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Description
About 300 years ago, a Flat Earth Society was founded by those who did not believe the world was round. That society still exists; it probably has about a dozen members.
--Dr R.K. Pachauri, Chairman of the IPCC, when asked on February 20 about criticisms of accepted global warming theory
THE KYOTO PROTOCOL opened for signature soon after the Conference of Parties meeting for the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change which approved the treaty in December 1997. It is still just short of the ratifications which are required to bring it into effect, and it has soaked up many hundreds of millions of dollars to bring it to this almost final stage of parturition.
The essential purpose of the Kyoto Protocol is to establish a global regime of de-carbonisation, a regime which can be described as one designed to increase, through international legal instruments and the use of trade sanctions as an enforcement mechanism, the rate of decline of carbon intensity in the economic life of the world's peoples which has been manifest since the 1850s.
US President George W. Bush formally announced in April 2001 that the USA would not ratify Kyoto. More than a year later, the Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, speaking in the House of Representatives on June 5 last year, followed suit. Both political leaders have been under sustained pressure to resile from these positions since then. Neither leader shows any sign of doing so.
The Kyoto Protocol is unique among international treaties in that its legitimacy is based on a chain of scientific and socio-economic hypotheses. These hypotheses and their interconnectedness are shown diagrammatically on the opposite page.
Much has been written about the validity of the climate models symbolised in the box labelled "General circulation models". These models use for their input data a range of atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide during the next century, and predict a range of global temperature outcomes as a consequence. When it issued its Third Assessment Report in January 2001, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)--a body established in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organisation and the United Nations Environment Panel--predicted global temperature increases by 2100 of between 1.4 and 5.8 degrees Celsius as a consequence of mankind's consumption of fossil fuels. These figures, (but mostly the higher figure) have provided ammunition for critics of President Bush and Prime Minister Howard for their refusal to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. In particular, it is noteworthy that in the USA, where there is an intense debate on America's role as the world's hegemon, and where commentators are increasingly voicing concerns about US unilateralism, the Kyoto Protocol and the International Court of Justice are almost always cited as examples of irrational unilateralism which are offensive to the "international community" and which compound America's difficulties with its allies abroad.
A number of eminent climate scientists have poured scorn on the claims made for the validity of the temperature predictions produced by these climate models. But the arguments used to justify this scorn are necessarily scientific arguments, and are almost always beyond the capacity of political leaders to comprehend, let alone to use in public debate. In every Western country but the USA, government-controlled or -funded scientific institutions, including universities, have fallen into line on global warming doctrine.
Australia is in the unique situation of having created a quasi-government department, the Australian Greenhouse Office, with a budget of a quarter of a billion dollars, and with an incentive structure for all of its officials which is predicated wholly upon the establishment of the Kyoto Protocol. With such a huge sum of money at its disposal, other institutions are easily suborned, and so the official weight of government-funded climatology and meteorology,... |
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