Re: India and the Global Warming Debate
Posted: 22 Aug 2010 10:31
'Daily Telegraph' apologises to RK Pachauri http://ibnlive.in.com/news/london-newsp ... ?from=trhs
Consortium of Indian Defence Websites
https://forums.bharat-rakshak.com/
Bilderberg. Whether you believe it’s part of a sinister conspiracy which will lead inexorably to one world government or whether you think it’s just an innocent high-level talking shop, there’s one thing that can’t be denied: it knows which way the wind is blowing. (Hat tips: Will/NoIdea/Ozboy)
At its June meeting in Sitges, Spain (unreported and held in camera, as is Bilderberg’s way), some of the world’s most powerful CEOs rubbed shoulders with notable academics and leading politicians. They included: the chairman of Fiat, the Irish Attorney General Paul Gallagher, the US special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke, Henry Kissinger, Bill Gates, Dick Perle, the Queen of the Netherlands, the editor of the Economist…. Definitely not Z-list, in other words.
Which is what makes one particular item on the group’s discussion agenda so tremendously significant. See if you can spot the one I mean:
Yep, that’s right. Global Cooling.
- The 58th Bilderberg Meeting will be held in Sitges, Spain 3 – 6 June 2010. The Conference will deal mainly with Financial Reform, Security, Cyber Technology, Energy, Pakistan, Afghanistan, World Food Problem, Global Cooling , Social Networking, Medical Science, EU-US relations.
Which means one of two things.
Either it was a printing error.
Or the global elite is perfectly well aware that global cooling represents a far more serious and imminent threat to the world than global warming, but is so far unwilling to admit it except behind closed doors.
Let me explain briefly why this is a bombshell waiting to explode.
Almost every government in the Western world from the USA to Britain to all the other EU states to Australia and New Zealand is currently committed to a policy of “decarbonisation.” This in turn is justified to (increasingly sceptical) electorates on the grounds that man-made CO2 is a prime driver of dangerous global warming and must therefore be reduced drastically, at no matter what social, economic and environmental cost. In the Eighties and Nineties, the global elite had a nice run of hot weather to support their (scientifically dubious) claims. But now they don’t. Winters are getting colder. Fuel bills are rising (in the name of combating climate change, natch). The wheels are starting to come off the AGW bandwagon. Ordinary people, resisting two decades of concerted brainwashing, are starting to notice.
All this, of course, spells big trouble for the global power elite. As well as leading to food shortages (as, for example, it becomes harder to grow wheat in northerly latitudes; adding, of course, to such already-present disasters as biofuels and the rejection of GM), global cooling is going to find electorates increasingly angry that they have been sold a pup.
Our fuel bills have risen inexorably; our countryside, our views and our property values have been ravaged by hideous wind farms; our holidays have been made more expensive; our cost of living has been driven up by green taxes; our freedoms have been curtailed in any number of pettily irritating ways from what kind of light bulbs we are permitted to use to how we dispose of our rubbish. And to what end? If man-made global warming was really happening and really a problem we might possibly have carried on putting up with all these constraints on our liberty and assaults on our income. But if it turns out to have been a myth……
Well then, all bets are off.
The next few years are going to be very interesting. Watch the global power elite squirming to reposition itself as it slowly distances itself from Anthropogenic Global Warming (”Who? Us? No. We never thought of it as more than a quaint theory…”), and tries to find new ways of justifying green taxation and control. (Ocean acidification; biodiversity; et al). You’ll notice sly shifts in policy spin. In Britain, for example, Chris “Chicken Little” Huhne’s suicidal “dash for wind” will be re-invented as a vital step towards “energy security.” There will be less talk of “combatting climate change” and more talk of “mitigation”. You’ll hear enviro-Nazis like Obama’s Science Czar John Holdren avoid reference to “global warming” like the plague, preferring the more reliably vague phrase “global climate disruption.”
And you know what the worst thing is? If we allow them to, they’re going to get away with it.
Our duty as free citizens over the next few years is to make sure that they don’t.
Al Gore, George Soros, Bill Gates, Carol Browner, John Holdren, Barack Obama, David Cameron, Ed Miliband, Tim Yeo, Michael Mann, Ted Turner, Robert Redford, Phil Jones, Chris Huhne, John Howard (yes really, he was supposed to be a conservative, but he was the man who kicked off Australia’s ETS), Julia Gillard, Kevin Rudd, Yvo de Boer, Rajendra Pachauri….The list of the guilty goes on and on. Each in his own way – and whether through ignorance, naivety idealism or cynicism, it really doesn’t matter for the result has been the same – has done his bit to push the greatest con-trick in the history of science, forcing on global consumers the biggest bill in the history taxation, using “global warming” as an excuse to extend the reach of government further than it has ever gone before.
It is time we put a stop to this. In the US, the Tea Party movement is showing us the way. We need to punish these dodgy politicians at the ballot box. We need to ensure that those scientists guilty of malfeasance are, at the very least thrown out of the jobs which we taxpayers have been funding these last decades. We need to ensure that corporatist profiteers are no longer able to benefit from the distortion and corruption of the markets which result from green regulation.
We need a “Global Warming” Nuremberg.
Speaking at an open meeting here, Ramesh told delegates that "all countries must take on binding commitments under appropriate legal form."
Later, the minister indicated that he raised this point to assure countries close to India like Nepal and Bangladesh that New Delhi was committed to fulfilling its domestic commitments.
"We will honor these," he said, noting that India was not ready to reflect these in an international agreement yet.
The present discussion has also raised questions about what constitutes the "bindingness" of a treaty.
India, for instance, argues that consensual decisions taken under annual climate conferences can be considered binding.
Stupid idiocy on the part of Jairam Ramesh. This guy is becoming a liability and IMO should be removed from his post. You can't function as a (western-funded) NGO would and still be part of the government. Maybe he likes James Cameroon but that doesn't mean Ramesh has the mandate to say the whole of India to likes him.geeth wrote:News is ticking in that Brazil and South Africa has agreed for legally binding emissions cuts and our beloved Jairam Ramesh has gone beyond his brief and added words in his statement which could be construed as acceptance by India also for legally binding cuts.
News channels say this is contrary to the promise he (Jairam) gave in parliament that India won't bow to pressure on legally binding cuts and is also against the decision of the Cabinet on this matter.
The UPA had committed to the Parliament that Indian would not take on any international legally binding commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It was also part of the cabinet decision drawing a clear redline against such a move.
But on last Thursday the cabinet, approved a proposal mooted by Ramesh, altered the non-negotiable line. The cabinet decision now read: India will not take any international legally binding agreement, at the moment.
This opened the window for Ramesh to make this dramatic shift in India's position with his statement, suggesting that while India would not take on commitments right now at Cancun, it could do so anytime in the future.
OMG, That is a sell out. Traitors?? or Morons??abhishek_sharma wrote:India willing to accept legally binding pact at Cancun...
The developed countries are pushing language for a climate fund that would commit them "to the goal of mobilizing jointly $100 billion a year by 2020." There is a lot of wiggle room in such words as "goal" and "jointly." The least-developed countries want the document to read that wealthy countries such as the United States would "commit to provide 1.5 percent of GDP per year by 2020," a global price tag approaching $600 billion a year.
Shin Yeon-sung, South Korea's ambassador on climate change, said that although many major emerging nations are open to "compiling" their emission pledges as part of an international registry, they become antsy when industrialized countries begin talking about "anchoring" those commitments. The negotiators can spend hours - or days - on these two words.
"Anchoring somehow sounds more legally binding to developing countries," Shin said. "There is consultation going on right now."
What will be the outcome of Cancun? The details are still being thrashed out but one thing is certain — when the two-week conference ends, India will have further diluted its stance on climate change negotiations.
The government might justify it as a part of its larger geopolitical need or a pragmatic review of its position or the need to not stand alone, but India is bound to come out by taking another step towards diluting the existing principles of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Bali Action Plan that it fought hard for two decades.
As a developing country negotiator said, "In Bali, India accepted it would carry out mitigation actions. In Copenhagen, it accepted international scrutiny and in Cancun, we have accepted the possibility of legally binding targets. One has to see if by Durban next year, India also accepts absolute emission cuts."
The questions that one would need to ask when the post-summit assessment begins are two-fold. How will these changes in the international climate change stance impact India's economic growth and what did India gain in return for these regressions?
Someone who is a student of international relations might see the climate change game changing in the light of US support for India's candidature to the UN Security Council but the critics of the flexibility that has PM Manmohan Singh's blessings would want to know if the mantra may cost the Indian economy and its poor too much by the time the new global climate deal is concluded.
Till 2009, the government had claimed that emission-reduction targets could wipe out considerable economic growth. At the penultimate day of the Cancun talks, India seemed poised to slip into such targets sooner than one had thought a couple of years ago.
It began by avoiding any kind of mitigation actions, pointing out that it was not the culprit in the first place. This was in the early 90s. It played a difficult balance of closing the bilateral gap with the US while it stuck to a stringent multilateral line at the climate forum.
By the time UPA was in place, the mandate had shifted. The policy shift towards US and the competitive neighbourhood made India dance a tricky step towards the high table, slowly forsaking its role as the leader of the G77 and quickly taking its seat at forums like the G20 and the Major Economies Forum. The climate shift was a package deal, policy wonks suggested, and that giving up on concerns about international scrutiny and bearing costs of a quicker transition to green energy is well worth the gambit.
The UPA is yet to show the cost sheets of this change in its policy climate.
Why throwing money at today's clean-energy technologies could keep us from discovering tomorrow's.abhishek_sharma wrote:
The climate shift was a package deal, policy wonks suggested, and that giving up on concerns about international scrutiny and bearing costs of a quicker transition to green energy is well worth the gambit.
Many argue that since we already have some technology today, we should simply deploy it. I believe doing this alone runs the risk of spending a significant amount of money on infrastructure that will require continued subsidies to survive. By diving into ambitious deployment efforts -- for instance, massively scaling wind farms or today’s geologic carbon capture and sequestration technology -- too early, we will be yoking ourselves to a carbon-reduction plan that is massively expensive to build and maintain.
He has taken a very good PR stand right in the beginning. Anyone who opposes him will turn out to be climate evangelists“There is a groupthink in climate science today. Anyone who raises alternative climate theories is immediately branded as a climate atheist in an atmosphere of climate evangelists,” he said. “Climate science is incredibly more complex than [developed countries] negotiators make it out to be… Climate science should not be driven by the West. We should not always be dependent on outside reports.”
NEW DELHI—A new study by the Indian Space Research Organization and the Geological Survey of India in Kolkata reports that although 21% of India's Himalayan glaciers are showing no increase in melt rate, the majority are receding. The pattern is a worldwide phenomenon and part of a natural cyclic process, according to a statement from India's environment minister, Jayanthi Natarajan. Her statement surprised many observers in that it did not attribute the glaciers' retreat to climate change.
The new results come from the "Snow and Glacier Studies" project, undertaken with government support by the Space Applications Centre (SAC) in Ahmedabad. Completed in 2010, the satellite-based survey took an inventory of the snow cover and glacier extent across glaciated regions of the Indus, Ganga, and Brahmaputra River basins. Speaking in Parliament on 8 August, Natarajan said the 5-year research project monitored 2767 glaciers and found that 2184 were retreating, 435 were advancing, and 148 showed no change.
"There is no doubt that the general health of the Himalayan glaciers is worsening, but the truth is incredibly complex," says India's former environment minister Jairam Ramesh. Last year, Ramesh locked horns with the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change over IPCC's exaggerated forecast of future glacier melting. The panel's 2007 report said that Himalayan glaciers "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." IPCC later acknowledged that this was an error.
It may be difficult to forecast glacier size, but some researchers are now concerned that the melt may create unstable lakes and threaten villages below. G. M. Bhat, a glacier expert in the Department of Geology at the University of Jammu in India told The Asian Age that an increasing number of such lakes were forming due to rising temperature. The article reads, "If these lakes breach their banks (often formed from loose Morain), the floods can cause devastation in downstream areas." Andreas Schild, director of the Nepal-based International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development, says about 15% of the lakes could be in the possible danger zone, according to the Hindustan Times.
The university said in a statement the emails did not appear to be the result of a new breach, but appeared to have been stolen two years ago and held back until now "to cause maximum disruption" to the imminent UN climate talks next week.
If that is confirmed, the timing and nature of the leak would follow the pattern set by the so-called "Climategate" emails, which caught prominent scientists stonewalling critics and discussing ways to keep opponents' research out of peer-reviewed journals.
Although their context could not be determined, the excerpts appeared to show climate scientists talking in conspiratorial tones about ways to promote their agenda and freeze out those they disagreed with. There were several mentions of "the cause" and discussions of ways to shield emails from freedom of information requests.