With all due respect to Tony Blair…ouch!
The Kyoto Protocol has been rubbished by a heavyweight committee of peers, on the day that Tony Blair opens the G8 summit with a focus on global warming. A cross-party House of Lords report today finds that the Kyoto targets will make “little difference” to the pace of global warming and has called for Gordon Brown, the Chancellor, to calculate how much it is costing Britain. The report will deal a damaging blow both to Mr Blair’s attempt to present a “consensus” behind global warming, and demands that the United States agrees to Kyoto in a G8 declaration tomorrow. In a report seemingly timed to have maximum impact on the G8, which is due to release its climate change communique tomorrow, the peers said that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations-backed environmental watchdog, is tainted by “political interference”. Policymakers were too focused on mitigating climate change, rather than adapting to it, they said.
And — can you imagine it? — Bush’s climate stance actually has some defenders in Europe:
The committee expressed sympathy with the United States, whose Senate voted unanimously against any climate-change treaty that could damage the economy without imposing conditions on developing countries. Instead of trying to coerce the US president, George Bush, into signing up to the Kyoto Protocol, the UK should abandon the treaty and explore alternatives based on agreements over carbon-free technology. “We are concerned that the international negotiations on climate-change reduction will be ineffective because of the preoccupation with setting emissions targets,” the report said. “The Kyoto Protocol makes little difference to rates of global warming and has a naive compliance mechanism, which can only deter countries from signing up to subsequent tighter emissions targets.” Since the Kyoto Protocol was signed in 1997, scientists have established that it would simply mean global temperature rising by 2.35?C rather than 2.5?C by 2100.
The insanity that has pervaded the world consciousness is indeed formidable; it deludes its subjects to such an extent that it actually seems reasonable and desirable to squander hundreds of trillions of dollars on a global scheme to reduce temperatures by fifteen-hundredths of one degree C over the next century, and even that’s wishful thinking. Would these same people be satisfied paying for a full price haircut that resulted in only one strand of hair being cut? (hat tip: JunkScience.com)