Climate change: the bullshit bonanza

By Richard North - November 14, 2021

I would be a lot more amenable to listening to the claims of the climate worshipers if they had got things in the right order. In the normal scheme of things, the “science” comes first and then a political response is crafted to deal with the problem(s) identified.

When Booker wrote his book, “The Real Global Warming Disaster”, however, he identified a very clear sequence of events where the political pathway was well established when the science was in its infancy. Subsequently, the science was shoehorned into place, to support the political agenda.

The nature of that agenda is rarely discussed but, back in 1992, in conjunction with the Rio Earth Summit, organiser Maurice Strong published an essay entitled: “Stockholm to Rio: A Journey Down a Generation”. In this, he made no attempt to conceal the long-term agenda – nothing short of global government. To pursue this, he wrote:

The concept of national sovereignty has been an immutable, indeed sacred, principle of international relations. It is a principle which will yield only slowly and reluctantly to the new imperatives of global environmental cooperation. There is no need for a renunciation or wholesale retreat from this principle.

What is needed is recognition of the reality that in so many fields, and this is particularly true of environmental issues, it is simply not feasible for sovereignty to be exercised unilaterally by individual nation-states, however powerful. The global community must be assured of environmental security.

The outcome of the Earth Summit was Agenda 21 in which climate change played a significant part and, within that, “small island developing States” were prominently featured.

These were considered “extremely vulnerable to global warming and sea level rise, with certain small low-lying islands facing the increasing threat of the loss of their entire national territories”, and it was thus felt that they would be “constrained” in meeting the challenges posed by global warning “without the cooperation and assistance of the international community”.

Since then, these small island states have hardly ever been out of the news, no more so than the island state of Tuvalu which has become a poster child for the climate worshipers, with ever-more pleas for “development” cash, backed up by such egregious stunts as holding cabinet meetings under water.

To coincide with the CoP26 eco-fest, we have seen the latest of such stunts where Tuvalu foreign minister Simon Kofe recorded a speech standing knee-deep in the sea, illustrating the “worst-case scenario” when the island is submerged in the sea.

Claiming that he had delivered the video address in a place that used to be dry land, adding that Tuvalu was seeing a lot of coastal erosion, what Kofe failed to do though was to draw attention to a NASA study published earlier this year which showed that the area of a significant number of the islands in the Maldives archipelago were actually increasing in size.

Grudgingly, NASA acknowledged that natural processes on coral reef atolls (which would include those in Tuvalu) “might make the islands more resistant to sea level rise than their low elevations might initially suggest”. Multiple studies, it says, “show that most coral atoll islands in the Maldives and elsewhere have remained stable or even grown larger in recent decades”.

That observation is borne out by scientists from the University of Auckland, who have found that some islands have grown as much as 8 percent in size over the last 70 years. They used satellite images and data gathered on site to discover the changes.

In particular, the scientists – who reported in early 2018 – specifically examined changes in the geography of Tuvalu’s nine atolls and 101 reef islands between 1971 and 2014. They found eight of the atolls and almost three-quarters of the islands had grown during the study period, lifting Tuvalu’s total land area by 2.9 percent, even though sea levels in the country had risen at twice the global average.

“We tend to think of Pacific atolls as static landforms that will simply be inundated as sea levels rise”, researcher Paul Kench said. “But there is growing evidence these islands are geologically dynamic and are constantly changing,” he added, going on to say that: “The study findings may seem counter-intuitive, given that (the) sea level has been rising in the region over the past half century, but the dominant mode of change over that time on Tuvalu has been expansion, not erosion”.

What these finding do is illustrate how the cataclysmic predictions, issued in the name of science by august but basically political bodies such as the IPCC, have actually preceded the real science – which paints a completely different picture.

With so much free money at stake, in the form of “loss and damage” compensation, the very last thing that was going to happen at CoP26 was for the truth to be on offer. Instead, Tuvalu’s delegate said his island nation was “literally sinking” amid sea level rises, claiming that the compensation: “is a matter of life and survival for many of us”.

Yet, this is only one example of many, of the bullshit bonanza which is CoP26, now thankfully concluded without actually committing states to phasing out fossil fuels, after India had watered down the final resolution, changing the original text from “phasing out” coal to merely “phasing down”.

Chair-thing Alok Sharma, closing the eco-fest, made the best of the agreement which had the climate worshipers spitting with fury, declaring: “We can now say with credibility that we have kept 1.5ºC alive. But, its pulse is weak and it will only survive if we keep our promises and translate commitments into rapid action”.

Eco-warrior George Non-biot, from the comfort of his own keyboard, responded by Tweeting” “Now we have no choice but to raise the scale of civil disobedience until we have built the greatest mass movement in history. We do not consent to the destruction of our life support systems”, attracting 5.3 K “likes” in matter of hours.

His angst is shared by Guardian columnist John Vidal who acknowledges that the deal gets us a smidgen closer to holding temperatures to a rise of 1.5ºC. But, he complains, “as regards all the most important pledges to phase out coal, reduce subsidies and protect forests, Glasgow failed”.

The UN climate process, he then argues, “must be reformed to become more nimble”. Showing his true democratic credentials, he argues that, short of locking leaders in a room and not letting them out until they have agreed something better, the only way 1.5ºC can be achieved must now be for those countries who want progress to work outside the UN process.

This process, he says, “is slow and measured and requires consensus and compromise” – which will never do. Rather, governments can “take the gloves off, treat the few countries who are preventing climate action as criminals and reward those who do with trade deals, contracts, investments and aid”.

With Moonbat manning the barricades, and “pariah” countries being bullied by their neighbours, perhaps Tuvalu will get its cash after all – perhaps sufficient to extend and improve its international airport. The country also wants to develop its tourist industry, in what is slated as “the least visited country in the world”, offering a “non-five star experience”.

Oddly enough, plans to attract “climate change tourists” to “see it before it sinks”, might be constrained by attempts to decarbonise the airline industry, making travel to the area too expensive. Ironically, therefore, climate change could after all prove to be Tuvalu’s greatest threat, but not in the sense that we know it.