As Donna Laframboise (to whom thanks and congratulations are due for her 500 posts since April 2009) wrote the other day, the BBC has egg on on its face following a bogus claim by David Attenborough in a recent TV program. Even Leo Hickman, of the greenest of ’em all U.K. Guardian – whose reputation for fact-checking before publishing is far from examplary – could not let this one pass unchallenged. Attenborough had claimed:
Some parts of the [African] continent have become 3.5C hotter in the past 20 years.
In a post, yesterday, Shub Niggurath expands on the connections Laframboise had uncovered and asks:
[…] why does Kenya want a climate bill, one wonders. It turns out, that it wants to ‘reduce’ greenhouse gas ‘emissions’. The aborted law had a provision to throw you in jail, for five years, if you flouted it
But I’m sure it must be sheer coincidence that Nairobi, Kenya just happens to be the HQ for the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP)
The UNEP, parent of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and its highly unsuccessful Kyoto Protocol, as well as a multitude of other acronymic offspring, is about to celebrate 40 years of generating and promulgating increasingly scary stories – and its recently acquired “upgraded” status in the UN maze.
So, I know you’ll you’ll be just as thrilled as I was to learn that (all emphases that follow are mine -hro]:
Hundreds of environment ministers, decision makers, scientists, civil society representatives and business leaders are set to gather at the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) headquarters next week to galvanize a new era of stronger action on pressing environmental issues.
The delegates will be making a small but significant piece of history by attending the first ever meeting of the UNEP Governing Council/Global Ministerial Environment Forum (GC/GMEF) under universal membership as a result of the Rio+20 Summit held last year.
As well as charting a course for a strengthened UNEP that will help transform a wide body of science into concrete policy action, the meeting will cover many pressing and emerging issues, including: sustainable consumption and production patterns and the post-2015 Development Agenda, financing options for chemicals and waste, and system-wide coordination on Rio+20 follow-up.
UNEP will launch new reports outlining emerging issues such as the global consequences of rapidly receding ice in the Arctic, […]
This “upgrade”, btw, “establish[es] the organization as the leading international authority that sets the global environmental agenda.”
Needless to say, during the course of this patting-themselves-on-the-back exercise in creative writing, the UNEP’s head honcho, Achim Steiner, is quoted:
“UNEP – with its long history of working with partners from governments, the UN family, cities, the scientific community, businesses and civil society – is entering a new phase that can better serve the needs of a growing global population while keeping humanity’s footprint within planetary boundaries,”
It would be interesting to know how “humanity’s footprint” (whatever that might mean in UN-speak) could exceed “planetary boundaries” (whatever they might mean in UN-speak), don’t you think?!
But – notwithstanding the single mention of”climate change” – against which the UNEP will “intensify the battle “- what struck me as being some rather, well, very conspicuous absences in this particular creative writing exercise from the ubiquitous – but uber-uninformed – Nick Nuttall, “Director of Communications and UNEP Spokesperson” was any mention of the IPCC or its “main client”, the UNFCCC.
Could it be that (as I had speculated a few years ago!) Steiner is about to throw … ooops … sorry, this is a UN body, where nothing ever happens (or certainly not quickly – unless, of course, it is to condemn Israel for defending itself) make that “moving towards throwing” the IPCC and the UNFCCC under the proverbial bus?!
The View From Here 