Opinions

Don't you feel better, now that Kyoto's in force?

by Klaus Rohrich

February 21, 2005

When you awoke this morning and looked out the window did you get an exhilarating rush of pride now that the Kyoto Treaty has taken effect? Didn't it make you feel so morally superior to those awful nations who refused to sign on? Did you notice a slight cooling of the ether as the amount of greenhouse gases has begun to shrink, making the world a better, safer place to live? Me neither!

What I did notice was absolutely nothing. Oh, yes, a lot of people were talking, particularly the talking heads in the media, about how exactly the Treaty would benefit mankind. No matter how I look at it, it does not make sense.

Someone please explain to me how we can control greenhouse gases by "purchasing" greenhouse emission credits from countries that have a surplus of these credits. As I understand this Ponzi scheme, if Canadians produced more greenhouse gases than they were allocated under Kyoto, then they could simply "purchase" greenhouse gas credits from another country that has a surplus. Two questions: who decided what a given country's greenhouse gases quota is and how will Canada paying $5 billion to a country like Russia to purchase surplus credit reduce greenhouse gases in the atmosphere? The country that we are purchasing from surely isn't going to spew them into the atmosphere if we don't purchase them. And us purchasing these credits will actually enable us to spew extra greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Any way I look at it, the Kyoto Treaty appears to be a wealth redistribution scheme dreamed up by Kofi Annan's crew to trim the sails of the West and lend some financial leverage to the Third World. As I see it, we morally superior Canadians are going to lay out billions of dollars to buy--nothing, the perfect Seinfeldian deal.

While climate change has been a bogeyman for the last 40 years, there is at best an array of conflicting claims by scientists that it is indeed happening and at worst, not a shred of evidence to support those claims. Compound this with the assertion that climate change is due to the activities of humans, namely humans living in the Western Hemisphere, and you have what looks to me like an "agenda".

Today every weather anomaly is used to support the claim that catastrophic climate change is in full force. These so-called no-falsifiable hypotheses are rearing their ugly head whenever there is a hurricane or a snowstorm or a flood resulting from a deluge. It's almost as if these phenomena had never occurred before. I recall last fall's Florida hurricanes and how many media commentators claimed that their unusual severity portended evidence of climate change. Obviously these pundits did not know that the 1940s saw the greatest quantity and severity of hurricanes in the past century, which was well before anyone even dreamed about the possibility of catastrophic climate change.

As evidence of global warming, certain scientists are citing today's temperatures being substantially higher than they were 30 years age. True as that may be, it is also true that today's temperature are substantially lower than they were in the 1930s. Does that mean we are now headed for an ice age?

The acronym GIGO, which stands for "garbage in-garbage out", applies equally to all computer-related activities, even those of UN climatologists. Two years ago, two researchers, Ian Castles and David Henderson, both with impeccable credentials in their respective fields, noticed some serious problems with the methodology used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to predict greenhouse gas emissions for the next century. Henderson, a respected economist and Castles a statistician, have challenged the IPCC's predictions as being unrealistic in their severity.

In signing on to the Kyoto accord, the government of Canada has betrayed its ineptitude both in matters of climatology as well as economics. The fact that there is no clear plan being floated by Ottawa, except some more conferences in the future is perfect evidence our political masters do not have a clue. But that isn't going to stop them from plunging headlong into a scheme that could well result in the most severe economic crisis this country has ever experienced.

Like same-sex marriage, the Kyoto Treaty is yet another ill-advised scheme to which the Liberals are committing this country, whether we like it or not, and consequences be damned.