Vocal Voices

The media is falling over itself with plaudits about the Paris "agreement". No amount of back-slapping the politicians can hide the fact that there is no such thing.

The text contains a lot of requests, invites, urges and notes but lacks demands, enforces, punishes or fines.

$100bn per year will be given to poorer nations by 2020 to help them cope with climate change, but nobody knows who will be giving it or how it will be spent. There are no details, no figures apart from an overall %, on who will be dropping their greenhouse gas emissions, to what level, or by when - only hopes.

Analysis here shows that the deal in Paris will still give a 2.7C rise and not the 1.5C fantasy figure hoped for.

Give it a year and it will be seen as what it was: another Copenhagen.

A lot of tosh!! Giving a load more cash to "Developing" nations can only lead to more people being produced and I think over population of the world is a main contributory to global warming. This does not even seem to have been mentioned at the conference and may even be the root cause. Every person causes some degree of warming in some way or other and if every child born lived to 100 disaster would overtake us fairly quickly, yet there are nutters trying to find ways to increase the population.

Workingman wrote:$100bn per year will be given to poorer nations by 2020 to help them cope with climate change.

New Mercedes limos all round! A new Swiss bank account!

cromwell wrote:

Workingman wrote:$100bn per year will be given to poorer nations by 2020 to help them cope with climate change.

New Mercedes limos all round! A new Swiss bank account!

Interesting observation really. $100bn is nothing more than a bribe because the rest of the world can't afford the developing nations to develop too much. They are in a cleft stick.

Develop fast on coal and the world drowns, including the western hegemony that exists today.
Develop fast on new high tech renewable energy and they begin to threaten the monopoly the developed nations have on the products and services of the world.

It must be terrible to be so conflicted.....

Is it any wonder that these accords fail every time. It is a mark of the ability, power and resourcefulness of Clinton and Gore that there has only been one accord which even came close to working.

Or was it that, before y2k and all the financial disasters that followed, that the developed nations never really understood the true price of pulling the world back from the brink of a climate which is not liveable for the majority of the population????

So they decided not to pay it.

The way politicians spin things is almost worthy of admiration.

Energy Secretary Amber Rudd tells us that this is the start and that we will transition to a low carbon economy.

The start was supposed to be in 1997 after Kyoto, and that came about after decades of protests, arguments and negotiations. Look at the ages of the delegate, they have all been around all the time this problem has been on the agenda. Every single one of them has seen the global population rise from ~3.5bn in the 1960s to over 7bn today, and yet it never gets a mention as part of the "climate" problem. The prediction is that it will be 8bn within the next ten years. All of these new people will need food, water, energy, accommodation and space to live. I see nowhere where this is taken into account.

At best we are 18 years late in starting, and at worst, 40 years or more, even then we are starting from the wrong place.

I only want to see one statement come out of these shindigs and I never do.

"The current raise of heat trapping gasses in the atmosphere is sufficient to become a real threat to the entire world. Continuing to increase these gasses creates a threat to the human species not just the individual".

Until they get that right, they are never going to take the steps to resolve it.

Anything less is just hot air. I would say free hot air but the cost to the environment of getting them all there is not negligible.... So, in the end, it is very expensive hot air. For our survival that is.

But don't all these extra people impact on the climate problem?

They use up resources, energy, fossil fuels....

The ingenuity of our scientists, engineers and inventors have made things so that each individual has a lesser impact on the environment than previously, but in doing so they have allowed more of us to take part. The end result is that each of us does less damage than was the case in the past, but collectively we do more damage.

They do indeed.

But until we state the problem clearly, then we can't get to the root of our creation of that problem.

For instance, 700m people do more damage to the climate of the world than 4bn in the 3rd world. So those 4bn are not going to accept that the 700m can put limits on them or that those 700m have a say in how they run their countries. After all it is not the 4bn who are sinking the climate of the world (as they see it), it is the 700m doing that. After all if the 4bn were to evolve with carbon neutral farming, transport and power, they would be the one's demanding that the 700m reduce their population and impact on the planet.

That is their argument and they are using it well. So the subject is not open for discussion, which is why we don't see it acknowledged.

I didn't see any mention of putting a stop to creating more Airfields.
China has, of late, created dozens of new ones. Surely all this is worsening the problem?

And will the car population still continue to grow, year by year? Of course it will.

We will never solve the problem of global warming until we stop all this travel activity.
We managed quite well without it not so very long ago.

I think this is a simple enough reason. From the US climate.dot.gov.

This is the overall emissions map.



This is the division of the 28% which constitute transport.


Granted that the 3.1% which represents air travel does inject the CO2 at a high altitude and the planes do create a very small amount of cloud.

But. Tax on aircraft for "global warming" reasons are nothing more than a tax grab. If you look at that first chart, every single slice in there is significantly higher than Aircraft. In fact the lowest category is almost twice Aircraft. Electricity generation is more than 10 times greater.

Even then, most aircraft flights are to places where other travel is simply not feasible. I'm not talking Edinburgh to London, I'm talking about International and transcontinental.

Now here's the lie to the taxes on aircraft. If your flight is inessential and should be discouraged, then the take off tax should be larger for the flights which you can use other means.

What have the governments done? The inessential flights in the EU, for which you could use rail or your car, carry a small take off tax. The flights which have no alternative (US/Aus/Asia/Africa), carry 4 times the take off tax.

Talking about aircraft when we are filling the planet up with Power CO2, Industrial CO2 and Truck and Car CO2 is a classic misdirection created by those who can't or won't address the real problem. But they'll sure make a quick buck out of it....