Consequently, delegates at last month's UN Conference of the Parties (COP) to the Framework Convention on Climate Change agreed to vastly increase the financial burden on taxpayers of developed countries to stop extreme weather and other problems they blame on anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming. That climate science is highly immature and global warming actually stopped 17 years ago was never mentioned.
So here's what happened in Warsaw that will soon make today's billion dollars a day climate bill look like small change.
Starting in 2014, the UN's Green Climate Fund (GCF), a plan to divert an additional $100 billion per year from the treasuries of developed countries to those of developing nations to help them "take action on climate change", will commence operation. The heads of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund took part in a launch ceremony for the GCF headquarters in South Korea on Thursday.
A timetable of activities and agreements was accepted to pave the way towards the establishment of a new international treaty in 2015 that will force developed countries to spend untold billions more to reduce carbon dioxide (CO
2) emissions that the UN blames for climate problems. Although national governments pretend otherwise, the fine print in the negotiating text leading to the 2015 agreement includes an out-clause for developing nations. The text states: "social and economic development and poverty eradication are the first and overriding priorities of developing countries". This means that CO
2 emission targets that developing country governments agree to will not be enforced. Developed nations do not have this escape clause.
The rules governing how developing countries will be financially rewarded, at our cost, for reducing deforestation were also established.
But this is only the tip of the financial iceberg we will soon face. Last minute concessions from our representatives have set us up for a potential liability of trillions of dollars.
Here's what happened:
At last year's UN climate talks in Doha, Qatar, developing nations pushed hard for developed countries to pay for "loss and damage" resulting from extreme weather events supposedly caused by over a century of CO
2 emissions from the industrialized world. After tense negotiations, our delegates finally acquiesced, promising to put in place "institutional arrangements" concerning loss and damage in Warsaw in 2013.
So at this year's conference, after developing countries staged a walk out to bring attention to the issue, our exhausted representatives accepted the establishment of a completely new institution under the COP legal framework. In a document entitled "
Warsaw international mechanism for loss and damage associated with climate change impacts", national delegates made the following commitment:
"the Warsaw international mechanism shall fulfill the role under the Convention of promoting the implementation of approaches to address loss and damage associated with the adverse effects of climate change."
This seemingly innocuous text opens the door to what developing countries have wanted all along: trillions of dollars in compensation for the impact of extreme weather events that are supposedly the fault of the developed world. Under this new regime, circumstances such as Micronesia's 2011 legal challenge against the Czech Republic for contributing to sea level rise due to its plans to expand a coal-fired power station, may become commonplace. Will we have to pay loss and damages for typhoon Haiyan that just struck the Philippines? What about extreme weather losses from 50 years ago? No one knows to what extent the charges against developed countries will be retroactive, but for the first time ever, the costs of extreme weather events all over the world are about to be added to our bill.
The establishment of the COP loss and damage mechanism came about because developed countries did not challenge the politically correct but scientifically flawed notion that anthropogenic climate change is known to be responsible for causing extreme weather events such as Haiyan. Consequently, Ban Ki-moon faced no opposition from delegates when he unjustifiably blamed the tragedy on man-made global warming. Similarly, Christiana Figueres, head of the UN climate change secretariat, was not taken to task for incorrectly asserting "we are witnessing ever more frequent, extreme weather events."
Rather than accepting such mistakes, here are the sorts of things our representatives to UN climate conferences must start to bring up.
Extreme weather has always been an integral part of the Earth's climate system. Such events are triggered by large-scale atmosphere-ocean circulation systems and their complex interaction with local and regional weather patterns. They are not within human control and there has been no worldwide increase in such phenomena. For example, the number of tropical cyclones making landfall in the Philippines has not changed in over a century, and globally,
we are near a 30-year low in worldwide Accumulated Cyclone Energy, a measure of total cyclone activity.
Our delegates should highlight the extreme weather conclusions of the UN's own science body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which stated in their March 28, 2012 Special Report on Extremes: "There is medium evidence and high agreement that long-term trends in normalized losses have not been attributed to natural or anthropogenic climate change." In their September 2013 assessment report, the IPCC had only "low confidence" that damaging increases will occur in tropical cyclones (typhoons and hurricanes) due to global warming.
This is one of the few areas of agreement between the IPCC and the
Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC). The latter asserted in its most recent report (September 2013): "In no case has a convincing relationship been established between warming over the past 100 years and increases in any of these extreme events."
UN delegates also must ask critical questions of their leaders. For instance, extreme weather events occurred with about the same frequency during the 1945 to 1977 global cooling period as they do today *, yet no climate scientist pointed to human activity as being responsible in the earlier period. What is different now?
Our representatives must ask the Secretary General why he has not answered the 134 skeptical climate experts who told him in their
November 24, 2012 open letter that "current scientific knowledge does not substantiate your assertions". The scientists explained: "Global warming that has not occurred cannot have caused the extreme weather of the past few years...We ask that you desist from exploiting the misery of the families of those who lost their lives or properties in tropical storm Sandy by making unsupportable claims that human influences caused that storm. They did not."
Delegates must also demand to know why the Secretary General and Figueres
continue to blame extreme weather on climate change when even the IPCC does not.
To maintain political pressure for the new climate accord, there will be additional UN negotiations this coming spring, summer, and autumn,
the latter hosted by the Secretary General himself. If our negotiators don't introduce the findings of real science at these meetings, we will soon be responsible for trillions of dollars in compensation for natural phenomena that impact rich and poor nations alike.
The right response is to help vulnerable people adapt to extreme weather events, to the degree we can afford. The idea that we cause them and can prevent them from occurring is science fiction.
Dr. Madhav Khandekar is a former Research Scientist with Environment Canada. He was an Expert Reviewer for the UN's IPCC 2007 Climate Change documents and continues to contribute to the report "Climate Change Reconsidered" (published by the
Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change). He has been on the Editorial Board of the Journal Natural Hazards (Kluwer, Netherlands) since 2000.
Appendix:
A list of notable extreme weather events during 1945-1977" from page 26 of Dr. Khandekar's just released scientific paper
