Ms. Christiana Figueres, chief secretary
of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, told a press
conference in Doha today that the 18th Conference of the States Parties would bring about “a complete economic transformation of the world.”
La Figurehead
did not have in mind a free-market transformation. The intention of
these 18 annual vacations – er, serious negotiations to Save The Planet –
is what it always was: to create a treaty binding more than 190 nations
to do as the Secretariat says. Democracy? What’s that?
Todd Stern, the U.S. lead negotiator, was
similarly upbeat at his own press conference. With all the fervour of
an evangelical preacher in an Alabama mega-church, he predicted that the
“Doha Way Forward”, following the “Bali Road-Map”, the “Durban
Platform”, etc., would achieve a second Kyoto Protocol – a treaty that all the nations of the world would ratify.
On
hearing this, the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, the only
climate-skeptical environmental group recognized by the U.N., decided to
design some lapel buttons showing the figure “67” – the minimum number
of U.S. Senators needed to ratify a treaty. In 1997, while Al Gore was
president of the Senate, it voted by 95 to nil not to accept any treaty
like the Kyoto Protocol.
Though the key bureaucratic
global-warming profiteers here think “progress” is at last going to be
achieved, there is a subdued air among everyone else. Very few came.
Copenhagen in 2009, when almost 50,000 turned up, is a distant memory.
Even the Communist-era slogans that are a
wearisome feature of these conferences are less strident than usual.
This year’s official catchphrase is “Count me in.”
The very slow, ancient, badly
air-conditioned buses echoing tinnily with Arab music that ferry the
plebs like us to and from the conference center have “Share The Ride –
Cut The Carbon” painted on their grimy flanks. Hardly a rallying-cry to
man the barricades.
The trouble is that there has not been
anything like enough global warming to keep the usual suspects safe in
their cushy, taxpayer-funded sinecures. My innocent amusement for today
was to visit several of the side-shows organized by the usual kooks who
are drawn to these conferences like quacks to colored water. At each
event I asked the obvious question:
“After 16 years without global warming, how confident are you that the official predictions of doom have not been overblown?”
A shrewish spokesman for the Gaia
Foundation replied: “Why should we answer that? You’re a well-known
climate denier.” Ma’am, 0 out of 10 for scientific rigor.
The reply from a spokesman for the Brahma
Kumaris Spiritual World University Living In Harmony Environment
Initiative Aligning Awareness With Action And Renewable Energy For the
Future Plus Capacity Building: “Something like 80 or 90% of scientists
accept that the world is warming ever faster.”
Another spokesman for the Guru-ji of
Guru-jis, one “Dr. Doebbler”, said that the rate of global warming had
accelerated in the past ten years. Actually, the trend since late 2001
shows a significant decline. Doebbler added, “Why should anyone take you
seriously? You’re just a climate denier. About 100 million people in
Africa will die because of global warming.” READ MORE
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