Obama administration officials and liberal activists are promising bold action this week through the the United Nations General Assembly and the People’s Climate March, but a climate expert says the left is desperately trying to find momentum for a movement beset by conflicting science and increasing international skepticism.
Secretary of State John Kerry repeatedly lists the confrontation of climate change at the very top of America’s diplomatic agenda. While addressing foreign ministers of the largest economic powers, Kerry stressed the climate as a priority yet again.
“While we are confronting [Isis], and we are confronting terrorism and we are confronting Ebola, this also has an immediacy that people have come to understand,” said Kerry, as reported by the UK newspaper the Guardian. “There is a long list of important issues before all of us, but the grave threat that climate change poses warrants a prominent position on that list.”
There’s a good reason for Kerry to keep stressing climate change at the UN, even as crises posed by ISIS, Ebola and Ukraine dominate most foreign headlines. Major foreign powers are getting more skeptical of the science and the agenda. The latest devastating blow comes courtesy of the second-largest nation on earth.
“The prime minister of India ordered a private commission to look into it. They basically came out and said, ‘Look, even if your very narrow possibility of a half a degree temperature rise over 50-100 years is true (we don’t think it is), we’ve got greater priorities. We’ve got people starving to death. We’ve got people that are unemployed.,'” said Dr. Tim Ball, a former professor of climatology at the University of Winnipeg.
“That shifted the moral high ground, which is very significant,” he said.
Another major setback for the Obama administration and other global warming activists is the diminished role of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which was designated to collect the carbon taxes. Ball says that tax was supposed to be implemented at the Copenhagen climate conference in 2009 but plans were derailed by the leaked emails from the climate institute in East Anglia.
At the same time, nations with no interest in pushing the climate agenda are creating a rival to the IMF. The BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa and many smaller nations) are even bracing for the eventual collection of carbon taxes by the IMF.
“They’ve already set up a loan fund to counter the IMF,” said Ball.
Over the weekend, the People’s Climate March took to the streets of New York City. By Monday, the demonstrations had turned violent, with several arrests being made. Actor Leonardo DiCaprio is the face of the UN’s climate activism. Ball says the whole operation is a charade borne out of sheer desperation.
“They’re losing every which way on this issue. That’s why when these leaders such as India said, ‘We’re not going to New York. We’re not going to be part of your silly game,’ the only choice they had left was to go to star power and appeal to celebrities. This is why they appointed Leonardo DiCaprio an ambassador of peace,” said Ball.
“What has global warming got to do with peace? ISIS is about peace, but global warming isn’t,” said Ball, noting that the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Al Gore both won Nobel Peace Prizes for issues that he sees as having no connection to the quest for world peace.
“This is all part of the politics of what’s going on with the marching and what’s going on in New York,” said Ball, author of “The Deliberate Corruption of Climate Science.”
Climate change activists disagree with Ball’s contention. They argue climate change is imperiling the world’s key resources and that leads to conflict in places like Syria.
Ball doesn’t buy it.
“I’d love to know what they’re specifying as the climate change that has caused the Syrian economy to suffer. If that’s true in Syria, why isn’t it true in other countries around there? These are just specious, alarmist arguments that are absolute nonsense,” said Ball.
In addition to emerging economies like India prioritizing economic growth and job creation about emissions standards, Ball says science continues to be a major hurdle for the global warming movement. He says more and more reports on temperatures and ice levels undermine the premise that carbon dioxide levels lead to a warmer planet.
“The evidence keeps coming forward, and at some point, the public is starting to realize. The arctic ice is precisely that. It was just five years ago that NASA and Al Gore were both saying there will be no summer ice in the arctic in 2013. It’s turned out to be absolutely wrong. In fact, there’s more ice than there was two years ago, and the same with Antarctica. So this evidence cumulatively, and every single bit of it, contradicts their hypothesis,” said Ball.
Reports in recent weeks suggest the Obama administration plans to team with like-minded governments and agree to new climate measures. Knowing such policies could never get approval from two-thirds of the U.S. Senate, the administration plans to attach the new policies to a 1992 treaty and claim such amendments don’t need Senate ratification.
Ball says he hopes Congress stops it anyway.
“The ultimate control of bureaucracy is in the funding. Hopefully, Congress will get the power and the sense to cut off the funding to the UN, cut off the funding to the EPA,” he said.
Ultimately, Ball also wants to see those he believes to be fostering climate hysteria held to account for being so wrong.
“These people at the IPCC should be held accountable. These people that are saying this is the problem and that’s the problem, they’re never held to account. That’s the real frustration with the public nowadays. These people just throw a bomb in a room and walk away,” said Ball.