USA First

Archive for January, 2010

Updated January 20, 2010
U.N. Panel’s Glacier-Disaster Claims Melting Away
By Gene J. Koprowski
– FOXNews.com

The world’s most famous climate change expert is in the midst of a massive controversy, as the leading environmental science institute he heads scrambled to explain data it promulgated for a U.N. report.

The world’s most famous climate change expert is at the center of a massive controversy as the leading environmental science institute he heads scrambled to explain its assertion that the Himalayan glaciers will melt completely in 25 years.

NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio A satellite image of the Koettlitz Glacer in Antarctica. An oft-cited report by the U.N.'s IPCC panel that the Himalayan glaciers will melt by 2035 may soon be retracted.

Rajendra Pachauri, head of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and director general of the Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) in New Dehli, India, said this week that the U.N. body was studying how its 2007 report to the United Nations derived information that led to its famous conclusion: that the glaciers will melt by 2035.

Today, the IPCC issued a statement offering regret for the poorly vetted statements. “The Chair, Vice-Chairs, and Co-chairs of the IPCC regret the poor application of well-established IPCC procedures,” the statement says, though it goes short of issuing a full retraction or reprinting the report.

Pachauri told Reuters on Monday that the group was looking into the issue, and planned to “take a position on it in the next two or three days.”

The IPCC’s 2007 report, simply titled AR4, claimed that “glaciers in the Himalayas are receding faster than in any other part of the world, and if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate.”

Contacted by FoxNews.com at TERI, officials would not respond to a request for additional comment. IPCC is expected to withdraw the report’s claim eventually.

Hundreds of millions of people in India, Pakistan and China would be severely affected if the glaciers were actually to melt. There are some 9,500 Himalayan glaciers.

Indian Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh questioned the findings of the 2007 report during a news conference.

“They are indeed receding and the rate is cause for great concern,” Ramesh said of the glaciers. But, he said, the IPCC’s 2035 forecast was “not based on an iota of scientific evidence.”

One of the key elements in the growing scandal is the revelation that IPCC based some of its public proclamations on non-peer reviewed reports.

“The data, all the data, needs to come to light,” says Dr. Jane M. Orient, president of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness and an outspoken skeptic on climate change.

“Thousands of scientists are capable of assessing it. The only reason to keep it hidden, locked in the clutches of the elite few, is that it decisively disproves their computer models and shows that their draconian emission controls are based on nothing except a lust for power, control and profit.”

The IPCC “made a clear and obvious error when it stated that Himalayan glaciers would be gone by 2035,” added Patrick J. Michaels, a senior fellow in environmental policy at the libertarian Cato Institute, in an interview.

“The absurdity was obvious to anyone who had studied the scientific literature. This was not an honest mistake. IPCC had been warned about it for a year by many scientists.”

A letter just released to the Science Web site underscores the mistake. Written by J. Graham Cogley of the department of geography at Canada’s Trent University, it points out that “the claim that Himalayan glaciers may disappear by 2035 … conflicts with knowledge of glacier-climate relationships, and is wrong.”

The dustup is the latest scandal in global warming science, coming after the disclosure of attempts to shade climate-science research findings at the U.K.’s East Anglia University and the failed talks in Copenhagen by environmental policymakers last month.

The IPCC report had indicated that the total area of Himalayan glaciers would shrink from 500,000 square kilometers to 100,000 square kilometers within 25 years. The study cited a 2005 report by the World Wildlife Fund, an environmental advocacy group. The WWF study cited a 1999 article in New Scientist magazine that quoted another expert, who speculated that Himalayan glaciers could disappear within forty years.

The speculative comments were not peer reviewed, and other reports have indicated that the glaciers are not retreating abnormally.

“Most Himalayan glaciers are hundreds of feet thick and could not melt fast enough to vanish by 2035. The maximum rate of decline in thickness seen in glaciers at the moment is two to three feet per year, and most are far lower,” Don Easterbrook, a professor emeritus of the department of geology at Western Washington University, told FoxNews.com.

Pachauri, the IPCC chief, is under attack on another front, as well, as newspaper reports in India have commented repeatedly on his reportedly lavish lifestyle. TERI receives funding from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Department of Energy, both of which did not respond to requests for comment from FoxNews.com. Reports indicate that there also are concerns in the United Kingdom surrounding 10 million British pounds in funding for TERI, and questions about TERI’s objectivity.

“It’s about time that somebody started following the money trail to the big interests that want to prosper from the green regime, while the rest of the economy is crushed,” Orient told FoxNews.com. “It’s not as though the amount were a trickle.”

Sunday, 03 Jan 2010 05:11 PM

A former director of the National Hurricane Center called Sunday for an investigation into the “scientific debauchery revealed by ‘Climategate,’” citing the way global warming skeptics have been marginalized by the mainstream media.

The emails not only are troubling because of what they reveal about how some scientists played with data, according to Neil Frank, who directed the National Hurricane Center for over a decade, but for the flawed assumptions they make about the role of CO2’s effects on warming. Frank called for the investigation Sunday in an article in the Houston Chronicle.

Climategate is the scandal that began when hackers penetrated the computers of the Climate Research Unit, or CRU, of the United Kingdom’s University of East Anglia, exposing thousands of e-mails and other documents. One of the top climate research centers in the world, CRU has been the source for much of the evidence supporting climate change theory.

But any of the exchanges were between top mainstream climate scientists in Britain and the U.S. in the emails suggested that data that didn’t support the global warming theory was being altered or ignored.

“Among the more troubling revelations were data adjustments enhancing the perception that man is causing global warming through the release of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other atmospheric greenhouse gases,” wrote Frank, who was director of the National Hurricane Center from 1974 to 1987.

“Particularly disturbing was the way the core IPCC scientists (the believers) marginalized the skeptics of the theory that man-made global warming is large and potentially catastrophic,” Frank wrote. “The e-mails document that the attack on the skeptics was twofold. First, the believers gained control of the main climate-profession journals. This allowed them to block publication of papers written by the skeptics and prohibit unfriendly peer review of their own papers. Second, the skeptics were demonized through false labeling and false accusations.”

The science isn’t settled, Frank wrote, despite what “climate alarmists” would lead you to believe. They also attack skeptics by painting them as tools of Big Oil or questioning their qualifications. But they are “numerous and well qualified,” Frank wrote.

“Several years ago two scientists at the University of Oregon became so concerned about the overemphasis on man-made global warming that they put a statement on their Web site and asked for people’s endorsement; 32,000 have signed the petition, including more than 9,000 Ph.Ds. More than 700 scientists have endorsed a 231-page Senate minority report that questions man-made global warming. The Heartland Institute has recently sponsored three international meetings for skeptics. More than 800 scientists heard 80 presentations in March,” Frank wrote.

“They endorsed an 881-page document, created by 40 authors with outstanding academic credentials, that challenges the most recent publication by the IPCC. The IPCC panel’s report strongly concludes that man is causing global warming through the release of carbon dioxide.”

“Last year 60 German scientists sent a letter to Chancellor Angela Merkel urging her to ‘strongly reconsider’ her position supporting man-made global warming. Sixty scientists in Canada took similar action. Recently, when the American Physical Society published its support for man-made global warming, 200 of its members objected and demanded that the membership be polled to determine the APS’ true position.”

The skeptics do agree that the Earth has been warming since the end of a Little Ice Age around 1850. But they question the cause, Frank wrote. Believers think the warming is created by man, but skeptics believe the warming is natural and contributions from man are minimal and certainly not potentially catastrophic.

And skeptics argue that CO2 is not a pollutant but vital for plant life. They cite numerous field experiments that have confirmed that higher levels of CO2 are positive for agricultural productivity. Carbon dioxide is a very minor greenhouse gas, they believe. More than 90 percent of the warming from greenhouse gases is caused by water vapor. If you are going to change the temperature of the globe, it must involve water vapor.

Finally, skeptics believe that climate models are grossly over predicting future warming from rising concentrations of carbon dioxide, Frank wrote. “We are being told that numerical models that cannot make accurate 5- to 10-day forecasts can be simplified and run forward for 100 years with results so reliable you can impose an economic disaster on the U.S. and the world,” he added.

“Climategate reveals how predetermined political agendas shaped science rather than the other way around. It is high time to question the true agenda of the scientists now on the hot seat and to bring skeptics back into the public debate,” he concluded.

http://www.newsmax.com/InsideCover/climategate-hurricane-frank-chronicle/2010/01/03/id/345219

ScienceDaily (Dec. 31, 2009) — Most of the carbon dioxide emitted by human activity does not remain in the atmosphere, but is instead absorbed by the oceans and terrestrial ecosystems. In fact, only about 45 percent of emitted carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere.

However, some studies have suggested that the ability of oceans and plants to absorb carbon dioxide recently may have begun to decline and that the airborne fraction of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions is therefore beginning to increase.

Many climate models also assume that the airborne fraction will increase. Because understanding of the airborne fraction of carbon dioxide is important for predicting future climate change, it is essential to have accurate knowledge of whether that fraction is changing or will change as emissions increase.

To assess whether the airborne fraction is indeed increasing, Wolfgang Knorr of the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol reanalyzed available atmospheric carbon dioxide and emissions data since 1850 and considers the uncertainties in the data.

In contradiction to some recent studies, he finds that the airborne fraction of carbon dioxide has not increased either during the past 150 years or during the most recent five decades.

The research is published in Geophysical Research Letters.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/12/091230184221.htm

Written by William F. Jasper
Wednesday, 18 February 2009 18:30

The United States Senate may vote very soon on one of the most far-reaching and dangerous treaties our government has ever considered for ratification: the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (also known as the Law of the Sea Treaty, or LOST). The treaty, which has simmered on the back burners of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for decades, would give the United Nations control and jurisdiction over the world’s oceans, nearly three-quarters of the surface of our planet.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), oceans cover 71 percent of the Earth’s surface and contain 97 percent of the planet’s water. The agency also notes, “one of every six jobs in the United States is marine-related and over one-third of the U.S. Gross National Product originates in coastal areas.” Of course, the oceans are important not only for our commercial transportation, recreation, food production and energy production, but also for our national security; our navy’s unhindered access to the ocean seas is crucial to our defense at home and the protection of our interests abroad.

The Law of the Sea Treaty would jeopardize all of this by subjecting America to the rules and jurisdiction of UN bodies and the incessant harassment of lawsuits by foreign nations and activist non-governmental organizations (NGOs). The LOST proponents snort in derision at these concerns, insisting that the treaty merely codifies customary international maritime law already in effect, and actually strengthens American sovereignty. “One of the most common criticisms of the treaty is that ratification will lead to the largest transfer of sovereignty and wealth in US history,” says the United Nations Association of the USA (UNA-USA) in its “fact sheet” on LOST. “Instead,” asserts the UNA-USA, “the treaty strengthens and extends U.S. sovereignty over vast amounts of ocean territory and resources.”

However, when we look closely at what the authors of the Law of the Sea Treaty say in various international fora and publications, and when we examine the admissions and boasts of the UN’s officials and legal experts, we find that they have baited a very big trap. Their public assurances notwithstanding, they have designed and birthed a monster that they intend will do far more than they openly concede when seeking state ratification. Here’s what the UN’s Division of Ocean Affairs and Law of the Sea (DOALOS) had to say at the official celebration of the “25th Anniversary of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea” on October 17, 2007:

The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea … is perhaps one of the most significant but less recognized 20th century accomplishments in the arena of international law…. Its scope is vast: it covers all ocean space, with all its uses, including navigation and overflight; all uses of all its resources, living and non-living, on the high seas, on the ocean floor and beneath, on the continental shelf and in the territorial seas; the protection of the marine environment; and basic law and order…. The Convention is widely recognised by the international community as the legal framework within which all activities in the oceans and the seas must be carried out.

Please note that DOALOS, the UN agency in charge of administering LOST, claims the convention covers “all ocean space,” including everything on, in, under, and above the oceans. Note also the heavy use of the adjective “all,” as in “all uses,” “all resources,” “all activities.” But wait; as we shall see, the claims go even far beyond this to include global regulations that will override domestic laws covering not only coastal waters and shorelines, but also human activities in rivers and inland waterways, and land-based activities that may be claimed — no matter how far-fetched — to be harming the marine environment.

Moreover, LOST may confer upon the UN, for the first time, the ability to tax Americans directly, without congressional approval.

Many Americans have experienced firsthand just how burdensome U.S. regulation of our own waterways, including wetlands regulations, can be. But how about international regulations of our waterways? What national interest can be served by subjecting ourselves to the regulatory ministrations and taxing authority of UN bureaucrats and judges and the litigational ploys of foreign dictators and anti-American NGOs? Obviously, none. Nonetheless, Senate ratification of LOST is a “top priority” for the new Obama administration.

At her January 13 hearings for confirmation as Secretary of State, then-Senator Hillary Clinton was asked by Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), a LOST supporter: “If confirmed, do you intend to make ratification of the Convention your top treaty priority at State?” Sen. Clinton responded: “The President-Elect and I both supported ratification of the Law of the Sea Convention as senators…. If confirmed, its ratification will be one of my top treaty priorities at State, and the new administration will work with the Senate to secure approval.”

The LOST Boys … and Girls

The new administration will be well packed with LOST boys and girls. Vice President Joseph Biden, for instance, was a longtime Senate champion of the Law of the Sea. He will be presiding over the Senate in the 11th Congress. President Obama’s recently confirmed ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, served as understudy in the Clinton administration, first to Anthony Lake, and then to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, both of whom were (and are) LOST enthusiasts. For the past several years, Rice has worked at the liberal-left Brookings Institution under the tutelage of Clinton’s former Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott. This is the same Strobe Talbott who approvingly predicted in his 1992 Time magazine essay, “The Birth of the Global Nation,” that someday “nationhood as we know it will be obsolete; all states will recognize a single, global authority.” LOST would be a very important part of the emerging global authority Talbott envisions. So it is not surprising that this same Strobe Talbott, a foreign-policy adviser to Barack Obama and Susan Rice’s Brookings boss and mentor, is one of the “101 prominent Americans” who signed a letter to Senate leaders in 2007 urging approval of LOST.

Leon Panetta, President Obama’s choice to head the CIA, is also a major LOST promoter. Until recently, Panetta served as co-chair of the Joint Ocean Commission Initiative, one of the main organizations pushing the convention.

The new Democrat-controlled Senate is the friendliest environment the LOST proponents have ever faced, but it is the Republicans who are causing the most worry. On January 9, just a week and a half before handing over the White House to Barack Obama, President Bush issued National Security Presidential Directive 66 (NSPD-66) on “Arctic Region Policy.” The executive order (also labeled Homeland Security Presidential Directive 25, HSPD-25), which brims with environmental shibboleths, declares:

The Senate should act favorably on U.S. accession to the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea promptly, to protect and advance U.S. interests, including with respect to the Arctic. Joining will serve the national security interests of the United States, including the maritime mobility of our Armed Forces worldwide. It will secure U.S. sovereign rights over extensive marine areas, including the valuable natural resources they contain. Accession will promote U.S. interests in the environmental health of the oceans. And it will give the United States a seat at the table when the rights that are vital to our interests are debated and interpreted.

In addition to the citation above, NSPD-66/HSPD-25 specifically endorses LOST four more times. The Bush executive order may not have been prominently featured in the major media (indeed, it seems few Americans are even aware it was issued), but the message certainly reached Republicans in the Senate. For the umpteenth time, and now as one of its last acts in office, the Bush administration was signaling its strong support for LOST.

Many of President Bush’s staunchest supporters, as well as many of his harshest Democratic opponents, were shocked when, on November 27, 2001, Ambassador Sichan Siv, U.S. Representative on the UN Economic and Social Council, made the following statement in the UN General Assembly: “The United States has long accepted the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea as embodying international law concerning traditional uses of the oceans…. I am pleased to inform you that the Administration of President George W. Bush supports accession of the United States to the Convention.”

On December 17, 2004, President Bush issued a report entitled the “U.S. Ocean Action Plan: The Bush Administration’s Response to the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy.” This presidential response stated that “as a matter of national security, economic self-interest, and international leadership, the Bush Administration is strongly committed to U.S. accession to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. The Administration urges Congress to provide advice and consent to this treaty as early as possible in the 109th Congress.”

President Bush’s unstinting support for LOST, along with endorsements from his top State Department officials (Secretaries Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, and Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte) and military appointees (General Richard Myers, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Admiral Vern Clark, former chief of Naval Operations), has been used by treaty advocates to undercut Republican and conservative opposition to the globalist scheme for UN control of the oceans.

Senator Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) is now the most senior Republican in the U.S. Senate and one of the most ardent supporters of the Convention on the Law of the Sea. Although usually described by liberal media commentators as “moderate,” Sen. Lugar is an avid internationalist and promoter of the United Nations. He has been instrumental in stacking the deck in favor of LOST at committee hearings, allowing pro-treaty witnesses to outnumber anti-treaty witnesses by three or four to one.

LOST: Spawn of the UN

The product of nearly a decade of negotiations at UNCLOS conferences, the treaty was finalized in 1982. However, the world’s most politically and economically powerful state, namely, the United States of America, which also happens to be the greatest naval power, refused to ratify the treaty. President Ronald Reagan opposed it for a number of reasons, though the one feature of the document that has received almost exclusive attention as being unacceptable, then as now, is the International Seabed Authority (ISA). The ISA is the UN entity that claims authority over all seabed resources as “the common heritage of mankind.” LOST declares that companies intending to mine the ocean floor must obtain permits from and pay royalties and fees to ISA, which then, supposedly, will distribute the proceeds equitably to all mankind. (And we know from vast experience that UN bureaucracies are famous for honesty, efficiency, and transparency, right?)LOST graphic from The New American cover

President Bill Clinton negotiated a few minor changes in the convention, declared that its defects had been remedied, and signed it. However, the Senate did not ratify it, as is required by the Constitution for a treaty to enter into force. Although hearings have been held several times over the years, the full Senate has yet to vote on it. The UN declared LOST to be in force in 1994, after it had been acceded to by 60 nations. There are now 157 nations on board, the United States being the main holdout.

Sovereignty Sellout

In his April 8, 2004 testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, William J. Middendorf II, a former secretary of the Navy and former ambassador to the Netherlands and the Organization of American States, identified “loss of sovereignty” as the most important problem with the Law of the Sea Treaty.

Ambassador Middendorf warned:

Traditionally, treaties, with only narrow exceptions, have been defined as formal agreements between and among sovereign states that help define their relations to each other as sovereign states. They are inherently political agreements. The option to change such relations and the concomitant power to discontinue adhering to the terms of a treaty is solely the prerogative of the sovereign. First and foremost, the Convention represents a departure from that tradition. It establishes institutions with executive and judicial powers that in some instances are compulsory.

Part XV of the convention, notes Middendorf, “establishes dispute settlement procedures that are quasi-judicial and mandatory. Once drawn into this dispute settlement process, it will be very difficult for the U.S. to extricate itself from it.”

Advocates for LOST contend that fears of loss of sovereignty are utterly ridiculous. Professor John Norton Moore, a negotiator on LOST and one of the main guns called upon repeatedly to testify in favor of the treaty, had this to say at a conference on LOST at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in New York on March 28, 2008:

What’s the principal argument we heard initially out of the opponents? This was going to remove the sovereignty of the United States. They cannot point to an ounce of removal of sovereignty for the United States…. There is no loss of U.S. sovereignty whatsoever.

Prof. Moore knows better. In the area of pollution control alone, the treaty presents serious threats to national sovereignty, creating, in essence, a global Environmental Protection Agency. Some of the most extreme environmental activists have announced their intention to use LOST as a back door to force global regulations, such as the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, on the United States.

Consider LOST’s Article 194, which says: “States shall take … all measures consistent with this Convention that are necessary to prevent, reduce and control pollution from any source … and they shall endeavor to harmonize their policies in this connection.”

Article 194 goes on to say that the measures taken shall be designed “to minimize to the fullest possible extent” pollution “from land-based sources” as well as “from or through the atmosphere.”

Article 213 says: “States shall … adopt laws and regulations and take other measures necessary to implement applicable international rules and standards established through competent international organizations or diplomatic conference to prevent, reduce and control pollution of the marine environment from land-based sources.” (Emphasis added.)

As previously noted, legal activists are eagerly anticipating the havoc they would be able to inflict on the U.S. constitutional system and the potential for building world government through these and other provisions of the Law of the Sea Treaty.

William C.G. Burns, an environmental law professor and global-warming alarmist, contends LOST “may prove to be one of the primary battlegrounds for climate change issues in the future.” He notes that “the potential impacts of rising sea surface temperatures, rising sea levels, and changes in ocean pH as a consequence of rising levels of carbon dioxide in sea water” could “give rise to actions under the Convention’s marine pollution provisions.”

This a golden opportunity for environmental activists. “While very few of the drafters [of LOST] may have contemplated that it would one day become a mechanism to confront climate change,” Burns says, “it clearly may play this role in the future.”

Extrapolating from current and recent past experience, it should not take too much imagination to visualize the horrors this would unleash. Lawyers from Greenpeace, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the World Wildlife Fund (to name but a few) would keep every court in the land (as well as every international tribunal) flooded with perpetual litigation aimed at every productive enterprise. Forget about drilling any new oil or gas wells, building any new refineries or power plants, or opening any new mines. Farmers, ranchers, manufacturers, processors, transporters — virtually everyone who does anything on land, air, or sea is a potential target.

One of LOST’s most avid proponents is University of Miami Law Professor Bernard H. Oxman, who served on the convention’s drafting committee and has sat as a judge ad hoc of the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea. Writing in 1996 in the European Journal of International Law, Prof. Oxman acknowledged that the convention’s text was definitely lacking in the crisp, clear meaning its adherents often ascribed to it. “Like many complex bodies of written law,” he wrote, “it is amply endowed with indeterminate principles, mind-numbing cross-references, institutional redundancies, exasperating opacity and inelegant drafting, not to mention a potpourri of provisions.”

The UN’s Division for Ocean Affairs and the Law of the Sea insists LOST is not “a static instrument, but rather a dynamic and evolving body of law.” This mind-numbing, “dynamic and evolving” mélange of “indeterminate principles” and “exasperating opacity” is causing elation amongst those who would undermine our constitutional foundations and, at the same time, inspiring dread amongst those who contemplate the havoc that subversive lawyers and activist judges could inflict on our republic.

University of Virginia School of Law Professor John Norton Moore, a supporter of the treaty, calls it “one of the most important law-defining international conventions of the Twentieth Century.”

“This is quite an assertion,” Ambassador Middendorf says of Moore’s statement. “In fact, it is the most troubling aspect of the Convention.” Middendorf continues:

Unacknowledged in the language about fostering the rule of law in international relations is the reality that in this particular case it entails subordinating the powers of the participating states to the dictates of an international authority…. The Convention is a vehicle for transferring these essential powers from the participating states to the international authority established by the treaty itself. It represents the establishment of the rule of law over sovereign states more than it is establishing a rule of law made by them.

Doug Bandow, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, warns that “LOST could be treated as self-enforcing, that is, found to create obligations enforceable by U.S. courts.” In Medellin v. Texas, he notes, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a challenge to a criminal conviction for failure to fulfill the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. The majority ruled that the consular treaty does not constitute “directly enforceable federal law.”

Bandow, who was a special assistant to President Reagan and served as deputy representative to the third UN Conference on the Law of the Sea, says:

Treaty advocates make the same claim for LOST. However, Annex III, Article 21(2) states that LOST tribunal decisions “shall be enforceable in the territory of each State Party.” And in Medellin, Justice John Paul Stevens contrasted the Vienna Convention with LOST, which he opined did “incorporate international judgments into international law.”

“The issue isn’t going to be settled,” says Bandow, “until a suit is filed under LOST, if the U.S. is foolish enough to ratify the Treaty.”

Ratification would be foolish indeed. The treaty proponents have offered no pressing exigencies to justify the claim that U.S. ratification of LOST is “urgently” needed, or that any supposed benefits outweigh the evident dangers we would be inviting. Contrary to the claims of proponents, failure to adopt the treaty will not harm the operations of our navy or our commercial shipping.

On the other hand, ratification would almost certainly lead to actions that would be very harmful to our naval and commercial operations. Critics predicted chaos at our failure to ratify LOST in 1982. They were wrong; the United States has functioned quite well without it. No nation has had the will or the wherewithal to challenge our use of the seas. And if they had, the UN and LOST would not have helped.

Americans must let their senators know in no uncertain terms that LOST was unacceptable in 1982 and nothing has changed to make it acceptable now.

http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/election/801

Sometimes, I get so caught up in being opposed to something I fail to remind myself as to WHY I’m opposed to it. Yesterday I found myself – in the wake of so much news in the past few months regarding swine flu and the WHO; climate change and Copenhagen; and the manufactured economic crisis and the G20 – wondering if I could articulate to one who is not so politically aware or analytical just why I think Global Governance is such a terrible idea. Here are some of the reasons I knew that I knew, but just hadn’t taken the time to spell out to myself.

1. The loss of the people’s voice. Today in Washington, Americans on all sides of the political spectrum increasingly feel that we have no say in the decisions made by our leaders. Even though we vote, our choices of leaders are unsatisfying, frequently leading us to choose the “lesser of two evils.” John McCain isn’t a true Conservative, and thus left true Conservatives without a candidate. Barack Obama claimed to be a centrist but it turns out that he’s as much in the bag for the bankers as any good Globalist should be. Neither one of these two men – or any of the other candidates in the 2008 election, save one – were good for this country, and many people knew it but felt it their civic duty to vote for SOMEONE. For those of us who are not caught up in the false left-right paradigm, we looked at the candidates and thought, what is going on here, with this cult of personality battling it out against reluctant followers of a false war hero who in no way represents the traditional Republican ideals? We look at our members of Congress and think, what makes you think you can get away with continuing to put lobbyists and special interests ahead of your constituents? Yet they do get away with it because there’s just too much power behind Washington in the form of special interests, a lack of government transparency, and sheer arrogance.

If you think you lack a voice now, wait until we have Global Government. It would necessarily have to be tyrannical. It could not be a Democratic Republic (not that we really have that now) for the simple reason that it would be too difficult for the World leaders to control. We can relatively easily get on a plane or train, or hop in our cars and get ourselves to Washington DC and see our leaders face-to-face now. Our presence – if we wake up and start holding these officials accountable in whatever ways we have left – may once again remind them that they work for us, we don’t work for them or their lobbyist fundraisers. We can still have a march in DC including tens of thousands – like that of the Ron Paul Revolution or the tea party marches – to let them know that we’re watching. In a World Government model, it would be vastly more difficult to organize. We’d have to do it on a global scale and rely on the people of India or Afghanistan or Spain or Zimbabwe to have this march, people who generally are much worse off than we and are worried about how they’re going to feed their families tomorrow than going to a political march. The World leaders will be very comfortable in their ivory towers because they will know that they will be untouchable. So, your voice will be lost simply because of logistics. Regardless of who’s in power, your opposition to decisions made by a world body will be meaningless. If you’re liberal who truly cares about the plight of the hungry (and there aren’t as many of you as you may think), you will have no recourse to destructive policies made under the guise of “environmentalism,” and if you’re a conservative, you will scream at the top of your lungs about spending and no one will care. No one will even hear you. They’ll be too far away and too insulated for your voice to break through the walls.

2. Control. In a World Government model, there would necessarily have to be a technological control grid. The government simply can’t control 6 billion people (if that many are left when they’re done) without some sort of biotech or tracking devices. It will start with convenience, but the real reason will be control. We see this now even in America and Britain with the abundance of “traffic cameras” that automatically send you tickets for violating any one of our thousands of traffic laws. They can’t even control the population of a large metropolis – how will they do it on a global scale? A global government can’t control your “carbon emissions” (since that seems to be what they’ve resorted to), it can’t control your salary, it can’t control your internet activity, it can’t control your money, it can’t control your health unless we are all electronically tracked. Since the trend of global governance is heavily reliant on controlling people in order to achieve some sort of “greater good,” we must be tracked to make things “fair” for all people in the world. Yes – this is a joke. It is socialism at its worst. There are already RFID chips in our passports and our drivers’ licenses, but imagine what else the governors of this World body can use to track us. GPS on our cars, tracking where we go and storing that information just in case they need it later? Chips in our forearms? How else would a global health care system know what we’re putting into our bodies and if it adheres to our government-prescribed diet? How else will the government know if we’re going to our required one hour gym visit? Do I sound paranoid? I shouldn’t – the trend is towards less human-to-human interaction and more human-machine interaction. Think of ATMs, online ordering, and touch-tone menus when you call almost any company. Last time I went to the doctor, she had me put all my information not on a piece of paper, but a wireless entry system that sent my personal, intimate details to God-knows-where.

3. Management. We have the UN now, which is basically a useless organization, luckily for us. Even though member states donate their money to the UN, the leadership of a global government would have to be a financial body capable of compelling member states to pay to a coffer from which they will draw, supposedly to orchestrate the needs of the globe. Re-read that: “orchestrate the needs of the globe.” This is an impossibility. A small government body can’t orchestrate the needs of its small population, let alone the needs of 6 billion people. (This is ignoring the idea that we even need government to orchestrate our needs, which is debatable since most of what government gets involved in gets all screwed up, anyways.) Regardless of where on the political spectrum you lie, think about it on an accessible scale: public schools. Look at the school systems of any large metropolis…say, Chicago. In Chicago, we have hundreds of government workers, including teachers, principals, staff, security, secretaries, financial operators, etc. All of these people are working in tandem, supposedly to meet the needs of the hundreds of thousands of students in the system. Yet we still have failing schools, incredible government waste, teachers failing to get their paychecks, staff at human resources who let their phones ring and ring while they paint their nails, schools without textbooks but cappuccino machines and flat screen televisions in the downtown offices. Why? Because the vision of any large governmental organization that BY LAW must exist will falter because it’s too big. The workers “downtown” (or wherever this world body is based) is completely out of touch with the needs of the people to whom it’s dictating. Some banker in Copenhagen has no idea how I should best educate my child. And if you think that the global body will rely on the member states to communicate to it what those individuals need, again think of CPS. It’s global governance-in-training. It doesn’t work. The money isn’t used appropriately, people slip through the cracks, and we have no control over our own fates.

Lest some of you jump in here and say that it’s hypocritical to think that we will have a government that can’t manage its own money but can track our movements and actions, think of this: We have a government now that can’t run a DMV efficiently, but can track, record, catalog, and use your phone calls and emails against you at any moment, when it decides that you represent a threat to someone. We have a government now that can manipulate voter data in two minutes via hacking, and we have government agencies that can genetically modify our food, thus changing our DNA. The waste and fraud are not about incompetence – they’re about the simple fact that the people committing these acts of fraud and waste because THEY CAN. can storm into the DMV or the Chicago Public Schools’ Human Resources department and scream and I’ll be heard…somewhat. I can’t walk over to Copenhagen and scream. Again, it goes back to the loss of my voice as an individual.

4. The loss of our individual rights at the expense of others’. Think about this: In 2004, France passed a law prohibiting in schools “symbols or clothes through which students conspicuously display their religious affiliation.” In Switzerland, the building of new minarets is illegal. In America, we have new hate crime legislation that allows the federal government to re-try you if it’s unsatisfied with a not-guilty verdict in a hate crimes case, thus destroying our protections against double-jeopardy. There are now certain groups of people against whom crimes are more heinous than others. In all of these cases, the rights of the individual are completely wiped away because of group identity.

Diversity is an important aspect to living in a country such as America and a world such as ours. However, at what point to your individual rights to believe what you want, say what you want, and behave in a manner in which you want become less important than hurting someone else’s feelings? Imagine this on a global scale. Our bill of rights – which our founders wrote so as to keep the individual’s rights protected from government infringement – will be destroyed at the expense of “diversity.” It ceases to become diversity when only certain opinions are allowed. Imagine if suddenly – around the world – Muslim women who chose to wear the hijab were not allowed to do so. Imagine if suddenly – around the world – the construction of new Presbyterian churches was illegal. What would happen to diversity at the expense of diversity?

What does this have to do with World government? Conformity. The destruction of the individual and his or her desires, needs, dreams, personalities will be complete. Again, necessarily World government will have to streamline and level the world population, curbing our speech, beliefs, and actions. We’re easier to control then.

These are just some of the problems with World government. There are more – many more. Consider this a call to action – perhaps to add your own ideas, but more simply to become aware that this is our fate unless you wake up to the realities of what’s going on around you. The trend is towards global governance; it is almost upon us. According to the new EU president Herman van Rompuy, 2009 was the first year of World governance. Despite what I want, I agree with him. It happened seemingly without warning, but in truth people have been screaming about this for decades. They’re crazy, though; the “conspiracy theorists’ who are derided on television by the accepted talking heads tell us so, and many people believe them.

World government will be inevitable unless people start taking action in whatever way they need to in order to avoid it. We must take back the power that we’ve been letting go of gradually since this country’s founding. We must wake up. For those of you who voted for him, Barack Obama is NOT the savior of this country – you must see that by now. He’s committed to using the farce of climate change and destroying the United States financially in order to bring about Global governance, regardless if it’s what’s best for you, the individual.

Beth Srigley
Infowars.com
December 23, 2009

http://www.infowars.com/whats-wrong-with-global-government/