Reaching an agreement in Cancun is out of reach. Representatives are desperate, and so they will go through every motion to give the appearance they are doing something – anything. They are obligated to go through the formalities of trying, after all.
Der Spiegel reports here that Germany’s Environment Minister Norbert Röttgen is now singing a whole new tune. Instead of singing the blues, he’s now whistling Dixie! And that likely through his you know what. Der Spiegel wrote yesterday:
The German environment minister, it would seem, is tired of issuing dark warnings of impending climate change disaster. ‘In Germany, we have begun to see things in a different light in recent years,’ Norbert Röttgen said on Wednesday during his first appearance at the UN climate summit in Cancun, Mexico. ‘People in business, in politics and in the society at large no longer see climate change as a threat, but as an opportunity and a challenge.’
Suddenly it’s no longer a threat, and now climate change will bring us opportunities. Obviously leaders have realised that people are not being scared into acceptong policy anymore, and so now the new tactic is to try to lure them into policy with pretty pictures.
Face it, the panic tactic has failed. Climate change is 10,000 times more boring than watching grass grow. It’s a very slow process. Indeed it would take a human an entire lifetime to even notice today’s sea level rise rate. That’s why the tactic of pretty pictures and nice stories is now being tried.
Röttgen claims:
Our strategy of investing in renewable energies and energy efficiency proved itself successful in times of economic and financial crisis.
If we approach our target in an efficient manner, we will have created 500,000 additional jobs by 2020 and will spend over €20 billion ($27 billion) less on energy imports.”
Sounds good on the surface. But what is not mentioned is that consumers would be forced to buy up expensive renewable energy at, let’s say, 35 cents a kwh instead of importing it for 3 cents a kwh – or producing it domestically with conventional methods for 4 cents a kwh. In the end, its the poor consumer who would get screwed, and man-made climate change would still remain a fairy tale.
Don’t expect this new rosy facade put on by Röttgen to sway positions, which have long since been decided and cemented. Der Spiegel writes:
China, however, continues to resist concrete targets for cuts in its greenhouse gas emissions. Early in the week, there were some reports from the talks in Cancun that China may be prepared to compromise. Deputy Chinese climate negotiator Liu Zhenmin said on Monday, however, that such reports resulted from a “misunderstanding.” Pledges from Beijing, he said, are “voluntary” and “non-negotiable.”
Non-negotiable. And as far as the USA is concerned any bill reaching Congress would be DOA.
For those of you out there still worried that leaders might do something really stupid, and actually sign something – stop worrying. Merkel hasn’t jumped on any jet to Cancun, and she isn’t going to. Cancun was pronounced dead before it even got started.
Parading the dead body that is Cancun through the conference may make it look like it’s alive, but it’s still dead. Time to bury it.
Important: study finds correlation between cosmic ray levels and tree ring growth.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_8311000/8311373.stm
They go out of their way to discard the Svensmark hypothesis but i think the connection can only work via clouds. We will see some arguments about this.
Oh sorry, old study – didn’t check the date:
19 October 2009
Anyhow, it was new to me…
Sorry to go even further OT but i just had a small enlightenment. It’s so obvious.
Why do climatologists hate new evidence-based discoveries? They hate it; they fight it, they try to rebut it as far as they can. Why? This is completely contradicting the behaviour in other scientific fields.
The reason is: Every time a new mechanism gets discovered they would have to rework their computer programs to take it into account – imagine, just after you made your complicated GCM hindcast the past correctly, and you had to find the exact right combination of 20 parameters to have the best curve fit, comes some post doc scientist with a study that proves the influence of, say, cosmic rays.
You have to make it go away, or you would have to start from scratch with your huge computer model all over again!
They are simply red-queened; they lose ground even while running under the shifting sands of knowledge… Their GCMs are their own maintenance nightmare, and they must suppress all new science because they need to perfect their beautiful mechanisms!
“If we approach our target in an efficient manner, we will have created 500,000 additional jobs by 2020 and will spend over €20 billion ($27 billion) less on energy imports.”
500,000 jobs and $27 B over 10 years is nothing, and that’s only if they approach the targets in an efficient manner (which they won’t). In other words they are selling a small growth oportunity with a good chance it will be a loss. In reality the EU is stuck with their corrupt carbon trading albatross and now they are trying to keep it afloat. The EU carbon exchange is doomed just like the Chicago Exchange and they know it.
Don’t forget the scheme was invented by the Red-Green government.
There will be always an occasion to earn the money. It doesn’t really matter if the AGW is true!
Like every capable politician, he knows when a vote winner becomes a vote loser. After the bloodbath in the mid terms in America, the writing was on the wall for AGW.
Pointman
This is all fine but the planned German Energy policies for the next 30 years are devastating.
I personally give a rats ass what our dim politicians are saying.
What counts are the deadly policies that are devastating the economy.
As long as this death march continues it is my advice to pack your bags and leave the land of the demagogues.
There are beautiful countries outside the EU that will serve you a lot better than the potential slaughterhouse our idiot establishment is preparing for.
You’re right about that. Even though a global treaty will not get signed, that won’t stop single countries from leaping without first looking.
Does this mean AGW is dead as well? Or climate change is worst than we thought?
It means the current German government will go on proclaiming victory while at the same time not ratifying any new CO2 reduction treaty, and at the same time continuing to ramp down the subsidies for new renewable energy installations.
AGW as a political MO is dead.
They have bigger fish to fry – trying to save the Eurozone from collapse, and planning for the Euro collapse.