Elephant in the greenhouse part II

Half a century ago, the big scare was dangerous anthropogenic population change. So why is climate alarmism now centre-stage?

Fast forward to New York City and the UN General Assembly  Special Session on 22 September last year and the 20^th anniversary of the 1994 Cairo population conference.

Cairo was described as a ‘global turning point’ because it affirmed the importance of reproductive health and rights. It was there

the world agreed that when women and girls get the education they deserve, societies are more productive.  When their rights are protected, societies are more just.  And when they are empowered to determine their own future, societies become stronger.

No mention, however, of the P-word. In any case, the Secretary-General’s attention was elsewhere - on opening Climate Week: “We need all hands on deck. Climate change is the defining issue of our time. Now is the time for action.”

Pope Francis was on the same page. His recent Encyclical Letter - the 38,000-word Laudato Si' - given in Rome at Saint Peter’s on 24 May this year, had only one paragraph (50) on population.

 “Instead of resolving the problems of the poor and thinking of how the world can be different, some can only propose a reduction in the birth rate….To blame population growth instead of extreme and selective consumerism on the part of some, is one way of refusing to face the issues. It is an attempt to legitimize the present model of distribution, where a minority believes that it has the right to consume in a way which can never be universalized, since the planet could not even contain the waste products of such consumption.

As for humankind’s problems today, they were due to the ‘inequity’between individuals and countries, and the ‘true “ecological debt” that exists, particularly between the global north and south’ (paragraph 51).

Against this background, it is not surprising that what was once described as the ‘defining issue of our time’ - the less developed world’s population problem - is absent from the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development - and its 17 new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), or Global Goals –  agreed by 193 countries in New York on 25 September this year. For SDGs are all about implementing programs that extend human life.

Yet the demographic challenge remains, at least according to a UN System Task Team Thematic Think Piece compiled two years ago.

 “Population dynamics, particularly in the context of persistent inequalities, will have major influence on development processes and on the inclusive and balanced growth and outcomes in the coming decades. They also challenge the capacity of countries to achieve broad-based development goals.(page 4)

Two months after release of the Pope’s Encyclical, the UN Population Division (UNPD) published its 2015 Revision of World Population Prospects. Humankind was now expected to grow by much more than the previous estimate of nine billion people by 2050. Whatever the impact of female empowerment during the two decades after Cairo, it did not slow global growth.

The current world population of 7.3 billion is increasing by 83 million a year. It will reach 8.5 billion by 2030, 9.7 billion by 2050 and 11.2 billion by 2100, assuming UNPD’s medium variant projection is accurate.

If, however, a higher growth rate prevails this century – with an increase in average fertility of just 0.50 children per woman - it would reach 16.6 billion people by 2100, assuming another global doubling is supportable. In this scenario, India would have 2.6 billionand China 1.6 billion people.

 India – with just 250 million people in 1950 - will overtake China as the most populous country in just seven years with 1.4 billion. Meanwhile, Africa’s population will double in the next 35 years. By 2100, almost 40 percent of humankind will live on this one continent.

Nigeria will overtake the US to become the world’s third largest country in just 35 years with 400 million people; more than double its current 170 million and eight times what it was a century ago.

As a Nigerian central banker explained on a recent BBC Inquiry programme:

…gap between the rich and the poor has continued to grow. If conditions are so tough today for so many, what is it going to be like when twice as many live there in 2050? Yet this isn’t a question the political elite have been asking themselves. (10min.)

My worry is that we are not making arrangements for this rising population. There is no country in the world that I know of over 70 million people that does not have a flourishing rail network, expanding social services and the rest of it. All those things need to be in place, together with better planning for population and for families.

What if the government could not improve opportunities for the many millions more who will be living there in the next few decades? Its fast-growing young population - 108 million Nigerians are currently under 25 - could become ‘deeply frustrated’.

The sort of thing that happened in the so-called Arab spring could happen in Nigeria.  (11 min.)

UNPD’s report also concluded that between 2015 and 2050, half of the world’s growth will occur in just nine countries: India, Nigeria, Pakistan, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Tanzania, the United States, Indonesia and Uganda.

John Wilmoth, head of UNPD, was interviewed by the ABC’s Mandie Sami two days after public release of the 2015 Revision. He was asked whether it was ‘a positive picture’, or one that ‘worries you when you look at these numbers.’

“That’s a very difficult question. The births have stopped increasing….But what is increasing is the number of people living at older ages and this is an enormous sign of success.

However, you can’t deny that the increased human activity in terms of consumption and production and the impact of human activity on the Earth’s environment is troublesome to anyone who looks at it.

To look at the change and speed of change that’s taking place, it’s troublesome to think about what this may bring in terms of environmental changes and how that then could alter the Earth’s ability to support not only human life, but life of other species.”

A year earlier, Wilmoth reportedly said: “There is a strong case to be made that the world faces sustainability issues whether it has nine billion people, seven billion people or four billion people. Nobody can deny that population growth is a major driving factor [of carbon dioxide emissions], but in terms of the policy response, what are you going to do?”

Stripping out the sustainable development and climate-catastrophist rhetoric that now dominate UN discourse, reveals another developed-developing world wealth transfer ambition. Eerily similar to the ‘new international economic order’ proposed four decades ago in Bucharest as the LDC ‘solution’ to the population problem (see Part I), it has been recast in the language of ‘climate reparations’, ‘climate debt’, ‘climate refugees’ and global ‘contraction and convergence’. Same ambition, new semantics. Déjà vu all over again.

How many climate-bureaucrats does it take merely to discuss controlling the planet’s elusive thermostat?At least 100 for each UN member state. Hence theabsurd annual pantomime of a cast of many thousands ‘debating’ a draft document of less than 50 pages for two weeks in an exotic location, and in the age of the internet.

For the first time in over 20 years of UN negotiations, COP21 aims to achieve a legally binding and universal agreement on climate, with the aim of keeping global warming below 2°C.The conference is expected to attract close to 50,000 participants including 25,000 official delegates from government, intergovernmental organisations, UN agencies, NGOs and civil society.

No wonder it is all smiles at Paris Climat 2015, - unlike the mood at Copenhagen 2009. For the show must go on. The juggernaut must reach its destination. The alarmist paradigm must be defended at all costs.

Obfuscation, opportunism and politics have triumphed, despite a lack of compelling evidence for causal links between anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions and ‘dangerous’ climate change. Hardly surprising when activist climate scientists are, as Garth Paltridge, a former chief CSIRO atmospheric researcher,suggested in a recent post:

quite willing to cherry-pick and manipulate real world data in support of their efforts to save the world.  The scientists on their part have learnt that they can get away with it.  Their cause is politically correct, and is shaping up well to be the basis for a trillion-dollar industry.  That sort of backing automatically provides plenty of protection.

Meanwhile, the followers of the Church of Climatology - many on same side as Prince Charles - earnestly promote a dodgy hypothesis to justify the UN Green Climate Fund (GCF), the annual 100 billion-dollar pot of gold at the end of its redistributive rainbow.

No wonder too it wants an ‘agreed outcome with legal form’ (Transforming our World, Clause 31, page 6, here). For that wouldcreate a global trading casino for ticket-clipping ‘carbon’ traders and national ‘climate-control’ agencies; and give so-called ‘climate refugees’ legal status.

After twenty-one years of conferences, political and reputational stakes are high. The UN wants another role - to manage the ‘multilateral climate change process’ and be ‘the trusted channel for rising to the [climate change] challenge’. For whoever holds the reins, controls the purse.

The new open-sesame passwords to climate-wealth are cannily vague too. Just mention ‘climate-resilience’, and take a ‘climate-proof’ approach in your funding application. Right on cue, UN Member countries – such as Nigeria – are busy preparing and promoting alarmist narratives for Paris.

The GCF will act as banker for the developed world’s eagerly anticipated billions, with Australia as its inaugural co-chair. Once ‘appropriately capitalized’, it will make grants and loans ‘for projects and programmes that enable developing countries to boost sustainable development, whilst [allegedly] curbing greenhouse gas emissions and adapting to climate change’.

According to the Foreign Minister on 6 November, Australia ‘has been instrumental in delivering the first tranche of eight GCF projects, totalling US$168 million’. They include an adaptation project in Fiji to take a climate-proof approach to urban water supply and wastewater management (US$31 million); support for communities in the Maldives to manage climate change induced water shortages (US$23.6 million); and climate-resilient local infrastructure in Bangladesh (US$40 million). Australia also will provide $1 million to the new Mauritian-based Commonwealth Climate Finance Access Hub.

But don’t mention the P-word, despite the ‘troublesome’ increases – one billion additional people since 2003 and two billion since 1990. This would deflect public attention from the main game. Why mention a problem that may not have a solution, even an interventionist one? No agency wants to hand itself a stinking fish.

Climate-speak is reaching a crescendo too. Who could possibly deny that growing numbers of the ‘world’s poorest and most vulnerable’ are already facing nasty – allegedly human-induced - climate impacts? Or that they urgently need assistance to tackle this ‘problem that they did not cause’?

Translation: every typical, extreme, random, unusual or destructive weather/climate event in the developing world is and will be deemed to be driven - not by the unpredictable whims of Gaia - but solely by developed world carbon dioxide/greenhouse gas emissions. Climate scientists are already attempting to legitimise statements about anthropogenic 'attribution' after each extreme weather event.

So why all the fuss? To restore global atmospheric equity and deliver greater developing country ‘climate resilience’, all the developed world has to do is deposit its fair share of ‘climate reparations’ into the GCF.

There is no contradiction, surely, in seeking ‘climate justice for billions of poor’ in Paris while simultaneously increasing developing world coal production and urging the West – now hoist on its own petard and desperately needing a fig-leaf to justify domestic alternative energy polices – to arrange urgent repayment of its climate debt.

And while our Three Amigos are urging greater ‘ambition and commitment’ in Paris, folk at home ought to prepare for the first flotilla of climate-refugees from a dystopia of failed states to somewhere near you. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions. But that is another story.