Climate Justice

[Peter1469]

We hear about the costs of saving the earth from ourselves, and I am only referring to man-made global warming, most people don't dodge on the cost issue.

But I oppose my allies' well-meaning campaign for "climate justice." More than 230 organizations, including Africa Action and Oxfam, want industrialized countries to pay "reparations" to African governments for droughts, rising sea levels and other alleged results of what Ugandan strongman Yoweri Museveni calls "climate aggression." And I oppose the campaign even more for trying to deny to Africans the reliable electricity—and thus the economic development and extended years of life—that fossil fuels can bring.


The left wants to stop industrialization—even if the hypothesis of catastrophic, man-made global warming is false. John Feffer, my colleague at the Institute for Policy Studies, wrote in the Dec. 8, 2009, Huffington Post that "even if the mercury weren't rising" we should bring "the developing world into the postindustrial age in a sustainable manner." He sees the "climate crisis [as] precisely the giant lever with which we can, following Archimedes, move the world in a greener, more equitable direction."


I started to suspect that the climate-change data were dubious a decade ago while teaching statistics. Computer models used by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to determine the cause of the six-tenths of one degree Fahrenheit rise in global temperature from 1980 to 2000 could not statistically separate fossil-fueled and natural trends.


Then, as now, the computer models simply built in the assumption that fossil fuels are the culprit when temperatures rise, even though a similar warming took place from 1900 to 1940, before fossil fuels could have caused it. The IPCC also claims that the warming, whatever its cause, has slightly increased the length of droughts, the frequency of floods, the intensity of storms, and the rising of sea levels, projecting that these impacts will accelerate disastrously. Yet even the IPCC acknowledges that the average global temperature today remains unchanged since 2000, and did not rise one degree as the models predicted.

Read the rest. Interesting article.

[Cthulhu]

There is no link to the article @Peter1469.

[Perianne]

There is no link to the article @Peter1469.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/...atestHeadlines

[Peter1469]

We hear about the costs of saving the earth from ourselves, and I am only referring to man-made global warming, most people don't dodge on the cost issue.



Read the rest. Interesting article.

[Peter1469]

There is no link to the article @Peter1469.

Hopefully I fixed it.

[Ransom]

Climate aggression? One wonders who Ugandan Museveni would then pay reparations to. Doesn't he global warm?

[waltky]

Rich Nations Vowed Billions for Climate Change; Poor Countries Are Still Waiting...

Rich Nations Vowed Billions for Climate Change. Poor Countries Are Waiting.
Sept. 9, 2018 — When industrialized nations pledged in 2009 to mobilize $100 billion a year by 2020 to help the poorest countries deal with climate change, it won over some skeptics in the developing world who had argued that industrialized nations should pay up for contributing so much to the problem.

But the money has been slow to materialize, with only $3.5 billion actually committed out of $10.3 billion pledged to a prominent United Nations program called the Green Climate Fund. President Trump’s decision last year to cancel $2 billion in promised aid did not help. At a climate change conference in Thailand this past week, some delegates reached by telephone said that the setting — the heart of Southeast Asia, a region where challenges relating to warming are readily apparent — was grimly fitting. They described the United Nations program’s shortcomings as a symbol of a broken promise. “The fund of hope is becoming a fund of hopelessness,” said Meena Raman, legal adviser to the Third World Network, an advocacy group in Malaysia, and a former nonvoting member of the Green Climate Fund’s board.

Farmers on a parched field in Bang Pla Ma district, north of Bangkok

The meeting in Bangkok of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is a prelude to a larger one in December in Poland, where countries will try to set rules for carrying out the 2015 Paris climate accord. The Bangkok meeting did not specifically address financing to mitigate climate change. But it came two months after disagreements among the Green Climate Fund’s board members prevented the fund from approving new projects at a routine meeting. Some observers say the fund’s funding shortfall and bureaucratic malaise have dimmed expectations for the talks in Poland, which were already bound to be difficult. “The lack of real money coming through is really undermining trust in the negotiations” around how to put the Paris accord in place, said Brandon Wu, the director of policy and campaigns at ActionAid USA, an advocacy group that monitored the Bangkok meeting. “That’s a big part of the logjam.”

Activists demonstrating in front of the United Nations building on Friday in Bangkok, where a climate change conference was being held.

The Green Climate Fund was designed to help developing countries prepare for climate disasters and develop low-fossil-fuel economies. It was part of a larger plan, led by Hillary Clinton, as secretary of state in 2009, to put together $100 billion a year for poor economies through a combination of government contributions and private investments. Many academics see contributions to the fund by wealthy countries as a moral imperative, arguing that the developing world is most vulnerable to the effects of climate change but least responsible for causing them. “Certainly, the richer countries should bear more of the burden in the G.C.F. because they have more means and more at stake,” said Thitinan Pongsudhirak, a political scientist at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, referring to the fund by its initials. “Richer countries also have benefited from wealth accumulated over decades when climate issues were not at the forefront.”

An Indonesian woman and child walking through a thick haze shrouding the city of Palangkaraya, Indonesia

The Obama administration delivered $1 billion of a $3 billion pledge to the program. But last year, Mr. Trump, while announcing plans to exit the Paris accord, said the United States would no longer pay into the Green Climate Fund. He explained his decision by saying that the contributions could eventually cost the United States “billions and billions and billions” of dollars. Ms. Raman said that while she still hoped to see other developed nations “step up” by contributing more to the fund, they had not yet made their exact commitments clear. “We’re very horrified by the stance taken by the United States, but it’s not the only one,” she said. “All the developed countries are united around the United States in not making any progress on finance.”



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