A handful of major states resisted pressure on Dec. 15 to ramp up efforts to combat global warming as a U.N. climate summit came to a delayed close.
The summit talks in Madrid, dubbed COP25, were viewed as a test of governments’ collective will for more aggressive cuts to greenhouse gas emissions. But the conference, in its concluding draft, endorsed only a modest declaration on the “urgent need” to close the gap between existing emissions pledges and the temperature goals of the 2015 Paris climate pact.
At a midnight stocktaking session on Dec. 15, Carolina Schmidt, Chile’s environment minister, who served as president of the talks, appealed for consensus.
As it turned out, the Madrid talks became mired in disputes over the rules that should govern international carbon trading. Brazil and Australia were among the main holdouts, delegates said, and the summit deferred big decisions on carbon markets until later.
“We are of mixed emotions,” Schmidt said after the final decisions were made.
Counter Conference Seeks to Inject ‘Dose of Reality’ Into Climate Debate
Meanwhile, The Heartland Institute hosted a counter-conference in Madrid, during which experts challenged the climate emergency narrative.Speakers at the event included Will Happer, former top science adviser to President Donald Trump. Happer argued in support of the position that human greenhouse gas emissions are having a significantly lower impact on global temperatures than some claim.
“Happer described the many beneficial effects of higher atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, including a dramatic greening of the Earth as more carbon dioxide serves as aerial fertilizer for crops and vegetation,” Burnett said.
Heartland reorganized its event, called the Climate Reality Forum, after the U.N. climate summit was moved due to social unrest.
“COP 25 had to change locations from Chile to Spain at very short notice (after it had already changed locations from Brazil to Chile), after riots erupted around the country in protest to energy price hikes to pay for Chile’s climate change programs, forcing Chilean President Sebastian Pinera to put troops on the streets and cancel his plans to host COP 25,” Burnett said.
“These days, climate change science really isn’t science at all. ... They draw their conclusions before even testing their hypotheses, and they base their assumptions on completely incoherent models, which is just an insult to science itself.”
Heartland policy adviser Ronald Stein noted the lack of hard evidence in support of climate crisis claims.
“The tweets are void of any ‘beef or facts’ as to what’s going to cause this forthcoming demise. They tweet rhetorical questions and emotional statements, and the millions of followers being brainwashed with scaremongering dogma slurp it up, as environmentalism has become the new religion.”
Geologist Gregory Wrightstone, author of “Inconvenient Facts: The Science That Al Gore Doesn’t Want You to Know,” told The Epoch Times that a radical shift away from fossil fuels into unproven and unreliable sources of energy would cause not just economic contraction, but human misery.
“We’re being told: ‘No, don’t use our resources to better mankind. You need to quit using fossil fuels that are actually lifting people out of generational poverty,'” he said.
“There are an estimated 4 billion people around the earth who are living in energy poverty. There are 4 million deaths a year from lung disease from people cooking in their homes with wood, a lot of it dried dung. They could benefit from more electrification, propane, compressed natural gas, so they don’t have to die an early death.
“What these people are doing who are pushing the Green New Deal and the Paris Climate Accord, they’re destining billions of people around the world to continued generational poverty,” Wrightstone said. “We’ve been lifting people out of poverty using fossil fuels by providing abundant, affordable, reliable energy, and not one of those three words are associated with wind or solar.”