By Simon Caldwell, Daily Mail
Pope Benedict XVI has launched a surprise attack on climate change prophets of doom, warning them that any solutions to global warming must be based on firm evidence and not on dubious ideology. The leader of more than a billion Roman Catholics suggested that fears over man-made emissions melting the ice caps and causing a wave of unprecedented disasters were nothing more than scare-mongering. The German-born Pontiff said that while some concerns may be valid it was vital that the international community based its policies on science rather than the dogma of the environmentalist movement. His remarks will be made in his annual message for World Peace Day on January 1, but they were released as delegates from all over the world convened on the Indonesian holiday island of Bali for UN climate change talks.
“It is important for assessments in this regard to be carried out prudently, in dialogue with experts and people of wisdom, uninhibited by ideological pressure to draw hasty conclusions, and above all with the aim of reaching agreement on a model of sustainable development capable of ensuring the well-being of all while respecting environmental balances. “If the protection of the environment involves costs, they should be justly distributed, taking due account of the different levels of development of various countries and the need for solidarity with future generations. “Prudence does not mean failing to accept responsibilities and postponing decisions; it means being committed to making joint decisions after pondering responsibly the road to be taken.”
Read more here.
By Terence Corcoran, National Post
By the time you read this, Al Gore will already have made his presentation to IPCC delegates, no doubt attracting global coverage from the thousands of media reps combing for nits of news at an event that offers little. By early last night, the Gore petition had accumulated 239,150 names. A box-office disaster, one would think, for a climate event that’s the product of a decade of polished political showmanship, billion-dollar marketing campaigns and relentless manufacturing of headline hyperbole.
On the hype front, which one would have thought pretty well exhausted by now, the Secretary-General of the United Nations cranked out a fresh one: “We are at a crossroads,” Ban Ki-moon said. “One path leads to a comprehensive climate-change agreement; the other to oblivion.” Oblivion! From now on, Mr. Ban is to be known around these parts as Ban Ka-boom!
Silly, to be sure, but what else can one do in the face of meetings such as Bali, where thousands gather to needle 190 governments into some kind of action to reduce the world’s output of carbon emissions, the objective being to change the global climate for the next 100 years and preserve some pseudo-scientific idea of what the world’s climate should be. Also on the agenda are schemes to redistribute unidentified megatonnes of cash and wealth from one part of the world to another.
This call to reason is obviously no match for Al Gore in the global competition for attention over climate change. It contains no warning of looming Armageddon. It offers no choice between oblivion and salvation. It simply suggests that Bali and the the whole IPCC process is a big mistake that will ultimately be futile. Read more here.
An international team of scientists skeptical of man-made climate fears promoted by the UN and former Vice President Al Gore, descended on Bali this week to urge the world to “have the courage to do nothing” in response to UN demands. Lord Christopher Monckton, a UK climate researcher, had a blunt message for UN climate conference participants on Monday. “Climate change is a non problem. The right answer to a non problem is to have the courage to do nothing,” Monckton told participants. “The UN conference is a complete waste of our time and your money and we should no longer pay the slightest attention to the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,)” Monckton added. Monckton also noted that the UN has not been overly welcoming to the group of skeptical scientists. “UN organizers refused my credentials and appeared desperate that I should not come to this conference. They have also made several attempts to interfere with our public meetings,” Monckton explained.
“It is a circus here,” agreed Australian scientist Dr. David Evans. Evans is making scientific presentations to delegates and journalists at the conference revealing the latest peer-reviewed studies that refute the UN’s climate claims. “This is the most lavish conference I have ever been to, but I am only a scientist and I actually only go to the science conferences,” Evans said, noting the luxury of the tropical resort. Evans, a mathematician who did carbon accounting for the Australian government, recently converted to a skeptical scientist about man-made global warming after reviewing the new scientific studies.
“We now have quite a lot of evidence that carbon emissions definitely don’t cause global warming. We have the missing [human] signature [in the atmosphere], we have the IPCC models being wrong and we have the lack of a temperature going up the last 5 years,” Evans said in an interview with the Inhofe EPW Press Blog. Evans authored a November 28 2007 paper ”Carbon Emissions Don’t Cause Global Warming.” Evans touted a new peer-reviewed study by a team of scientists appearing in the December 2007 issue of the International Journal of Climatology of the Royal Meteorological Society which found “Warming is naturally caused and shows no human influence.” “Most of the people here have jobs that are very well paid and they depend on the idea that carbon emissions cause global warming. They are not going to be very receptive to the idea that well actually the science has gone off in a different direction,” Evans explained.
UN IPCC reviewer and climate researcher Dr. Vincent Gray of New Zealand, an expert reviewer on every single draft of the IPCC reports since its inception going back to 1990, had a clear message to UN participants. “There is no evidence that carbon dioxide increases are having any affect whatsoever on the climate,” Gray, who shares in the Nobel Prize awarded to the UN IPCC, explained. “All the science of the IPCC is unsound. I have come to this conclusion after a very long time. Read more here