Climate alarmist: Carbon taxes could badly hurt tourism in the Caribbean

"New carbon taxes and levies on air travel could have dramatic influences on the flow of tourists to the islands"

At a recent conference in London,  a number of  "experts" have discussed how to respond to climate change in the Caribbean. Judging from this report in AlertNet, the the London conference was an almost exact copy of all other similar climate alarmist conferences - the "experts" were competing with each other about who could present the worst possible doomsday scenario.

Here are just a couple of examples:

• With 70 percent of the region’s population and an equal share of its infrastructure along threatened coastlines, Caribbean nations could be spending close to a fifth of their GDP just to cope with climate impacts by 2080, said Murray Simpson, a University of Oxford researcher who has worked with the U.N. Development Programme in Barbados.
• If the Caribbean fails to adequately prepare, it faces “perpetual recession under these conditions”, Leslie warned, calling adaptation to the ongoing changes “an imperative”. (Kenrick Leslie, executive director of the Belize-based Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre)
• Most countries in the region are feeling the pressure already. Farmers in Jamaica are seeing an unusual combination of increasingly severe droughts and hurricanes, leading to a gradual depletion of their financial resources. (David Barker, University of West Indies)
• Shifting temperature and rainfall patterns also are likely to drive increases in tropical diseases like dengue and malaria, and worsen problems with heat stress and water-related diseases like cholera, said David Dodman of the London-based International Institute for Environment and Development.

However, Mr. Dodman must have amazed all the gathered alarmists with this statement:

New carbon taxes and levies on air travel, for instance, could have dramatic influences on the flow of tourists to the islands, he said.
“Regulations around trade and carbon are going to create very large shifts in our economies,” he predicted.

Dodman´s statement was a unique breeze of fresh air at a gathering of climate alarmists. But he will probably regret having said it. His fellow alarmists will never forgive him for having committed the mortal sin of pointing out the negative effects of carbon taxes and levies.

Great news from Greenland: Greenpeace chief Kumi Naidoo arrested





The Danish police are to be congratulated:

Police say the head of Greenpeace has been arrested after climbing an oil rig off Greenland's west coast in an attempt to stop a Scottish oil company from deepwater drilling in Arctic waters.
Police spokesman Morten Nielsen told The Associated Press that Greenpeace's executive director Kumi Naidoo was arrested Friday along with a Norwegian activist on top of the Leiv Eriksson drilling rig, which is operated by Cairn Energy.
Nielsen says the two will be transferred to Greenland's capital Nuuk where they will be charged with trespassing and violating Greenland's "home rule order on safety zones."

Read the entire article here

This is the way to treat people who break the law!

PS
Here is a link to the latest Greenpeace news

(Image by Wikipedia)

New study: Climatologists are dumber than other scientists

Click for larger image

A new study shows that climitalogists are considered less clever than other scientists and academic professionals. Lawyers and engineers are more than ten times cleverer than climatologists, according to the summary for decisions makers. Sociologists are the second least clever professionals, but even they are almost double as clever as climatologists.

However, the author of this groundbreaking non-peer reviewed study, Dr. G. Alileo, points out that "no single study as such definitively proves the dumbness of climate scientists, but the result is broadly consistent with empirical observations over a long time period". According to Dr. Alileo, it is also important to keep in mind, that there are a number of extremely clever climatologists, usually not connected with such organisations as the IPCC, NASA, UEA and the Met Office.

Scientific method used in the study:
A separate google search for each profession (in plural) together with the word "clever" was performed. Each search produced a certain number of pages. The page numbers (in millions) were then combined into the graph above, showing how each of the ten professions is connected with the word "clever".

The Danish led Climate-Industrial complex tries to stop the shale gas revolution in Europe

"Vestas and other big players in Danish industry will not leave the climate conference empty handed".

The US-led shale gas revolution - ending Europe´s dangerous dependance on Russian energy - should be welcomed by both industry and consumers in Europe. Poland is leading the way, and there is growing interest in shale gas in several other European countries, as well.

This promising development is however facing strong opposition from the Danish led climate-industrial complex, which has joined forces with Russia´s Gazprom and a number of enviro-fundamentalist NGO´s. The climate-industrial lobby, promoting the interests of  heavily subsidised wind energy companies, is scared stiff  by the succes of  the U.S. shale gas industry, and is using all its lobbying power in order to kill the budding European shale gas revolution. The power of the climate-industrial lobby must not be underestamated; its tentacles have reached into the heart of the EU:

EU´s Climate Commissioner, Danish Connie Hedegaard is the de facto leader of the complex, actively lobbying for the wind power industry in the Commission, other EU and international bodies and on the governmental level in the members states.

Hedegaard was actively promoting the interests of Danish wind energy giant Vestas already when she, as Danish climate change minister, was planning the failed Copenhagen climate conference in 2009. According to this Danish news report she then promised that "Vestas and other big players in Danish industry will not leave the climate conference empty handed". 

As we all know, the climate conference failed badly, and Vestas left empty handed.

But now it´s payback time for the Commissioner:  

On January 14, Ms. Hedegaard met with the CEO of  the Vestas Wind Systems in Copenhagen.
The  meeting with Mr. Engel was mentioned on Ms. Hedegaards agenda page, but it has later been removed. One wonders why?

Fortunately a record of the meeting is still to be found elsewhere in the EU web jungle:
Mrs Connie HEDEGAARD in Denmark: meets with Mr Ditlev ENGEL, CEO of Vestas Wind Systems

It is not difficult to imagine what Mr. Engel had on his mind when he met the Commissioner: what could the EU do in order to help his loss making wind turbine empire? Nobody knows what Ms. Hedegaard may have promised, but she has certainly done her best in order to give the Danish company a helping hand:
 Here is a picture from the Vestas website showing the Commissioner promoting Vestas in China:



Vestas, the world leader in wind energy – today received Connie Hedegaard, the European Union Commissioner for Climate Action, at its Tianjin factory complex, located in the Tianjin Economic Development Area (TEDA).

This is how Hedegaard is planning to prevent Poland and other European countries from entering the shale gas revolution:

The EU's climate chief is seeking to extend the bloc's renewable energy targets, in a move apparently designed to protect the green energy sector from an intensifying attack by the gas industry.

This is the first time the European commission has raised the issue of mandatory targets beyond 2020, when the current commitment – to generate 20% of energy from renewable sources – expires.

An extension would boost the renewable energy industry in the face of lobbying efforts by the gas industry, which is trying to rebrand gas as a cheaper "green" alternative to renewables.

In its attempts to push this line, the gas industry has held a series of high-level meetings with senior figures in the European commission and the European parliament, as well as with the governments of member states.

Connie Hedegaard, the climate change commissioner in Brussels, is concerned at the lobbying, and is determined to maintain Europe's lead in developing renewable energy and clean technology. "We should be looking to avoid a lock-in to fossil fuels," she said. "We should be discussing a renewable energy target for 2030. We need to have ambitious targets. It would be one way to send a long-term price signal for renewable energy – that renewable energy is not just going to stop growing after 2020."

In an interview with the Guardian, Hedegaard declined to put a clear figure on what the renewable energy target should be beyond 2020. But others have suggested that it could be cost-effective to opt for a target of 40% by 2030.
The push to extend the target is likely to be resisted by some member states who fought hard against the 2020 targets when they were unveiled in early 2007. Poland is known to be concerned that its heavy reliance on coal should not attract penalties, and Italy has a history of opposing climate targets.An official in the department of Günther Oettinger, the EU commissioner for energy, said no targets were yet needed beyond 2020. He is also against raising the current emissions-cutting target from 20% by 2020 to 30%, as some member states – including the UK, France and Germany – have proposed.

The European Wind Energy Association (EWEA),  lead by another former Danish journalist, Christian Kjær is now intensifying its lobbying on behalf of  Vestas and the other wind industry companies. Kjær´s latest effort was this "debate " in Brussels on June 15:

A 45% renewable energy target for 2030 would create the future policy-stability the green energy sector the needs, was one of the main messages emerging from last night’s public debate on EU energy policy post-2020.
New energy policies must be drawn-up today, and not in 2020 when the current targets expire, Josche Muth, Secretary General of the European Renewable Energy Council (EREC) said at the debate organised by the European Wind Energy Association.

Ms. Hedegaard was apparently too busy elsewhere propagating windmills, so she sent a representative, another Dane, to bring the anti-shale gas message to the "debate":

renewable energy could face a threat from cheap gas supplies unless policy-makers fix renewable energy targets beyond 2020. Niels Ladefoged, from Connie Hedegaard’s, European Commissioner for Climate Action, cabinet, warned that there are enough fossil fuels in the ground to heat up the planet beyond levels that nature can sustain.

PS

The Climate-Industrial lobby is masquerading as a partner in the (dubious) fight against global warming. The real purpose of its lobbying is to safeguard the taxpayer financed subsidies, without which the wind power companies would not make any profits at all. Poland, the US and all other sane forces must prevent the Climate-Industrial lobby from succeeding in its efforts to prevent the shale gas revolution from becoming reality in Europe. Energy security and shale gas will feature high on the agenda of the Polish EU presidency, due to begin on July 1. One must hope that the Poles - hopefully with the support of the US - will be able to stave off  the attacks of the wind power "mafia", which, if succesful, would leave Europe dangerously dependent on Russian gas deliveries.

A new low from His Royal Higness

 The Mega Carbon Footprint Prince giving another of  his alarmist doomsday lectures

Is there nobody in the UK who is capable of  stopping the ecofundamentalist Prince Charles´s continuing his crazy climate change crusade. Now he has been attacking climate change "deniers" in a video speech in Australia - thus giving a helping hand to the embattled PM Julia Gillard, who also was one of the speakers.

THE heir apparent to the British throne has called on Australian business leaders to ensure climate change deniers aren't allowed to further delay action to tackle dangerous global warming.
The Prince of Wales delivered a 10-minute pre-recorded video address to the 12th National Business Leaders Forum on Sustainable Development today.

"All the evidence shows that we are living in an increasingly unstable world," Prince Charles told industry figures gathered in Canberra.

"And yet we continue to test it to destruction and to allow the deniers of human-induced climate change to prevent vital action being taken."

Read the entire article here

On the British Monarchy webpage the duties of  Prince Charles are explained in the following way:

3) Promoting and protecting national traditions, virtues and excellenceThis includes supporting Britain’s rural communities, promoting tolerance and greater understanding between faiths and communities, and highlighting achievements or issues that, without his support, might otherwise receive little exposure. In this regard, His Royal Highness often acts as a catalyst for facilitating debate and change through contacts with Government Ministers and other people of influence, and by giving speeches and writing articles.In doing so, he is always careful to remain separate from party political debate.

PS

Climate change/Global warming is most certainly a highly political question both in Australia and elsewhere. That is why the prince is clearly in breach of his duty to "remain separate from party political debate". Neither do his alarmist rants "act as a catalyst for facilitating debate". Maybe it is time for a STOP PRINCE CHARLES movement in the UK?

NATO - The slow death of a once so powerfulful military alliance

"In the Libya operation, Norway and Denmark, have provided 12 percent
of allied strike aircraft yet have struck about one third of the
targets"
"We have the spectacle of an air operations center
designed to handle more than 300 sorties a day struggling to launch
about 150. Furthermore, the mightiest military alliance in history is
only 11 weeks into an operation against a poorly armed regime in a
sparsely populated country – yet many allies are beginning to run
short of munitions, requiring the U.S., once more, to make up the
difference".


There is good reason to return to the important speech that U.S. Secretary of  Defense Robert Gates gave in Brussels on June 10. The reason is Angela Merkel´s Germany.

Robert Gates did not mention Germany specifically in his speech, but it is obvious which country he had on his mind when he said this:

In the past, I’ve worried openly about NATO turning into a two-tiered
alliance: Between members who specialize in “soft’ humanitarian,
development, peacekeeping, and talking tasks, and those conducting the
“hard” combat missions. Between those willing and able to pay the
price and bear the burdens of alliance commitments, and those who
enjoy the benefits of NATO membership – be they security guarantees or
headquarters billets – but don’t want to share the risks and the
costs. This is no longer a hypothetical worry. We are there today.
And it is unacceptable.

Also this was mostly directed at Germany, the richest and most powerful European country:

Indeed, if current trends in the decline of European defense
capabilities are not halted and reversed, Future U.S. political
leaders– those for whom the Cold War was not the formative experience
that it was for me – may not consider the return on America’s
investment in NATO worth the cost.

Gates concluded his article with a polite hope - although he must know that neither Germany nor any  of the other major European NATO members are willing to increase defense spending:

Over the life of the transatlantic alliance there has been no shortage
of squabbles and setbacks. But through it all, we managed to get the
big things right over time. We came together to make the tough
decisions in the face of dissension at home and threats abroad. And
I take heart in the knowledge that we can do so again


The future of the once so powerful alliance does not look promising. Germany could and should take the lead in keeping NATO alive, but it is doing exactly the opposite. The only thing Germany - and the EU countries in general - are ready to fight - and finance - is imaginary human-induced global warming.

PS

The New York Times´s Judy Dempsey seems to make the same kind of conclusion about the future of NATO as I in an article called "The beginning of the end for NATO?":


NATO as such will probably survive. The alliance will continue to be of use to the United States when it looks to build coalitions of the willing. It might also come in handy to confer some added legitimacy to future military missions. But its role as the central trans-Atlantic organization with a truly united purpose and solidarity among all of the allies is in doubt.

"Timothy Garton Ash is the most overrated political writer of our time".

 "Timothy Garton Ash is the best and most perceptive political writer of our time"
  John Simpson

When you visit the home page of Oxford grandee Timoth Garton Ash, you will find John Simpson´s characterisation quite prominently displayed.

It seems that John Simpson is somewhat out out touch these days. I would like to suggest an improved and shorter version: "Timothy Garton Ash is the most overrated political writer of our time".

His latest article in the Guardian is proof of this.

Garton Ash first gives a very realistic and true description of the reality of the "European project" today:

Like an overladen container lorry labouring up a steep hill, the European project is close to stalling. If it stalls, even the emergency brake may not stop it running back down the hill, out of control, until it jackknifes off the road. Two of the lads are wrestling over the steering wheel; others lie comatose in the sleeping area at the back of the cab.
---
And it's not just the eurozone. Every major project of the European Union is faltering.
---
Why? Because all the great underlying motivators of the European project back in the days of Helmut Kohl, François Mitterrand and Jacques Delors, and even more so in the time of the founding fathers, have faded or disappeared.

Then it begins to go wrong:

The key to so much of this, especially on the economic side, is Germany. For much of its history, what has become the European Union pursued political ends by economic means. For Kohl and Mitterrand, the euro was mainly a political project, not an economic one. Now the boot is on the other foot. In order to save a poorly designed and over-extended monetary union, we need an exceptional political commitment. The political must ride to the rescue of the economic.

This is where Angela Merkel comes in. There is no particular reason to expect Germany to take the lead in creating a European foreign and security policy. For a response to the Arab spring, we should look first to the Mediterranean countries, such as Spain, France and Italy. If the issue is the integration of people of migrant background, every country must do its own homework. But if we are talking about the European economy and currency, Germany is the indispensable power. Only the combination of Germany and the European Central Bank, working in unison, has a chance of calming the mighty markets.
For more than a year now Merkel has attempted to find the narrow – perhaps nonexistent – line where the minimum that can be done to save the embattled eurozone periphery meets the maximum she thinks German public opinion will bear. She has then tried to win her eurozone partners to that course. So far it has not worked.
Now she needs to start from the other end: work out, with the ECB and other eurozone governments, what is the best, most credible deal available, and then put all her authority on the line to persuade a reluctant German public that this will be in the long-term, enlightened national self-interest of Germany. Which it will be. For no one has more to lose from the disintegration of the eurozone than the continent's central economic power. It may soon be too late.

The professor is appealing to Angela Merkel to save "a poorly designed and over-extended monetary union"!  But why on earth should it be in German, or anybody else´s interest to save such a union? The professor does not provide an answer.

No, if you want good political analysis, you must turn to another leading British professor and writer. The link is here.