You would expect that, when the foreign secretary goes to New York to deliver a speech to one of America's most prestigious think tanks, that the British media might report it.

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I haven't bought a newspaper for years, and I don't own a television set.

I know exactly what you are talking about, and it is very serious. The politicans are no longer talking politics (other than personality politics), the media are no longer giving news and the average member of the public is living in a dream world of facebook and sensationalism that they only half believe in. Everything is on autopilot and the pilot isn't in the cabin. It cannot end well.

WTF is a climate attaché and how can you become one? "Climate attaché" has 344 google hits..

Bill Vague said:

What the hell does this mean? Man the bilge pumps! It makes no sense.

Four pillars on which three things stand. Is it an allusion to Trafalgar Square? What shall we put on the fourth plinth? I vote for a gibbet.

No nation or Earth or global government can provide 'climate security'. The most any can do is attempt to lessen the impact of severe weather through managing water resources, not ruining croplands and encouraging energy generation. We already have plentiful, affordable food but idiots at the UN and in other NGOs keep cocking up the distribution of it with trade tariffs and dumping. Charities are doing more to aid access to water than Governments are. Dependence on fossil fuels doesn't threaten climate security because climate security is a fiction (what are we going to do, pick an arbitrary global pattern of weather and engineer a means to make it repeatable?) Floods and droughts may or may not be increasing in severity but I would bet any increase is due to poor planning and poor water management. Gas in particular aids food production you prat - they make fertiliser out of it. Oil fuels the vehicles that move the food around and coal provides a means to cook it. Billy boy is making a leap of faith in assuming that we are reducing biodiversity let alone that it is being exacerbated by fossil fuels.


I was appalled at the poor standards of construction in places that flood badly. Haven't they got planning officers and building regs? China is big enough and populated enough that at any given time someone, somewhere will be suffering from extremes of weather. Mudslides can be caused by deforestation and/or the building of reservoirs. As for Mozambique bread riots, it wasn't Russian wheat that caused it but the Government, who also increased the price of water and electricity at the same time. How jolly nice of them.

To be honest I am struggling to find any sense in the Mekon's speech.



Decarbonised? These people are anti-life. Development can be climate resilient. Build their homes on stilts. Every home to have a wheelchair ramp too, so it can double as a slipway if things get really bad when the Himalayan glaciers melt by 2035.


A roving band of taxpayer funded Greenshirts with their Little Green Book waiting for the Green Leap Forward! Haven't they got anything better to do, like proper Foreign Office work. Our Government appears to be composed of little green men in more ways than one.


No we don't. Climate is always changing but, there is a means to do it quickly and with the least cost and fuss. Free trade. Our cost of living falls. The income of poor places with cheaper labour prices increases and they can afford their own climate change adaption programmes. But then that wouldn't provide ample political PR, the chance to direct trillions of dollars of funding, the opportunity to feather your own nest or allow people the choice to find their own solutions to a problem they might not be all that worried about even if it were true.


And always will be. It is not an unsurmountable problem but regular monsoon flooding is a far more pressing concern.


Threatens the livelihoods, maybe. Threatens their current way of life, perhaps. I assume the glacial melt claim is in reality overstretched fresh water resources - ie population and development growth that is unchecked by Governments until it is checked by nature. Sea level rises in their proper context are pifflingly small compared to just a few thousand years ago and pretty small anyway.


I hope you don't mean the Maldives, Bill. They aren't sinking. Neither is Tuvalu which is compacting in places due to over development and growing in other areas. Actually, I think he secretly means Great Britain. We've pretty much gone already.

EDIT

I must add: I wonder how much of this Hague himself believes. It is really the civil service message he is vomiting up.

Apologies for replying to myself but this post goes in a somewhat different direction.

Like Therewasalight I wondered what a Climate Attache is and does. Haven't found out yet but did find mention on the FCO website of Our little green man in Germany - Andrew Smith. Last year he co-chaired a workshop. One of the speakers at that workshop was Olivier Feix, Vattenfall Europe Transmission GmbH. Yes, that Vattenfall. A brief search of the UK Government domain found a pdf brochure Vattenfall produced talking about their efforts to reduce CO2 and whatnot. If it wasn't so serious I would find the last few pages setting out the demands of the 3C - Combat Climate Change group laughable.

Why are Governments bending over backwards to satisfy corporate interests?(Including Tata Power Company...) Do none of them have the wherewithal to think 'All these major companies are eager to support and invest in low-carbon initiatives only so long as we fix the market in their favour'?

Now that the government is preening itself over opening the world's biggest wind farm, it may be interesting to speculate what future generations, who will have to suffer the consequences, will make of all this.

I think the closest parallel to the Thanet wind farm will be the mo'ai statues on Easter Island -- hundreds of large, unsightly and useless structures put up for abstruse religious reasons by a small ruling elite, requiring vast resources and ever-greater sacrifices from the common people, eventually leading to the collapse of the entire society from within.

What 'British' Ambassadors?
So AWE is "Ambassadors without Embassies"??

Ye Gods! I struggled to get half way through that speech from Haig.

He is pandering to the New World Order, a One World, he's staking his place in the power game. Energy security? What security is there in a mess of wind farms planted in the North Sea? Farms which will be reliant upon the right amount and speed of wind. It's nonsense, and he knows it. They all now it, their 'security' is in maintaining enough for themselves and whoever can pay for their expensive forms of 'green', whilst the rest can perish, steadily sweeping aside those on benefits and pensions. Soft targets. Easy targets.

Richard wrote: "I really don't know any more what is supposed to be news. But generally, it ain't anything I'm interested in."

Nor I, it exists as an interlude between soaps, the papers bought for last nights lottery numbers and to line the Guinea Pig hutch.
Television is the great hypnotiser in the room, brain not required.

Climate attache? Sounds like a case of snake oil.

Derek

From the link on China:

<<"China hopes that based on the outcomes from Cancun, we'll be able to settle on a legally binding document at the meeting in South Africa," Li said, according to the Chinese-language newspaper. "After the South Africa meeting, we'll move to concrete implementation."

However, he also stressed that numerous obstacles needed to be overcome before an agreement could be reached, warning that China would continue to push for deeper emission cuts from industrialised nations and would refuse to compromise on issues of "principle" - a thinly veiled reference to the country's insistence that any emission inspection regime must not impinge upon the country's sovereignty.>>

So China wants the west to de-industrialise further but does not itself wish to be subject to that same regulatory regime which enforces the west's de-industrialisation. Clearly the Chinese see exactly what is going on, and they intend to win. I'm just not sure why Hague's owners (the NWO) are strengthening China given that China will never submit to their will.

Well said Gareth, what is he on these days. It must be strong stuff. What a tray full of stupidity, the mind boggles that he can stand up and pass off this as "thinking". Still he is only a toy "foreign secretary", bag carrier for Baroness "stupid" Ashton so maybe her staff wrote the speech.

How is this "no carbon" stuff going to work? Last time I looked plants require it, and an industrial nation will find it very difficult to work without it. So it appears he contradict himself, he claims to want a growing economy but without the wherewithal to do it. The lunatics really do run the asylum.

Bill Vague says in the context of "climate security.......

"Increasing dependence on coal, oil, and gas threatens climate security, increasing the severity of floods and droughts, damaging food production"

With Gareth and Therewaslight I am equally baffled, and particularly by Bill's statement above.

First of "Climate security" like energy and water security must be a complete myth. What government, environmental agency, let alone a "Foreign Secretary" can guarentee any such thing? How on earth can such an absurd concept be believed, accepted and then propagated as a policy is beyond all logic, reason, and above all, the realities of what we know as to the unpredictability of all climactic patterns and weather. There is no "security" at all is there?

So how does Bill, who I assume has swallowed the warmists spurious theory, believe that somehow this security is attainable in ANY degree at all, anywhere on the globe? His sentence above gives the answer, and it is the one which lies at the very heart of the controversy, namely that AGW is a reality. But I know of no professional reputable climatologist who believes this, or at least to any degree that can actually produce a global effect.
It is therefore a lie of such gargantuan proportions that its very brazenness deceive the gullible who naively believe in whatever "science" comes out with.

Please Bill tell us - what is the link between weather patterns in say Bangladesh, subject as it is to regular flooding due to monsoons rains in great volume and a topography which cannot disperse it (flat), and the use of coal oil and gas, either locally or thousands of miles away on the globe?. Where is the scientific evidence of such a link?. Of course there is a direct link which can affect local weather , but only to a very limited degree, and which fluctuates, where there is pollution due to motor emissions (Los Angeles, Hong Kong, or even London and other cities from time to time. It is a common phenomena, but nothing to do with something called "climate change". In any event that is a localised air pollution - not evidence of global climate change.
Why is it that floods and drought have been with us for centuries, always unpredictable, sometimes catastrophic, and long before any widespread burning of fossil fuels and before the invention of the internal combustion engine? What is to explain the randomness of these events? Will a sudden abandonment of the use of the car, and burning fossil fuels produce some sort of reduction in climates, or weather patterns? If so, when? 10 years, 30, 50, or what?
How is it that the use of fossil fuels is SO powerful that it can override what scientists know to be the main driver of climate conditions worldwide, namely solar activity, or the lack of it in temperate and arctic areas?
Are you saying global or even regional climates can be contained or even controlled? How, where, and by whom can a pilot scheme be initiated to prove the theory? No sorry, the theory simply does not stand up.

I think I know what a climate attaché possibly could be... another word for an MEP who spends most of her time on beaches.

Climate attaché: Your role - 1. To help HMG meet its green objectives in accordance with her treaties and international law. 2. Develop special partnerships with nations at high risk of global climate disruption (e.g. tropical island states). 3. Investigate instances of severe global climate disruption for case file 4. Provide an on-site framework for liaising with parties potentially affected by global climate disruption and ICRNs (international climate reaction networks) 5. Encourage states to buy British carbon low and carbon-neutral technology.

Salary: £90,000, EU tax-rate + expenses

It's an interesting phrase, climate disruption. It came to wider attention only recently but has been used in an EU context at least, for several years. That link is a report of a meeting in 2008 with Prince Charlie. Climate disruption is blamed on deforestation.

Earlier still - 2006 Stavros Dimas again, this time in Ireland.

Compare the 2006 Dimas piece with Vague's. Both are rich with hyperbole and rhetoric but the vast slew of 'facts' Dimas produces are mostly absent from Billys' speech. Whether that is because the science has been questioned or the science is no longer necessary I don't know. Dimas may have been trying to convert people whereas Vague was preaching to the choir.

Is it a massive goalpost moving exercise? The West wanting stronger national trade protection and is using eco-wibble to disguise it.