In two weeks' time, the U.N. will host yet another "climate summit" – an opportunity for left-leaning world "leaders" to strut and fret their hour upon the stage, parading their ersatz consciences and vowing to inflict ever heavier taxes and regulations upon their baffled and suffering peoples.
The people are baffled at the gibbering and gesturing and posturing on climate change, because there has been no global warming for just about 18 years, according to the latest satellite global temperature data from Remote Sensing Systems Inc., and the rate of global warming since 1990 has been half what the failed computer models predicted that year.
The people are suffering because they are being made to pay through the nose for the desire of the global ruling elite to establish a global "government," using the supposed "imperative" to make non-existent "global warming" go away as the feeble pretext.
At the U.N. climate gabfest in Doha, exactly 21 months ago, world "leaders" decided they would extend the failed Kyoto Protocol from 2012 to 2020, with nations outbidding each other in their commitments to shut down their economies for no good reason at all. Technically, the Protocol had already lapsed, but world "leaders" do not pay much attention to the law.
However, a show of hands at the lamentably disorganized Doha climate yadayadathon was not enough. Individual nations were required, under the usual rules for treaties, to lodge an instrument of accession to the amendment with the U.N. as the depositary. So far, of 144 nations bound by the Kyoto Protocol, only 11 – or 7.5 percent – have indicated that they will sign.
The United States had the good sense not to sign up to the Kyoto Protocol in the first place. The U.S. Senate in 1997 voted by 95 to not accept any such protocol unless it bound all nations. The president of the Senate at that time was one Albert Arnold Gore.
Canada had originally signed the Protocol, but gave notice that it did not intend to continue with it and has now left. Russia, New Zealand and Japan (where an influential group at the Academy of Sciences has described belief in catastrophic manmade warming as "akin to belief in astrology") did not vote to renew the Protocol in Doha.
However, of 144 nations who voted at Doha, only 11 have actually signed up to the amendment almost two years later. Aside from China, which appears to have signed by mistake, the other 10 nations are tiddlers: Bangladesh, Barbados, Honduras, Kenya, Mauritius, Micronesia, Monaco, Norway, Sudan and the United Arab Emirates.
Not one of the 29 states of the EU has agreed to sign the new amendment. This is not particularly surprising, since individual EU nations no longer have the right to enter into foreign treaties on their own behalf. Foreign policy is now an exclusive competence of the unelected Kommissarsmeeting in secret behind closed doors in Brussels.
The refusal of most nations to agree to the Kyoto Protocol shows that the steam has gone out of the ghastly climate "process," and not before time. If climate action were really urgent (which, after 18 years without any global warming, it is not), they would be competing to be among the first to sign up.
Though the Kyoto Protocol has been in force for more than a decade, it has had no discernible effect on global CO2 concentration, which continues to rise at record rates. Yet global warming has not risen, is not rising and – aside from the occasional "El Niño" – will probably not rise by very much over our lifetimes.
The U.N. knows that if it is to get away with its plans to set itself up as a global government in 2015, having failed spectacularly and humiliatingly to get away with its attempted coup-by-treaty in 2009 at Copenhagen, it is in an increasingly desperate race against time. The longer the period without global warming, the more nations will wake up, come off the Kool-Aid, and realize they had been deceived by a small, poisonous clique of climate communists aided and abetted by the usual host of useful idiots – as Lenin used to call them – in academia and the news media.
Mr. Obama, of course, as climate communist in chief, will go to the U.N. meeting. But the Chinese and Indian heads of government will not be there – and they account for a third of the world's population between them.
The extent to which tyranny by treaty is replacing democracy may be gauged by a remark by M. Laurance Tubiana, France's "climate ambassador" to the U.N., who told one of the newspapers that world "leaders" recognized what he called "the difficulties of the U.S. situation."
What he meant by this is that Mr. Obama is powerless to inflict any treaty on the U.S. unless he can convince two-thirds of the Senate to ratify it. And that is not going to happen anytime soon. Indeed, in the forthcoming midterms, there is a possibility that the GOP may take overall control of the Senate, albeit by a narrow margin.
The "difficulties" at which M. Tubiana is so exercised were put there, for very good reason, by your Founding Fathers, who wanted to make sure that no person occupying the office of president could sign away your freedoms by treaty without a two-thirds majority in the now-elected Senate. The greatest of these "difficulties," then, is democracy itself. Self-evidently, M. Tubiana has no time for mere voters. They smell. They are illiterate. They are stupid. Leave it to us, the experts.
The GOP, at first wobbly on the climate issue, has now rightly hardened its opposition to the anti-capitalist measures proposed by Mr. Obama and his lickspittle lackeys at the EPA, for GOP leaders have realized that the supposed dangers of manmade global warming are more imaginary than real. There are even some in the Republican Party – in both Houses – who consider that the EPA has outlived what usefulness it had and should now be de-funded and swept away. Quite right, too.
Mr. Obama, powerless to bind his people by treaty, is proposing an idea as characteristically spiteful as it is characteristically pointless – to "name and shame" nations into making "legally binding" reductions in their sins of emission. He can do that without the consent of the Senate.
However, the world will simply laugh.
Where is the shame in a nation deciding that it will take no further steps to shut down its economy in the name of saving the planet, when the planet plainly does not need to be saved?
If one is a Christian, one believes the planet was triumphantly saved some 2,000 years ago. Whether theologically or meteorologically, it does not need to be saved again.
Media wishing to interview Christopher Monckton, please contact [email protected].
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