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Amy Goodman had a very interesting exchange yesterday with US Climate Negotiator Jonathan Pershing. The US has been criticized now for years as one of the primary obstacles to a globally binding treaty which meets the requirements of climate science. Indeed, as one of Amy’s guests said yesterday, Obama has actually been a worse influence on these climate negotiations than Bush was.
Here is Amy’s “who’s your daddy” exchange with Pershing :
AMY GOODMAN: …Yesterday, a number of civil society groups held a news conference, and they said at that news conference—Kumi Naidoo of Greenpeace International said, “Todd Stern and Jonathan Pershing have come to Doha with their needles stuck in the groove of obstructing the U.N. process, an art they have perfected.” And he said that it is “disrespectful of President Obama to inflict on us two negative negotiators who act as if the comments he made after his election were never made. Obama should pick up the phone and tell his delegates to follow his lead, or, alternatively, call them back to Washington.” That’s what Kumi Naidoo said. Jonathan Pershing, are you following President Obama’s wishes? And how do you respond to civil society groups who are saying that the U.S. is the lead obstructor to any kind of negotiated deal here in Doha?
JONATHAN PERSHING: I have no comment on the first part of that.
Of course you don’t have a comment on that, you officious prick! But it is obvious that you are doing exactly the bidding of your employers, Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama. So much for the meme that Obama was merely waiting until after the election to be our progressive hero. By their fruits you shall know them, and the shite doesn’t fall far from the asshole.
Of course, it’s a fool’s errand to think we can get Clinton and Obama to recall their hand-picked negotiators at this late date, but we can let the White House know that they aren’t fooling us – that we know Pershing and Stern speak for them and that this makes Clinton and Obama some of the worst perpetrators of violence against Mother Earth. Recall Stern and Pershing!
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From Wikipedia
He’s representing the US? How so?
From a Department of State press release of March 23, 2009:
Pershing has apparently had one press availability at Doha; Stern has had none. Keepin’ it on the down low, eh fellers?
Recommended!
How much longer does Obama get an environmental pass? For further verification see Environment – http://newprogs.org/blog/2011/11/08/environment-under-democraticrepublican-uni-party
China’s per capita CO2 production was up 9% last year. Let’s say that the US becomes the #1 enabler of a Doha agreement. How will this affect China’s CO2 production?
Also, the colorful Christopher Monckton snuck into these high, holy proceedings (apparently dressed in traditional Arab garb – “Monckton of Arabia”, he calls himself) and told the high, holy practitioners of NON climate change denial….
He was referring to the recent release of HADCRUT4 surface temperature data, that shows no statistically significant global warming in 16 years. You’d have thought that the climate gloom and doomers would have appreciated this fortunate turn of events – after all, if the world’s oceans had risen so much that Doha was under water, everything would have been a soggy mess! More seriously, being on a temperature plateau implies not have passed through some “tipping point”.
It looks like what would be good news for most of us, is bad news indeed for the climate catastrophists.
The above Monckton link also contains the following quote:
Is this true? Because, if it is, it seems to me that the Doha shindig is divorced from reality. Which implies that its real agenda is not what it’s purported to be. Does anybody know if any of the Doha luminaries are actively calling for the rapid development and deployment of zero carbon fusion energy? With all the people in the rich West, alone, who believe that human CO2 will cook our planet, you’d think that the Doha wise men and women would be strongly pressing for a plan B – one that could even be crowd funded, I might add, if governments fail to pony up.
Many of us like to play scientist, or lawyer, on the Internets. Sometimes, though, it’s nice to listen to actual scientists to see what they have to say. I’ve sometimes gone to realclimate.org for information on current debates, but your comment got me to go back there and see what they had to say about HADCRUT4. That led me to a cite to a blog that even the scientists on realclimate admire: http://tamino.wordpress.com/ Here is Tamino’s post on the HADCRUT4 data: http://tamino.wordpress.com/2012/10/21/temperature-analysis-by-david-rose-doesnt-smell-so-sweet/
Viscount Monckton is another who likes playing scientist. I’m sure his degree in Classics and his diploma in Journalism has prepared him well to unmask the technical aspects of the nefarious schemes of scientists with actual Ph.D’s – in science!
Good on you for posting this – I’m used to just talking points and links to stuff that usually isn’t terribly useful.
The 16 year hiatus in statistically significant warming is significant because at least some of the modelers, themselves, gave 15 years of ‘underperformance’ as a sign that their models are off. Laymen who believe that catastrophic global warming is occurring are actually placing their faith in modelers. That faith deserves to be rationally examined – which is all the more likely when following indications of something being awry by the modelers, themselves, and not just the so-called “climate change deniers”.
It’s also significant because it contradicts climate catastrophism talking points that have been given even front page space here at MyFDL. (Garbage about “even worse than we expected.” ) That points to a successful propaganda effort, at some level or other.
There are not only problems with the models, theoretically (including unexplained inconsistencies of aerosol values between models, but also via discrete models being given such a high sensitivity that they are inconsistent with themselves, on this basis, over a long-term period), and experimentally (see Lindzen); and there is not only the issue of just how much accurate data is available (satellite data is only a few decades old; argos buoy data only since 2003; instrumented data only a couple of centuries; proxy data for prior epochs is fuzzier); there is also the issue of how accurately processed some of the modern instrumented data is.
If you look at this video, by Burt Rutan, starting at about 40:00, you will see a graph presented that provided Anthony Watts with his “aha” moment. (No, the graph is not a picture of a check from Exxon-Mobil.) Watts had started out, like a lot of us, believing that anthropogenic CO2 was creating some dire problem…. The graph clearly shows the effect of population density on temperature reading. I.e., the Urban Heat Island Effect. You don’t have to be a scientist to grasp this point. This past summer, Watts and collaborators posted their initial analysis of US surface temprature data showing a major correction (downwards) is obtained by using higher quality data. This represents 5 years worth of work, BTW. The net/net was that US temperature increase during the 20th century were overstated by about a factor of 2, IIRC.
If you have trouble grasping how a guy (Watts) who didn’t even finish college might be capable of doing better science than hordes of well funded scientists, I suggest you read ‘Not Even Wrong’, ‘The Trouble with Physics’, and even Richard Feynman’s piece on Cargo Cult Science. See also my recent diary on Judith Curry’s characterization of the type of problem that climate modeling constitutes. (Messy, not tame.)
Finally, I’ll add that there are lots of studies that, contrary to what the climate catastrophists claim, show that the midieval warm period was hotter than it is now, NOT just in Europe. The significance of this is that CO2 was much lower. I intend to post diaries on this, but I first want to know more about it. (In particular, just how “fuzzy” the data is in places like China.) Hopefully, this is well covered in The Cold Sun, by Lüning and Vahrenholt, which has about 800 scientific references, but awaits translation from German into English.
Way, way back in time (1990-2001), even the IPCC was presenting the Medieval Warm Period as warmer than today, overall. Unfortunately, I don’t know how this graph’s constituent data would average out if broken down by continent, e.g. I do know that there is at least some data that shows that China also had a Medieval Warm Period, which was warmer than today.
Excellent post. I would extend your sentiment to the New Zealand representatives also – recall them, John Key! You just saw with your own eyes what the climate is doing to your country – a supercell struck north of Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city, and rare tornadoes of enormous intensity fleetingly gave you a taste of what the planet is in for, thanks to all the footdragging that is going on at the climate conference.
Shame on you!
shame.
Not relevant. This is all very difficult you know.
There’s more oil money to be made, and handed out, more national and international appointments to be had, many more conferences to be attended, more contacts to be made, more corporate positions to be attained, and more socializing, fancy dining, expensive shopping in Doha, maybe some real estate to be bought, and gerneral hobnobbing with the other elites to be done.