Posted 8 June 2015
Sleepwalking into a loss of national sovereignty
by: Maurice Newman
From: The Australian
June 08, 2015
The one thing that is settled in climate science is that if you deviate from the officially sanctioned scripture, you will be severely dealt with.
Take the University of Western Australia’s withdrawal of its offer to establish the Australian Consensus Centre because it failed to conform to global-warming orthodoxy. The founder, Bjorn Lomborg, accepts the basic tenet of man’s role in global warming but differs on how to respond. In the totalitarian world of eco-catastrophism, competing views must be silenced.
Surely this bullying is wearing thin. For nearly 50 years we have been assailed with dud predictions of man-made climate disasters — first cooling, then warming.
It was always problematic that a trace gas which represents 39/1000ths of one per cent of the atmosphere could be the dominant driver of climate, and no surprise, after 18½ years of stasis, that more than 95 per cent of the IPCC’s climate models we have long been assured prove global warming’s link to CO2 emissions are in error.
Scientists from the University of NSW dutifully explain, “This is not a modelling failure, this is just a fact of life in dealing with complex systems”… “It’s clear that the overall modelled surface warming over the course of more than a century is off by only a small margin.”
Well not according to American climate scientist and IPCC expert reviewer Don Easterbrook. He says: “When we check their projections against what actually happened, they’re not even close.” IPCC lead author Hans von Storch observes: “So far no one has been able to provide a compelling case (for the model failures).”
And the goalposts keep shifting. If the heat can’t be found in the atmosphere, it must be hiding in the deep ocean. When historical temperature and sea level records don’t comply, they are homogenised.
It’s on such weak evidence that the World Bank and the United Nations expect “more developed” countries to abandon fossil fuels and spend a staggering $89 trillion over 15 years combating climate change. (World GWP is $74 trillion). Does anyone doubt such a massive wealth transfer and the power to redistribute it would change the existing world order? No wonder “big oil” is urgently seeking a place at the UN table.
The climate change movement has become the rallying point for millions of environmental activists who push their alarmist predictions into every home and parliament on the planet. They teach in schools and universities the consequences of inaction. They promote the serious ethical, moral and governance obligations imposed by our membership of the global community.
All this, according to executive secretary to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Christiana Figueres, falls into what she calls a “centralised transformation”. She openly declares the shortcomings of democracy and the benefits of communism in fighting global warming. She likes regimented societies and central intervention, not free-market capitalism.
Gideon Rachman, the Financial Times’s chief foreign affairs commentator, in a December 2008 op-ed piece wrote: “So it seems everything is in place. For the first time since homo sapiens began to doodle on cave walls, there is an argument, an opportunity and a means, to make serious steps towards a world government. A world government would involve much more than co-operation between nations. It would be an entity with state-like characteristics, backed by a body of laws. The European Union has already set up a continental government of 27 countries which could be a model.”
Indeed, but a growing number of Europeans, including Britons, now regret not listening to warnings about ceding their national sovereignty to unaccountable bureaucrats in Brussels when the Common Market was first proposed.
Green politics have long had close ties to the UN. The IPCC employs members of Greenpeace and WWF. UN Environment Program founder Maurice Strong, a lifelong Marxist, challenged the 1992 Rio Earth Summit: “Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialised civilisations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?” He said the Earth Summit would play an important role in reforming and strengthening the UN as the centrepiece of the emerging system of global governance. “Our concepts of ballot box democracy may have to be modified,” he said.
Figueres shares Strong’s Malthusian views, saying: “We are already exceeding the planet’s carrying capacity.” But is this, like climate predictions, also exaggerated? According to the Karolinska Institute’s Professor of Health, Hans Rosling, “fast population growth is coming to an end. Unprecedented in human history, the average fertility rate has halved.”
While world population growth will continue until 2050, the number of people in extreme poverty has fallen from two billion in 1980 to just over one billion today. Rosling believes “for the first time ever, the evidence suggests it is now possible for the last billion to also get out of the misery of extreme poverty in the next few decades.” He should have added, subject to free-market capitalism and access to cheap energy.
Figueres’s approach is entirely consistent with the Rio Earth Summit’s Agenda 21 where the UN, through environmentalism and wealth redistribution, seeks to call the shots. Her intentions may be good but she believes in big government and powerful, ambitious and unaccountable bureaucrats like herself. As the FT’s Rachman says, at the UN everything is in place for that. There’s no conspiracy here, it’s transparent.
So before we laugh off the prospect of global government based in Geneva and sleepwalk into surrendering more of our national sovereignty in Paris, we should wake up.
Having just commemorated the centenary of the Gallipoli landing and the 70th anniversary of Victory in Europe, it would be irresponsible to be so casual with our individual liberties and our children’s economic future.