Klimaatactivisten wanhopig over klimaattop Parijs: fraude en verraad!

 

Klimaatsceptici als de Belgische professor István Markó noemen de uitkomst van de klimaattop in Parijs ‘een grote illusie’, een ‘verpletterend fiasco’ en ‘wensdenken’. Markó noemt de doelstelling om de opwarming tot 2 graden C te beperken onrealistisch – en dat geldt a fortiori voor de 1,5 graden doelstelling, die hij lachwekkend vindt.

Lees verder hier.

Maar ook klimaatactivisten als James Hansen, George Montbiot, Naomi Klein, en Bill McKibben zijn diep ongelukkig met het resultaat – getuige kwalificaties als fraude en verraad – maar dan om andere redenen.

James Hansen, die door de media vaak wordt opgevoerd als NASA-wetenschapper, was het sterkst in zijn afkeuring. Maar is die gesuggereerde NASA–connectie wel helemaal kosjer? Nou nee, Hansen was directeur van een semi–onafhankelijk filiaal van de NASA: het ‘NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies’. Met zijn extreem klimaatactivisme wordt Hansen door velen binnen de moederorganisatie als een smet op het blazoen en een nagel aan hun doodskist beschouwd.

Onder de titel, ‘James Hansen, father of climate change awareness, calls Paris talks ‘a fraud’, schreef Oliver Milman in ‘The Guardian:

The former Nasa scientist criticizes the talks, intended to reach a new global deal on cutting carbon emissions beyond 2020, as ‘no action, just promises’. John Kerry rejects scientist’s claim Paris talks were ‘fraud’.

Mere mention of the Paris climate talks is enough to make James Hansen grumpy. The former Nasa scientist, considered the father of global awareness of climate change, is a soft-spoken, almost diffident Iowan. But when he talks about the gathering of nearly 200 nations, his demeanour changes.

“It’s a fraud really, a fake,” he says, rubbing his head. “It’s just bullshit for them to say: ‘We’ll have a 2C warming target and then try to do a little better every five years.’ It’s just worthless words. There is no action, just promises. As long as fossil fuels appear to be the cheapest fuels out there, they will be continued to be burned.” …

But, according to Hansen, the international jamboree is pointless unless greenhouse gas emissions are taxed across the board. He argues that only this will force down emissions quickly enough to avoid the worst ravages of climate change.

In de rest van het artikel geeft Milman Hansen alle ruimte om zijn gal te spuwen over de kortzichtigheid van de politiek, waarbij vooral de Republikeinen (wie anders?) het moeten ontgelden.

Maar ook Obama schiet tekort volgens Hansen:

“We all foolishly had such high hopes for Obama, to articulate things, to be like Roosevelt and have fireside chats to explain to the public why we need to have a rising fee on carbon in order to move to clean energy,” he says. “But he’s not particularly good at that. He didn’t make it a priority and now it’s too late for him.”

Lees verder hier.

Onder de titel, ‘Grand promises of Paris climate deal undermined by squalid retrenchments’, schreef George Monbiot in ‘The Guardian’:

Until governments undertake to keep fossil fuels in the ground, they will continue to undermine agreement they have just made.

By comparison to what it could have been, it’s a miracle. By comparison to what it should have been, it’s a disaster.

Inside the narrow frame within which the talks have taken place, the draft agreement at the UN climate talks in Paris is a great success. The relief and self-congratulation with which the final text was greeted, acknowledges the failure at Copenhagen six years ago, where the negotiations ran wildly over time before collapsing. The Paris agreement is still awaiting formal adoption, but its aspirational limit of 1.5C of global warming, after the rejection of this demand for so many years, can be seen within this frame as a resounding victory. In this respect and others, the final text is stronger than most people anticipated.

Outside the frame it looks like something else. I doubt any of the negotiators believe that there will be no more than 1.5C of global warming as a result of these talks. As the preamble to the agreement acknowledges, even 2C, in view of the weak promises governments brought to Paris, is wildly ambitious. Though negotiated by some nations in good faith, the real outcomes are likely to commit us to levels of climate breakdown that will be dangerous to all and lethal to some. Our governments talk of not burdening future generations with debt. But they have just agreed to burden our successors with a far more dangerous legacy: the carbon dioxide produced by the continued burning of fossil fuels, and the long-running impacts this will exert on the global climate.

En vervolgens herhaalt Montbiot maar weer eens de grijsgedraaide plaat met de bekende litanie van klimaatellende die ons te wachten staat, maar die nog steeds niet wil komen.

With Barack Obama in the White House and a dirigiste government overseeing the negotiations in Paris, this is as good as it is ever likely to get. No likely successor to the US president will show the same commitment. In countries like the UK, grand promises abroad are undermined by squalid retrenchments at home. Whatever happens now, we will not be viewed kindly by succeeding generations.

So yes, let the delegates congratulate themselves on a better agreement than might have been expected. And let them temper it with an apology to all those it will betray.

Lees verder hier.

Onder de titel, ‘Naomi Klein, Bill McKibben Knock Paris Climate Deal. Too little, too late. Redouble the fight, say two leading activists’, schreef David Beers, voor ‘TheTyee.ca’:

Two of the world’s foremost advocates for action against climate change have let it be known they are largely unimpressed with the COP21 agreement in Paris.

Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything and Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, characterize the deal as too little too late. Still, both famous journalist-activists mark COP21 as a potential catalyst for heightened activism to pressure the world’s governments to do more to forestall a greenhouse-gas fueled catastrophe.

In an interview today with Huffington Post UK, Klein sounded out of step with the enthusiasm voiced by many other climate change fighters when the accord was hammered out.

“It’s a very strange thing to cheer for setting a target that you are knowingly failing to meet,” Klein told her interviewer.

“It’s like going: ‘I acknowledge that I will die of a heart attack if I don’t radically lower my blood pressure. I acknowledge that in order to do that I need to cut out alcohol, fatty foods and exercise every day. I therefore will exercise once a week, eat four hamburgers instead of five and only binge drink twice a week and you have to call me a hero because I’ve never done this before and you have no idea how lazy I used to be.'”

Later in the interview Klein emphasized that climate change and economic justice must be linked in efforts for progressive social change. …

Writing yesterday in the op-ed pages of the New York Times under the headline “Falling Short on Climate in Paris,” McKibben assailed the fossil-fuel industry’s decades of self-serving propaganda for putting the world’s nations, likely, too far in the hole to fend off climate disaster. And he portrayed COP21 as too much a compromise.

Signatories, he wrote, “like gas station owners on opposite corners looking at each other’s prices, have calibrated their targets about the same: enough to keep both environmentalists and the fossil fuel industry from complaining too much. They have managed to provide enough financing to keep poor countries from walking out of the talks, but not enough to really push the renewables revolution into high gear.”

McKibben doubted Congress would approve America’s pledged contribution of $800 million and even that amount he termed “risible compared to the need.”

Lees verder hier.

Oh Heer, verlos ons van deze onheilsprofeten en de goedgelovige media die hun uitspraken kritiekloos verspreiden! Waar halen de catastrofisten toch hun apocalyptische visioenen vandaan? Die ontlenen zij aan de projecties van klimaatmodellen – en niets anders. Maar zijn die betrouwbaar? Nee, dat zijn ze niet. Ze kunnen nog niet eens het verleden ‘voorspellen’, laat staan de toekomst. Wat deze doemprofeten drijft, is een mengsel van onberedeneerde angst, morbide fantasie, narcisme en een Messias complex.

Maar ons miljardenverslindende klimaatbeleid is eveneens daarop gebaseerd. Het is een triomf van obscurantisme over rationaliteit.

Voor mijn eerdere bijdragen over klimaat en aanverwante zaken zie hier, hier, hier, hier en hier.