The FAO-EC report fails to see the wood for the trees as the climate change argument unravels a little more
http://www.thecommentator.com/article/754/a_new_climategate_how_the_left_can_t_see_the_wood_for_the_trees
Another grand bargain not only failed to materialise but in Durban’s aftermath, Canada pulled out of the Kyoto Treaty claiming that the moribund agreement had failed to “represent a way forward.”
Canada’s (and Japan’s) actions have rightly bundled the Kyoto Protocol into the morgue, the coroner probing and dissecting to find the cause of death: Kyoto choked on hyperbole and a lack of direction.
Not only was the agreement detrimental to economic growth (read: Miss me Yet?), but also recent – and largely unreported – information highlighted just how fatuous this entire ‘green scare’ is.
Much of the discussion surrounding climate change mitigation is focused on reducing deforestation as a means of reducing emissions. Thanks to satellite technology, a report issued by the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization and the European Commission was set to uncover just how urgent the situation was just days before Durban Summit, creating yet more alarmist rhetoric in order to compel global leaders to sign a binding deal.
The facts, however, revealed otherwise. The report served to show that both organisations have been using such fatally flawed data that they overestimated global deforestation by a whopping 32 percent.
The overriding assumption, supported most notably by Lord Stern (we don’t link to the Grauniad), has always been that large scale deforestation has been the primary contributor to greenhouse gas emissions (GHG). The fact that the FAO and EC have been hoist with their own petard is a delicious irony not lost on us.
Global deforestation is occurring, but at an annual rate of 0.07 percent—a level surely tolerable for countries currently on the path towards industrialization. One of the most damning aspects of the FAO-EC report is that all the green initiatives put in place to help prevent deforestation in the developing world have been shown to be nothing but a sham.
What’s more, Britain is donating vast sums for conservation efforts to address a problem that actually doesn’t exist.
The developing world has repeatedly been cajoled into supporting schemes such as the United Nations’ Collaborative Programme on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries (REDD). In short, REDD is an egregious con perpetuated by global institutions, hampering growth in the developing world and sucking Western taxpayers dry.