Source: Obama’s timing boosts hope for major deal on emissions
…”The Copenhagen summit is set to do “real business” because of President Barack Obama’s decision to attend its crucial final stage, says Climate Change Minister Nick Smith.
Dr Smith said the summit was rapidly gaining momentum, with 105 world leaders now signed up for the final day.”…
..”Dr Smith said the mantra of his negotiating team was “for New Zealand to do its fair share” to stop global warming. “Not more, not less, but our fair share towards a global solution.”
He said recent efforts by climate-change sceptics to discredit the work of leading meteorologists ahead of the summit, including hacking computers, was “a bit of a sideshow”.
The first week of the fortnight-long summit will mainly involve officials, before environment ministers like Dr Smith arrive next week.
Dr Smith said the growing numbers of world leaders signing up for the final stage meant there would be “enormous pressure” to deliver up a deal.”..
COMMENTS:This will be proven over time as one the dumbest things a NZ politican has ever done. Dr Nick Smith will join Max ‘Power prices wont go up’ Bradford as the ‘King Of Stupid’ !
Question: Has the world been hood winked before ?
1) 1916: We are off to war, it will be over by xmas ( streets of London)
2) 1938: Hitler will not invade europe (Uk prime minster Neville Chamberlain)
3) 1975: By there year 2000 there will be a new ice age (Newsweek April 28, 1975).
4) 2000: The world will stop Y2K, computer date issue.
Sure it has, and now the Greenpeace (and now their IPCC Scientist) communists will most likely have there biggest win ever. That is until Obama is fired !
It always fascinates me how hands keep returning to the cookie jar and become more and more frantic as the last remnants become inexhorably obvious; and how one is left. Also how, when the question is asked, no-one freely owns up to who ate them all, yet all are rpepared to point the finger. A great environmental or resource teaching model, really. Very applicable to Aotearoa-Clean Green New Zealand (HA!?). It is (or should be) apparent that finite resources are finite and will be used up and will not renew? It is apparent that populations and ecosystems decline or even ‘boom and bust’ in pendulus swings when they are out of balance. It is apparent that as biological beings, humans are every bit as much as a fruit fly vulnerable to such swings; perhaps in a temporal sense of species, even more so? It is apparent that The Club of Rome, including Al Gore and many other world leaders, may have a Gaiian agenda in exagerating and pushing a global crisis, based on possibility and proactivity towards avoiding a probability of decline, for profit or otherwise? It is also apparent that those who find this confronting have their own agendas of profit and power within worldviews of possibilities perhaps limited by economic forecasts and inability to look beyond their own personal fortune? We are biological beings living on a single enclosed system, just the same as fruit flies in a jar. The faster we eat the food, the faster and more we defecate and corrupt the system that produces the air, water and food sources. The model is simple, and to my knowledge has never varied in consequence (no jar leaders have escaped the jar by space-craft to another new jar-planet to recolonise and temproarily flourish with their genetically selected few?). When I consider my children, I want to leave them and their children’s children something of what I experienced as a child, to choose to enjoy, or not, as the case may be for them. A virtual reality video game of catching a fish in a clean-ish river under blue-ish skies is not quite the same as the real thing. I believe it is easy to find fault, say “you’re wrong” and knock or mock – any idiot can do it; fewer can say “you’re wrong” and explain a balanced “why”; very few can say “you’re wrong, this is why, and here are three considered and balanced ideas about where we are at, why and how to fix it from here”. It is clear that there are no answers – there is no dispute that we are only guessing on all sides of the argument in relation to global science. We need to bear in mind that many environmental impacts take decades to manifest – gaps of between 20 and 40 years between cause and effect not uncommon. Have a yarn with the Sawmill workers of the 1950’s – 1960’s about that one; particularly about dioxines and the other 48 known industrial chemicals impacting on them (the few that are still alive) and their families? Everything in the environment is interconnected and in some way interrelated; we are what we eat and what we breath and what we drink. That is an ancient understanding that is just as valid now. We can not eat money and money does not cure anything (other than our material pangs, really). I am looking for valid solutions. What is it you would advocate for Mr Smith? Or Al Gore, the Club of Rome and the United Nations? In the meantime, you GO Mr Smith – you get ‘sucked in’ by the nasty global community and have a shot at doing what we can – always better than sometime in the future looking back and wishing we’d had a go!? Thanks for your time. David McKay