Following is an excerpt from an article written by Dr. Sallie Baliunas (Harvard U Astrophysicist), Dr. Tim Patterson (Carleton U Paleoclimatologist) and me in 2002. The world is now entering a ~30-year cooling phase , and the Kyoto Protocol is in disrepute. Our list of fatal flaws in Kyoto has proven to be remarkably accurate.

THE KYOTO ACCORD - POINT AND COUNTERPOINT

PEGG - November 2002

Excerpt:

Kyoto has many fatal flaws, any one of which should cause this treaty to be scrapped. Climate science does not support the theory of catastrophic human-made global warming - the alleged warming crisis does not exist.  Kyoto focuses primarily on reducing CO2, a relatively harmless gas, and does nothing to control real air pollution like NOx, SO2, and particulates, or serious pollutants in water and soil.

Kyoto wastes enormous resources that are urgently needed to solve real environmental and social problems that exist today. For example, the money spent on Kyoto in one year would provide clean drinking water and sanitation for all the people of the developing world in perpetuity.

Kyoto will destroy hundreds of thousands of jobs and damage the Canadian economy - the U.S., Canada’s biggest trading partner, will not ratify Kyoto, and developing countries are exempt.  Kyoto will actually hurt the global environment - it will cause energy-intensive industries to move to exempted developing countries that do not control even the worst forms of pollution.

Kyoto’s CO2 credit trading scheme punishes the most energy efficient countries and rewards the most wasteful. Due to the strange rules of Kyoto, Canada will pay the former Soviet Union billions of dollars per year for CO2 credits. Kyoto will be ineffective - even assuming the overstated pro-Kyoto science is correct, Kyoto will reduce projected warming insignificantly, and it would take as many as 40 such treaties to stop alleged global warming.

The ultimate agenda of pro-Kyoto advocates is to eliminate fossil fuels, but this would result in a catastrophic shortfall in global energy supply - the wasteful, inefficient energy solutions proposed by Kyoto advocates simply cannot replace fossil fuels. [end of excerpt]

This elegantly-written 2001 comment by Dr. Richard Lindzen of MIT is worth repeating:

“We are not in a position to confidently attribute past climate change to carbon dioxide or to forecast what the climate will be in the future...” “Science, in the public arena, is commonly used as a source of authority with which to bludgeon political opponents and propagandize uninformed citizens. This is what has been done with both the reports of the IPCC and the NAS. It is a reprehensible practice that corrodes our ability to make rational decisions. A fairer view of the science will show that there is still a vast amount of uncertainty - far more than advocates of Kyoto would like to acknowledge...”

Best regards to all for the Holidays

Allan M R. MacRae