July 22, 2004

Russian Officials Shred Kyoto

Lots of posts started and not finished, and I'm crashing early tonight, but I was just completely blown away by this statement from Andrei Illarionov, the chief economic advisor to Russian President Vladimir Putin, on the just ended Seminar on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol in Moscow.

Illarionov speaks passionately on behalf of Russian scientists who know that the scientific basis for Kyoto is nonsense on stilts, and who refuse to compromise their integrity so that the EU and other unaccountable international elites can get on with the business of dismantling capitalism and economic freedom. The behavior of the British scientific community was shameful, and speaks to the bankruptcy of their science. A few excerpts follow, but please RTWT.

Nine months ago, at an international climate change conference in Moscow, ten questions concerning the essence of the Kyoto Protocol and its underlying theory were submitted to the IPCC. We were told that the reply would be given within several days. Nine months have passed since then but there has been no reply, even though we have repeated our inquiries on these and the growing number of other related questions.

Instead of getting replies to our questions, we kept on hearing that replies did not matter. What was important is that whether or not Russia trusts Britain, the European Union and the countries that have Ratified the Kyoto Protocol and that have been exerting unprecedented pressure on Russia to ratify it...

Basically, none of the assertions made in the Kyoto Protocol and the "scientific" theory on which the Kyoto Protocol is based been borne out by actual data. We are not seeing any high frequency of emergency situations or events. There has been no increase in the number of floods. Just as there has been no increase in the number of droughts. We can see that the speed of the wind in the hails in some areas is decreasing contrary to the statements made by the people who support the Kyoto Protocol. We are not witnessing a higher incidence of contagious diseases, and if there is a rise, it has nothing to do with climate change...

The statistical data underpinning these documents and issued in millions of copies are often considerably distorted if not falsified.

So the British had a hissy fit...

...they revealed an absolute - and I stress, absolute inability to answer questions concerning the alleged professional activities of the authors of these papers. Not only the ten questions that were published nine months ago, but not a single question asked during this two-day seminar by participants in the seminar, both Russian and foreign, were answered.

When it became clear that they could not provide a substantive answer to a question, three devices were used. And I have to say it now although has not direct bearing on the Kyoto Protocol and the content of the extremely interesting presentations made during the past two days. The British participants insisted on introducing censorship during the holding of this seminar. The chief science adviser to the British government, Mr. King, demanded in the form of an ultimatum at the beginning of yesterday that the program of the seminar be changed and he presented an ultimatum demanding that about two-third of the participants not be given the floor.

Then he unabashedly calls the driving ideology behind radical environmentalism by its name, and rails at those who condescend to Russia:

The next point brings us directly to the Kyoto Protocol, or more specifically, to the ideological and philosophical basis on which it is built. That ideological base can be juxtaposed and compared, as Professor Reiter has done just now, with man-hating totalitarian ideology with which we had the bad fortune to deal during the 20th century, such as National Socialism, Marxism, Eugenics, Lysenkovism and so on. All methods of distorting information existing in the world have been committed to prove the alleged validity of these theories. Misinformation, falsification, fabrication, mythology, propaganda. Because what is offered cannot be qualified in any other way than myth, nonsense and absurdity.

These guys know totalitarianism when they see it.

This is not a simple war. Like any war it cannot be easy and simple. Regrettably like any war it has its losses and victims, and we must understand that. The main thing is that we have now obvious evidence that we have got over the past two days, although we had some hints before that time, and it was the approach to Russia practiced by some people attending the seminar, an approach to Russia as a kind of banana republic, an approach to a country that is not a colony yet but about to become it as soon as it ratifies the document. At least we now know how people in colony feel towards other people who are trying to make them a colony.

Wow.

(via Lopsided Poopdeck)

Posted by dan at July 22, 2004 10:21 PM