The Copenhagen Agreement - Australia to lose sovereignty?

[Garpal Gumnut]

Im not against a World government per se, but i would be against it if it meant that people did not have the right to vote. It then becomes like a monarchy/dictorship where the standard 'peasants' have no way of making their voice heard and creates an (even) bigger divide between the haves an have nots. Too 1984ish for my liking if there is no voting involved.

Just imagine all the evil bastards you would have had on the ballot papers over the last thirty years, Pol Pot, Tony Blair, Jimmy Carter, Gus Pinochet, and Bob Mugabe to name just a few.

gg

 

[prawn_86]

SC,

I agree that the Aus system only has 2 parties as candidates, but the fact we still get to vote (although we shouldn't have to imo) is a big difference. Ultimately i would like to think that if both parties went to extremes some other party would step up and get voted in.

The problem i see with unelected govs, is not in this generation, but say in 10 generations time, when those in power feel it is their right, not privilege, to rule over others.

 

[Chris45]

Re: Australia to lose Sovereignty to an un-elected World Government in Dec 09

The New World Order idea/theory has been around for a while now, and belief is slowly growing. Just how far it will go though is still unknown, but i dont doubt that there are much higher powers out there trying to gain World control.

You wouldn't be referring to that secretive Bilderberg Group by any chance would you? There's an interesting report of their 2009 conference here:

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?aid=13738&context=va

Apparently, the main topic of discussion at this year's meeting was to address the economic crisis, in terms of undertaking, “Either a prolonged, agonizing depression that dooms the world to decades of stagnation, decline and poverty ... or an intense-but-shorter depression that paves the way for a new sustainable economic world order, with less sovereignty but more efficiency.” Other items on the agenda included a plan to “continue to deceive millions of savers and investors who believe the hype about the supposed up-turn in the economy. They are about to be set up for massive losses and searing financial pain in the months ahead,” and “There will be a final push for the enactment of Lisbon Treaty, pending on Irish voting YES on the treaty in Sept or October,”[1] which would give the European Union massive powers over its member nations, essentially making it a supranational regional government, with each country relegated to more of a provincial status.

Forget democracy, their plan is for a World Government of the people, by the billionaires, for the billionaires.

 

[prawn_86]

Chris,

As per WayneL's previous post in this thread the Lisbon Treaty has already been signed off on creating a massive Euro state essentially. Although i am not familiar with the details of that specific paper.

 

[bellenuit]

I just shot off an e-mail to my local MP asking that the issues raised in some of the links here be openly discussed. My knowledge of the agreement is based solely on what I have read here today and though this forum may be distorted (not saying it is, just acknowledging it may be) the issues are of such concern that they must be highlighted to the general public and discussed.

Although some recent posts have suggested that the agreement is not binding, one thing you can be sure of, even if it were binding our Kev would still be rushing to sign it.

Even though I detest the guy, I must agree with Ruport Murdoch when he said in a interview in the last few days that Rudd is more interested in running the world than in running Australia. The Copenhagen Agreement is just the sort of platform that Rudd would use to promote his "world" credentials and he would bask in the glory of the praise heaped on him by the faceless bureaucrats behind the agreement, even though that praise is really for selling Australia out.

 

[Garpal Gumnut]

I just shot off an e-mail to my local MP asking that the issues raised in some of the links here be openly discussed. My knowledge of the agreement is based solely on what I have read here today and though this forum may be distorted (not saying it is, just acknowledging it may be) the issues are of such concern that they must be highlighted to the general public and discussed.

Although some recent posts have suggested that the agreement is not binding, one thing you can be sure of, even if it were binding our Kev would still be rushing to sign it.

Even though I detest the guy, I must agree with Ruport Murdoch when he said in a interview in the last few days that Rudd is more interested in running the world than in running Australia. The Copenhagen Agreement is just the sort of platform that Rudd would use to promote his "world" credentials and he would bask in the glory of the praise heaped on him by the faceless bureaucrats behind the agreement, even though that praise is really for selling Australia out.

Don't worry about it.

The word is that it will be a talkfest.

Nobody has the bottle to enforce any of the controversial bits. Its dead in the water.

Next stop Mexico 2010.

gg

 

[Smurf1976]

Don't worry about it.

The word is that it will be a talkfest.

Nobody has the bottle to enforce any of the controversial bits. Its dead in the water.

Next stop Mexico 2010.

gg

Words and signing bits of paper is easy. Actually cutting emissions is another matter...

 

[bellenuit]

Don't worry about it.

The word is that it will be a talkfest.

Nobody has the bottle to enforce any of the controversial bits. Its dead in the water.
gg

We may not need to worry that the agreement will be passed, but we should be very worried that our dear leader would want to pass such an agreement in the first place. He is doing everything within his power to actual get this agreement up and running.

Somebody mentioned earlier that this issue is almost unique in that there hasn't been anyone on this forum who has tried to defend the agreement, in spite of the same posters having opposing opinions on other issues. If this is reflective of how the population as a whole would view the issue if they were aware of the facts, then the opposition is missing a golden opportunity to expose Rudd for the duplicitous creep that he is.

They should highlight the concerns raised here. Rudd will then have to defend why he wants to support selling out our sovereignty. Letting him go unchallenged because the agreement is unlikely to be passed would be another missed opportunity.

 

[Mickel]

Here is an essay by one of the lead authors on the IPCC- the panel that many world leaders (including K Rudd) cite as the conclusive evidence that carbon emissions are causing heating of the planet to an alarming degree-.

I've edited the essay as the full text is too long to repeat here.

Resisting climate hysteria

by Richard S. Lindzen

July 26, 2009

A Case Against Precipitous Climate Action

The notion of a static, unchanging climate is foreign to the history of the earth or any other planet with a fluid envelope. The fact that the developed world went into hysterics over changes in global mean temperature anomaly of a few tenths of a degree will astound future generations. Such hysteria simply represents the scientific illiteracy of much of the public, the susceptibility of the public to the substitution of repetition for truth, and the exploitation of these weaknesses by politicians, environmental promoters, and, after 20 years of media drum beating, many others as well. During the latter, alpine glaciers advanced to the chagrin of overrun villages. Since the beginning of the 19th Century these glaciers have been retreating. Frankly, we don’t fully understand either the advance or the retreat.

For small changes in climate associated with tenths of a degree, there is no need for any external cause. The earth is never exactly in equilibrium. The motions of the massive oceans where heat is moved between deep layers and the surface provides variability on time scales from years to centuries. Recent work (Tsonis et al, 2007), suggests that this variability is enough to account for all climate change since the 19th Century. Supporting the notion that man has not been the cause of this unexceptional change in temperature is the fact that there is a distinct signature to greenhouse warming: surface warming should be accompanied by warming in the tropics around an altitude of about 9km that is about 2.5 times greater than at the surface. Measurements show that warming at these levels is only about 3/4 of what is seen at the surface, implying that only about a third of the surface warming is associated with the greenhouse effect, and, quite possibly, not all of even this really small warming is due to man (Lindzen, 2007, Douglass et al, 2007). This further implies that all models predicting significant warming are greatly overestimating warming. This should not be surprising (though inevitably in climate science, when data conflicts with models, a small coterie of scientists can be counted upon to modify the data. Thus, Santer, et al (2008), argue that stretching uncertainties in observations and models might marginally eliminate the inconsistency. That the data should always need correcting to agree with models is totally implausible and indicative of a certain corruption within the climate science community).


According to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the greenhouse forcing from man made greenhouse gases is already about 86% of what one expects from a doubling of CO2 (with about half coming from methane, nitrous oxide, freons and ozone), and alarming predictions depend on models for which the sensitivity to a doubling for CO2 is greater than 2C which implies that we should already have seen much more warming than we have seen thus far, even if all the warming we have seen so far were due to man. This contradiction is rendered more acute by the fact that there has been no statistically significant net global warming for the last fourteen years. Modelers defend this situation by arguing that aerosols have cancelled much of the warming, and that models adequately account for natural unforced internal variability. However, a recent paper (Ramanathan, 2007) points out that aerosols can warm as well as cool, while scientists at the UK’s Hadley Centre for Climate Research recently noted that their model did not appropriately deal with natural internal variability thus demolishing the basis for the IPCC’s iconic attribution (Smith et al, 2007). Interestingly (though not unexpectedly), the British paper did not stress this. Rather, they speculated that natural internal variability might step aside in 2009, allowing warming to resume. Resume? Thus, the fact that warming has ceased for the past fourteen years is acknowledged. It should be noted that, more recently, German modelers have moved the date for ‘resumption’ up to 2015 (Keenlyside et al, 2008).

Given that the evidence (and I have noted only a few of many pieces of evidence) strongly implies that anthropogenic warming has been greatly exaggerated, the basis for alarm due to such warming is similarly diminished. However, a really important point is that the case for alarm would still be weak even if anthropogenic global warming were significant. Polar bears, arctic summer sea ice, regional droughts and floods, coral bleaching, hurricanes, alpine glaciers, malaria, etc. etc. all depend not on some global average of surface temperature anomaly, but on a huge number of regional variables including temperature, humidity, cloud cover, precipitation, and direction and magnitude of wind. The state of the ocean is also often crucial. Our ability to forecast any of these over periods beyond a few days is minimal (a leading modeler refers to it as essentially guesswork). Yet, each catastrophic forecast depends on each of these being in a specific range. The odds of any specific catastrophe actually occurring are almost zero. This was equally true for earlier forecasts of famine for the 1980's, global cooling in the 1970's, Y2K and many others. Regionally, year to year fluctuations in temperature are over four times larger than fluctuations in the global mean. Much of this variation has to be independent of the global mean; otherwise the global mean would vary much more. This is simply to note that factors other than global warming are more important to any specific situation. This is not to say that disasters will not occur; they always have occurred and this will not change in the future. Fighting global warming with symbolic gestures will certainly not change this. However, history tells us that greater wealth and development can profoundly increase our resilience.

In view of the above, one may reasonably ask why there is the current alarm, and, in particular, why the astounding upsurge in alarmism of the past 4 years. When an issue like global warming is around for over twenty years, numerous agendas are developed to exploit the issue. The interests of the environmental movement in acquiring more power, influence, and donations are reasonably clear. So too are the interests of bureaucrats for whom control of CO2 is a dream-come-true. After all, CO2 is a product of breathing itself. Politicians can see the possibility of taxation that will be cheerfully accepted because it is necessary for ‘saving’ the earth. Nations have seen how to exploit this issue in order to gain competitive advantages. But, by now, things have gone much further. The case of ENRON (a now bankrupt Texas energy firm) is illustrative in this respect. Before disintegrating in a pyrotechnic display of unscrupulous manipulation, ENRON had been one of the most intense lobbyists for Kyoto. It had hoped to become a trading firm dealing in carbon emission rights. This was no small hope. These rights are likely to amount to over a trillion dollars, and the commissions will run into many billions. Hedge funds are actively examining the possibilities; so was the late Lehman Brothers. Goldman Sachs has lobbied extensively for the ‘cap and trade’ bill, and is well positioned to make billions. It is probably no accident that Gore, himself, is associated with such activities. The sale of indulgences is already in full swing with organizations selling offsets to one’s carbon footprint while sometimes acknowledging that the offsets are irrelevant. The possibilities for corruption are immense. Archer Daniels Midland (America’s largest agribusiness) has successfully lobbied for ethanol requirements for gasoline, and the resulting demand for ethanol may already be contributing to large increases in corn prices and associated hardship in the developing world (not to mention poorer car performance). And finally, there are the numerous well meaning individuals who have allowed propagandists to convince them that in accepting the alarmist view of anthropogenic climate change, they are displaying intelligence and virtue For them, their psychic welfare is at stake.

With all this at stake, one can readily suspect that there might be a sense of urgency provoked by the possibility that warming may have ceased and that the case for such warming as was seen being due in significant measure to man, disintegrating. For those committed to the more venal agendas, the need to act soon, before the public appreciates the situation, is real indeed. However, for more serious leaders, the need to courageously resist hysteria is clear. Wasting resources on symbolically fighting ever present climate change is no substitute for prudence. Nor is the assumption that the earth’s climate reached a point of perfection in the middle of the twentieth century a sign of intelligence.


Richard S. Lindzen is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Link- http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/doomed-planet/2009/07/resisting-climate-hysteria


Says it all really,doesn't it !!! We should urge our Senators and Government to have an open debate on the issue and vote against any emissions trading scheme.

 

[Mickel]

I don't think anyone has mentioned this on this thread to date.

In 2007 a British High Court Judge ruled that 9 major points in Al Gore's film "An Inconvenient Truth" were in fact errors.

Here they are-

The Alleged Errors Highlighted by High Court Judge Michael Burton:

1.) The sea level will rise up to 20 feet because of the melting of either West Antarctica or Greenland in the near future. (This "Armageddon scenario" would only take place over thousands of years, the judge wrote.)

2.) Some low-lying Pacific islands have been so inundated with water that their citizens have all had to evacuate to New Zealand. ("There is no evidence of any such evacuation having yet happened.")

3.) Global warming will shut down the "ocean conveyor," by which the Gulf Stream moves across the North Atlantic to Western Europe. (According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, "it is very unlikely that the Ocean Conveyor will shut down in the future…")

4.) There is a direct coincidence between the rise in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the rise in temperature over the last 650,000 years. ("Although there is general scientific agreement that there is a connection, the two graphs do not establish what Mr. Gore asserts.")

5.) The disappearance of the snows on Mount Kilimanjaro is expressly attributable to global warming. ("However, it is common ground that, the scientific consensus is that it cannot be established that the recession of snows on Mount. Kilimanjaro is mainly attributable to human-induced climate change.")

6.) The drying up of Lake Chad is a prime example of a catastrophic result of global warming. ("It is generally accepted that the evidence remains insufficient to establish such an attribution" and may be more likely the effect of population increase, overgrazing and regional climate variability.)

7.) Hurricane Katrina and the consequent devastation in New Orleans is because of global warming. ("It is common ground that there is insufficient evidence to show that.")

8.) Polar bears are drowning because they have to swim long distances to find ice. ("The only scientific study that either side before me can find is one, which indicates that four polar bears have recently been found drowned because of a storm.")

9.) Coral reefs all over the world are bleaching because of global warming and other factors. ("Separating the impacts of stresses due to climate change from other stresses, such as overfishing and pollution, was difficult.")

The link- http://abcnews.go.com/US/TenWays/story?id=3719791&page=1&page=1

 

[Mickel]

As you may note from my 3 posts on this thread tonight, I am passionate about this subject.

Here is a link to a website - http://noteviljustwrong.com/home where they are selling a DVD movie titled "Not Evil Just Wrong" which is a reply to the Al Gore movie "An Inconvenient Truth".

I intend buying a copy of the DVD.

Here is a synopsis of the movie. It's about 88 min in length and had its premiere on 18 Oct 09-

Global warming alarmists want Americans to believe that humans are killing the planet. But Not Evil Just Wrong, a new documentary by Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney, proves that the only threats to America (and the rest of the world) are the flawed science and sky-is-falling rhetoric of Al Gore and his allies in environmental extremism.

The film drives home the realities of that extremism. "Turn off your lights. Turn off your heat when you get cold. Turn off your air when you get hot," one man on the street says. "And then think about that."

Not Evil Just Wrong warns Americans that their jobs, modest lifestyles and dreams for their children are at stake. Industries that rely on fossil fuels will be crippled if the government imposes job-killing regulations on an economy already mired in recession. Small towns in the heartland, like Vevay, Ind., will become bastions of unemployment and poverty. Breadwinners like Tim McElhany in Vevay will lose their jobs -- and will have to start borrowing money again just to buy bread for their families.

The damage that would be wrought is unjustified by the science. Not Evil Just Wrong exposes the deceptions that experts, politicians, educators and the media have been force-feeding the public for years. Man-made pollution is not melting the polar icecaps. The ocean will not rise 20 feet in a flash. And the only polar bears dying because of man are the ones who try to eat men.

McAleer and McElhinney debunk what for a time was the environmental movement's most powerful weapon of disinformation, the infamous "hockey stick" graph that attributed a supposedly unique burst of warming in the 20th century to humans. They also shatter the myth that the hottest years in the United States were 1998 and 2006. The hottest year was 1934, and the hottest decade was the 1930s -- when there were half as many people and no SUVs or jumbo jets.

But environmentalists like actor Ed Begley Jr. and Leo Murray of Plane Stupid, who appear in the film, won't tell you that. Instead, Begley sheds phony tears for ex-cons who are offered "green" jobs, and Murray decries air travel as the modern world's worst indulgence. Their hysterical claims have fooled many people into believing that carbon dioxide, an element that is essential to life, is poison.

Organizations like Greenpeace, whose excesses are roundly condemned in Not Evil Just Wrong by founding member Patrick Moore, persistently push the same kind of propaganda that prompted world leaders to ban DDT. They believed environmentalist Rachel Carson's doomsday scenarios about the mosquito-killing chemical, and millions of children in the Third World may have been infected by malaria and died as a result.

The documentary notes that the World Health Organization lifted its ban on DDT in 2006, but Al Gore and his allies will not accept that verdict any more than they will accept the science that discounts theories about global warming. They are determined to blame humans for everything.

 

[Calliope]

Rudd;

The challenge we face, and others around the world face, is to build momentum and overcome domestic political constraints. The truth is this is hard because the climate change sceptics, the climate change deniers, the opponents of climate change action are active in every country. They are a minority. They are powerful. And invariably they are driven by vested interests.

Now Rudd is a very intelligent man. He surely knows, like those of us without vested interests know, that to think we can change the climate is a crock of s**t.

He should come clean on what his vested interests are.

 

[prawn_86]

For all those interested Barnaby Joyce has just started an online petition to reject the CPRS and the signing of the Copenhagen agreement- http://barnabyjoyce.com.au/default.aspx

 

[Smurf1976]

Re: The Copenhagen Agreement

Smurph can you give some factual science to back up your line which I turned into blue? Pump is too grandiose and reads like propaganda. (Not saying you are propagandising)

Note that I said "probably" in that sentence.

If you change the chemical composition of something to a significant extent then generally speaking you would expect it to have some effects. That's just what happens.

Now, I'm not saying that adding CO2 to the atmosphere will cause climate change. But I do think it reasonable to assume that if we forever increased the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere then there will be some effect on something, somehow. What I don't know, but it would be an unusual situation if there were not some form of feedback resulting from a change in composition of the atmosphere.

Proof? I don't have any and don't claim to have any. But if the change were large enough then I do think it reasonable to assume that there would be some impact on something - whether it's good or bad I really don't know.

My main point though is that no matter what your stance on CO2, Copenhagen doesn't deliver. It doesn't cut emissions and it doesn't maintain cheap energy. Fail on both sides of the fence.

 

[Smurf1976]

Re: The Copenhagen Agreement

Rudd is a bigoted fool. Nearly all the world's great advances in science, medicine and geographical discovery were made by sceptics and usually in the face of great opposition from the perceived wisdom of the majority. Columbus and Charles Darwin e.g. weren't spineless.

Exactly. Hit the nail on the head there...

 

[Smurf1976]

Somebody mentioned earlier that this issue is almost unique in that there hasn't been anyone on this forum who has tried to defend the agreement, in spite of the same posters having opposing opinions on other issues. If this is reflective of how the population as a whole would view the issue if they were aware of the facts, then the opposition is missing a golden opportunity to expose Rudd for the duplicitous creep that he is.

The unique thing about this agreement is that it doesn't actually deliver what either side wants. It doesn't maintain cheap fossil fuel energy and it doesn't cut CO2 emissions.

And that raises some rather serious questions - it's clearly not about CO2 / climate change at all. So why the apparent desire to push it through?

 

[OzWaveGuy]

For all those interested Barnaby Joyce has just started an online petition to reject the CPRS and the signing of the Copenhagen agreement- http://barnabyjoyce.com.au/default.aspx

Excellent! thank you.

 

[Smurf1976]

I've signed the petition against the ETS.

I think most would agree that it is never wise to sign any contract or agreement without having a plan that enables you to meet the conditions of that agreement. And we sure don't have a workable plan to meet the conditions of a CO2 cut.

 

[Julia]

For all those interested Barnaby Joyce has just started an online petition to reject the CPRS and the signing of the Copenhagen agreement- http://barnabyjoyce.com.au/default.aspx

Good. Thanks, Prawn.

 

[So_Cynical]

Is there something in the psyche of conservatives that makes change so difficult to accept? the whole climate change denial/Copenhagen treaty thing reminds me of the aboriginal native title issue of a few years ago.

Remember how the NFF and the Coalition were all dead against it...how the farmers were all going to get kicked of there land and suburban blocks were going to get seized....lol

LOL ive started a Petition. http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/whinyliberals/ SIGN NOW