Note: this is my article last week, it has plenty of links which may not be shown here. To see those links, visit this online paper where this article was first posted:
http://www.thelobbyist.biz/lobbyist.biz/perspectives/columns/back_to_personal_responsibility/737.html
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There have been a number of recent reports showing that current global cooling is getting more pronounced and obvious, sometimes adversely affecting agricultural production.
Among these reports (all dates refer to 2009) are:
(1) Crops under stress as temperatures fall (The Sunday Telegraph, UK, June 14);
(2) Canadian Wheat Output May Fall on Dry, Cool Weather (Bloomberg);
(3) Southeastern Missouri farmers try to overcome wet spring, soggy crops (TV4 Kansas City);
(4) Canada frosts the most widespread in recent memory (Reuters, June 9);
(5) Cold weather, late-blooming flowers stymie Washington, Oregon tulip festivals (The Oregonian, March 31);
(6) Many forecasters have one word this summer: COOL (Climate realists, June 16);
(7) Dickinson ND sees first June snowfall in 60 years (WUWT, June 6);
(8) Great British summer goes from sweltering to shivering in just a week (Daily Mail, June 6);
(9) Shoveling hail in sandals? NJ (wcbstv.com, June 16);
(10) First ever icewine in Brazil (ICECAP and WUWT, June 16).
There are many other news and blog reports, complete with pictures, how global cooling is showing and affecting agriculture in various parts of the world. Here in the Philippines, there are a few reports how the early onset of rains this year in the Philippines – it started mid-April, instead of June – has affected summer crops. I personally saw for instance, an onion farm in western Pangasinan that suffered heavy losses when about 2 weeks before scheduled harvest by end-April, the onset of rains in mid-April damaged the onions. These onion farms are established by onion farmers from Nueva Ecija only during the summer months, as the land will revert back to ricefarms for 2 cropping period starting June.
It should be noted though that when media people report about the cooling trend (early rains and typhoons, often cloudy skies), they still refer to it as “climate change due to global warming”. If there is global warming, then there should be less rains, less clouds, more drought, more hot days, right?
The main perpetrators of the global warming hysteria are the various leaders in governments, the UN, NGOs, and some business interests. While most climate indicators point to falling global temperatures – an exact opposite of what the UN IPCC predicted of ever-rising temperatures until 2100 – there are simply too many global meetings by the above-stated group of leaders. Their goal is to hammer a post-Kyoto Protocol agreement (expiring in 2012) that will pressure if not coerce countries to drastically cut their carbon emissions which they blame as the main cause of global warming and climate change.
Last March, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) held its climate change talks in Bonn, Germany. Then another 2-weeks meeting in the same city last June 1-12, ending only last Friday. This week, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) is holding a High Level Dialogue on Climate Change in Asia and the Pacific, June 16-17 here in Manila, and UNFCCC Executive Secretary Yvo de Boer is one of the keynote speakers.
Another UNFCCC meeting in August, also to be held in Bonn. Another meeting in late September to early October in Bangkok, Thailand. Another meeting in early November in Barcelona, Spain. And ultimately, a 2-weeks meeting in December in Copenhagen, Denmark.
These are just among the few international meetings on-going and scheduled for the next 6 months. Other rich goverments have also sponsored and hosted international meetings on their own over the past few months, with generally the same set of environment and climate officials and carbon cutting “negotiators”.
As I have shown in my recent articles in this online paper here and here, carbon dioxide (CO2) has little or no contribution to recent warming (until 1998), and much less in the current cooling. The Sun, its solar irradiance and sunspot activities or inactivity, is the main driver of climate changes (warming and cooling) in the planet.
Last June 2, the Heartland Institute sponsored the 3rd International Conference on Climate Change (ICCC) in Washington, DC. Among the speakers there was my friend, Dr. Willie Soon, the only world-reknown Asian-American astrophysicist and geoscientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. I met him during the 2nd ICCC last March in New York City, also sponsored by Heartland Insitute. A number of the charts that I showed in my recent talks on climate alarmism here in Manila were lifted from Dr. Soon’s presentation.
Also during the 3rd ICCC, a new report by the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), "Climate Change Reconsidered", was formally launched. It is the report on global warming that the UN IPCC should have written—but didnt. The 880-page report rigorously critiques the 2007 Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) of the UN IPCC, which concluded that harmful global warming “very likely” has been due to human activity in the release of greenhouse gases. The science behind that conclusion is soundly refuted in that report, coauthored by Dr. S. Fred Singer and Dr. Craig Idso. Full text of the report and related materials can be found at http://www.nipccreport.org.
The battle for sanity and reason vs global ecological central planning is a hard one. Governments and the UN, pushed by influential international NGOs and business interests that will benefit from the hundreds of billion dollars per year of carbon trading alone, are hell-bent on continuing the warming hysteria. Several hundred billion dollars more on carbon taxes, subsidies to renewable energy plants, the hundreds of new climate bureaucracies that are sprouting up in almost all countries, these vested political and economic interests conspire to continue the warming scam so that they can dictate how we should run our lives.
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Yesterday, I posted this short note in facebook:
"Pondering that with the US government's (a) huge borrowings for the fiscal stimulus, (b) another huge borrowings for health care, and (c) cap and trade bill passed by the House, Mr. Obama is very successful in making taxes, energy prices and commodity prices very high, very soon."
I got 3 short comments, one of which from Vanni,
"Hi Nonoy! You are right on the money my friend. I think the U.S. has only two options. One, declare bankruptcy or inflate their way out of their debts. Your guess is as good as mine. Cheers."
I thanked them for the comments. Obama's federal carbon tax alone will be around $93 B/year from 2012-19, on top of existing federal environmental taxes and various state carbon taxes. High overall taxes + high energy prices = low growth for the US. Which will mean lower export market for the Philippines and the US' other trade partners.
China should not follow the same economic-busting policies stemming from "CO2-induced warming" hysteria. China should take up the slack from economic slowdown in the US, it should continue growing fast, and it should continue to be the major buyer for many exporting countries like the Philippines.
The warming hysterics seem to be winning in politics even if they are losing in science. They want to conquer the world through ecological central planning, after economic central planning was proven to be a failure. But both are same dog with a different collar.
This week or exactly five years hence, same Eastern US, see this news...
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