Industrialized Nations Halfway to $100 Billion UN “Climate Change Aid” Goal

Article audio sponsored by The John Birch Society

Almost six years after then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the United States will help raise $100 billion annually by 2020 to assist poor countries in coping with “climate change,” several sources estimated that the participating countries are about halfway to that goal.

Clinton made the announcement during a news conference at the UN’s Copenhagen Climate Change Conference in December 2009. She did place conditions on the commitment, however, stating that the money would be made available only if rapidly industrializing nations such as China and India accept binding environmental regulations that are open to international inspection and verification.

“In the absence of an operational agreement that meets the requirements that I outlined, there will not be that financial agreement, at least from the United States,” Clinton warned at the time: “Without that accord, there won’t be the kind of joint global action from all of the major economies we all want to see, and the effects in the developing world could be catastrophic.”

A “Report of the Conference of the Parties” released at the conference stated, “Developed countries commit to a goal of mobilizing jointly USD 100 billion dollars a year by 2020 to address the needs of developing countries. This funding will come from a wide variety of sources, public and private, bilateral and multilateral, including alternative sources of finance.”

Though the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference failed to achieve its goal of a treaty requiring the industrialized nations to submit to strict carbon emission regulations, funding for Clinton’s promised plan has progressed. As James Heiser noted in an article posted by The New American in 2011:

Despite the failure of the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference in December 2009 to achieve its goal of a treaty binding the industrialized world to an economic suicide pact, the “voluntary” agreements are still a threat to the West. The UN is engaged in an effort to use the imagined environmental crisis as the justification for a program of sweeping economic redistribution that would shift trillions of dollars from the industrialized nations to the Third World. The UN is now demanding an “investment” of $1.9 trillion per year in “green technology” to meet the goals that the internationalists have set for the nations of the world.

In a report in the New York Times on September 29, columnist Eduardo Porter quoted Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, who told him: “Financing is the most challenging aspect of the whole deal. There is no credible road map to the $100 billion.”

The climate doomsayers are still doing reasonably well in their international share-the-wealth scheme, however. In a press statement released on September 6, Secretary of State John Kerry said that during that weekend in Paris, the United States and Switzerland hosted senior officials from 18 developed countries to discuss their collaborative efforts “to scale up climate finance for developing nations,” and to provide increased transparency on our progress toward “working together towards a goal that President Obama and other heads of state set nearly six years ago in Copenhagen: to mobilize — from public and private sources — $100 billion a year by 2020 to help the developing world address both the causes and impacts of climate change.”

Kerry continued: “Today, at the halfway mark to 2020, we are well on our way to achieving this $100 billion goal. “

In his statement, Kerry continued the establishment line that climate change is not only a devastating threat, but that it can somehow be averted by mankind’s efforts, which necessitate spending billions of dollars:

The science is crystal clear: The threat posed by climate change is as global as it gets. Without global cooperation, the impacts will be devastating — and they will extend to every country on Earth.

The problem with Kerry’s assertion is that many scientists do not believe that the science of global warming is “crystal clear.” In fact, many dispute that global warming, if it exists at all, is either caused by human activity or can be stopped by human activity.

In recent years, The New American has published dozens of article refuting the claims of the “global warming,” doomsayers. Our magazine’s affiliate, ShopJBS.org, has made available The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming, a book that debunks the political correctness of global-warming claims, and The Great Global Warming Swindle, a DVD that presents an authoritative account of how the hysteria over global warming has parted company with reality.

Earlier this year, we cited in an online article an exclusive report for Climate Depot made by Lord Christopher Monckton — who was chief policy advisor to the Science and Public Policy Institute and former special advisor to former U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher from 1982 to 1986. In that report, Monckton maintained that there has been no global warming at all for more than 18 years, since December 1996 and referred to data collected by a private research company called Remote Sensing Systems, founded in 1974 by Frank Wentz, who was a member of NASA’s SeaSat Experiment Team. Under a heading reading “Key facts about global temperature,” Monckton wrote, in part:

The RSS satellite dataset shows no global warming at all for 222 months from December 1996 to May 2015 — more than half the 437-month satellite record.

The entire RSS dataset from January 1979 to date shows global warming at an unalarming rate equivalent to just 1.2 Cº per century.

Since 1950, when a human influence on global temperature first became theoretically possible, the global warming trend has been equivalent to below 1.2 Cº per century.

The global warming trend since 1900 is equivalent to 0.8 Cº per century. This is well within natural variability and may not have much to do with us….

The oceans, according to the 3600+ ARGO bathythermograph buoys, are warming at a rate of just 0.02 Cº per decade, equivalent to 0.23 Cº per century.

Recent extreme-weather events cannot be blamed on global warming, because there has not been any global warming to speak of. It is as simple as that.

In another article last June, we reported that far from warming, data from the U.S. Climate Reference Network (USCRN) developed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) shows that the United States has undergone a cooling trend over the last decade.

The report cited Anthony Watts, a former broadcast meteorologist and publisher of the science blog Watts Up With That?, who compiled NOAA/USCRN data to use the agency’s own statistics to refute a recent report by NOAA researchers claiming there has been no 15-year “hiatus” in global warming.

For his June 14 article, Watts plotted the USCRN data on a graph and concluded: “Clearly, a ‘pause’ or ‘hiatus’ exists in this most pristine climate data. In fact, a very slight cooling trend appears.” (Emphasis added.)

It is obviously impossible for the untrained layman to determine which theories postulated by scientists on either side of the global-warming debate are accurate and which are not. However, there is enough disagreement among credible scientists to cast serious doubt on the assertion that we are in a period of catastrophic “global warming,” and furthermore, that such warming (if it exists at all) is caused by anthropogenic (human) carbon dioxide emissions.

Until such doubts can be better resolved, spending billions of taxpayer dollars to alleviate the effects of “climate change” is clearly irresponsible.

Related articles:

NOAA’s Own Data Shows That Global Climate Has Cooled Over 10 Years

Climate Expert Lord Monckton: Global Warming Ceased Over 18 Years Ago

NASA’s Own Data Discredits Its Predictions of Antarctic Doom

Pseudo-scientists Demand Obama Prosecute Climate Realists

July “Warmest on Record” Lie Debunked by NASA Data

Report: Obama’s “Green” Agenda Threatens National Security

Obama’s Prophecies of Climate Doom in Alaska Fall Flat

Big Media Ignores Nobel Physicist, Promotes Hollywood Climate Activists

President Obama Unveils “Clean Power Plan” to “Combat Climate Change”

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Global Warming “Consensus”: Cooking the Books