A Resolution To Defend Billions of Lives: WE SAY NO TO PARIS COP21

The following resolution was released yesterday by the Schiller Institute, with the intention of rapidly collecting signatures from qualified professionals, political leaders, and ordinary citizens internationally. The main posting of the resolution can be found here, as well as the downloadable leaflet for signatures.

The conditions of life for billions of people depend upon rejecting the agenda being presented at the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference to be held in Paris this December. The COP21 Paris initiative to adopt a legally binding agreement to reduce CO2 emissions must be rejected on two grounds: the scientific reality that mankind’s activity is not going to cause catastrophic climate change, and the very real, lethal consequences of the CO2 reduction programs being demanded.

There is no legitimate basis for having the COP21 conference. Put an end to this now!

Despite the climate-change narrative being presented by an extremely well-funded, top-down propaganda campaign, there is an immense amount of solid scientific evidence which clearly contradicts and/or refutes the claims of coming catastrophic climate change caused by human emissions of greenhouse gases. For example, satellite measurements have shown that there has been no average rise in global temperatures for over 18 years, despite the fact that human greenhouse gas emissions have been increasing at an accelerating rate. This underscores the reality that the climate simply does not respond to CO2 levels in the way claimed by climate alarmists; said otherwise, the Earth’s climate system is not highly sensitive to changes in atmospheric CO2 concentrations.

Because many climate models are using these false assumptions of high climate sensitivity to CO2, the predictions of these climate models have been consistently wrong, and with each year they are diverging further from reality. The gradual changes in the climate that have occurred over the recent decades, and the gradual changes which will continue to occur in the future, are not and will not be a cause for alarm. Most of these changes are natural, and any impact mankind may have would be relatively minor. A healthy and growing world economy will be able to adapt to these changes.

We must also recognize that CO2 is not a pollutant—it is an essential part of the biosphere. Because the present atmospheric CO2 levels are well below the optimum for plant growth, human-caused increases in CO2 concentrations are already contributing to increases in agricultural productivity and natural plant growth—creating a measurably greener planet.

But the Paris 2015 summit is not only about nations potentially wasting time and resources on a phantom problem existing only inside computer models—the ugly reality is that the CO2 reduction programs being proposed would increase poverty, lower living conditions, and accelerate death rates around the world. The world simply cannot support a growing population with improving conditions of life using only solar, wind, and other forms of so-called “green” energy.

More to the point, this scheme is being intensely promoted by modern followers of the population reduction ideology popularized by Thomas Malthus. Organizations such as the World Wildlife Fund/World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) have repeatedly declared that current human population is billions of individuals beyond the Earth’s ”carrying capacity,” and must therefore be reduced by some billions of people. The present push for a CO2 reduction program is deeply rooted in this Malthusian ideological motivation. But Malthus was wrong in the Eighteenth Century, and his followers are wrong today.

Energy-intensive scientific, technological, and economic growth is essential to human existence. This can be measured by transitions to higher levels of energy flux-density, per capita and per area. Such progress, growth, and development is a universal right, and CO2 emissions are presently a vital part of that process for the overwhelming majority of the world’s population. The adoption of a legally binding CO2 reduction scheme at the COP21 conference in Paris will condemn billions of people to a lower quality of life, with higher death rates, greater poverty, and no ability to exercise their inherent human right to participate in the creation of a better future for society as a whole.

This is deeply immoral.

For these reasons the CO2 reduction scheme of the COP21 conference in Paris must be rejected.