Time to part ways with flawed Paris Agreement
THE IPCC’s hysterical report is the latest case of crying wolf on climate change, and its recommendations will ensure our economic destruction. Our hand has been forced, writes Miranda Devine.
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IF you bothered actually to read the Paris climate Agreement you would find in the preamble such boiler plate political correctness as to disqualify the entire climate alarm project.
Signatories must “respect, promote and consider their respective obligations on human rights, the right to health, the rights of indigenous peoples, local communities, migrants, children, persons with disabilities and people in vulnerable situations and the right to development, as well as gender equality, empowerment of women and intergenerational equity.”
In that one paragraph you can see that climate alarm is a social engineering project involving a whole lot more than greenhouse gas emissions. The only thing missing is LGBTQI rights but no doubt that’s in the mix.
There’s also guff on “climate justice”, “Mother Earth”, “efforts to eradicate poverty” and the guiding principle of “equity”, aka the disastrous socialist goal of “equality of outcome”, achieved by a massive wealth transfer from rich to poor nations.
Seriously, say no more.
This week’s hysterical missive from the United Nation’s Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is just the latest case of the boy who cried wolf.
We have 12 years to save the planet from catastrophic global warming, it says. We must immediately take “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society”.
That means no more eating meat and no more coal, among other enforced “lifestyle changes”.
“If we don’t quit coal, we are screwed,” said a delighted Greens climate change spokesman Adam Bandt, calling for a “war-footing” on climate change and the immediate “phase out of thermal coal exports”.
“It is time to hit the climate emergency button.”
“The world is on fire,” said Executive Director of Greenpeace International, Jennifer Morgan.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres foreshadowed the IPCC report with a bizarre speech last month which began: “Dear friends of Planet Earth”.
“We face a direct existential threat,” said the Portuguese-born former President of Socialist International.
“Climate change is moving faster than we are — and its speed has provoked a sonic boom SOS across our world.”
Yeah, yeah. We’ve been hearing the same doomsday scenario for decades and none of the predictions have come true.
Remember Al Gore’s apocalyptic 2006 movie An Inconvenient Truthwhen he told us the earth would be in “a true planetary emergency” within 10 years?
Well, nothing happened.
Nations weren’t washed away by rising tides, the planet didn’t burn and even the IPCC conceded that, despite the extra carbon dioxide humans had pumped into the atmosphere, the rate of warming since 2000 was less than predicted by climate models.
But a generation of children suffered nightmares and billions of dollars were wasted in a futile effort to “control climate change”, as the IPCC climate spruikers like to phrase it.
If the IPCC actually was serious about reducing human carbon dioxide emissions, then it would propose nuclear power as the solution, since nuclear power plants generate zero emissions and give us all the electricity we could ever want.
Instead, its latest report is decidedly cool on nuclear power, saying it risks nuclear war, childhood leukaemia and environmental degradation.
Also “a non-negligible risk for accidents in nuclear power plants and waste treatment facilities remains. The long-term storage of nuclear waste is a politically fraught subject”.
Surely such problems pale by comparison to a global apocalypse?
In any case, exhorting us to make “lifestyle changes”, not eat meat and do away with coal is ridiculous when, as Australian researcher John McLean and others point out, the actual temperature data on which the IPCC bases its reports are woefully inadequate.
Every mathematician knows that computer models are only as good as their inputs. With garbage data you get bogus results. GIGO, we used to call it at university: Garbage In, Garbage Out.
Meanwhile, China continues merrily to build coal-fired power plants and ramp up emissions, while little Australia, which contributes less than two per cent of global greenhouse gases, is supposed to cop a double whammy, with two of our biggest exports damned as evil.
Coal is projected to become our largest export earner next year, at close to $60 billion, surpassing even iron ore. It provides 75 per cent of generation in the National Electricity Market.
We have the best beef and lamb in the world. Meat is among our top ten export earners.
But according to the global climate tsars, we are to become a nation of sickly soyboys scrabbling about for protein, paying exorbitant prices for intermittent electricity, and paying the UN for the pleasure.
No thanks.
PM Morrison says we’ll meet our Paris commitments to reduce emissions “in a canter” and he doesn’t seem too worried if we don’t.
But if we ever needed an excuse to bail out of the whole corrupt IPCC process, now is the time.
The latest report has targeted Australia as surely as if our continent were marked by a crosshair on the world map. Coal, meat and the destruction of the Great Barrier Reef are the three big take-outs.
According to Article 28 of the Paris agreement, “at any time after three years from the date on which this Agreement has entered into force for a Party, that Party may withdraw from this Agreement by giving written notification.”
Three years is up on December 12. Our withdrawal would take effect a year later.
We can go our own way, perfectly legitimately, and continue to meet our emissions targets if we wish. We wouldn’t be breaking our word as the invitation to withdraw after three years is written into the Paris agreement.
We would not be slavishly copying Donald Trump.
We can make our own reasoned decision that we should no longer be part of a deeply flawed process that has specifically singled out our economy for destruction.
The IPCC has forced our hand.