GWPF | 8 Dec 2014
Green Blob’s Annual Ritual Hits Rift Over Pledges, Climate $Trillions
China has rejected the scrutiny of efforts to limit carbon emissions, a key tool that the US says is necessary as more than 190 countries work to come up with a new deal to fight climate change. Chinese negotiators sought to delete provisions in a draft text that would have paved the way for other countries and non-governmental organisations to submit questions about its carbon-reduction plans, according to environmental groups that are official observers to the talks. —South China Morning Post, 8 December 2014
India on Friday refused to take a deadline for capping its emissions unlike China, saying the ongoing climate meet in Lima was not to discuss peaking year and hoped the world would reach a deal to cut down carbon emissions. The main issues which are dividing countries are centred on the excessive focus on mitigation which is opposed by the developing countries. Most developing countries were favouring a review process to assess contributions, though India remains totally opposed to such a process. —Press Trust of India, 7 December 2014
Benny Peiser, of the climate-sceptic Global Warming Policy Foundation described the summit as the “green blob’s annual ritual” and “an expensive form of mass tourism, never mind the carbon footprint. More importantly, the ritual gathering isn’t going to overcome the underlying deadlock,” he said. “The developing world will ask for a high price which will sink the deal in the US.” He said he believed any deal would not be legally-binding and that this would lead the EU to renege on its own carbon-cutting pledges. “In short, the deal that is now in the making won’t slow CO2 emissions and won’t bind any nation. But it will be sold as a breakthrough – as all agreements have been sold in the past,” he said. –Emily Gosden, The Sunday Telegraph, 7 December 2014
1) Surprise, Surprise: China Rejects Emissions Pledge Review – South China Morning Post, 8 December 2014
2) India Says ‘No’ To Emissions Cap & Review Process – Press Trust of India, 7 December 2014
3) Global Warming Negotiators Can’t Stand The Heat – The Sunday Telegraph, 7 December 2014
4) You Don’t Say: UN Climate Talks Hit By Rift Over Funding – International Business Times, 8 December 2014
5) Matt Ridley: Beware The Corruption Of Science – The Times, 8 December 2014
6) Christopher Booker: Billions Won’t Satisfy Warmists – The Sunday Telegraph, 7 December 2014
As somebody who has championed science all his career, carrying a lot of water for the profession against its critics on many issues, I am losing faith. Recent examples of bias and corruption in science are bad enough. What’s worse is the reluctance of scientific leaders to criticise the bad apples. Science as a philosophy is in good health; science as an institution increasingly stinks. –Matt Ridley, The Times, 8 December 2014
Negotiators at the UN climate talks in Lima have encountered yet another stumbling block with nations divided over including finance and adaptation commitments in national action plans. The European Union and Japan want national offers to be focused only on mitigation actions to reduce planet-warming emissions. Brazil, on the other hand, wants countries to be able to put adaptation and finance in their national contributions. Countries like Nicaragua have warned that a Paris deal could fail unless adaptation is included in the draft text expected to come out of the Lima talks. —International Business Times, 8 December 2014
So carried away are the warmists by their quasi-religious belief system that, when it was again proposed in Lima that richer nations should pay poor countries $100 billion a year to protect them from runaway global warming, the UN’s chief spokesman, Christiana Figueres, dismissed this as “a very, very small sum”. What is needed to decarbonise the global economy, she said, is “$90 trillion over the next 15 years”. It makes the £1.3 trillion we Brits are committed by the Climate Change Act to pay to halt global warming within 36 years look like chicken feed. –Christopher Booker, The Sunday Telegraph, 7 December 2014
1) Surprise, Surprise: China Rejects Emissions Pledge Review
South China Morning Post, 8 December 2014
China has rejected the scrutiny of efforts to limit carbon emissions, a key tool that the US says is necessary as more than 190 countries work to come up with a new deal to fight climate change.
Chinese negotiators sought at a climate conference in Lima, Peru, to delete provisions in a draft text that would have paved the way for other countries and non-governmental organisations to submit questions about its carbon-reduction plans, according to environmental groups that are official observers to the talks.
The pledges will be included in a global deal to be sealed next year and that starts in 2020.
US lead climate envoy Todd Stern told reporters that all national pledges should be subject to scrutiny by other countries, saying “the sunshine is intended to prod countries to be as ambitious as possible” in limiting carbon emissions.
The United States and China last month jointly announced efforts they plan to make under the new climate deal.
“The spirit of constructive cooperation of the US-China agreement seems to have come to a full stop,” Liz Gallagher, senior adviser to the policy analyst group E3G, said on Saturday in an interview in Lima, where two weeks of UN climate talks began last Monday.
Chinese negotiator Su Wei did not immediately reply to an e-mail seeking comment.
“This is exactly the kind of risk that we face when hard lines are taken by parties,” Tasneem Essop, a spokeswoman on climate policy for the environmental group WWF International, said. “It’s early days … so we do hope that arties will soften their lines.”
Essop said her remarks referred to all nations. She also criticised what she called a “slash-and-burn” exercise by the United States, European Union, Australia, Canada and New Zealand to remove any reference to a review of the commitments they had made to cut emissions before 2020.
2) India Says ‘No’ To Emissions Cap & Review Process
Press Trust of India, 7 December 2014
India on Friday refused to take a deadline for capping its emissions unlike China, saying the ongoing climate meet in Lima was not to discuss peaking year and hoped the world would reach a deal to cut down carbon emissions.
“Peaking year is not an issue to be discussed in Lima,” Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar told a press conference just ahead of leaving for the Peruvian capital to participate in the high-level ministerial segment of the U.N. climate conference where nations are discussing steps for a new deal in Paris to replace the Kyoto Protocol on global warming.
The road map to Paris is fraught with contentious debates over the focus of contributions from countries and whether it was enough to take only mitigation seriously as developed nations are doing at the U.N. climate talks here.
The main issues which are dividing countries are centred on the excessive focus on mitigation which is opposed by the developing countries. Mohammed Adow, senior adviser, Global Advocacy and Alliances, said the main question is if the draft texts have enough clarity on the deal to be finalised in Paris.
Most developing countries were favouring a review process to assess contributions, though India remains totally opposed to such a process.
3) Global Warming Negotiators Can’t Stand The Heat
The Sunday Telegraph, 7 December 2014
Emily Gosden
Temperatures are rising at the UN’s annual climate gathering in Peru.
They are, according to energy secretary Ed Davey, “the most complex negotiations the world has ever undertaken”: representatives from 190 countries attempting to draft an unprecedented worldwide deal to tackle global warming.
But the near-9,000 delegates attending the UN’s climate change summit in Peru have found they also have a more local warming problem to contend with: the venue is too hot.
Sweltering temperatures inside the meeting halls have prompted many delegates to complain that the temporary buildings are generating their own “greenhouse effect” – with one Zimbabwean representative at Monday’s opening plenary reportedly even suggesting it was “too hot to work”. […]
While most delegates appeared in good spirits despite the heat, there remain numerous areas of disagreement over the shape of a global climate deal – which is being drafted in Lima and due to be officially agreed at next year’s summit in Paris. The aim is to come up with an agreement that will cut greenhouse gas emissions in order to limit global warming to 2C above pre-industrial levels, beyond which scientists say the effects will be far more dangerous. […]
The UK hopes initial pledges will then be scrutinised and bettered, enabling “a deal in Paris that keeps the 2C limit within reach”, he said. […]
Benny Peiser, of the climate-sceptic Global Warming Policy Foundation described the summit as the “green blob’s annual ritual” and “an expensive form of mass tourism, never mind the carbon footprint”.
“More importantly, the ritual gathering isn’t going to overcome the underlying deadlock,” he said.
“The developing world will ask for a high price which will sink the deal in the US.” He said he believed any deal would not be legally-binding and that this would lead the EU to renege on its own carbon-cutting pledges. “In short, the deal that is now in the making won’t slow CO2 emissions and won’t bind any nation. But it will be sold as a breakthrough – as all agreements have been sold in the past,” he said.
4) You Don’t Say: UN Climate Talks Hit By Rift Over Funding
International Business Times, 8 December 2014
Negotiators at the UN climate talks in Lima have encountered yet another stumbling block with nations divided over including finance and adaptation commitments in national action plans.
The European Union and Japan want national offers to be focused only on mitigation actions to reduce planet-warming emissions.
Brazil, on the other hand, wants countries to be able to put adaptation and finance in their national contributions.
Countries like Nicaragua have warned that a Paris deal could fail unless adaptation is included in the draft text expected to come out of the Lima talks.
The UN has warned that the cost of adapting to climate change in developing nations is likely to be two to three times higher than previous estimates even if emissions are cut to avoid the two degrees warming threshold.
Achim Steiner, executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) said that adaptation costs could climb as high as £96bn ($150bn) a year by 2025 to 2030, and £160-320 bn ($250-500 bn) per year by 2050, compared with earlier estimates of £44-64bn ($70-100bn) yearly by 2050, reports Reuters.
This gives further strength to the demand by poor, developing nations to include adaptation costs in the agreement.
They have been arguing that unless their adaptation costs are met by the developed world, which was largely responsible for the carbon emissions following the industrial revolution, they will not be able to cut down on emissions as they engage in development and poverty abatement priorities.
5) Matt Ridley: Beware The Corruption Of Science
The Times, 8 December 2014
Environmental researchers are increasingly looking for evidence that fits their ideology, rather than seeking the truth. 
The Nuffield Council on Bioethics published a report last week that found evidence of scientists increasingly “employing less rigorous research methods” in response to funding pressures. A 2009 survey found that almost 2 per cent of scientists admitting that they have fabricated results; 14 per cent say that their colleagues have done so.
This month has seen three egregious examples of poor scientific practice. The most recent was the revelation in The Times last week that scientists appeared to scheme to get neonicotinoid pesticides banned, rather than open-mindedly assessing all the evidence. These were supposedly “independent” scientists, yet they were hand in glove with environmental activists who were receiving huge grants from the European Union to lobby it via supposedly independent reports, and they apparently had their conclusions in mind before they gathered the evidence. Documents that have recently come to light show them blatantly setting out to make policy-based evidence, rather than evidence-based policy.
Second example: last week, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), a supposedly scientific body, issued a press release stating that this is likely to be the warmest year in a century or more, based on surface temperatures. Yet this predicted record would be only one hundredth of a degree above 2010 and two hundredths of a degree above 2005 — with an error range of one tenth of a degree. True scientists would have said: this year is unlikely to be significantly warmer than 2010 or 2005 and left it at that.
In any case, the year is not over, so why the announcement now? Oh yes, there’s a political climate summit in Lima this week. The scientists of WMO allowed themselves to be used politically. Not that they were reluctant. To squeeze and cajole the data until they just crossed the line, the WMO “reanalysed” a merger of five data sets. Maybe that was legitimate but, given how the institutions that gather temperature data have twice this year been caught red-handed making poorly justified adjustments to “homogenise” and “in-fill” thermometer records in such a way as to cool down old records and warm up new ones, I have my doubts.
In one case, in Rutherglen, a town in Victoria, a recorded cooling trend of minus 0.35C became a reported warming trend of plus 1.73C after “homogenisation” by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. It claimed the adjustment was necessary because the thermometer had moved between two fields, but could provide no evidence for this, or for why it necessitated such a drastic adjustment.
Most of the people in charge of collating temperature data are vocal in their views on climate policy, which hardly reassures the rest of us that they leave those prejudices at the laboratory door. Imagine if bankers were in charge of measuring inflation.
Third example: the Royal Society used to be the gold standard of scientific objectivity. Yet this month it issued a report on resilience to extreme weather that, in its 100-plus pages, could find room for not a single graph to show recent trends in extreme weather. That is because no such graph shows an upward trend in global frequency of droughts, storms or floods. The report did find room for a graph showing the rising cost of damage by extreme weather, which is a function of the increased value of insured property, not a measure of weather.
The Royal Society report also carefully omitted what is perhaps the most telling of all statistics about extreme weather: the plummeting death toll. The global probability of being killed by a drought, flood or storm is down by 98 per cent since the 1920s and has never been lower — not because weather is less dangerous but because of improvements in transport, trade, infrastructure, aid and communication.
The Royal Society’s decision to cherry-pick its way past such data would be less worrying if its president, Sir Paul Nurse, had not gone on the record as highly partisan on the subject of climate science. He called for those who disagree with him to be “crushed and buried”, hardly the language of Galileo.
Three months ago Sir Paul said: “We need to be aware of those who mix up science, based on evidence and rationality, with politics and ideology, where opinion, rhetoric and tradition hold more sway. We need to be aware of political or ideological lobbyists who do not respect science, cherry-picking data or argument, to support their predetermined positions.”
If he wishes to be consistent, he will therefore condemn the behaviour of the scientists over neonicotinoids and the WMO over temperature records, and chastise his colleagues’ report, for these are prime examples of his point.
I am not hopeful. When a similar scandal blew up in 2009 over the hiding of inconvenient data that appeared to discredit the validity of proxies for past global temperatures based on tree rings (part of “Climategate”), the scientific establishment closed ranks and tried to pretend it did not matter. Last week a further instalment of that story came to light, showing that yet more inconvenient data (which discredit bristlecone pine tree rings as temperature proxies) had emerged.
6) Christopher Booker: Billions Won’t Satisfy Warmists
The Sunday Telegraph, 7 December 2014
What is needed to decarbonise the global economy is “$90 trillion over the next 15 years”, says Christiana Figueres, the UN’s green fundraiser.
It is true that the temperature records compiled by the avid warmists of the Met Office and the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (the one formerly run by climate activist James Hansen) have managed to show this year squeaking just ahead of 2010 as “the hottest year since records began”. But the much more comprehensive and reliable satellite records agree that 2014 is way down the list, with six of the past 16 years ahead of it.
The reason for this excitement just now, even before the final 2014 data are in, is that it is timed to coincide with yet another two-week UN climate conference in Lima, where thousands of officials and activists are gathered to whip up support for next year’s planned “universal climate treaty” in Paris.
What worries them more than anything is the unavoidable evidence that global temperatures have shown no significant rise for 18 years, making ever more nonsense of all those scary computer model predictions relied on by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But so carried away are they by their quasi-religious belief system that, when it was again proposed in Lima that richer nations should pay poor countries $100 billion a year to protect them from runaway global warming, the UN’s chief spokesman, Christiana Figueres, dismissed this as “a very, very small sum”. What is needed to decarbonise the global economy, she said, is “$90 trillion over the next 15 years”. It makes the £1.3 trillion we Brits are committed by the Climate Change Act to pay to halt global warming within 36 years look like chicken feed.
