COP IT LIKE IT'S HOT COP29 - Follow the Money

By Demosthenes on

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"People are stupid; given proper motivation, almost anyone will believe almost anything. Because people are stupid, they will believe a lie because they want to believe it's true, or because they are afraid it might be true. People's heads are full of knowledge, facts, and beliefs, and most of it is false, yet they think it all true. People are stupid; they can only rarely tell the difference between a lie and the truth, and yet they are confident they can, and so are all the easier to fool."

- Zeddicus Zu'l Zorander, ‘Wizard's First Rule


Welcome to COP or "Conference of the Parties" - ‘parties’ referring to the 200 countries that ratified the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) in 1992. Hosted this year is notorious sanctuary of progressive liberalism, Azerbaijan, around 50,000 delegates flew in via various forms of passenger and (mostly) private jets to debate just how many zeroes should be added on the ends of tin-pot dictators’ Swiss bank accounts this time round. 

Third-World despots and Pacific kleptocrats alike descended on proceedings as carrion feeders smelling wounded prey. The old and bloated beast of Western Civilisation lay flailing about in confusion and pain, unable even to muster up the energy or courage required to bat away the scavengers feasting on its living corpse. 

Shortly after the $300 billion a year deal was passed, India's representative, Chandni Raina, made a predictably histrionic speech - “We cannot accept it, the proposed goal will not solve anything for us. It is not conducive to climate action that is necessary to the survival of our country.” Describing the amount as “A paltry sum” to raucous applause by the assembled gathering… and awkward glances from the few remaining pale-faces. 

For context, despite being the world’s 5th richest economy and 3rd largest CO2 emitter, India is still technically classified as a ‘developing country’ according to the original UN framework back in 1992 - and therefore fully entitled to a slice of the 300 billion dollar pie Westerners have acquiesced to baking each year for the foreseeable future. 

Given her flamboyant degree of concern, one wonders why Ms Raina, as the serving Economic Adviser in India’s Ministry of Finance, does not consider petitioning her own governmental colleagues to maybe rein-in the $1.8 billion they spend on India’s space program per annum? 

Also reacting to the deal was ActionAid UK’s ‘senior climate specialist’ Zahra Hdidou, saying it was an "alarming step back… far short of the trillions needed to help the Global South adapt to the climate crisis.” Meanwhile, Nigeria's envoy Nkiruka Maduekwe described the deal as an "insult”. 

Ali Mohamed, of Kenya, who chairs the African Group - an influential bloc made up of 54 nations - decried the $250bn figure being floated earlier in negotiations as "totally unacceptable and inadequate" and that the countries he represents wanted at least $1.3 trillion from Western governments or it would certainly lead to “unacceptable loss of life in Africa and around the world.” 

Somewhat rich given the Kenyan Penal Code prescribes penalties of up to 14 years imprisonment for consensual same-sex relations between adults, and where extra-judicial killings of rival politicians and journalists are rife. 

Evans Njewa, chair of the Least Developed Countries group, who is from Malawi (incidentally also a country where homosexuality is illegal) said - “We remain committed to a fair and balanced process. It's for the survival of our 1.1 billion people and our planet."

Piling-on was Mohamed Adow, of Power Shift Africa, complaining the deal no longer specifically required ‘rich nations’ to contribute cash, and that instead the money could come from any country - "It’s a great escape effectively" adding his suspicion that the US was behind such an outrage - "This is largely as a result of the fear of the incoming Donald Trump administration.” 

Colombia's representative, Environment Minister, Susana Muhamad - curiously of Palestinian roots - went further still. On Trump’s re-election she said “It is absolutely a disaster for global climate, because the U.S. is one of the big emitters in the world and has a big responsibility… this trend of the far-right coming to power is not only in the U.S. We have seen that happening in Europe. We have seen that in Latin America.”

Even the Taliban got it on the action. Mutual Haq Nabi Kheel, chief of Afghanistan's environment protection agency (yes, seriously) told an eager BBC reporter, as irony glinted brightly in his eyes, that they would be - “raising the voice of people vulnerable to the impact of climate change, including women, children and men.” Going on to demand the international community, which suspended funding for climate projects when the Taliban seized power, should start donating to the Islamic Emirate yet again. 

The summit was joined by hordes of ‘climate activists’ - with sundry groups of protesters chanting and waving flags in corners of the COP venue. Muhammed Lamin from Senegal, wearing a head-banner scrawled the words ‘PAY UP’ was among them. Speaking to the same BBC reporter, he said the world was - “In the critical hours" and it was time for communities like his to be heard - “This ship will sink” he prophesied “there will be no first class, no second class - we are all going to sink together if they don't put finance on the table."

Hmm, that sure is a lot of Muhamads, Mohameds and Muhammeds considering a recent World Value Survey found that only 8% of Muslims on Earth thought ‘Climate Change’ was the most important problem facing the globe. 

Scuttling in the background, like some kind of unkillable political cockroach, Ed Miliband, now the UK’s Energy Secretary, said COP-29 had already “Put Britain back on the map of global climate leadership" following Labour’s pledge to cut domestic emissions by 81% before 2035.

Well, pat yourself on the back Mr Miliband, because the rest of the world is laughing behind yours. As also, I suspect, is your own brother David, who this year reaped over £1 million salary for his role as President of the International Rescue Committee - supposedly running refugee, health and poverty-relief projects in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Despite being a US-based organisation, the British government (and thus the British taxpayer) lavished £30m on the charity, just to make certain Miliband’s six-figure bonus checks cleared on time. 

The feeblest of resistance was put up by the UK and EU in arguing China should contribute, pointing it out as the world’s second richest economy and the largest emitter of greenhouse gases by far. 

China, also offically classified as a ‘Developing Nation’ dismissed this out of hand, claiming it was historically a poor nation and not responsible for most global warming so far.

Just to be clear, cumulative CO2 emissions by Britain since 1750 are estimated to be around 80 billion (giga) tonnes - which represents roughly the same amount China has produced since 2018. Thus, China emitted as much CO2 in the last six years as Britain has in the last 270 combined. 

As of 2019, China was estimated to be responsible for 27% of the world's current level of greenhouse gases, followed by the US with 11%, then India with 6.6%. By 2020, China produced 66% of global emissions for the two apparently most potent greenhouse gases of tetrafluoromethane and hexafluoroethane, according to a study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Looming over it all was the prospect of US president-elect Donald Trump withdrawing the US from the COP process when he takes office for a second time, rendering any deal a moot point. He has called the whole climate change movement a “scam” and, at his victory celebration in West Palm Beach earlier this month, vowed to boost US oil production beyond its current record levels, saying, “we have more liquid gold than any country in the world”.

Despite being an Atheist, I find myself thanking God Almighty yet again that he won. 

It’s not that I don’t ‘believe in climate change’ - it’s that I believe in it all too well. Worse, I actually understand it. 

I would even go so far as to say ‘Climate Change’ is a deeply duplicitous misnomer - after all, the climate has been constantly changing throughout the history of our planet. Indeed, just over half a billion years ago the global temperature was so low that the Earth was covered in permafrost from pole to pole, with only a thin band of liquid water encircling the equator and permitting the survival of complex lifeforms. A time-period known as ‘Snowball Earth’. 

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An artist's impression of what Earth looked like during the Snowball Earth glaciations.Julio Lacerda/Studio 252MYA

More recently there were several centuries, from around 950 AD to 1250 AD, during which the global climate was considerably warmer than it is today, known to paleoclimatologists as the ‘Medaeval Warm Period’ - so warm in fact there were vineyards in Yorkshire, and Greenland really was a green land. 

The Medieval Warm Period played a significant role in shaping Europe's development during the High Middle Ages, arguably it created the High Middle Ages. The warmer conditions led to agricultural abundance, population explosion, economic prosperity, and cultural flourishing - all of which had lasting impacts on European history and culminated in the Renascence itself. 

Fast-forward another few hundred years and we come to the ‘Little Ice Age’ - a period conventionally defined as extending from the 16th to the 19th centuries where global temperatures were much, much lower than today. The winter of 1739-1740 for example, is among the coldest on record - The Thames froze for about eight weeks straight and the ice was thick enough to support bustling fairs. During the winter of 1813-1814, the last great Frost Fair was held, and the river froze solid for several days. Famously, an elephant was led across the ice near Blackfriars Bridge.

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Average temperature of the Northern Hemisphere during the past 2000 years. The grey lines are the annual reconstructed estimates. The bold curve is the low frequency component (estimable between 133 and 1925). Colours indicate especially cold and warm periods. (Cold: Migration Period and Little Ice Age; warm: Medieval Warm Period and the Present.) The thin lines are the 95% confidence intervals (uncertainty due to the variance among the different proxies used). Moberg, A., Sonechkin, D., Holmgren, K. et al.Nature 433, 613–617 (2005). 

There’s something deeply fishy and sinister in the air. I have completed degrees in Evolutionary Science, and currently practice as a medical doctor, so am very familiar with the sciences. Yet so-called ‘climatology’ is unlike anything I’ve encountered prior; the Stazi-like enforcement of orthodoxy, the emergence of child prophets preaching apocalypse, the labelling of ‘deniers’ and ‘believers’ - all have a palpable religious quality that should never be interwoven with the scientific method, which, after all, is built upon a very foundation of scepticism.

Political dogma and science are ever a toxic cocktail. We were permitted a rare glimpse behind the Green Curtain in November 2009, with the hacking of servers at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia by an external attacker, copying thousands of emails and computer files to various internet locations several weeks before the Copenhagen Summit on climate change.

The so-called ‘Climate-Gate’ emails revealed the authors of this material did not present a neutral view of ‘the science’. In particular, they downplayed the considerable uncertainty inherent in trying to approximate temperatures from proxy data over a 1000-year period. They suppressed contrary information, and ignored dissenting views in ways that made even their own colleagues uncomfortable. 

In one representative email written during the preparation of the IPCC Third Assessment Report (TAR), Keith Briffa, climatologist and then-deputy director of the CRU, stated that - "I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards 'apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data' but in reality the situation is not quite so simple." He went on to say - "I believe that the recent warmth was probably matched about 1000 years ago." 

Similarly, another key researcher, Ed Cook, in a lengthy email bristling at the effort to eliminate the MWP, wrote "I do find the dismissal of the Medieval Warm Period as a meaningful global event to be grossly premature and probably wrong."

Alas, these concerns were brushed aside in the final report, which presented a version of temperature records based on the now-infamous ‘hockey stick’ study of Mann et al., purporting to show 1000 years of slightly declining global temperatures followed by a sharp increase in the 20th century. The hockey stick paper concluded that the 1990s were the warmest decade and 1998 was the warmest year in a millennium. The hockey stick graph was the single most important piece of information in the TAR, and has since been widely criticised by many in the scientific community as entirely misleading, though is still displayed ubiquitously in official material nonetheless.

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The infamous ‘Hockey Stick’ graph of Mann et al. (above) compared to corrected data (below) by Moberg, A., Sonechkin, D., Holmgren, K. et al.Nature 433, 613–617 (2005)

These ‘climatologists’ are not following where the evidence takes them, as all good scientists should, but rather approaching the data looking to confirm their own pre-conceived biases, more like cultists than scientists.

In spite of that, I don’t doubt that digging up trillions of tonnes of fossilised carbon and combusting it into the atmosphere must be doing something, and the hypothesis of an atmospheric greenhouse-gas effect makes a kind of intuitive sense. Then again, so does thinking the world is flat, it certainly appears so. If history has taught us anything it is that human intuition is often strewn with errors.

As I said, the climate has always been changing and will forever continue to change, with or without Homo sapiens on the scene. That’s not the question… the question is how much of the change we are currently experiencing can be attributed to human activity - is it 90%? Is it 50%? Is it 1%? - because just for the sake of argument, if it is only a percentage or two (with Britain contributing 1% of that 1%) does it really make any sense for us to be bankrupting ourselves and crippling our economy to prevent, at most, 0.01% of the change that would have happened regardless?

This, to me, is the only question that truly matters - and the only one anyone should be asking. They either have no idea, or they won’t tell us, my money’s on the former. Indeed, I suspect Greta wouldn’t even understand the question. Whenever I’ve put these queries to climate activists they just shrug as though doesn't make a difference. I guess it's not them who'll be put out of work at the end of the day, on the contrary...

People will believe a lie if the want it to be true, or they fear that it is. I emerged from the English education system firmly convinced that global warming was the most severe threat to the planet and everything else paled in comparison. I believed anyone who didn't agree with that was just some kind of far-right conspiracy theorist.

That was about a decade ago, boy was I in for a shock when I discovered it was in fact myself who was the conspiracy theorist and ‘denier’. 

Even leaving the cancerous culture of climatology aside, almost everything about the modern sustainability moment is an abject farce. Approximately 70% of all plastic ‘recyclables’ collected in the UK is exported, as we apparently lack sufficient facilities to process all that waste domestically, and lower processing costs abroad make exporting plastics financially appealing.

We used to send the vast bulk of it to China, in a perverse trading loop where Britain would pay to import mountains of cheap plastic crap, and then pay again to export it back for China to burn in giant pits. Then in 2018, China launched the ‘National Sword’ policy, imposing strict restrictions on the import of foreign waste, especially plastics. The policy set contamination thresholds for recyclable imports at 0.5%, a standard most exporting countries, including Britain, could never hope to meet.

Thus, the British government was forced to turn to less sniffy countries like Turkey, Malaysia or Indonesia to take our rubbish and burn it in their own pits, lest we fall short of our self-imposed ‘recycling’ targets. This is where the vast majority of all those plastic milk bottles and ready-meal containers - carefully sorted into colour-coded bins by sanctimonious housewives across Middle England - end up… being transported in shipping containers halfway across the world to be combusted in Vietnamese open-air firepits, usually on former-rainforests cleared specifically for the purpose just to add insult to injury.

Encouraged by my wife, we recently watched the ‘Seaspiracy’ documentary, which from the outset seemed far more interested in promoting veganism-for-all than anything meaningful. As ever, the evil role of China is ignored entirely. That East Asian country is not only the planet's biggest seafood exporter, but their population accounts for well over a third of all fish consumed worldwide. 

Having depleted the seas close to home, the Chinese fishing fleet has been venturing farther afield to exploit the waters of other countries, including those of West Africa and Latin America, where enforcement tends to be weaker, and where they know the local governments don't have the resources to stop them or can be bribed into silence. The distant fishing fleet of China comprises around 17,000 vessels - by way of comparison, the US distant fishing fleet has less that 300 boats.

For years the Japanese were baffled why dozens of battered wooden ‘ghost ships’ - often containing the emaciated corpses of North Korean fishermen, whose starved bodies are reduced to mummified cadavers - keep washing up on their shore. 

Later it was discovered the Chinese had secretly been sending armadas of industrial fishing trawlers to illegally pillage North Korean waters, forcing out smaller boats and leading to a decline in the once-abundant squid stocks by more than 70%. The North Korean fishermen washing up in Japan seemingly ventured too far from shore in a vain, desperate search for squid and starved to death.

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Another North Korean "ghost ship" has washed ashore in Western Japan

China is raping the worlds oceans, it's as simple as that. Not only by trawling all the fish they can get their greedy hands on, but by using it as a toxic waste dump for the rivers of refuse produced by their colossal industrial economy. 

To that end, it matters not one iota whether the British people avoid haddock in Spring and eat mackerel in Autumn. Just as with global air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, our entire annual output represents but a week or two of China's. 

Any article or documentary or conference that doesn't acknowledge this simple fact is simply irrelevant.