Briefly: behind the Gadarene rush to condemn President Trump's announcement that he will no longer abide by the provisions of the Paris Agreement signed by President Obama is nothing more than political posturing. The campaign is designed only to spread rampant disinformation in an effort to undermine Trump's public support.
At the same time, the remarkable breadth and effrontery of this campaign is highly revealing of the motives of those behind it. There is no science (understood properly, as a prediction of what will happen when a process is repeated) to back their claims. Instead, there is a consensus of the like-minded and like-motivated, around the moniker of "climate change" (after all, who in his right mind could disagree that the climate changes over time?), that is propped up by highly flexible (and debatable) computer models.
And now that President Trump has had the gall to question the validity of their unsupported (and unsupportable) consensus, the elites and their media are in an uproar: an uproar based on fear of exposure, and not on facts (because there aren't any facts -- only elaborately constructed, and continually revised, computer models). I shall not boost their Web traffic by linking in this post to all the stories they have generated. You may, as Claude Rains would say, round up the usual suspects by going to Huffington Post, MSNBC, CNN or the New York Times, and take it from there.
In short, Obama signed the Paris Agreement as a hollow gesture to his Potemkin legacy, and now Trump has decided he won't play along with the charade.
You will never read the whole truth in the mainstream media. So those of you who find your way to this obscure outpost on the worldwide Web may thank the luck (or chance) that brought you, because here you will find nothing but the unvarnished truth, as always -- no matter how unpalatable it may be. Qui potest capere capiat.
Let me begin with some unvarnished facts.
First, the so-called "Paris Agreement (or Accord)" of 2015 is called that, because it is not a full-fledged international treaty. It is more akin to a "gentlemen's agreement" between those who signed it as to the levels of greenhouse gases they will individually (as leaders) strive to meet on behalf of their respective countries. (I say "strive", because the Agreement contains no consequences for signatories who fail to reach their own set goals -- see below.)
Second, because it is not a treaty, it is not legally binding on any country whose leader signed it. Instead, it contemplates only a series of implementation measures to be adopted by the signers at future sessions, subject to formal ratification and adoption by the respective governmental bodies of their individual countries.
Third, in the United States, our Constitution gives legal effect only to a treaty that has been signed by the President and ratified by a two-thirds majority of the Senate. (See Article II, Section 2 for the language.) All else is ephemeral: what one President signs, a later President may revoke.
President Obama signed the accord, but he never submitted it to the Senate for ratification. So it has no legal force on the United States, and never has had. It was only his personal commitment to the other signers to lower CO
Thus the vocal opposition to Trump's announcement is not based in law, or on any other justifiable ground. The measure of it is simply the degree to which the globalists are outraged that any public figure should attempt at this date to thwart their agenda. (After all, they managed to persuade the heads of 197 countries to climb on board initially, and now those heads have secured official ratification in 147 instances.)
In other words, their bobbing balloons having been punctured, the "climate change" enthusiasts are now emitting a gaseous pollution of their own into the atmosphere. The collective phenomenon is so unique to our experience that I have had to invent a new word for it: "Trumphooey".
The reaction of leftists since Trump's election has been irrational and is getting worse.
ReplyDeleteIt is disturbing that the media/universities/government can mislead such a large proportion of the people, over such a very long time, with claims about climate change that are so clearly unsupported. I remember around 1989, Al Gore and others claiming that we needed to act immediately or global warming would spiral out of control by 2000.
ReplyDeleteI also recall the attacks on skeptics of 'Global Warming' for questioning the validity of the data. Then the 2006 UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change destroyed the climate movement's credibility with fraudulent data. And yet, it is still difficult to get much of America to doubt the false alarms.
This reminds me of your last post, Inclusivity Revisited. As Father Neuhaus described the "new orthodoxy" within TEC: "Evidence, reason, and logic count, in principle at least. Not so with the new orthodoxy. Here disagreement is an intolerable personal affront. It is construed as a denial of others, of their experience of who they are." Similarly, in the case of climate, your disagreement or skepticism is an attack on the very survival of others, their ability to exist.
I saw Al Gore yesterday on TV still claiming that he saw fish swimming in the streets of Miami beach only he made that claim a few years ago but now claims that it was just the other day. That sounded a bit fishy to me.
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ReplyDeleteThe Paris Treaty is a classic QTIIPS: Quantitatively Trivial Impact, but Intense Political Symbolism. Given the amount of virtue signaling going on by the Left, the response to being told NO is what you would expect.
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