It’s not just the “inability” of Kyoto to deal with these countries. It’s that the proponents of Kyoto have no serious interest in doing so. That is because Kyoto, like much of today’s so-called environmentalism, isn’t about science (since, for example, China’s coal furnaces are a far larger problem than U.S. SUVs) but about Earth worship and anti-capitalism. Environmentalism has become the last refuge of the Marxists. The U.S. must especially be contained because it is the biggest sinner, being the most successful capitalist. The SUV is the symbol of global warming because it represents the sins of capitalism and “greed.” We have indulged, and we will be punished by a Higher Power, now “the Planet,” rather than God, by apocaplypse. Ancient apocalyptic myth, combined with inchoate Earth worship and the tattered end game of global Marxism. That is what Kyoto represents.

It’s not just the “inability” of Kyoto to deal with these countries. It’s that the proponents of Kyoto have no serious interest in doing so. That is because Kyoto, like much of today’s so-called environmentalism, isn’t about science (since, for example, China’s coal furnaces are a far larger problem than U.S. SUVs) but about Earth worship and anti-capitalism. Environmentalism has become the last refuge of the Marxists. The U.S. must especially be contained because it is the biggest sinner, being the most successful capitalist. The SUV is the symbol of global warming because it represents the sins of capitalism and “greed.” We have indulged, and we will be punished by a Higher Power, now “the Planet,” rather than God, by apocaplypse. Ancient apocalyptic myth, combined with inchoate Earth worship and the tattered end game of global Marxism. That is what Kyoto represents.

Kyoto signee Canada saw its emissions not only rise, but rise above its promised target.

Response from the Canadian environmentalist?

Blame America.

Wait a minute. The US economy grew at a fairly good clip under the Bush administration and yet greenhouse emissions actually went down? How could that have happened?

Perhaps this is just a another typical case of a journalist mangling the scientist’s words. There’s emissions, and there’s net emissions. I live in the corn belt, where each year we watch corn plants go from bare dirt to 10 feet tall in about 6 weeks. Every single carbon atom in every single cell in every single one of those 10-foot-tall corn plants gets into the plant by sucking a CO2 molecule out of the air. Our agriculture is incredibly productive, and gets more productive every year. Farmers drip ammonia onto the fields, which means that the tonnage of CO2 sucked out of the air per acre goes up and up over time. Less productive land is continuously taken out of production (witness the depopulation of western South Dakota, for example.) It used to be (and still is in the developing world) that in order to get 700 bushels of corn, you needed 20 acres. Now you have 700 bushels of corn on 4 acres, and 16 acres of prairie grass, trees, and various random weeds. And all of that grass, trees and weeds sucks CO2 out of the air, too.

We may be the world’s biggest non-natural emitter of greenhouse gasses, but we’re also by far the world’s largest absorber of them, too. But under Kyoto we get no credit for removing CO2 from the air, and no credit for increasing the amount of CO2 we remove from the air.

Then there’s this crap:

world’s biggest polluter

This is only true if you define CO2 as “pollution.” Which is very dangerous hogwash, in that it allows people to increase real pollution in order to decrease CO2 emissions.

cathy

An example: A couple of years ago the Corps of Engineers was planning to change the classification of certain smaller wetland units, which would have made them vunerable to destruction. The American Wildlife Conservation Partners, a consortium of hunting groups, wangled an invitation to the Whitehouse to talk with the President, and got to sit down with him for an hour. They persuaded him to deep-six the Corps proposal. That’s the kind of results you can get when you don’t think of the president as Chimpy McHitlerburton.

The temps have been dropping pretty much since the President came into office. Oh, the irony!

re: climate fear mongering, esp. “rising oceans” dispossessing the poor.. I’m reminded of how often the well-intentioned political process yields unintended results. It could well be that any actual warming (up to another 20, if not 50+(!) degrees C will reduce the height of the ocean (as warmer southern ocean water puts more moisture over the world’s coldest continent-sized high plateau – where it’s a balmy MINUS 20C in mid-summer – i.e. Antarctica). And our ability to model and predict past Antarctic history for this “simple” question is little better than tossing a coin.