Copenhagen: UN Climate Chief Weighs in On Climategate, EPA Ruling, Work Ahead
COPENHAGEN — The United Nations top climate official Yvo de Boer weighed in on a variety of high-profile issues at a press conference at the Copenhagen climate negotiations on Tuesday morning, including the leaked climate science emails, how the ruling from the Environmental Protection Agency yesterday that greenhouse gases are dangerous to health would affect the Copenhagen talks and what needs to happen for success in Copenhagen.
Similar to the statements made by much of the science community and climate negotiators at the Copenhagen conference, de Boer said that the science presented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change “is rock solid.” The IPCC’s findings (the fourth version), which some critics are questioning in light of the leaked emails, is based on 2,500 scientists completing their own independent research, which went through a peer review process and then was analyzed and put together by the IPCC, explained de Boer. De Boer said while the email leaks don’t change the science itself, it’s beneficial to go through the process of investigating the leaked email issue and see what happened. There is an investigation going on by the police, by the University of East Anglia (where the security breach occurred) and by the IPCC, said de Boer.
Called Climategate by many in the media, the leaked email issue has reared its head at the opening of the Copenhagen climate talks and is proving to garner a significant portion of attention from the press, from concerned negotiators like those from Saudia Arabia, and from critics looking for fodder to support climate change skepticism (this site and many others focused on issues of climate change have seen a burst of attention from climate change skeptics).
But Climategate was just one of a sweeping range of issues upon which de Boer gave his opinion this morning. De Boer also weighed in on domestic U.S. policy. He said he sees the EPA’s recent findings that greenhouse gases are dangerous to human health (opening the gate to the EPA regulating greenhouse gases) as “the stick behind the door” for the Obama administration. The passage of the U.S. House climate bill wasn’t easy and its passage through the U.S. Senate will be difficult, said de Boer, so the EPA ruling is something that the administration could fall back on if legislation stalls.
For business, however, de Boer said they should pray for some kind of market mechanism like the cap and trade system under consideration in Congress as “taxes and regulation tend to be less efficient and more expensive than market approaches,” said de Boer. At a press conference held by the European Union shortly after de Boer’s meeting, representatives of the E.U. also “welcomed” the EPA’s decision as “another possible instrument that the administration could use.” But the E.U. representatives said history has shown that it is questionable whether it is a wise decision to exclude the House and Senate from such a politically sensitive issue.
On the issue of what do the negotiations need to succeed, de Boer said before the heads of state arrive in the last few days of the summit, the negotiators now need to buckle down and get to work. “Get the basics done in the first week and make sure the foundations are in place.” In response to a question posed from the media about how large players like the U.S. could very well come to the meeting with an already decided upon target (with few plans to negotiate), de Boer said that in talks with negotiators he’s heard that the targets that China, the U.S. and even the E.U. have put forth could be improved upon. “African and the least developed nations are saying that no one’s targets are good enough and we all know rich countries’ targets are not good enough to get us to the climate mitigation that is needed,” said Boer. “We still need negotiations to maximize the greenhouse gas emission reductions.”
In terms of financing for the most vulnerable nations, we need developed countries to gives us pledges for what they will contribute, said de Boer. “Not a collective promise, but individual announcements from countries. We also need an effective tracking mechanism to see that industrialized nations are meeting those financial commitments.” The UN and de Boer have maintained that the most vulnerable nations need $10 billion per year from developed countries to address immediate climate change adaptation and mitigation over the next several years.
De Boer plans to hold media updates throughout the Copenhagen negotiations to focus on key issues, topics and milestones. We’ll keep you updated.
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Good info, thanks for sharing.
This article, like most in the press and blogosphere, repeats an urban myth when it claims 2500 scientists endorse the IPCC’s position on global warming. Those 2500 scientists are not endorsers but reviewers.
Here’s the straight goods: http://energy.probeinternational.org/climate-change/costs-benefits-and-risks/the-case-doing-nothing-global-warming
Are you angry about this obvious fraud and the national media’s complicity in the cover-up, misinformation, reframing and misdirection of the issue? Take responsibility and take action. Stop all donations to the political party(s) responsible for this fraud. Stop donations to all environmental groups which funded this Global Warming propaganda campaign with our money, especially The Environmental Defense Fund. START donations to Oklahoma’s Senator Inhofe, the only politician to stand firmly against this obvious government/media coordinated information operation (propaganda) targeted at its own people. People that government leaders and employees are sworn to protect. Write your state and federal representatives demanding wall to wall investigations of government sponsored funding and coordination of this and related propaganda campaigns and demand indictments of those responsible. Write your state and federal Attorneys General demanding Al Gore and others conducting Global Warming/Climate Change racketeering and mail fraud operations be brought to justice, indicted, tried, convicted and jailed. That’s what I have done in response to this outrageous violation of the public trust. Think of the consequences if you do nothing! For one, the UK is becoming the poster child for George Orwell’s “1984” and the US government’s sponsorship of this worldwide Global Warming propaganda campaign puts it in a class with the failed Soviet Union’s relentless violation of the basic human right to truthful government generated information. Given ClimateGate’s burgeoning revelations of outrageous government misconduct and massive covert misinformation, what are the chances that this Administration’s National Health Care sales campaign is anywhere near to the truth?
Monckton Says Secretive Copenhagen Treaty Creates Global Government Tax
“We’re looking at a grab for absolute power and absolute financial control worldwide by the UN and its associated bureaucracies and 700 new bureaucratic bodies,” said Monckton.
Speaking about how such draconian measures were being forced through despite the recent scandal surrounding how key IPCC-affiliated scientists conspired to “hide the decline in global warming, Monckton emphasized how the climate change establishment were still ludicrously attempting to downplay the significance of the climategate emails by merely repeating their already discredited propaganda about global warming.
“What has happened is that the mainstream media has done themselves terrible damage by signing up to this climate nonsense and then by servilely refusing to admit that climategate was happening, admit how serious it was and simply inform their readers of what was actually in these emails,” said Monckton, “Admissions that while they’re telling us, as the Met Office did just today, that today is the warmest decade since records began 150 years ago, privately what they’re saying in the climategate emails is ‘hey look we’ve got a temperature which has been falling and we can’t explain why and it’s a travesty that we can’t explain why’ – so they’re saying one thing to us publicly to maintain the scare that’s making them rich, and that’s what’s called fraud, it’s criminal fraud, and on the other hand they’re saying privately ‘oh dear oh dear we can’t account for the fact that there’s been no warming for the last 15 years’”.Monckton said that the Copenhagen treaty meant America was in “immediate peril” of losing its freedom to a “sinister dictatorship” being formed under the contrived pretext of global warming. infowars.com
NEW! NEW! NEW!
Check out the Copenhagen Document Leaks : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_W7vrgW8GTQ
AND http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94KH-WMZuw0 – Tells how they will get rid of UN and use IMF to tax you!
Protest the False Climate Measurments being used in the Copenhagen Treaty: http://www.gopetition.com/online/32485.html
“Climategate” started out when there appeared on the Internet a collection of e-mails of a group of climatologists who work in the University of East Anglia in England. These documents reveal that some climatologists of international preeminence have manipulated the data of their investigations and have strongly tried to discredit climatologists who are not convinced that the increasing quantities of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere are the cause of global warming.
It is true that a majority of the scientists who study climatic tendencies in our atmosphere have arrived at the conclusion that the world’s climate is changing, and they have convinced a group of politicians, some of whom are politically powerful, of the truth of their conclusions.
A minority, however, is skeptical. Some believe that recent data that suggest that the average temperature of the atmosphere is going up can be explained by natural variations in solar radiation and that global warming is a temporary phenomenon. Others believe that the historical evidence indicating that the temperature of the atmosphere is going up at a dangerous rate is simply not reliable.
Such lacks of agreement are common in the sciences. They are reduced and eventually eliminated with the accumulation of new evidence and of more refined theories or even by completely new ones. Such debates can persist for a period of decades. Academics often throw invective at one another in these debates. But typically this does not mean much.
But the case of climate change is different. If the evidence indicates that global warming is progressive, is caused principally by our industrial processes, and will probably cause disastrous changes in our atmosphere before the end of the twenty-first century, then we do not have the time to verify precisely if this evidence is reliable. Such a process would be a question of many years of new investigations. And if the alarmist climatologists are right, such a delay would be tragic for all humanity.
The difficulty is that economic and climatologic systems are very complicated. They are not like celestial mechanics, which involves only the interaction of gravity and centrifugal force, and efforts to construct computerized models to describe these complicated systems simply cannot include all the factors that are influential in the evolution of these complicated systems.
All this does not necessarily indicate that the alarmist climatologists are not right. But it really means that if global warming is occurring, we cannot know exactly what will be the average temperature of our atmosphere in the year 2100 and what will be the average sea level of the world’s ocean in that year.
It also means that we cannot be confident that efforts by the industrialized countries to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere will have a significant influence on the evolution of the world’s climate.
Alas, the reduction of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere would be very costly and would greatly change the lives of all the inhabitants of our planet–with the possibility (perhaps even the probability!) that all these efforts will be completely useless.
Harleigh Kyson Jr.