"Pundita, dear, dare I ask for your thoughts on the latest UN climate change report? I see it places much of the blame for global warming on human activity.
Boris in Jackson Heights"
Dear Boris:
You've been reading this blog long enough that you should be able to look at a calendar to understand how the world works. Remember: If it's April, the Brussels-UN dog-and-pony show is readying the world for the agenda they want to push hardest at the G8 Summit.
Every April at least one dire report is issued under UN auspices that by coincidence happens to relate to a major theme at the summit. So three guesses what the big theme will be at the 2007 meet?
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who is also serving a term as the European Union president, wants to use the summit to hammer out a successor agreement to the Kyoto Protocol on climate protection, which runs out in 2012, and get the US on board the newest version.
See this handy cheat sheet from the University of Toronto on the proposed agenda items for the summit, which will have "Growth and Responsibility" as the theme.
As to what growth and responsibility mean in this context -- see if you can figure it out; Pundita got cross-eyed after plowing through the third explanation. But taking a shot in the dark, I think it has to do with finding ways to sit on growth globally without seeming to do so. And without mentioning the verboten term "sustainable development." The term has been off-limits since somebody piped up and asked, "Hey, isn't sustainable development actually genocide against the poorest peoples of the world?"
Anyhow, we're all going to hell and damnation if we don't take up carbon swap trading in earnest; that will be the big news coming out of this year's summit.
Where and when is the summit? It will take place June 6-8 in glorious downtown Heiligendamm in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. That's in Germany. The town has its back to the water and it's got basically one road into the place. The site was chosen to flummox the anti-globalists and other colorful characters who show up each year to scream obscenities at the G8 participants and hop up and down.
Also, whenever you think of April, you should think "World Bank-IMF Spring meetings," which are taking place this weekend in Washington. Three guesses -- never mind the guesses; the World Bank has gone gaga over carbon emissions trading.
Do I think that putting a cap on carbon emissions will save the world from all the wild weather and natural disasters we've been seeing since the Earth's magnetic shield started collapsing? I suspect that the most significant research on the Earth's weather patterns is classified. Some small indication of the direction of the research is found in this hodgepodge of hard data and speculation, which also includes the text of a 2004 Fortune magazine article with the fun title Climate Collapse.
You can also refresh your memory about an earlier Pundita discussion of the topic by plowing through the 2003 Nova transcript on the collapse of the magnetic shield and speculation that the Earth's poles are starting the long grinding process of reversing themselves.
The big question is whether the magnetic shield collapse at this time is part of a relatively short cycle or a harbinger of a pole reversal. I am not convinced by a New York Times 2003 article assuring us that the collapse of the magnetic shield doesn't portend dire changes in the weather, but the article has useful background information.
It could be that the connection between carbon emissions and global warming is hoodoo, which is not necessarily a bad thing -- if one doesn't want to accept LaRouche's thesis that it's plot to carry out genocide in Africa.
The human race has kept itself going not on faith but on hoodoo. Hoodoo is what you do when you haven't a clue as to what to do. The idea behind hoodoo is that you have to do something, but if it doesn't work you have to maintain plausible deniability to explain the failure.
For example if what's in my medicine bag doesn't cure your illness, I tell you to sacrifice three goats. If your illness has not cured by then, well, you didn't do the ritual right, or the goats were too old, or the gods wanted more goats. And I can always fall back on, "The demon is too powerful" and the ever-popular, "You're being punished for something your older brother did."
The nice thing about the carbon emissions-global warming thesis is that it provides endless excuses for why capping carbon emissions does not halt the wild weather patterns: China cheated on their emissions cap, India cheated, the United States didn't meet the emissions guidelines, and on and on. And through this application of hoodoo the human races lurches onward, despite wild weather.
See you in Heiligendamm.
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