More Pseudo-Science From the Doom and Gloomers

World Leaders to Discuss Strategies for Climate Control
Bush Administration Shuns Conference On Strategies to Build on Kyoto Pact

By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 27, 2005; Page A03

The nations of the world will meet in Montreal this week to start discussing the next step in combating the global warming problem, hoping to devise a successor to the Kyoto Protocol that was scorned by the Bush administration in 2001. But the United States is saying it doesn't want to talk.

Despite the Bush administration's resistance, an assortment of U.S. elected officials, industry representatives and environmentalists are pushing to chart a new climate change strategy that will bring the United States back into international discussions while forcing developing countries to make meaningful cuts in their own carbon dioxide emissions. This push for a more flexible approach than Kyoto provided will be on full display in Montreal and could frame how the world confronts climate change in the years to come.

"Most people are ready to take the dialogue forward. The only place where that is not the case is the administration," said Eileen Claussen, president of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. Many advocates, analysts and policymakers are willing to move beyond the "one size fits all" approach of Kyoto, she added.

Climate experts such as Claussen are grappling with how best to proceed after 2012, when Kyoto -- which set a goal of cutting heat-trapping gases by 7 percent below 1990 levels by then -- expires. Scientists such as Princeton University's Michael Oppenheimer believe the world is in the middle of "the critical decade" in terms of curbing greenhouse gas emissions and needs to lock in carbon dioxide cuts soon before the warming trend has irreversible consequences.

"We do have a little time, but not much. . . . If we don't get a serious program in place for the long term in this second post-Kyoto phase, we will simply not make it and we will be crossing limits which will basically produce impacts that are unacceptable," Oppenheimer told reporters in a telephone conference call this month.

Starting tomorrow and continuing until Dec. 9, two overlapping groups will be meeting in Montreal: the 156 countries that signed Kyoto, which include every industrialized nation except the United States and Australia; and the 189 signatories to the 1992 U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, a pact without binding emissions limits that the United States and Australia have both endorsed.

Negotiators are hoping to have talks about a post-Kyoto climate strategy under the auspices of the U.N. Framework Convention, the broader coalition. But Paula J. Dobriansky, the undersecretary of state for democracy and global affairs, said the United States would prefer that each country to pursue its own way of curbing harmful emissions.

"We don't see the commencement of a negotiation process as contributing to progress now . . . given the differing positions held by parties to the Framework Convention on Climate Change," she said. "One of the best ways forward is to allow for the development of different approaches."

There continues to be no proof that man's activities have any effect, adverse or beneficial on the climate change which is occurring. There is a tremendous amount of demagoguery on this subject, but no real evidence. Opinions abound and people are prone to believe the faux science because they see some variations in climate. This is especially true when you have idiots like Robert Kennedy, Jr. and Al Gore running around touting this bad science. This is what happens when emotion rather than logic is allowed to run your life and lead you in your decisions. At that point, facts become irrelevent. Bobby Jr. is the poster boy for this kind of thinking.

Full Story: Oh No! Mr. Bill, Another Kyoto Fol de rol

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