Climate Bills and a Green Economy

Farmers Must Earn Carbon Market Rewards: Report

December 11, 2009

Reuters - ...The U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization says the world's 500 million smallholders can tackle climate change and boost food output at the same time.

The agency argues that developing nation farmers can both cut greenhouse gas emissions and improve degraded land and so boost yields, through practices such as tree planting.

"It's important for this conference not to separate the two," said Vilsack. "Food security and climate change are in my view linked and if you address one you address the other."

He was speaking at an event focused on the role of agriculture, on the fringes of the U.N. climate talks.

Specialists discussed the priorities for a farm sector which accounts for 14 percent of global greenhouse gases, and which must feed an additional 2.3 billion people and increase food output by 70 percent by 2050.

The U.N.'s World Food Programme issued a report on Wednesday which estimated that an extra 100-200 million people could go hungry by 2050 without firm action on climate change, as a result of more droughts and floods.

The World is Cooling Not Warming Says Scientist Peter Taylor … and We’re Not Prepared

December 11, 2009

Daily Mail - In his provocative book Chill, Peter Taylor warns that the world is cooling not warming and that solutions proposed at Copenhagen ignore the risks of a possible return of the Ice Age…

The real science points to the sun’s magnetic cycle as the key driver by unknown mechanisms. Right now, NASA is throwing its hands up and saying ‘we’ve never seen anything like it and can’t tell what it is going to do next’...

Natural climate change, especially cooling, is already dangerous for very large numbers of people who are vulnerable to climate changing -- the urban poor in the developed world, including the UK, plus the poor nations currently dependent on food aid.

Cooling reduces food surpluses upon which we all depend. The biofuels programmes aimed at preventing climate change will expose them to greater risk by decreasing the amount of land available and raising costs of food, while this problem coupled with peak oil will affect everyone worldwide and drive up transport and manufacturing costs to levels even the super rich will struggle to afford.

These threats are real and here now, not in 50 years time...

Copenhagen won’t broker a solution -- not only has the IPCC hyped the warming and misrepresented the science with regard to CO2 and ‘warming’ -- but it has also proposed a system of cap-and-trade and technology transfer that means huge profits for banks and brokers.

These useless technology sales coupled with a massive global and unelected bureaucracy that decides which technology and which projects get funded -- merely provide jobs for the boys rather than address the issues.

What we need is the creation of resilience -- the rich world is unstable and will try to buy its way out of problems, by buying food on the world market -- the rest of the world is at grave risk of starvation.

Food not energy will be the big issue we urgently need to address in the next few years. In the developed world we need to systematically restructure and reduce demand and in the developing world, people need to stay in communities on the land and not be forced to seek work in unsustainable megacities.

Climategate does not just demonstrate the corruption of science and peer-review, it also demonstrates the incompetence of specialists who do not understand planetary ecology, especially its cycles.

We’re being fatally led up the wrong garden path by green businesses, politicians, the IPCC and their computer geeks with their doctored spreadsheets and forecasts. They need to get out more and study the real world – not their virtual reality – because, like the asset bubbles of the financial crisis, the global warming bubble is about to burst…