ARTICLE SYNOPSIS:

The United Nations predicts very dire consequences due to global warming, setting the stage for world climate policies.

Follow this link to the original source: "No doubt global warming is real, UN panel says"

COMMENTARY:

The UN's panel on climate change has issued the most amazing Chicken Little-style "the sky is falling," report ever. Climate "experts" from 140 national delegations assembled quite the list of worst-case scenario predictions:

• A 4.6 foot average rise in sea levels, imperiling 1/5 to 2/3 of the worlds species
• Water shortages for 75 to 250 million Africans by the year 2020
• Extensive species loss in Europe
• North American heat waves with resulting water shortages
• Continuously rising temperatures at an ever quickening pace
• The drowning of coastal cities due to the melting Greenland ice sheet
• An inevitable 70 percent extinction of all plant and animal species
• The spreading of hunger and disease worldwide
• Fierce storms and more frequent droughts

Ban Ki-Moon, the UN secretary-general said, "The world's scientists have spoken clearly and with one voice. I expect the world's policy makers to do the same." Calling specifically on the United States and China he urged "the world's two biggest polluters" to do more to slow the effects of global warming saying, "Only urgent, global action will do." Yvo de Boer, the UN's top climate change official warned the report "will have an incredible political impact. It's a signal that politicians cannot afford to ignore."

But there are just as many scientists that have more than slight reservations about the global warming models and the policies suggested to remedy the problems those models predict. Respected leading scientists around the world who have spoken out in opposition to the UN's IPCC theories are Danish-born Bjorn Lomborg, MIT professor Richard S. Lindzen, Henk Tennekes from the Royal Dutch Meteorlogical Society, Aksel Winn-Nielsen, former director of the UN's World Meteorological Organization, and William Gray from Colorado State University. Further debunking of the UN's global warming scare tactics can be found in what is now a 38-part entertaining and informative series run by the Canada National Post entitled "The Deniers."

Ignoring findings that contradict the standard model of global warming, the UN is using the latest report to set the stage for another world conference to take place in Bali, Indonesia, in December. That conference would focus on replacing the 1997 Kyoto Protocol that the United States opted out of in 2001, and which didn't apply to China at all. The Kyoto treaty expires in 2012 and the push is on to replace it with even more restrictive measures.

This time it looks as though the United States is ready to acquiesce and accept a new treaty that would be even more restrictive than Kyoto. U.S. delegate Sharon Hays indicated that things are different now. In a phone call to the Associated Press she said: "What's changed since 2001 is the scientific certainty that this is happening." But China and India are likely to escape once again under the excuse that any measures affecting their development and efforts to lift their people from poverty are unacceptable.