Global Warmers Party in Cancun While Peasants Freeze to Death in Europe

So nice to see the global warming extremists party hard down in Cancun while Europeans are dying of cold in the streets. Surely they'll pay their respects to the dead once they shake off their hangovers and declare a fierce moral urgency to combat global cooling.

FREEZING weather has claimed 26 lives across Central Europe this week including 18 deaths in Poland where temperatures plunged to minus 33 degrees Celsius.

"Ten people died due to exposure over the last 24 hours across Poland after eight died on Tuesday," national police spokesman Mariusz Sokolowski said.

Alcohol and homelessness are common factors in the deaths and the victims are primarily men, aged 35 to 60, he added.

The two factors also played a role in the freezing deaths of four men aged 47 to 61 in the neighbouring Czech Republic over the last 48 hours, police confirmed.

In Lithuania, cold weather has also claimed four lives.

Heavy snow overnight on Wednesday to Thursday forced the closure of the international airport in the Czech capital Prague and wreaked havoc on road and railway networks, officials confirmed.

Heavy snowfall earlier this week grounded flights and caused transport chaos on Poland's road and rail networks.

Temperatures plunged on Tuesday night to minus 33 degrees Celsius in the eastern city of Bialystok near Poland's eastern border with Belarus.

They'll be in Cancun for a couple of weeks, so hopefully for them the deep freeze passes before they return.

In other deeply ironic news, Japan refuses to extend the meaningless Kyoto protocol.

The delicately balanced global climate talks in Cancún suffered a serious setback last night when Japan categorically stated its opposition to extending the Kyoto protocol – the binding international treaty that commits most of the world's richest countries to making emission cuts.

The Kyoto protocol was adopted in Japan in 1997 by major emitting countries, who committed themselves to cut emissions by an average 5% on 1990 figures by 2012.

However the US congress refused to ratify it and remains outside the protocol.

Not that the media will mention it, but that was a 97-0 vote in the U.S. Senate back in the 1990's. Of course that was Bush's fault or something.

Monday Doom and Gloom: Kyoto Has Failed, We're All Doomed

A little unbridled hysteria to get your week off on a positive note.

Now that the vaunted Kyoto protocol has been established as worthless (hey, there's a reason it got zero votes in the United States Senate), it's time for--you guessed it--Kyoto 2!

But what are we to do? All our policies to date to tackle global warming have been miserable failures. The Kyoto protocol has created a vast carbon market but done little to reduce emissions. The main effect of the EU's emissions trading scheme has been to transfer about €30bn or more from consumers to Europe's biggest polluters, the power companies. The EU and US foray into biofuels has, at huge cost, increased greenhouse gas emissions and created a world food crisis, causing starvation in many poor countries.

A vast carbon market where certain obese hucksters (I won't name name, but you know who I'm talking about) get rich while children starve!

So are all our efforts doomed to failure? Yes, so long as our governments remain craven to special interests, whether carbon traders or fossil fuel companies. The carbon market is a valuable tool, but must be subordinate to climatic imperatives. The truth is that to prevent runaway greenhouse warming, we will have to leave most of the world's fossil fuels in the ground, especially carbon-heavy coal, oil shales and tar sands. The fossil fuel and power companies must be faced down.

Global problems need global solutions, and we also need an effective replacement for the failed Kyoto protocol. The entire Kyoto system of national allocations is obsolete because of the huge volumes of energy embodied in products traded across national boundaries. It also presents a major obstacle to any new agreement – as demonstrated by the 2008 G8 meeting in Japan that degenerated into a squabble over national emission rights.

The answer? Scrap national allocations and place a single global cap on greenhouse gas emissions, applied "upstream" – for instance, at the oil refinery, coal-washing station and cement factory. Sell permits up to that cap in a global auction, and use the proceeds to finance solutions to climate change – accelerating the use of renewable energy, raising energy efficiency, protecting forests, promoting climate-friendly farming, and researching geoengineering technologies. And commit hundreds of billions of dollars per year to finance adaptation to climate change, especially in poor countries.

Such a package of measures would allow us to achieve zero net greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, and long-term stabilisation at 350 parts per million of CO2 equivalent. This avoids the economic pain that a cap-and-trade system alone would cause, and targets assistance at the poor, who are least to blame and most need help. The permit auction would raise about $1 trillion per year, enough to finance a spread of solutions. At a quarter of the world's annual oil spending, it is a price well worth paying.

Better yet, make the worst polluters (China, for example) pay their fair share.

But no, we can't do that. We have to make Western nations bear the brunt of this transfer of wealth instead, while lining the pockets of fat hucksters who live large on the gullibility of naive people.

Inconvenient Kyoto Truths

Wonderful suggestion by George Will. I doubt we'd hear from some of the blowhards once their bluff was called.

The Kyoto Hypocrisy

Temper all the global warming lunacy dominating the airwaves with this column by Christopher C. Horner. It's a shame the President has not spoken out more forcefully against the avalanche of misleading propaganda we're subjected to daily. Read the whole thing, but this part is relevant.

Climate change and Kyoto have simply become totems in the larger anti-Bush struggle. When he is gone the rhetoric will calm, the world will get used to the idea that, like 155 other countries including China, India, Mexico, South Korea and Brazil, under no president will the U.S. ratify a global pact rationing greenhouse emissions. This is particularly true regarding a regime with such a miserable record already, with its perverse incentives, economic cost and, frankly, the pervasive cheating.

Even a scaled-back and solely domestic replication of Kyoto would simply be a smaller mistake on the road to the same disastrous goal of ensuring energy poverty and economic outsourcing in the developed world. Yet given as the longstanding goal of a vocal and powerful yet tiny minority, Congress is now making loud noises about doing just that. A cadre of Wall Street insiders within the administration is also urging such action, Wall Street standing to gain greatly under this scheme at consumers' expense. That, too, is a current European reality that must be brought to the fore of the debate.

There remains time. The Democrat majority see no need to rush "climate change" off the stage before the 2008 elections, given the free pass they are granted on the issue in no small part to the administration's reluctance to fight back. President Bush failed to right the rhetorical ship on climate change in his State of the Union address, though fortunately he volunteered nothing to deepen the policy conundrum. The administration must articulate the facts of superior U.S. emissions performance to avoid the absurd outcome of leaping onto a sinking policy ship, leaving behind the most successful approach in a futile struggle for elite approval.

Don't forget when the U.S. Senate had the opportunity to vote on Kyoto, they went 97-0 against it. The drive-by media likes to obscure that fact.