A 2013 comment from a former high-level UN climate official offers a telling look at why climate activists have been marveling at the worldwide COVID-19 inspired lockdowns of the economy.
“The only way that a 2015 agreement can achieve a 2-degree goal is to shut down the whole global economy,” Yvo de Boer, former UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) executive secretary said in 2013.
Bloomberg News: “There is nothing that can be agreed in 2015 that would be consistent with the 2 degrees,” said Yvo de Boer, who was UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) executive secretary in 2009, when attempts to reach a deal at a summit in Copenhagen crumbled with a rift between industrialized and developing nations. “The only way that a 2015 agreement can achieve a 2-degree goal is to shut down the whole global economy.”
Yvo de Boer’s words sound prophetic when compared to the comments of climate campaigners in 2020 excited about the impact of the COVID lockdowns.
Climate activist Eric Holthaus said on April 22, 2020, about the impact of lockdowns on global CO2 emissions: “This is roughly the same pace that the IPCC says we need to sustain every year until 2030 to be on pace to limit global warming to 1.5C and hit the Paris climate goals. This is what ‘rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society’ looks like.”
This is roughly the same pace that the IPCC says we need to sustain every year until 2030 to be on pace to limit global warming to 1.5C and hit the Paris climate goals.
This is what "rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society" looks like. https://t.co/UtERWg28vb
— Eric Holthaus (@EricHolthaus) April 22, 2020
Great news! Just 10 more years of lockdowns and we can meet our UN Paris climate goals! Hurray!
— Marc Morano (@ClimateDepot) April 27, 2020
But the reality is that even with lockdowns and shutdown of most aspects of society, global CO2 emissions didn’t seem to notice yet.
See: June 2020: Humans do Ultimate UN Paris Climate Pact Lockdown — But CO2 hits record high anyway – The new figures from the Mauna Loa Observatory show humans are irrelevant. Despite the Ultra-Revolutionary-Carbon-Reduction-Program far beyond anything the UN has every dreamed of, Global CO2 hit 417ppm. This is a record high since humans discovered test tubes but the 300 millionth time since life on Earth evolved. It shows how all plans for carbon reduction known to mankind are futile.
Climatologist Dr. Roy Spencer: “It would be difficult to see a downturn in the anthropogenic source of CO2 unless it was very large (say, over 50%) and prolonged (say over a year or longer).”
Net-Zero GHG Emissions and Extinction Capitalism – By Rupert Darwall: Shutting down the whole global economy is the only way of limiting global warming to 2 degrees Centigrade, Yvo de Boer, the former United Nations climate chief, warned in the runup to the 2015 Paris climate conference. Thanks to COVID-19 we now have an inkling what that looks like. The conference went further and chose to write into the Paris agreement an aspiration to pursue efforts to limit warming to 1.5°C. The 1.5°C backstory reveals much about the quality of what passes for science and gets enshrined in U.N. climate treaties — and is directly relevant to American corporations that now find themselves on the front line of the climate wars.
Flashback: UN climate chief Christiana Figueres seeks ‘centralized transformation’ that is ‘going to make the life of everyone on the planet very different’ – ‘The Industrial Revolution was also a transformation, but it wasn’t a guided transformation from a centralized policy perspective. This is a centralized transformation that is taking place because governments have decided that they need to listen to science. So it’s a very, very different transformation and one that is going to make the life of everyone on the planet very different’
The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change book reveals UN’s goal of ‘2 degree’ limit of ‘global warming’ has no scientific basis – ‘Pulled out of thin air’ – Book Excerpt: In 2007, Jones emailed, “The 2 deg C limit is talked about by a lot within Europe. It is never defined though what it means. Is it 2 deg C for globe or for Europe? Also when is/was the base against which 2 deg C is calculated from? I know you don’t know the answer, but I don’t either! I think it is plucked out of thin air.”
“Two degrees is not a magical limit—it’s clearly a political goal,” says Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK).
Professor Roger Pielke Jr. explained in 2017 that the 2-degree goal “is an arbitrary round number that was politically convenient. So it became a sort of scientific truth. However, it has little scientific basis but is a hard political reality.”
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Book Excerpt:
Will UN treaties, EPA regulations, and personal sacrifices for the planet actually impact the climate? As we’ll see, even the Obama administration EPA chief admitted there would be no measurable climate impact from these proposed remedies.
The notion that a UN agreement to limit emissions will somehow alter the Earth’s temperature or storminess borders on belief in witchcraft. Philip Stott, professor emeritus of Biogeography at the University of London, points out that “climate change is governed by hundreds of factors, or variables, and the very idea that we can manage climate change predictably by understanding and manipulating at the margins one politically-selected factor [CO2], is as misguided as it gets.”
If we had to rely on the UN or EPA to save us from global warming, we would all be doomed. Nothing the UN is proposing to solve climate change would have any significant impact on temperatures or extreme weather events even if you accept the climate warmists’ scientific claims. In any case, the UN’s agenda of limiting the Earth’s temperature to a rise of no more than two degrees Celsius is a target “plucked out of thin air,” according to an email exposed in the Climategate scandal—about which, much more later.
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Just Turn Down the Heat
The warmists seem to believe that international agreements can act as thermostatic controls for the earth’s climate. A G8 Summit in 2009 announced a “historic breakthrough” when Western leaders “agreed to the goal of keeping the world’s temperatures from rising more than 2C.” Philip Stott, professor emeritus of Biogeography at the University of London ridiculed the idea that politicians can control the Earth’s climate with regulations. “Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, and my own good Prime Minister [Tony Blair], for whom I voted—let me emphasize—arguing in public as to who in ‘Annie get the gun style’ could produce the best temperature. ‘I could do two degrees C,’ said Angela. ‘No, I could only do three,’ said Tony. Stand back a minute. Those are politicians telling you that they can control climate to a degree Celsius,” Stott said in disbelief.
★★★★★
Still True Today
The late ABC News anchor Peter Jennings reported in 1998: “Al Gore genuinely believes that if he does not prevail, the apocalypse is coming. His opponents think he is the danger.”★★★★★
The pervasive belief that politicians can control the weather by agreements to curtail our lifestyle has not gone away. But the Climategate emails leak revealed the elusive 2-degree C regulatory cap of the Earth’s temperatures has no basis in science—according to a former top UN scientist. Former UN lead author Phil Jones admitted that the 2-degree C limit was “plucked out of thin air.”
In 2007, Jones emailed, “The 2 deg C limit is talked about by a lot within Europe. It is never defined though what it means. Is it 2 deg C for globe or for Europe? Also when is/was the base against which 2 deg C is calculated from? I know you don’t know the answer, but I don’t either! I think it is plucked out of thin air.”“Two degrees is not a magical limit—it’s clearly a political goal,” says Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK).
Professor Roger Pielke Jr. explained in 2017 that the 2-degree goal “is an arbitrary round number that was politically convenient. So it became a sort of scientific truth. However, it has little scientific basis but is a hard political reality.” He noted that the goal “originated in a local, long-term record of temperature variation in England, which was adapted by an economist in a ‘what if?’ exercise.”
Ironically, the EPA had admitted that its climate regulations would not only have no measurable effect on global temperatures, they would not even impact global CO2 levels. Even if the UN Paris pact were fully enacted, it would have no measurable impact on global temperatures. And that’s on the assumption that the UN is correct on the science. The entire campaign is pure symbolism on climate—but the more centrally planned economy would be a reality.
When the UN Paris climate pact was agreed to by President Obama in December 2015, to exuberant celebration, I penned this response:
“Now that the United Nations has officially ‘solved’ man-made global warming, does this mean we never have to hear about ‘global
warming’ fears again!? Does this mean we can halt the endless supply of federal tax dollars funding ‘climate change’ studies? Does this mean we can stop worrying about ‘global warming’s’ ability to end civilization and cause wars, and increase prostitution, bar room brawls, rape, airline turbulence, etc.? Can we finally move on to other issues?” I added, “If climate activists celebrating truly believe the UN has solved ‘climate change,’ even skeptics should rejoice! Now that the UN treaty has ‘solved’ global warming, can we all just move on to something else?”Of course, that was before President Trump announced his intention to withdraw from the UN Paris pact in June of 2017. But it is obvious that the activists have no intention of ever admitting that climate change has been solved because if they did they would jeopardize all the other agendas wrapped up in the climate cause.
Former Czech president Václav Klaus, who lived under a totalitarian regime, perhaps summed it up best. “As someone who lived under communism for most of his life, I feel obliged to say that I see the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity now in ambitious environmentalism,” Klaus warned. “This ideology wants to replace the free and spontaneous evolution of mankind by a sort of central (now global) planning.”
I traveled to Prague in 2016 to interview Klaus. He explained to me the forces that were behind the climate change movement. “Today, the green agenda and the environmentalist agenda and the fighting climate agenda are trying to basically influence the economic system. It’s trying to basically stop the existence of the free market system which we were fighting for and were dreaming about in the communist era for decades.”
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There’s a New Sheriff in TownGiven the absurd faith in the power of climate regulations, President Trump’s reversal of President Obama’s regulations has
caused lots of hand-wringing. Even before the elections, climate activist and Penn State professor Michael Mann warned that
Trump was a “threat to the planet,” whose future “could quite literally lie in the balance.”