Blair Buries Kyoto

A few weeks ago, my mother mentioned she heard somewhere Tony Blair had abandoned the ridiculous Kyoto treaty. I couldn't find any information about that, however, not being able to find that TechCentralStation article.

Well, it seems the MSM didn't want to touch the story at the time, but the persistent work of bloggers finally brought it to the surface. It is all the more obvious that they buried this, as Blair made his remarks at an important environmental summit that received press coverage -- that ignored his shockingly total break with the party line:

Interestingly, these words from Blair, addressing an audience of a thousand at the Sheraton just a few blocks north of Times Square, failed to get any pickup in the media. Even The New York Times, published just down the street, ran a story that dwelt on the star power in the room, including King Abdullah of Jordan, Jesse Jackson, and George Stephanopoulos. "Isn't this awesome?" said one participant, and those words seemed to reflect fully the Times' take on the event.

For its part The Washington Post offered this bland headline: "Clinton Gathers World Leaders Nonpartisan Conference Focuses on Global Improvement," making no mention of Blair's global warming remarks. As for TV coverage, there wasn't much of that either; on CNN Headline News, Christi Paul said, admiringly, "former President Clinton is still looking to get things done," noting that Clinton garnered "more than $200 million in pledges" to address world problems.

What Blair in fact said, on a stage flanked by Bill Clinton and Condi Rice, was rather remarkable for its clarity:

“We have got to start from the brutal honesty about the politics of how we deal with it,” he said. “The truth is no country is going to cut its growth or consumption substantially in the light of a long-term environmental problem. To be honest, I don’t think people are going, at least in the short term, to start negotiating another major treaty like Kyoto.”
...
In his comments, Blair suggested he no longer had faith in global agreements as a way of reversing rising greenhouse gas emissions. Instead he appeared to place his faith in science, technology and the free market — a position that President George W Bush adopted when he repudiated the Kyoto treaty in 2001.

Not to mention the Senate unanimously rejecting it...And when do those folks agree on anything?

This is great because the fact is, and I say this as a physicist unconnected with the energy industry, and can report that all my colleagues have the same view, that human-influenced Global Warming is a bunch of hooey, to use a technical term. And the Kyoto treaty was a complete and utter foolish waste based on pernicious nonsense.

See here.

A pillar of the Kyoto Accord is based on flawed calculations, incorrect data and an overtly biased selection of climate records...

IPCC clearly identified two major global climatic events in the past millennium, as confirmed by thousands of papers written by quaternary geologists during the past century -- a "Medieval Warm Period" (MWP) from about 800 to 1300 A.D. that was as much as two degrees Celsius warmer than today, and a far colder "Little Ice Age" (LIA) from about 1300 to 1900 A.D. The effects of these events were felt worldwide with convincing evidence of both the MWP and LIA found in Europe, North America, Africa, the Caribbean, Peru and even in China, Japan and Australia. As part of our emergence from the LIA, scientists agreed there had been a gradual warming throughout the 20th century, although the reasons for this were hotly contested with increasing greenhouse gases (GHG) and changes in the output of the sun being leading contenders.

In recent years, however, the case for solar variations being the 20th century's major climate driver has become much stronger, much to the consternation of Kyoto supporters. After all, if long before human-induced GHG emission became significant, temperatures were considerably higher than today, there would be little reason to think today's temperatures were anything unnatural. This was especially true since long-term solar records indicated that both the MWP and LIA were closely correlated with changes in solar activity, and the output of the sun has indeed been increasing during the past century's 0.6C warming.

Got that?

Global Warming due to "greenhouse gases" is a myth.