Kumbaya in Paris is Collective Insanity

One definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. That is what just took place at the climate meeting in Paris and has been taking place every year since the meeting that produced the Kyoto Treaty.

The scenario and outcome is always the same. Thousands of delegates spend two weeks debating how to reach a global agreement to save the planet, run beyond the set deadline, fail in their effort but always find a way to claim progress.  The media is hailing this just-completed meeting as historic, presumably because leaders such as President Obama call it historic.  It is not and we should be thankful for another failure because serious economic damage from carbon suppression will be averted.

At the conclusion of the meeting, the director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, Dr. Benny Peiser, posted these comments.  “The Paris agreement is another acknowledgement of international reality.  The deal is further proof, if any was needed, that the developing world will not agree to any legally binding caps, never mind reductions of their CO2 emissions.”

“As seasoned observers predicted, the Paris deal is based on a voluntary basis which allows nations to set their own voluntary CO2 targets and policies without any legally binding caps or international oversight.”

“In contrast to the Kyoto Protocol, the Paris deal removes all legal obligations for governments to cap or reduce CO2 emissions.  This voluntary agreement also removes the mad rush into unrealistic decarbonisation policies that are both economically and politically unsustainable.”  

Dr. Peiser then added a footnote, “

We would like to apologise  …as this is exactly the same statement we issued a year ago, with the sole change of Paris for Lima; but since there has been no substantive change in the COP21 deal there is no change in our assessment.

The deal is described as historic because 180 nations have pledged to submit voluntary plans to move away from carbon based economies, to cut fossil fuel subsidies, to increase research and development expenditures, and to commit at least $100 billion dollars annually to clean energy for developing countries.  The only real difference between this meeting and its predecessors is that delegates abandoned the call for a legally binding treaty, which the French President said was mandatory before the meeting.

Like the results of past meetings, nothing dramatically different will happen, especially with the commitment to developing countries.  As developed nations struggle to achieve even modest levels of economic growth, where will $100 billion and more come from?  In fact, it will be honored in the breech as past commitments have been.  Neither the Clean Development Mechanism nor the Millennium Challenge objectives have been met.  Money has been wasted, enterprising companies have made money, and there are still over 1 billion people who live in extreme poverty.  

As the late historian Daniel Boorstin chronicled in his 1964 book The Image, politicians excel in creating images that substitute for reality and then convince us that the image is reality.  The political leaders at COP-21 have demonstrated that with a meaningless agreement that will not be implemented for practical and economic reasons.  Like the man who walks to the head of the parade and then claims to be leading it, cleaver political leaders now claim that they have averted a climate catastrophe that was unlikely to happen.  

Professor Judith Curry and other scientists who have reviewed Iscience assessment reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) point out that its estimates of climate sensitivity—the amount of warming from doubling CO2—have gradually been reduced. 

In past reports, the IPCC stated that “climate sensitivity is likely to be in the range 2 degree C to 4.5 C with a best estimate of about 3C… .”  In its latest report, the lower range has been reduced to 1.5 C and the best estimate dropped.  In her research, Curry concludes that the best estimate is likely to be 1.64 C, almost half of the IPCC’s.  This change might seem trivial but it is not:  3C equals 5.4F while 1.64 equals 2.9 F, which would hardly be catastrophic and based on the physics of CO2 would take almost a century to be reached.  

While the adherents to the climate orthodoxy cling to their evangelistic beliefs about eliminating the use of fossil fuels to save the planet, the shrewd political leaders of COP-21 now claim victory and brandish their legacy.