise at the end of their useful life.
However, since Pachauri became a vice-chairman of the IPCC in 1997, TERI has vastly expanded its interest in every kind of renewable or sustainable technology, in many of which the various divisions of the Tata Group have also become heavily involved, such as its project to invest $1.5 billion (£930 million) in vast wind farms.
Dr Pachauri’s TERI empire has also extended worldwide, with branches in the US, the EU and several countries in Asia. TERI Europe, based in London, of which he is a trustee (along with Sir John Houghton, one of the key players in the early days of the IPCC and formerly head of the UK Met Office) is currently running a project on bio-energy, financed by the EU.
Another project, co-financed by our own Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the German insurance firm Munich Re, is studying how India’s insurance industry, including Tata, can benefit from exploiting the supposed risks of exposure to climate change. Quite why Defra and UK taxpayers should fund a project to increase the profits of Indian insurance firms is not explained.
Even odder is the role of TERI’s Washington-based North American offshoot, a non-profit organisation, of which Dr Pachauri is president. Conveniently sited on Pennsylvania Avenue, midway between the White House and the Capitol, this body unashamedly sets out its stall as a lobbying organisation, to “sensitise decision-makers in North America to developing countries’ concerns about energy and the environment”.
TERI-NA is funded by a galaxy of official and corporate sponsors, including four branches of the UN bureaucracy; four US government agencies; oil giants such as Amoco; two of the leading US defence contractors; Monsanto, the world’s largest GM producer; the WWF (the environmentalist campaigning group which derives mu
All of this is doubtless useful to the interests of Tata back in India, which is heavily involved not just in bio-energy, renewables and insurance but also in ‘carbon trading’, the worldwide market in buying and selling the right to emit CO2. Much of this is administered at a profit by the UN under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) set up under the Kyoto Protocol, which the Copenhagen treaty was designed to replace with an even more lucrative successor.
Under the CDM, firms and consumers in the developed world pay for the right to exceed their ‘carbon limits’ by buying certificates from those firms in countries such as India and China which rack up ‘carbon credits’ for every renewable energy source they develop – or by showing that they have in some way reduced their own ‘carbon emissions’.
It is one of these deals, reported in last week’s Sunday Telegraph, which is enabling Tata to transfer three million tonnes of steel production from its Corus plant in Redcar to a new plant in Orissa, thus gaining a potential £1.2 billion in ‘carbon credits’ (and putting 1,700 people on Teesside out of work).
More than three-quarters of the world ‘carbon’ market benefits India and China in this way. India alone has 1,455 CDM projects in operation, worth $33 billion (£20 billion), many of them facilitated by Tata – and it is perhaps unsurprising that Dr Pachauri also serves on the advisory board of the Chicago Climate Exchange, the largest and most lucrative carbon-trading exchange in the world, which was also assisted by TERI in setting up India’s own carbon exchange.
But this is peanuts compared to the numerous other posts to which Dr Pachauri has been appointed in the years since the UN chose him to become the world’s top ‘climate-change official’.
In 2007, for instance, he was appointed to the advisory board of Siderian, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm specialising in ‘sustainable technologies’, where he was expected to provide the Fund with ‘access, standing and industrial exposure at the highest level’,
In 2008 he was made an adviser on renewable and sustainable energy to the Credit Suisse bank and the Rockefeller Foundation. He joined the board of the Nordic Glitnir Bank, as it launched its Sustainable Future Fund, looking to raise funding of £4 billion. He became chairman of the Indochina Sustainable Infrastructure Fund, whose CEO was confident it could soon raise £100 billion.
In the same year he became a director of the International Risk Governance Council in Geneva, set up by EDF and E.On, two of Europe’s largest electricity firms, to promote ‘bio-energy’. This year Dr Pachauri joined the New York investment fund Pegasus as a ‘strategic adviser’, and was made chairman of the advisory board to the Asian Development Bank, strongly supportive of CDM trading, whose CEO warned that failure to agree a treaty at Copenhagen would lead to a collapse of the carbon market.
The list of posts now held by Dr Pachauri as a result of his new-found world status goes on and on. He has become head of Yale University’s Climate and Energy Institute, which enjoys millions of dollars of US state and corporate funding. He is on the climate change advisory board of Deutsche Bank. He is Director of the Japanese Institute for Global Environmental Strategies and was until recently an adviser to Toyota Motors. Recalling his origins as a railway engineer, he is even a policy adviser to SNCF, France’s state-owned railway company.
Meanwhile, back home in India, he serves on an array of influential government bodies, including the Economic Advisory Committee to the prime minister, holds various academic posts and has somehow found time in his busy life to publish 22 books.
Dr Pachauri never shrinks from giving the world frank advice on all matters relating to the menace of global warming. The latest edition of TERI News quotes him as telling the US Environmental Protection Agency that it must go ahead with regulating US carbon emissions without waiting for Congress to pass its cap and trade bill.
It reports how, in the days before Copenhagen, he called on the developing nations which had been historically responsible for the global warming crisis to make ‘concrete commitments’ to aiding developing countries such as India with funding and technology – while insisting that India could not agree to binding emissions targets. India, he said, must bargain for large-scale subsidies from the West for developing solar power, and Western funds must be made available for geo-engineering projects to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere.
As a vegetarian Hindu, Dr Pachauri repeated his call for the world to eat less meat to cut down on methane emissions (as usual he made no mention of what was to be done about India’s 400 million sacred cows). He further called for a ban on serving ice in restaurants and for meters to be fitted to all hotel rooms, so that guests could be charged a carbon tax on their use of heating and air-conditioning.
One subject the talkative Dr Pachauri remains silent on, however, is how much money he is paid for all these important posts, which must run into millions of dollars. Not one of the bodies for which he works publishes his salary or fees, and this notably includes the UN, which refuses to reveal how much we all pay him as one of its most senior officials.
As for TERI itself, Dr Pachauri’s main job for nearly 30 years, it is so coy about money that it does not even publish its accounts – the financial statement amounts to two income and expenditure pie charts which contain no detailed figures.
Dr Pachauri is equally coy about TERI’s links with Tata, the company which set it up in the 1970s and whose name it continued to bear until 2002, when it was changed to just The Energy Research Institute. A spokesman at the time said ‘we have not severed our past relationship with the Tatas, the change is only for convenience’.
But the real question mark over TERI’s director-general remains over the relationship between his highly lucrative commercial jobs and his role as chairman of the IPCC.
TERI have, for example, become a preferred bidder for Kuwaiti contracts to clean up the mess left by Saddam Hussein in their oilfields in 1991. The $3 billion (£1.9 billion) cost of the contracts has been provided by the UN. If successful, this would be tenth time TERI have benefited from a contract financed by the UN.
Certai
But whether those 1,700 Corus workers on Teesside will next month be so happy to lose their jobs to India, thanks to the workings of that international ‘carbon market’ about which Dr Pachauri is so enthusiastic, is quite another matter.
The End
(but this raises a lot of questions about the motives of the whole MMGW crowd, doesn't it?)
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Gordon Brown calls for new group to police global environment issues
A new global body dedicated to environmental stewardship is needed to prevent a repeat of the deadlock which undermined the Copenhagen climate change summit, Gordon Brown will say tomorrow.
The UN’s consensual method of negotiation, which requires all 192 countries to reach agreement, needs to be reformed to ensure that the will of the majority prevails, he feels.
The Prime Minister will say: “Never again should we face the deadlock that threatened to pull down those talks. Never again should we let a global deal to move towards a greener future be held to ransom by only a handful of countries. One of the frustrations for me was the lack of a global body with the sole responsibility for environmental stewardship.
“I believe that in 2010 we will need to look at reforming our international institutions to meet the common challenges we face as a global community.” The summit failed to produce a political agreement among all the countries. Delegates instead passed a motion on Saturday “taking note” of an accord drawn up the night before by five countries: the US, China, India, Brazil and South Africa.
Despite being the first world leader to join the summit, Mr Brown was excluded from the key meeting where the compromise was decided.
Ed Miliband, the Climate Change Secretary, admitted today that the results of the Copenhagen conference were “disappointing” because of the absence of agreement on emissions targets or a deadline for turning the accord into a legally binding treaty.
Mr Miliband pointed the finger of blame at China for resisting a legal agreement and its rejection of a proposal for 50 per cent cut in global greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
Efforts to give legal force to the commitments in the Copenhagen accord came up against “impossible resistance from a small number of developing countries, including China, who didn’t want a legal agreement”, he said.
Mr Miliband rejected claims that Britain and the European Union were “sidelined” by their absence from a meeting at which President Obama and the leaders of China, India, Brazil and South Africa thrashed out the basic shape of the accord.
“I don’t think that was the meeting that in the end decided the agreement,” he said. “The big decisions took place in a group of about 30 countries in which President Sarkozy, Chancellor Merkel and Gordon Brown were represented.”
In the accord
• Agreement that “deep cuts in global emissions are required according to science”
• “Long co-operative action” needed to keep the global temperature increase below 2C
• Rich countries should submit proposals for economy-wide emission reduction targets for 2020 to the UN by January 31
• By the same date, developing countries should produce plans to cut the rate of growth of their emissions
• There should be international monitoring of any emission cuts in developing countries that are funded by rich countries
• A reassessment of the accord by 2015 to check whether emission reductions are on track to keep the temperature increase below 2C
• Consideration in 2015 of strengthening the goal to 1.5C
Not in the accord
• Emission targets, either for 2020 or 2050
• A date by which global emissions should peak
• Any deadline for turning the accord into a binding treaty
• A commitment on how much of the climate protection funding would be additional to existing overseas aid pledges
• Agreement on an international body to verify the emissions reported by each country
Kyoto was a failure & waste of money, with NO Country meeting the goals set. Why should COP15 be any different? Just more wasted tax payer money. While we are at it why not disband the UN?
PS
Thank You China for showing some common sense!