Now we have the UN pitching plans — again — for taxes on world commerce that would pluck scores of billions directly from the private sector every year, and send this lucre through the skimmers of the UN system, to be reallocated as the UN might prefer.

In a PJ Media article, Claudia Rosett – by far the most illuminating and reliable authority on the UN and its iniquities – writes:

Never mind where you might stand on the question of global warming, global cooling, climate change or plain old weather. If there’s one constant to this entire climate debate, it is that in the name of “climate,” the United Nations wishes to regulate and tax the economy of the planet — stripping resources from the most productive economies to hand them out as assorted UN bureaucrats deem fit. 

This is an agenda for global central planning — which, at the extreme, is what the Soviet Union envisioned as the radiant future of mankind, at least until the USSR itself collapsed as a basket case of monstrously misallocated resources, pervaded by the nightmare repression required to enforce such a system. Nonetheless, at the UN this agenda keeps coming up, year after year, at one climate conference after another.

The proclamations of emergency have varied, but always, in the middle of it, there is the UN, proposing to serve as planner and traffic cop for global commerce — a role that entails the UN aiming to redirect resources and collecting a cut to cover the administrative enterprises of its own neo-colonial empire of agencies, organizations, intergovernmental outfits, programs and special envoys. Somehow that already includes a need for climate conferees to travel great distances at other people’s expense …

Right now, at the UN Climate Change Conference in Durban, South Africa, they’re at it again, conferring for a fortnight. There, they are trying to design a “Green Climate Fund,” hoping to impose some form of global taxes that would bring in some $100 billion per year, to be redistributed to countries the UN decides are most at risk from change in climate. Reports have been emerging that the UN is eyeing a “carbon” tax on shipping, or international financial transactions, or cross-border aviation. Of course, this would raise the cost of commerce for everyone, so there is a further proposal, reports AFP, to use some of the money to compensate developing countries, at the expense of the most productive countries, for the higher costs. Such an arrangement would presumably require yet more intervention from the UN, since someone would have to decide which countries should be compensated, and to what extent — presumably a changing scene, as economic shifts occur — and of course there would be a need for more international bureaucrats to administer such a scheme. It’s also a good bet that more UN bureaucrats would also devote some of their time to coming up with yet more global tax schemes. The possibilities are staggering.

As a recipe for corruption of monumental scope, this is brilliant.It would open money spigots on a scale the UN to date has only dreamt of. …

The UN is a collective, encased in immunity, prone to horrific waste and abuse, and likewise prone to endless promises of reform and transparency which never quite work out — because there is no mechanism to hold the UN to account, or require that its officials comply with their promises. Even the U.S., which contributes 22% of the UN’s core budget, pours billions into the UN system, and periodically tries to clean the place up, has scant luck. In the 193-member General Assembly, the U.S. casts only one vote. The General Assembly budget process is one in which the U.S. provides the biggest share of the money, and a majority of other states out-vote the U.S. in deciding how it will be spent.

The UN must not be allowed to tax us. The UN must not be allowed to become the world’s Kremlin. The UN must be destroyed.

As we provoked indignant comments from an environmentalist enemy with our post yesterday (though he/she only addresses marginal points), we return to the attack today with more on the UN’s climate conference being held now in Durban, South Africa, and the lethal threat named “Agenda 21”  (see our posts Beware “Agenda 21”, June 24, 2011; The once and new religion of earth-worship, October 27, 2011; Agenda 21: the “smart growth” conspiracy, November 21, 2011).

Phyllis Schlafly goes right to the heart of the matter – the UN making a power-grab on the pretext of protecting the planet from human depredation – with this article at Townhall:

The United Nations Climate Change Conference in Durban, South Africa, opening on Nov. 28, called COP-17, is one of a series of U.N. meetings working toward a specific goal … to move the United States into a global government by environmental regulations and a vast network of taxes. These newly imposed taxes will give the U.N. a tremendous stream of money in addition to U.S. dues and congressional appropriations.

The plan for taxes was launched at the 1992 U.N. meeting in Rio de Janeiro, known as the Earth Summit, where Conference Secretary-General Maurice Strong produced a 300-page document with 40 proposals called Agenda 21.

The tax-seeking route then proceeded through U.N. meetings in Cancun in 2010, in Durban this November and will be finalized next year at what is called Rio+20 (i.e., Rio de Janeiro after 20 years).

Agenda 21 is a comprehensive master plan to reshape and control the U.S. while locking us into the clutches of the U.N. under the innocuous phrase “sustainable development.” Along with 178 countries, President George H.W. Bush accepted Agenda 21 as “soft law.” It was adopted by a new tactic called collaborative consensus building, instead of by treaty.

Bush popularized the term “new world order,” but left it for others to define. Mikhail Gorbachev said the threat of an environmental crisis will be the international key to unlocking the new world order, and former President Bill Clinton issued an executive order in 1993 creating the President’s Council on Sustainable Development.

Advocates of Agenda 21 talk about the three E’s of sustainable development: economy, equity and environment.

Equity means replacing our American constitutional system with central planning and social justice, which is a code word for redistribution of wealth, abolition of private property rights and giving favored corporations tax breaks, grants, and use of eminent domain.

Economy means shifting from a private enterprise system to government, private-corporation partnerships. That would be a giant step toward total government and U.N. control of our economy, with the ability to redistribute our goods and services to foreign countries.

Environment means giving animals and plants more rights or equal rights with humans. It also promotes worship of nature and mother Earth.

Yes, a multitude of genuine anti-human fanatics are only too happy to be used by the UN as it pursues its political aim of a centrally controlled world economy, which is to say a global socialist tyranny.

To talk about Agenda 21, you will have to get used to a new vocabulary: green jobs, green building codes, going green, regional planning, smart growth, biodiversity, sustainable farming, growth management, resilient cities, sustainable communities, redistribution, urban growth boundaries, redevelopment districts and consensus.

Agenda 21 wants to herd people into crowded communities with limited housing space and limited parking spaces. This will promote the green goal of reducing our use of automobiles, allowing only electric cars that can’t go very fast or very far, so people will have to walk, use bicycles and mass transit.

Agenda 21 supports the Wildlands Project, which seeks to re-wild 50% of our nation and turn it into a pre-Columbian wilderness where animals roam freely and humans are crowded into limited spaces. Already, we find that rural roads are not being repaired or maintained.

Agenda 21 has started its attacks on rural and small-town property rights. Six hundred U.S. cities and counties have signed on to the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives putting themselves indirectly under supervision of U.N. regulations and restrictions.

Advocates of Agenda 21 believe the earth is overcrowded. They demand an 85% reduction in human population. It’s a major goal of Agenda 21 to lower the U.S. standard of living by cutting our use of energy. Agenda 21 plans to use smart meters, smart grids and smart growth so that our nation’s use of electricity can be controlled, limited and redistributed.

Schools and universities are important to Agenda 21’s goals. The plan is make them indoctrination institutions, where kids are taught “green” propaganda, as well as global education to make them citizens of the world.

The UN will tax “currency transfers, fossil energy production including oil, natural gas and coal, the commercial use of oceans, international airplane tickets and all foreign exchange transactions”.

Taxes of this magnitude would give the U.N. so much power that it would become a de facto world government.

So, Phyllis Schlafly urges, take action to prevent this happening:

Tell your members of Congress to pledge that the day the U.N. adopts this nonsense will be the day we say goodbye to the U.N.

But why wait until then? The UN does enough harm right now.

The UN must be destroyed.

Another UN conference  on “climate change” with the ulterior motive of setting up a world government to redistribute wealth from prosperous Western countries to the bank accounts of Third World tyrants is running now in Durban, South Africa.

As we hoped and expected, Lord Christopher Monckton is there, speaking out as he constantly does against this conspiracy:

Mainstream science, politics, bureaucracy, academe, banking, business, media – all were of one mind. The West, so the playbook ran, must be shut down at once to Save The Planet from “global warming”, er, “climate change”, um, “climate disruption”, no, “extreme-weather events”, ah, that is, “energy-security challenges”. …

I find myself … in Durban among the creatures of “consensus” for the annual UN climate gabfest. Yet the party line was wrong. … Every dire prediction that the usual suspects had made with such sneering arrogance has failed.

Just look. Professor “Phil” Jones of the “University” of East Anglia had to admit … that there had been no statistically-significant “global warming” for 15 years. …

Arctic sea ice was supposed to be gone by 2013. Then it rebounded. Then it was going to reach a new low on 15 September this year …. [but] Antarctic sea ice has been on the up throughout the satellite era. Global sea ice shows little trend in 30 years.

Polar bears were supposed to be headed for extinction. … Today there are five times as many polar bears as 70 years ago.

Kilimanjaro has been losing ice since 1880. …  “Global warming” could not have caused the recent ice loss … The summit temperature, monitored by satellites, has not changed. Now the glacier is growing again.

Sea level is the big one. James Hansen of NASA, who made more than $1 million out of the climate scare last year alone, had predicted it would rise imminently by 246 feet. Was he right? No. The increase over the past eight years, according to the Envisat satellite, was at a rate equivalent to 2 inches per century. Not meters, not even feet. Inches. Two of them. Per century. …

Malaria was going to spread because of “global warming.” Yet the terrible leap in mortality from 50,000 to 1 million child deaths a year occurred a generation ago, when the Environmental Defense Fund – which, with Greenpeace and the World Wide Fund, spent $1 billion of taxpayers’ and donors’ cash on anti-Western pseudo-enviro propaganda last year alone – successfully campaigned for a worldwide ban on DDT, the only effective agent against the mosquitoes that carry malaria.

When the Board of the EDF met to plan the DDT ban, its then legal advisor, Victor John Yannacone Jr., begged it to ban only outdoor use: DDT sprayed inside houses would harm only the mosquitoes and spare the children. The then chairman, furious, fired Yannacone on the spot. As he left the room, someone said: “That’s the last time we employ anyone who knows any science.” That ban has killed 40 million children.

Extreme-weather deaths are down sharply. Global tropical-cyclone and hurricane activity is almost at its least in 30 years. Severe tornadoes have declined. Patterns of drought and flood remain as unpredictable and as devastating as ever. Bangladesh and nearly all of the Pacific atolls are gaining land mass, not losing it.

Net primary productivity of trees and plants worldwide is up. If you want a greener planet, add as much CO2 to the air as you can. Your emissions are also helping to stave off the next Ice Age. It’s already 6000 years overdue.

Yet the dreary, wasteful, pointless congresses of the greedy feeble-minded continue. The Bali Road-Map to Nowhere. The Copenhagen World-Government Treaty that collapsed as soon as it saw the light of day. The Cancun Concordats to establish 1000 – yes, 1000 – new bureaucracies: the structure of the unelected world government that every ex-politician from Gore and Chirac to Attali is demanding.

Everyone says nothing will happen at Durban. That worries me. It suggests the process of building a totalitarian global junta by what one UN official at Cancun called “transparent impenetrability” – publishing documents of such prolix length and complex obscurantism that no one can understand a word and yet no one can later deny the information was available – will invisibly gather pace. …

We like “transparent impenetrability”! Could we suspect that the UN official who invented it had a sense of irony?  No – too unlikely.

The Marxists’ wet dream …  is global totalitarian dictatorship. … But the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow and I are in Durban to stop them. So perhaps you’re not going to have it after all.

It’s good to know that a Committee and the noble lord are defending us from world totalitarian dictatorship. But it would be better if the United States, which should be and can be and was always meant to be the truly powerful defender of liberty, had a president and administration that would put an end to the UN and a stop to all its evil schemes forever.

The UN must be destroyed.

There is a newly released batch 0f 5,000 emails (out of 220,000 held by the whistleblower) sent by scientists to each other about “manmade global warming”. You can find a selection at Climategate 2 FOIA 2011 Searchable Database here.

The last lot came out shortly before the UN’s Copenhagen Conference on climate change, December 2009, and helped to make it a failure. These, almost certainly released by the same unknown hand, appear a few days before the Durban Conference which starts November 28, 2011. We hope they will have the same effect.

Many of them show an intention to deceive, some an uneasiness about the deception, and very few a frustrated desire to tell the truth.

Examples from the selection –

On fixing the information in the UN’s IPCC [International Panel on Climate Change] report:

Thorne/MetO:

Observations do not show rising temperatures throughout the tropical troposphere unless you accept one single study and approach and discount a wealth of others. This is just downright dangerous. We need to communicate the uncertainty and be honest. Phil, hopefully we can find time to discuss these further if necessary […]

Thorne:

I also think the science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run.

Carter:

It seems that a few people have a very strong say, and no matter how much talking goes on beforehand, the big decisions are made at the eleventh hour by a select core group.

Wigley:

Mike, The Figure you sent is very deceptive […] there have been a number of dishonest presentations of model results by individual authors and by IPCC […]

Overpeck:

The trick may be to decide on the main message and use that to guid[e] what’s included and what is left out.

Overpeck:

I agree w/ Susan that we should try to put more in the bullet about “Subsequent evidence” […] Need to convince readers that there really has been an increase in knowledge – more evidence. What is it?

Coe:

Hence the AR4 Section 2.7.1.1.2 dismissal of the ACRIM composite to be instrumental rather than solar in origin is a bit controversial. Similarly IPCC in their discussion on solar RF since the Maunder Minimum are very dependent on the paper by Wang et al (which I have been unable to access) in the decision to reduce the solar RF significantly despite the many papers to the contrary in the ISSI workshop. All this leaves the IPCC almost entirely dependent on CO2 for the explanation of current global temperatures as in Fig 2.23. since methane CFCs and aerosols are not increasing.

Briffa:

I find myself in the strange position of being very skeptical of the quality of all present reconstructions, yet sounding like a pro greenhouse zealot here!

Jones:

Getting people we know and trust [into IPCC] is vital – hence my comment about the tornadoes group.

On the importance and difficulty of spinning the message for political ends as the government among others requires:

Humphrey/DEFRA:

I can’t overstate the HUGE amount of political interest in the project as a message that the Government can give on climate change to help them tell their story. They want the story to be a very strong one and don’t want to be made to look foolish.

Fox/Environment Agency:

if we loose [sic] the chance to make climate change a reality to people in the regions we will have missed a major trick in REGIS.

Adams:

Somehow we have to leave the[m] thinking OK, climate change is extremely complicated, BUT I accept the dominant view that people are affecting it, and that impacts produces risk that needs careful and urgent attention.

Lorenzoni:

I agree with the importance of extreme events as foci for public and governmental opinion […] ‘climate change’ needs to be present in people’s daily lives. They should be reminded that it is a continuously occurring and evolving phenomenon

Jones:

We don’t really want the bullshit and optimistic stuff that Michael has written […] We’ll have to cut out some of his stuff.

Mann:

the important thing is to make sure they’re loosing the PR battle. That’s what the site [Real Climate] is about.

Ashton/co2.org:

Having established scale and urgency, the political challenge is then to turn this from an argument about the cost of cutting emissions – bad politics – to one about the value of a stable climate – much better politics. […] the most valuable thing to do is to tell the story about abrupt change as vividly as possible

Singer/WWF:

we as an NGO working on climate policy need such a document pretty soon for the public and for informed decision makers in order to get a) a debate started and b) in order to get into the media the context between climate extremes/desasters [sic]/costs and finally the link between weather extremes and energy

Minns/Tyndall Centre:

In my experience, global warming freezing is already a bit of a public relations problem with the media

Kjellen:

I agree with Nick that climate change might be a better labelling than global warming

Pollack:

But it will be very difficult to make the MWP [Medieval Warm Period] go away in Greenland.

Rahmstorf:

You chose to depict the one based on C14 solar data, which kind of stands out in Medieval times. It would be much nicer to show the version driven by Be10 solar forcing

Cook:

A growing body of evidence clearly shows [2008] that hydroclimatic variability during the putative MWP (more appropriately and inclusively called the “Medieval Climate Anomaly” or MCA period) was more regionally extreme (mainly in terms of the frequency and duration of megadroughts) than anything we have seen in the 20th century, except perhaps for the Sahel. So in certain ways the MCA period may have been more climatically extreme than in modern times.

On the science being far from settled :

Warren:

The results for 400 ppm stabilization look odd in many cases […] As it stands we’ll have to delete the results from the paper if it is to be published.

Wils:

What if climate change appears to be just mainly a multidecadal natural fluctuation? They’ll kill us probably […]

Wilson:

Although I agree that GHGs are important in the 19th/20th century (especially since the 1970s), if the weighting of solar forcing was stronger in the models, surely this would diminish the significance of GHGs. […] it seems to me that by weighting the solar irradiance more strongly in the models, then much of the 19th to mid 20th century warming can be explained from the sun alone.

Hoskins:

If the tropical near surface specific humidity over tropical land has not gone up (Fig 5) presumably that could explain why the expected amplification of the warming in the tropics with height has not really been detected.

Jenkins/MetO:

would you agree that there is no convincing evidence for kilimanjaro glacier melt being due to recent warming (let alone man-made warming)?

Jones:

[tropical glaciers] There is a small problem though with their retreat. They have retreated a lot in the last 20 years yet the MSU2LT data would suggest that temperatures haven’t increased at these levels.

Jones:

There shouldn’t be someone else at UEA with different views [from “recent extreme weather is due to global warming”] – at least not a climatologist.

Crowley:

I am not convinced that the “truth” is always worth reaching if it is at the cost of damaged personal relationships

Briffa:

Also there is much published evidence for Europe (and France in particular) of increasing net primary productivity in natural and managed woodlands that may be associated either with nitrogen or increasing CO2 or both. Contrast this with the still controversial question of large-scale acid-rain-related forest decline? To what extent is this issue now generally considered urgent, or even real?

Crowley:

Phil, thanks for your thoughts – guarantee there will be no dirty laundry in the open.

Steig:

He’s skeptical that the warming is as great as we show in East Antarctica – he thinks the “right” answer is more like our detrended results in the supplementary text. I cannot argue he is wrong.

Jones:

This will reduce the 1940-1970 cooling in NH temps. Explaining the cooling with sulphates won’t be quite as necessary.

Haimberger:

It is interesting to see the lower tropospheric warming minimum in the tropics in all three plots, which I cannot explain. I believe it is spurious but it is remarkably robust against my adjustment efforts.

Klein/LLNL:

Does anybody have an explanation why there is a relative minimum (and some negative trends) between 500 and 700 hPa? No models with significant surface warming do this

Osborn:

This is an excellent idea, Mike, IN PRINCIPLE at least. In practise, however, it raises some interesting results […] the analysis will not likely lie near to the middle of the cloud of published series and explaining the reasons behind this etc. will obscure the message of a short EOS piece.

Norwegian Meteorological Institute:

In Norway and Spitsbergen, it is possible to explain most of the warming after the 1960s by changes in the atmospheric circulation. The warming prior to 1940 cannot be explained in this way.

On the nuisance of the urban heat effect:

Jones:

I think the urban-related warming should be smaller than this, but I can’t think of a good way to argue this. I am hopeful of finding something in the data that makes by their Figure 3.

Rean:

We found the [urban warming] effect is pretty big in the areas we analyzed. This is a little different from the result you obtained in 1990. We have published a few of papers on this topic in Chinese. Unfortunately, when we sent our comments to the IPCC AR4, they were mostly rejected.

Wigley:

there are some nitpicky jerks who have criticized the Jones et al. data sets – we don’t want one of those [EPRI/California Energy Commission meeting].

Jones:

The jerk you mention was called Good(e)rich who found urban warming at all Californian sites.

On hiding the unreliability of data:

Wilson:

any method that incorporates all forms of uncertainty and error will undoubtedly result in reconstructions with wider error bars than we currently have. These may be more honest, but may not be too helpful for model comparison attribution studies. We need to be careful with the wording I think.

Jones:

what he [Zwiers] has done comes to a different conclusion than Caspar and Gene! I reckon this can be saved by careful wording.

Bradley:

I’m sure you agree – the Mann/Jones GRL paper was truly pathetic and should never have been published. I don’t want to be associated with that 2000 year “reconstruction”.

Osborn:

Because how can we be critical of Crowley for throwing out 40-years in the middle of his calibration, when we’re throwing out all post-1960 data ‘cos the MXD has a non-temperature signal in it, and also all pre-1881 or pre-1871 data ‘cos the temperature data may have a non-temperature signal in it!

Esper:

Now, you Keith complain about the way we introduced our result, while saying it is an important one. […] the IPCC curve needs to be improved according to missing long-term declining trends/signals, which were removed (by dendrochronologists!) before Mann merged the local records together. So, why don’t you want to let the result into science?

Cook:

I am afraid that Mike is defending something that increasingly can not be defended. He is investing too much personal stuff in this and not letting the science move ahead.

Cook:

One problem is that he [Mann] will be using the RegEM method, which provides no better diagnostics (e.g. betas) than his original method. So we will still not know where his estimates are coming from.

On religion being brought to bear on the subject:

Wigley:

I heard that Zichichi has links with the Vatican. A number of other greenhouse skeptics have extreme religious views.

Houghton [MetO, IPCC co-chair]:

[…] we dont take seriously enough our God-given responsibility to care for the Earth […] 500 million people are expected to watch The Day After Tomorrow. We must pray that they pick up that message.

Hulme:

My work is as Director of the national centre for climate change research, a job which requires me to translate my Christian belief about stewardship of God’s planet into research and action.

Hulme:

He [another Met scientist] is a Christian and would talk authoritatively about the state of climate science from the sort of standpoint you are wanting.

On the fallibility of climate models:

Watson/UEA:

I’d agree probably 10 years away to go from weather forecasting to ~ annual scale. But the “big climate picture” includes ocean feedbacks on all time scales, carbon and other elemental cycles, etc. and it has to be several decades before that is sorted out I would think. So I would guess that it will not be models or theory, but observation that will provide the answer to the question of how the climate will change in many decades time.

Shukla/IGES:

[“Future of the IPCC”, 2008] It is inconceivable that policymakers will be willing to make billion-and trillion-dollar decisions for adaptation to the projected regional climate change based on models that do not even describe and simulate the processes that are the building blocks of climate variability.

Lanzante/NOAA:

While perhaps one could designate some subset of models as being poorer in a lot of areas, there probably never will be a single universally superior model or set of models. We should keep in mind that the climate system is complex, so that it is difficult,if not impossible to define a metric that captures the brea[d]th of physical processes relevant to even a narrow area of focus.

Santer:

there is no individual model that does well in all of the SST and water vapor tests we’ve applied.

Barnett:

[IPCC AR5 models] clearly, some tuning or very good luck involved. I doubt the modeling world will be able to get away with this much longer

Hegerl:

[IPCC AR5 models] So using the 20th c for tuning is just doing what some people have long suspected us of doing […] and what the nonpublished diagram from NCAR showing correlation between aerosol forcing and sensitivity also suggested.

Jones:

Basic problem is that all models are wrong – not got enough middle and low level clouds.

Jones:

GKSS is just one model and it is a model, so there is no need for it to be correct.

On (not proving the case but) promoting “the cause”:

Mann:

By the way, when is Tom C going to formally publish his roughly 1500 year reconstruction??? It would help the cause to be able to refer to that reconstruction as confirming Mann and Jones, etc.

Mann:

They will (see below) allow us to provide some discussion of the synthetic example, referring to the J. Cimate paper (which should be finally accepted upon submission of the revised final draft), so that should help the cause a bit.

Mann:

I gave up on Judith Curry a while ago. I don’t know what she think’s she’sdoing, but its not helping the cause

On trying to evade disclosure under Freedom of Information laws:

Jones:

I’ve been told that IPCC is above national FOI Acts. One way to cover yourself and all those working in AR5 would be to delete all emails at the end of the process

Briffa:

UEA does not hold the very vast majority of mine [potentially FOIable emails] anyway which I copied onto private storage after the completion of the IPCC task.

McGarvie/UEA Director of Faculty Administration:

As we are testing EIR with the other climate audit org request relating to communications with other academic colleagues, I think that we would weaken that case if we supplied the information in this case. So I would suggest that we decline this one (at the very end of the time period)

Jones:

[FOI, temperature data] Any work we have done in the past is done on the back of the research grants we get – and has to be well hidden. I’ve discussed this with the main funder (US Dept of Energy) in the past and they are happy about not releasing the original station data.

One plain fact emerges from the internal conversations of this coterie: the rest of us are being played for dupes, suckers, fall guys.

Newt Gingrich warns against Agenda 21. (See our posts Beware “Agenda 21”, June 24, 2011, and The once and new religion of earth-worship, October 27, 2011.)

“Agenda 21 proposes an array of actions which are intended to be implemented by every person on Earth…it calls for specific changes in the activities of all people… Effective execution of Agenda 21 will require a profound reorientation of all humans, unlike anything the world has ever experienced… ” – Agenda 21: The Earth Summit Strategy to Save Our Planet (Earthpress, 1993)

– and quoted as the introduction to an article by Chris Carter at Canada Free Press, in which he goes on to say:

Agenda 21 seeks to control populations through zoning and seizure of private property, strip national sovereignty, reduce the world population, even control our consumption of meat and air conditioning … all in the name of the environment. And who can be against the environment, right? …

From the report produced by the United Nations Conference on Human Settlements [!], which was the predecessor to Agenda 21: “Land … cannot be treated as an ordinary asset, controlled by individuals and subject to the pressures and inefficiencies of the market [!]. Private land ownership is also a principal instrument of accumulation and concentration of wealth and therefore contributes to social injustice … Public control of land use is therefore indispensable …”

A speech that could have come from the mouth of a villain politician in Atlas Shrugged. 

Our Constitution explicitly protects our private property rights. No wonder President Clinton signed it into law without consent from Congress. In fact, those who drafted the plan considered it to be so toxic that they warned proponents not to use the term Agenda 21.

“Participating in a UN advocated planning process would very likely bring out many of the conspiracy-fixated [!] groups and individuals in our society,” said J. Gary Lawrence, adviser to President Clinton’s Council on Sustainable Development. “This segment of our society who fear ‘one-world government’ and a UN invasion of the United States through which our individual freedom would be stripped away would actively work to defeat any elected official who joined ‘the conspiracy’ by undertaking Agenda 21. So we call our process something else, such as comprehensive planning, growth management or smart growth.”

Rather than defend against the disinformation campaign used to prop up Agenda 21, we must read the document and instead demand why the UN thinks it has any business subjugating the world under its authority …

The UN must be destroyed.

This is from Investor’s Business Daily:

Earth now has 7 billion people. Are we overcrowded? About to outstrip our resources? Should we prepare for the catastrophic population bomb we’ve been warned about? No, no and no.

In 1968, a Stanford biologist named Paul R. Ehrlich wrote “The Population Bomb,” an unnecessary alarmist book that warned of famines in the 1970s and 1980s due to overpopulation.

Ehrlich, still honored and respected for reasons we don’t understand, likened humans to a cancer that must be cut out using “brutal and heartless decisions.”

Ehrlich, of course, advised governments to impose population growth limits. One solution included “the addition of temporary sterilants to water supplies or staple food,” doses of which “would be carefully rationed by the government to produce the desired family size.” …

Despite it being a tome of gloom and barbarism, Ehrlich’s book became a best-seller, which is odd since he did nothing but repeat the false theme that Thomas Malthus and the rest of the doomsayers have been saying for centuries.

It makes no sense to us why so many want to believe predictions of mass human tragedy, especially when the end-of-the-worlders such as Ehrlich have always been wrong and spectacularly so. 

Naturally, the misanthropes, environmentalists and gaia worshippers have latched onto the anti-humanity message to support their Earth-first, people-are-invaders radicalism. …

Humans are in fact a resource, an infinite form of capital. We have had an uncanny way of using our minds to overcome all of the environmental challenges we’ve faced and there’s no reason to think that won’t continue as long as the Ehrlichs don’t succeed in stamping out large portions of the population.

No one honest or decent person can say what the right number of people is for this planet. But overpopulation at 7 billion isn’t a concern. …

Population growth is no plague. It is an opportunity.More people mean more minds able to solve problems and sustain human progress. …

In contrast with the academic and left-wing pessimism about population growth, there exists a cogent argument that our planet is actually underpopulated. We are headed toward a world with a population that’s growing old — and peaking in 25 years.

We will be looking for help that won’t be there as birth rates fall and life spans increase. Under these conditions, who’ll pay taxes to fund the aging population’s pensions? …

How will a shrinking labor force provide the goods and services the older population demands in its extended retirement years?

And how will it pay off the staggering debt that keeps growing in so many nations?  …

While 7 billion might seem like a teeming crowd ready to devour the Earth, it’s not. There’s no population bomb to worry about. Worry instead about how population bombers, so wrong for so long, get into academe and other places of influence — and stay there.

*

Free enterprise, meanwhile, responds to the demands of the “misanthropes, environmentalists and gaia worshippers”, the back-to-nature cultists, the apostles of anorexia, the role-playing children of the prosperous West, catering to their faddish tastes by opening a stone-age restaurant.

This report is from the MailOnline:

At first glance, Berlin’s Sauvage restaurant looks much like many of the German capital’s other trendy eateries.

But take a closer look at the chalkboard out front and you’ll discover they are embarking on a culinary shake-up that takes its inspiration from the Stone Age.

Proudly announcing a “Real Food Revolution – Paleolithic cuisine!“, there is no cheese, bread or sugar available, only fare accessible to our hunter-gatherer ancestors more than two million years ago.

Sauvage claims to be the first restaurant in Europe to solely serve a Caveman diet.

The restaurant menu shows a stereotypical image of modern humanity’s forbearer, the jutting profile of a hirsute caveman.

Inside, diners eat at candle-lit tables [wax candles are too mod-con for cavemen, actually – JB] with a contemporary cave painting hanging in the background …

Sauvage, which is the French word for “savage” or “wild”, is part of the Paleolithic diet movement and claims to be first of its kind in Europe.

Probably only the first of many. And they’re unlikely to be cheap.

That means serving only organic, unprocessed fruit and vegetables, meat, fish, eggs, nuts, seeds, and herbs.

The truly obsessed build an entire lifestyle around the concept, mimicking caveman-era exercise.

This can involve lifting boulders and running barefoot, with some even emulating the blood loss they believe Stone Age hunters might have experienced in pursuit of their dinner by donating blood every few months. …

Sauvage’s Boris Leite-Poço … said: “Many people think the Paleolithic diet is just some hipster trend, but it’s a worldwide phenomenon, with an online community that spans the globe. The trend is probably strongest in the United States …”

We wish the enterprising Boris Leite-Poço success. He should do well until the food fashion changes, and the play-boys and play-girls of the free capitalist world move on to indulge their next modish whim.

Unless socialism-induced, global economic collapse plunges them – and all of us – into the real thing: the life that Thomas Hobbes accurately described as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short“.

Make no mistake about it – environmentalism is a new nature-worshiping religion.

It’s vatican is the United Nations. Its inquisitors are walking up and down and to and fro on the earth furtively trying to enforce a ukase titled “Agenda 21”.

We have warned about “Agenda 21” (see our post Beware “Agenda 21”, June 24, 2011).

We said that it is one of the biggest steps the UN has taken towards world socialist government, and we quoted Dr Ileana Johnson Paugh, an expert on the subject.

Because we cannot iterate too often or too strongly that Agenda 21 is a serious menace, we’re returning to the subject and quoting her again. She wrote on October 18 at Canada Free Press.:

Senator Robert Menendez [introduced] SB 1621 on September 22, [which may become] the Livable Communities Act. The bill has 17 Democrat cosponsors and, when passed, would create an Office of Sustainable Housing and Communities at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), more bureaucracy to control our private land and housing by government fiat. …

All elements in this bill …  are further implementation of United Nation’s Agenda 21 goals …

The UN’s congregation for the doctrine of the faith has set up the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives [ICLEI], name-adjusted in 2003 to ICLEI — Local Governments for Sustainability. In its turn it has formed sub-bureaus, one of which is named Smart Growth America.

The  words “sustainability” and “smart growth” are euphemisms respectively for a “green” agenda and growth of government power.

Smart Growth America is another NGO (non-government organization) that pushes ICLEI’s goals …

As their site states, “Smart Growth is a better way to build our urban, suburban, and rural communities.”  They are concerned with our transportation, our communities, and reducing carbon emissions. They are using “steering committees” and “visioning” to change our lives in accordance with the United Nation’s vision of a one world government controlled by a few. Under the guise of saving the planet from the destructive humans, private property must be abolished; everybody must live in mixed-use zones, five-minute walk from work and school, moving about on public buses or light rail. Land must be given back to its intended wilderness. …

These progressives are marching on, trying to reshape, restructure, control, and fundamentally change the way we live, according to their dictates and twisted vision of the world. …

Smart Growth America is offering free technical assistance to communities “interested in smart growth strategies.” Americans must wake up fast to this “green” invasion in our way of life: smart green growth, green transportation, saving the green planet, sustainable development, sustainable agriculture, and sustainable green jobs. Everything now is sustainable and all jobs and activities are green.

[But] there is no green industry. We have windmills and we build solar panels expensively. Wind and solar power cannot provide enough electricity for our huge economy. Nobody has built a nuclear power plant since the seventies. There are no green jobs. …

Beware of the Green Monster coming to your community, the excuse for United Nations to take over our economy, take over private property, and set the country back a few decades to the level of third world countries in the name of “social justice.” Watch for these signs and language of UN Agenda 21 activities underway in your communities:

• Installation of Smart Meters in your area, an illegal surveillance device without a warrant in the name of reducing electricity consumption and costs by cutting your power at peak usage and causing all sorts of health ailments because of radiation from the meter itself
• Your area is a member of ICLEI (International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives) or ICMA (International City/County Management Association)
• Your area has a Vision, Master, or Comprehensive Plan that has been adopted in the last 5-10 years, promoting the “Triple Bottom Line,” or the three Es of Sustainable Development (Environment, Economy, and Social Equity)
• Your community supports Smart Growth, New Urbanism, and Resilient Communities with emphasis on using light rail, bike paths, walking, public transportation, discouraging the use of cars.
• Some communities narrow the roads to make them less accessible or install thousands of speed bumps; parking is at a premium and no parking garages are planned.
• Sustainable agriculture and community gardens are emphasized, encouraging a shift away from traditional free market driven food system, providing food just for the local community
• Your city established an Urban Growth Boundary [and] anything beyond it is considered “sprawl” and “blight” .. discouraged through incentives and regulations.
• Your town has joined Public-Private Partnerships, local regional councils, state, or federal government to promote Sustainable Communities Planning or Initiatives.
• Measurement of wealth through GDP (Gross Domestic Product) is discouraged while “happiness” and “well-being” become measures of wealth.
• A “New American Dream” is advertised as “living simply.”
• Green energy is most important, wind and solar, fossil fuels are evil.
• More and more restrictions and regulations are placed on land use, farm, residential, and commercial, in order to preserve the wilderness, small creatures, and natural resources at the expense of humans.
• The community is buying more and more “green space” and returning it to wilderness.
• You find a chart in your local government’s documents with three concentric circles with the words, Environment, Economy, Equity written in the middle of each circle.
• Community leaders subscribe to global warming as a manmade fact. They take action to lower the community’s carbon footprint by adopting “green” LEED [Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, “an internationally recognized green building certification system”] building and energy code standards for construction and development, including incentives, benchmarks, and retrofitting.
• Your town belongs to Earth Charter, the Sierra Club’s Cool Cities Initiative, the Audubon Society’s Sustainable Community Initiative, or your mayor has signed the U.S. Conference of Mayors’ Climate Protection Agreement.
• Officials refer to your town as a “transition town,” a “resilient city,” or a “livable community” and begin teaching “globalism,” “interdependence with nature,” and “interconnectedness”.
• Social Equity vocabulary is being used in your community such as “food justice,” “economic and environmental justice,” “fairness,” “direct democracy,” “diversity,” “food deserts,” “social justice,” and “wealth redistribution.”
• NGOs (non-governmental organizations) become involved in your city’s planning through other “stakeholders” in the “collaborative, consensus-building,” “visioning” process that takes about 18 months to complete and details your community’s future without input from the voters.
• Your school system starts teaching children how to be good “global citizens” and stewards of the environment via International Baccalaureate and other UN sponsored education agendas.
• Your local government authorities start to exceed their constitutionally granted powers by working with private international and national organizations through Public-Private Partnerships.
• You notice a significant push toward “social justice,” interfaith initiatives that promote “one world” along with community diversity, multiculturalism, sameness of faiths, social inclusion, and environmental stewardship.

There is some good news in that here and there people are becoming aware of the threat and are beginning to resist. In another article, October 26, the same author wrote:

As the battles against the green sustainability monster pushed by ICLEI and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) rage across the nation, ten communities have officially rejected membership in the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI).

Rep. Matt Shay reported the creation of an anti-UN Agenda 21 Caucus in the Washington State Legislature … [and]  following the latest rejections of ICLEI by James City County, VA and Lexington, VA, several more communities across the nation are making similar decisions.

The Wisconsin Legislature has introduced two bills (Assembly Bill 303 and Senate Bill 225) to “allow local governments to repeal comprehensive development plans that were forced under smart growth legislation.” …

But the hooded monks of the UN, and their local collaborators – many disguised as “educators and entertainers” – pursue their mission relentlessly:

Meanwhile, the Office of Sustainability Institute at George Mason University invited the “sustainability community” of Fairfax, Virginia, to the Sustainable Living Roadshow on October 19, 2011. If you have no clue about the nature of this road show, it is safe to guess, it is environmental propaganda. I am still trying to understand the need for a sustainability institute at GMU, but then every government entity now has such an office or at least a sustainability plan.

When I saw the invitation, I began to understand the depth and length of brainwashing that the environmental minority is assaulting this country with in order to pass and promote their anti-American agenda.

“The Sustainable Living Roadshow is a caravan of educators and entertainers who tour the country in a fleet of renewable fuel vehicles setting up off-the-grid eco-carnivals with interactive learning villages at K-12 schools, universities, festivals and community events. These villages are designed to empower communities to utilize sustainable living strategies for a healthier planet.”

The sponsors of the Sustainable Living Roadshow are an interesting mixture of corporations, stores, and environmental groups: Birkenstock, Nature’s Gate, Petzl, Hemp Oil Canada, Organic India, The Living Seed Company, Hemp Industries Association, Elemental Herbs, Natracare, and Synchro.

The Sustainable Living Roadshow website displayed pictures of energetic young people holding signs that read, “Toss out fossil fuels,” “We’re Ready, Green Jobs Now,” emphasizing a global culture, another element of UN Agenda 21, a powerful assault on impressionable minds to erase any trace of our culture, our nationality, our borders, our sovereignty.

It does not matter that there is no viable, full replacement for fossil fuels yet to run the largest economy on the planet. Let us toss them out because teachers and environmentalists say so. There is no green industry and there are no green jobs. Students, impressionable children, and ignorant adults have overlooked these tiny details. The media never reports the truth. People do not know that there are are no green jobs and no green industry, just windmills and solar panels.

GMU asked attendees to arrive preferably by bike or public transportation, keeping in line with their walkability and mass-transit goals, which happen to coincide with UN Agenda 21. …

I wondered if parents knew what kind of brain washing their expensive tuition bought for their children and what kind of generation was going to lead our country into the future.

A future of –

Crowding humans off their lands and off their suburban homes into high-density, high-rise mixed-use tenements.

And as the environmentalists complain that there are too many people in the world, reduction of populations would come next by means of abortion, infanticide, refusal of medical treatment to the old, and – we guess – punitive executions for (eg) endangering a species of owl or smelt.

Not to mention suicide, which would be fully understandable in such circumstances.

“Agenda 21”, Dr Paugh points out, is not a treaty, and no member state is as yet bound to implement it. But although its recommendations, “covering every facet of human life”, are not legally binding, they are being implemented administratively in the US “without Congress ever approving or debating them”. If Senator Menendez’s Livable Communities bill is passed, they will become the law of the land.

Plainly, the religion of environmentalism would put total political power in the hands of a self-elected priestly caste.

Primitive earth-worshipers believed that human blood had to be spilt to ensure fertility. We don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that the priests and inquisitors of the new earth-worshiping religion plan to carry out mass human sacrifice, and the enslavement of those they’ll permit to live.

The Environmental Protection Agency is a curse on the American nation, and must be abolished.

Its innumerable regulations “to protect the environment”  make energy more expensive, and consumers poorer.

This is from Investor’s Business Daily:

Those [in the US] who fancy themselves to be green progressives are about to get some unwelcome “progress.” Thanks in part to environmental rules, electricity bills are headed for double-digit increases. …

A review of regulatory filings by the news source found that “utilities are seeking permission to pass on hundreds of millions of dollars in new charges to customers to help upgrade aging infrastructure and build new or retrofitted power plants that comply with tougher environmental regulations.” …

Yes, the environmentalists’ bill is now coming due. Some cost hikes are unavoidable. The electrical grid, like other infrastructure, needs to be updated and improved. But the costs due to “tougher environmental regulations” are avoidable. …

Trying to scrub and eliminate carbon dioxide emissions, for instance, is counterproductive. CO2 is not a pollutant. It’s a naturally occurring gas necessary for life on Earth.

But the environmentalists are extreme in their loathing of man-made carbon emissions, and their agenda is supported by many policymakers.

Remember when a 2008 presidential candidate said if he’s elected his cap-and-trade policy would bankrupt anyone who tried to build a coal-fired power plant on his watch?

Well, President Obama has yet to get a cap-and-trade scheme through Congress, yet he is seeing a version of the future he wanted unfold. American Electric Power, which provides electricity to customers in 11 states, plans to retire five of those hated-by-the-left coal plants, which generate enough power to light 3 million homes; retrofit a number of other coal plants at a cost of $8 billion; and add at least two natural gas plants by the end of this decade. …

AEP is not the only power company that is having to pass on the costs of decarbonization and other environmental regulations to its rate payers. The entire industry has to play the game whose rules are fixed in Washington and state capitals. 

Because of this game, “consumers,” the Chicago Tribune reported, “could see their electricity bills jump an estimated 40% to 60% in the next few years” due to “pending environmental regulations” that will make coal-fired generating plants, which produce about half the nation’s electricity, more expensive to operate. “Many,” continued the Tribune, “are expected to be shuttered.”

This is only the beginning of higher prices.

National Economic Research Associates estimates that the cross-state air pollution and proposed maximum achievable control technology rules could cost the electric power industry $21 billion annually (which will be paid by customers), kill an average of 183,000 jobs a year, and reduce the typical family’s disposable income by $270 a year.

The people behind the policies that drive power bills higher will argue that their motives are pure. They’d say they’re simply trying to make the planet a healthier place.

They’re unlikely to say that their real motive is to gain ever more political power, but gain it they do – and bear the burden with beatific equanimity.

More expensive energy cannot make people healthier, only poorer and colder.

As the  IBD editorial rightly concludes:

They  ignore how much cheap energy has promoted health and accelerated the prosperity that has contributed to our wellness. As such, there’s nothing progressive about the environmentalists’ agenda.

Although this article from PowerLine by Steven Hayward, referring to another in Nature, doesn’t deal specifically with retractions of scientific papers on climate change, it provides a needed lesson to those warmists who argue that consensus is in itself a scientific proof.

[B]ehind at least half of [the retractions] lies some shocking tale of scientific misconduct — plagiarism, altered images or faked data — and the other half are admissions of embarrassing mistakes. But retraction notices are increasing rapidly. In the early 2000s, only about 30 retraction notices appeared annually. This year, the Web of Science is on track to index more than 400 — even though the total number of papers published has risen by only 44% over the past decade.

There’s a lot more here to ponder, such as the essentially hollow and meaningless nature of modern peer review, and the increasingly tribal and ideological drift of much of the academic scientific establishment. …

Elsewhere in this week’s issue of Nature, Dan Sarewitz of Arizona State University, one of the truly honest brokers in the academic science and policy world, offers a terrific essay on what’s wrong with so-called “consensus” science reports. …

When scientists wish to speak with one voice, they typically do so in a most unscientific way: the consensus report. The idea is to condense the knowledge of many experts into a single point of view that can settle disputes and aid policy-making. But the process of achieving such a consensus often acts against these goals, and can undermine the very authority it seeks to project. . .

The very idea that science best expresses its authority through consensus statements is at odds with a vibrant scientific enterprise. Consensus is for textbooks; real science depends for its progress on continual challenges to the current state of always-imperfect knowledge.

Yet it was probably peer review criticism that revealed the errors in at least some of the retracted papers. The fact that so many more papers are being retracted is a healthy sign. To what extent, one may wonder, is the international row over climate-change claims and counter-claims responsible for the rise.

What seems to have happened with the papers on man-made global warming (AGW) is that a politicized posse of immoral scientists did everything they could to silence criticism.

They wanted AGW to be believed like a religion, with faith rather than reason. That made them betrayers of science itself, its enemies: anti-scientists.

If their thesis was true, why did they need to fake data (the “hockey-stick” graph), suppress facts (the Climategate emails), and conspire to block criticism?

Because – one must conclude – they wanted “scientific fact” to support policies that mattered more to them than truth. See here and here and here.

Change happens. Warming happens. It’s the causes of change that are in dispute – and whether it is a threat, so serious that impoverishing redistribute policies must be enacted by governments to save the earth from doom. In regard to which, there is this statement (from this source):

In the room where you are sitting right now, the temperature difference between the floor and the ceiling is about one degree. That’s the kind of imperceptible change we’re talking about — over the next century!

Arguments supporting and disputing that are invited.

The Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World simply erased hundreds of huge glaciers from their maps, substituting the white of the ice with the green of a mythical unfrozen shoreline.

The once highly respected Times Atlas got it wrong! How did it happen?

Was it  a result of extremely bad research on the part of a whole team of geographers and cartographers?

Or deliberate fraud? And if so why, when the professional reputation of each one of them was at stake?

It seems they dumbly chose to believe the propaganda put out by the unscientific, thoroughly discredited, “report” (actually fiction) of  the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) rather than find out the truth for themselves. If so, they thoroughly deserve to lose their reputations as scientists.

We quote from an article by Jonathan S. Tobin in Commentary-contentions:

A number of researchers are complaining the most recent edition of Britain’s Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World contains misleading information about alleged melting of Greenland’s ice-capped shores. A news release issued by the publishers and echoed in much of the media asserted that the atlas illustrates how Greenland has lost 15 percent of its permanent ice cover. Maps in the atlas show significant portions of the large island’s shores are ice-free. The only problem is, as scientists — who are not warming skeptics– point out, it isn’t true.

The error stems from a 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that has since been discredited. As the Times reports, for the claim of a 15 percent ice loss to be true that would have already raised sea levels around the world by three to five feet.

In fact, Greenland has only lost one-tenth of one percent of its ice. …

The publishers of the atlas initially claimed they stood by their data but are now said to be studying the problem and thinking about a revision. But their effort to correct this error seems, as the article pointed out, to be as slow as the actual rate of melting in Greenland.

The problem here is not just that a publisher made an error. There is a strong suspicion every time something like this happens it is the result of a deliberate effort to exaggerate the extent of warming so as to scare the public into backing measures that global warming activists support. That was the lesson of the Climategate e-mails. That story revealed the cynical efforts by some in the scientific community to fudge data in order to come up with results that might exploit the public’s fears about warming. Many researchers now understand the tendency by some to hype this issue with implausible and unsubstantiated claims of imminent catastrophe, such as those put forward in Al Gore’s lamentable film “An Inconvenient Truth,” do more to damage the credibility of climate science than anything else.

The scandals indicate that thousands of scientists are more emotionally and intellectually invested in left-wing activism than they are in science.

And that is a chilling thought.