GENIUS FORUMS

Open Letter to the Secretary-General of the United Nations

Dec. 13, 2007
His Excellency Ban Ki-Moon
Secretary-General, United Nations
New York, N.Y.

Dear Mr. Secretary-General,

Re: UN climate conference taking the World in entirely the wrong direction

It is not possible to stop climate change, a natural phenomenon that has affected humanity through the ages. Geological, archaeological, oral and written histories all attest to the dramatic challenges posed to past societies from unanticipated changes in temperature, precipitation, winds and other climatic variables. We therefore need to equip nations to become resilient to the full range of these natural phenomena by promoting economic growth and wealth generation.

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has issued increasingly alarming conclusions about the climatic influences of human-produced carbon dioxide (CO2), a non-polluting gas that is essential to plant photosynthesis. While we understand the evidence that has led them to view CO2 emissions as harmful, the IPCC's conclusions are quite inadequate as justification for implementing policies that will markedly diminish future prosperity. In particular, it is not established that it is possible to significantly alter global climate through cuts in human greenhouse gas emissions. On top of which, because attempts to cut emissions will slow development, the current UN approach of CO2 reduction is likely to increase human suffering from future climate change rather than to decrease it.

The IPCC Summaries for Policy Makers are the most widely read IPCC reports amongst politicians and non-scientists and are the basis for most climate change policy formulation. Yet these Summaries are prepared by a relatively small core writing team with the final drafts approved line-by-line by ­government ­representatives. The great ­majority of IPCC contributors and ­reviewers, and the tens of thousands of other scientists who are qualified to comment on these matters, are not involved in the preparation of these documents. The summaries therefore cannot properly be represented as a consensus view among experts.

Contrary to the impression left by the IPCC Summary reports:

- Recent observations of phenomena such as glacial retreats, sea-level rise and the migration of temperature-sensitive species are not evidence for abnormal climate change, for none of these changes has been shown to lie outside the bounds of known natural variability.

- The average rate of warming of 0.1 to 0. 2 degrees Celsius per decade recorded by satellites during the late 20th century falls within known natural rates of warming and cooling over the last 10,000 years.

- Leading scientists, including some senior IPCC representatives, acknowledge that today's computer models cannot predict climate. Consistent with this, and despite computer projections of temperature rises, there has been no net global warming since 1998. That the current temperature plateau follows a late 20th-century period of warming is consistent with the continuation today of natural multi-decadal or millennial climate cycling.

In stark contrast to the often repeated assertion that the science of climate change is "settled," significant new peer-reviewed research has cast even more doubt on the hypothesis of dangerous human-caused global warming. But because IPCC working groups were generally instructed (see http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/docs/wg1_t ... -08-14.pdf) to consider work published only through May, 2005, these important findings are not included in their reports; i.e., the IPCC assessment reports are already materially outdated.

The UN climate conference in Bali has been planned to take the world along a path of severe CO2 restrictions, ignoring the lessons apparent from the failure of the Kyoto Protocol, the chaotic nature of the European CO2 trading market, and the ineffectiveness of other costly initiatives to curb greenhouse gas emissions. Balanced cost/benefit analyses provide no support for the introduction of global measures to cap and reduce energy consumption for the purpose of restricting CO2 emissions. Furthermore, it is irrational to apply the "precautionary principle" because many scientists recognize that both climatic coolings and warmings are realistic possibilities over the medium-term future.

The current UN focus on "fighting climate change," as illustrated in the Nov. 27 UN Development Programme's Human Development Report, is distracting governments from adapting to the threat of inevitable natural climate changes, whatever forms they may take. National and international planning for such changes is needed, with a focus on helping our most vulnerable citizens adapt to conditions that lie ahead. Attempts to prevent global climate change from occurring are ultimately futile, and constitute a tragic misallocation of resources that would be better spent on humanity's real and pressing problems.

Yours faithfully,
List of signatories

<We therefore need to equip nations to become resilient to the full range of these natural phenomena by promoting economic growth and wealth generation.>
The problem is that we are not seeing the "full range", but only those options which enhance the wealth and power of the elites.

For instance, the elites promote nuclear power because it concentrates production, and therefore profit, at certain points which they own. They ignore the risk inherent in creating rich target zones for terrorism.

Last spring, I surfed wind power to discover the the amortized ROI was better than nukes even tho the cost of insurance, from risks of WMD or accident, were covered by big government. Back then, before the runup in oil prices, windpower could amortize the cost of investment for a mere $0.04/kwhr.

The fact that the wind does not always blow is a canard because while it may not be blowing at one windpower field, it will be blowing at another. There's also a good case to be made, that while ocean waters rise with global warming, evaporation will increase, and with that cloud cover, which will create greater temperature differentials during the lower wind summers. Hurricanes are not the only form of wind which increase with rising water temps.

And because windpower is dispersed across the landscape, it offers investment opportunity to small entrepreneurs and land owners. This reduces the power of the Elite to manipulate the prices to everyone else. Then too, there's the matter of installation, which in the case of nukes will only be by big multinationals and banks.

But they are now building a windpower turbine blade manufacturing plant near Little Rock on the Arkansas river. That construction can be handled by Arkansas construction companies. Arkansas does not have a building code, so there are no inspectors to pay off who mite be friends of the power elite either. When completed, it'll be 1000 manufacturing jobs that go on indefinitely rather than a handful of nuclear power engineers. Then the blades can be mounted on barges for shipment up the Arkansas river onto various locations on the high plains. Which will put money in the pockets of farmers.

Cant have that, can we.

Global warming is a very difficult issue to prove or disprove because there are so many causes contributing to it. My logic has always been that pouring millions of tones of CO2 into the atmosphere annually must have some affect on the way things are. It is true that the many of nature’s processes require CO2, but does nature need the abundant amount of CO2 that we are putting into the atmosphere? And what happens to the excess CO2 that nature isn’t able to use? Scientists suggest that it collects in certain strata in the atmosphere and blocks certain types of sunlight in, thus warming up the surface.

To prove or disprove its validity, we would need to examine the experiments used to prove the hypothesis.

Because perhaps man-made global warming is exaggerated, but I still believe that the sustainable direction we are moving in is the right action regardless. Switching to Green energy will reduce air pollution in large cities, thus lowering rates of lung disease and all the rest of it.

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Here is the best argument in favor of the current policies towards global warming –

If we do nothing and global warming is caused by human activity then a global calamity will occur for our failure to act.

However, if we do act, and global warming was exaggerated and not solely caused by human activity, then the end result is that we end up with more green technologies, and thus air, and water pollution is lowered in major urban centers, and lung disease and disease in general is lowered.

So it seems like taking action to lower global warming will cause more benefit to mankind even if global warming is exaggerated.

<So it seems like taking action to lower global warming will cause more benefit to mankind even if global warming is exaggerated.>
It does seem that way. But the New World Order is a machiavellian republic, and he tells us that such republics always respond with too little, too late.

I've read that back before the ice ages there was a period when the CO2 level was this high. Europe was a subtropical jungle. So much water was evaporating off the warm Indian Ocean, that the Sahara was grassland. The Arctic ocean was so warm that the Canadian, Alaskan, and Siberian coasts were lush temperate zone conifer rain forests. The rain also spread south down to what are now the Kara Kum, Kyzyl Kum, & Gobi deserts. The Taklamakhan depression filled with rain water.

It'd raise all kindsa holy hell with grains which need dry conditions at harvest. Alberta & Saskatchewan harvests were down because the varieties they grew were not adapted to the heat. We are already loosing soybean production because of a fungus, and in warm wet global warming conditions, the fungi are just going to explode.

Its not upta me. None of us can really get thru the hype of corporate media, and besides, the voters are busy watching football. What is upta me, is to collect seed varieties to find out what I can grow where I am with the weather warming like I expect, and trade with others trying to do the same. I also have cloning powder, so if I get something started, I can make a lot of it from just a few seeds.

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Great Barrier Reef doomed within a generation

The scientists present three scenarios for the future of coral reefs - the world's largest lifeforms - under different climactic conditions.

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,22 ... 60,00.html

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Magma May Be Melting Greenland Ice

What caused the hotspot to suddenly form is another mystery

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/200 ... eenlandice

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Whether its man made or not, the Greenland ice core for one, shows its been going on for 10,000 years, and whether man has anything to do with it in the last few hundred years, the point is that it is going on. And its not the first time. Before the ice age there were periods when it was even warmer than the GW agitators say it will get in the next century.

The only question is, how to adapt to the changes. We can be sure that other life forms are now doing what they've always done, evolve. Even if GW was not a problem, we are not going to run the Global Economy that much longer on oil China is putting another million cars on the road this year. Where's all the gas going to come from?

Any business man will tell you- a sole source of supply is a bad idea. The Green technologies, whether they help with Global Warming or not, just by being under continued development, give pause to those considering jacking the prices for petroleum higher and faster. There aint no free lunch. If the power elite hasta scare sheeple to get them to allocate the R&D, so be it.

What really scares the shit outta me is that these decisions are made by urban bureaucrats. If you dont think Global Warming is going on, go ask an old farmer. Alberta and Saskatchewan had a reduced grain harvest last year cause the varieties they were growing were not well adapted to such hot dry weather. They shouldda tried seed from Kansas.

Ocean surface water temps are rising, evaporation increases, so some areas will not only see more heat, they'll have longer more humid summers. The fungi population will just explode. The seed varieties sold to agribusiness now are not selected for resistance to fungi, but maximum tonnage per acre. The ongoing eradication of heritage lines diminishes the variety needed to develop new strains.

A passing freighter dropped off some spores on Victoria Island from Australia. The fungi just loves the rain forest there, which is now war enuf to support it. Uncounted numbers of dogs have been killed from going into the woods and sniffing the spores, and the anthrax like disease has killed some of the owners. You can quit worrying about whether you will still be able to put gas in the car, and start wondering whether you'll have food on the table or air you can breathe.

Nothing proposed to deal with global warming so far sees these problems on the radar.

Yours faithfully,
List of signatories

There are 18 Australians (or people working in Australia) on that list of 100 people.
That is 18%.

Oz's population is 21,000,000 whereas the world population is 6,600,000,000, so Oz represents 0.32% of the world population.

We Ozzies sure must be a skeptical lot.

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Here is a quality video that puts the myth of Man Made Global Warming completely to rest. Like I said before, focusing on the carbon being released into the atmosphere is absolutely ridiculous when we have toxic chemicals like lead, mercury, radio-active waste, and all the other deadly pollutants being poured into the air, land, and water. To put it quite simply, carbon is not toxic, in fact it is the building block of life. The only reason I can think of for the focus on carbon emissions is because it provides the governments of the world a convenient excuse to impose a carbon tax, and distract us from the real pollutants we inevitably ingest. And just to make things clear, Global Warming, and Cooling happens, it's happening right now, and has happened many times through out Earth's history. Not suprisingly people forget they don't live in isolated bubbles where the Universe revolves around them, let alone a planet that caters to them with a steady climate.

If you actually crunch the green numbers to get down to a fair share per capita carbon footprint, you can see that no way in hell is it going to happen with the nuclear family model. But it would work with communal housing.

The Chinese have come close by building multi-story apartment buildings out in the boonies, moving everyone in the village into flats, then bulldozing the village to make that land available for crops. A single satellite dish on the roof provides cable and high speed Internet to everyone. One central heating, cold & hot water, sewer, and electrical system. The amount of heat needed for each person's share of outside wall, the amount of copper wiring, plastic and sewer pipe all go down to reasonably sustainable global levels.

But anyone who thinks you can put that many people in the same structure, with the pheremones building up who thinks monogamy is going to work, has not lived in a college dorm. I have mentioned this on green lists, and the silence is just fucking deafening. But if you can handle the attitude adjustments, then economically it works. There is a large number of people on hand at critical times like planting and harvest. But yet the rest of the time for cottage industry to be ramped up an order of magnitude to the small business scale, which is demonstrably competitive in the global economy.

Nobody has to commute to work. Like Fed-X or UPS, trucks bring everything everyone orders online. People pile in vans or buses to go to concerts or whatever. Yes, the emergency room is a lot further away, but the lifestyle has more exercise with healthier locally grown food so that people live longer better lives anyway.

If we built these out in the country, we could ship the welfare queens out there so that they could grow their own food and quit charging the taxpayers for food stamps. It'd break up the street gangs. Targets for social predators would not be very convenient. The kids would get healthier food, and learn a thing or two about working to get it, rather than just expecting a free ride.

Daybrown wrote:

The Chinese have come close by building multi-story apartment buildings out in the boonies, moving everyone in the village into flats, then bulldozing the village to make that land available for crops. A single satellite dish on the roof provides cable and high speed Internet to everyone. One central heating, cold & hot water, sewer, and electrical system. The amount of heat needed for each person's share of outside wall, the amount of copper wiring, plastic and sewer pipe all go down to reasonably sustainable global levels.

Yes, this is something I intuitively thought as well. It seems to me that large apartment complexes are much more energy efficient compared to scattered rows of middle class split entry houses. Moreover, Middle Class homes are comparably excessive, they need their own sewer, wall system, much more biological habitat is bulldozed to make room for them, and there is more space per person to heat and all the rest of it.

the idea makes a lot of sense ….

Nick Treklis wrote:Here is a quality video that puts the myth of Man Made Global Warming completely to rest.

I watched this the first time that you posted the link (in another thread, I forget which) and it was quite startling. I think that for fairness you should let people know that there are those who dispute its "quality" and that it has "put the myth...completely to rest". See its Wikipedia page for details. Having said that, I don't claim to be in any position to know either way. I tend to take the point of view that Ryan expounded on earlier - that acting to reduce CO2 emissions has benefits anyway, even if we're wrong about global warming being attributable to CO2. It's at least strongly possible, so why take the risk?

I haven't read much of the rest of this thread so I won't respond to anything else except to say thanks to daybrown for the little thought that he gave me - that when the wind's not blowing in one place it will be blowing in another: neat argument for wind power, whose truth value I can't evaluate but if it is indeed true then it's a winner.