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Science journal “Nature” article says Kyoto is bunk. Liberals go nuts. Want to ban science.

The only thing worse to liberals than a black woman being a Republican and a gay guy turning straight is a science journal that claims Kyoto is a useless, misguided piece of bunkum.

Actually, good news from Iraq, like “America is winning” is also greeted with dour reporters’ faces, disdain, and then not reported. 

Actually, “facts” are also anathema to liberals.

But we shouldn’t care what liberals think.  What they think (actually, they mostly “feel” rather than “think”) is obviously getting us nowhere good.

The National Post has been good enough to be perhaps the one news journal in Canada that has consistently presented the sensible side to the “man-made global warming” debate.  Today they bring us this good news:  we were right all along.  Investment in technological innovation is the way to go. 

Kyoto must go, science journal says

Protocol failing to combat climate change

Margaret Munro, CanWest News Service
Published: Thursday, October 25, 2007

A report in an influential science magazine says it is time to forego the Kyoto protocol because the United Nations treaty has failed to bring about any significant action on climate change.

Echoing sentiments long associated with such politicians as U.S. President George W. Bush and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, the article in the journal Nature would appear to undermine arguments from Kyoto supporters who insist there is merit in sticking to the treaty even if it has proven to be ineffective.

Not only has the decade-old treaty not delivered cuts in global emissions of greenhouse gases that continue to soar, but it is the wrong tool for the job, say Gwyn Prins of the London School of Economics and Steve Rayner at Oxford. Their commentary has top billing in the British science journal this week.

Under the headline “Time to Ditch Kyoto,” they call on delegates heading for the United Nations climate meeting in Bali in December to “radically rethink climate policy” and warn against creating a “bigger” version of Kyoto with more stringent targets and timetables.

Kyoto is a “symbolically important expression” of governments’ concerns about climate change, they say. “But as an instrument for achieving emissions reductions it has failed. It has produced no demonstrable reduction in emissions or even in anticipated emissions growth. And it pays no more than token attention to the needs of societies to adapt to existing climate change.”

“Kyoto’s supporters often blame non-signatory governments, especially the United States and Australia, for its woes,” say Messrs. Prins and Rayner. “But the Kyoto Protocol was always the wrong tool for the nature of the job.”

Canada’s three opposition parties have called in various ways for the governing Conservatives to meet their Kyoto commitments, including through the passage of a Liberal private member’s bill that instructs the federal government to live up to the treaty’s requirement to slash greenhouse-gas emissions by 6% below 1990 levels by 2012—with the first targeted reduction coming next year.

Canada’s greenhouse-gas emissions are 33% above the Kyoto commitment.

In his government’s recent Throne Speech, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said: “It is now widely understood that, because of inaction on greenhouse gases over the last decade, Canada’s emissions cannot be brought to the level required under the Kyoto Protocol within the compliance period, which begins on Jan. 1, 2008 … “

[…]

Joel Johannesen
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