Climate Change politics, that’s all it ever was anyway

by Sterling Burnett NCPA November 30, 2012

And so comes the beginning of the end the Kyoto Protocol, with wimper rather than a bang or the sounding of a gong.  The year 2013 is fast arriving and the Kyoto protocol on climate change has no successor.

Though almost no one has noticed, the United Nation’s is holding its annual “We’ve got to save the planet this year or it’s too late and we’re all doomed — no really, this time we mean it,” Framework Convention on Climate Change conference in Doha, Qatar this year. 

Despite having representatives from more than 200 countries, and despite Kyoto expiring this year, it is the least well attended UN climate conference meeting in a decade.  In part this is due to waning public and thus political attention.  But it is also due to the fact that for the first time in the Framework’s 18 year history the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was neither invited to address nor attend the meeting. 

The UN Framework convention has always argued that our understanding climate science, not politics was driving the need for carbon restricting policies — and they argued that the IPCC was the gold standard for climate science, and the scientific body that has consistently argued that human actions are warming the globe and must be curtailed to prevent all manner of calamities.  I, among others, have consistently argued otherwise, that it was politics, not science that was driving the international climate policy agenda.

So what’s a climate conference sans climate scientists? — a political meeting.

At least now the UN is being open about what the Climate Convention is all about.

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