O' Canada - Kyoto No Mo'

Power bloc ... WESTPAC, the business roundtable, meets with journalists last Thursday and issues supportive initiatives to combat global warming (Sydney Morning Herald – second article excerpted below). Photo: Lee Besford

Is it just a more conservative new government or the weight of sixty scientific experts that put the kabash on Kyoto in Canada?

Excerpts from the Telegraph -

Kyoto is pointless, say 60 leading scientists
By Philip Sherwell(Filed: 09/04/2006)

Canada's new Conservative prime minister, Stephen Harper, has been urged by more than 60 leading international climate change experts to review the global warming policies he inherited from his centre-Left predecessor.

In an open letter that includes five British scientists among the signatories, the experts praise his recent commitment to review the controversial Kyoto protocol on reducing emissions harmful to the environment.
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They emphasised that the study of global climate change is, in Mr Harper's own words, an "emerging science" and added: "If, back in the mid 1990s, we knew what we know today about climate, Kyoto would almost certainly not exist, because we would have concluded it was not necessary." Despite claims to the contrary, there is no consensus among climate scientists on the relative importance of the various causes of global climate change, they wrote.
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"'Climate change is real' is a meaningless phrase used repeatedly by activists to convince the public that a climate catastrophe is looming and humanity is the cause. Neither of these fears is justified.

"Global climate changes all the time due to natural causes and the human impact still remains impossible to distinguish from this natural 'noise'."
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So, who are these guys listening to?

Excerpts from The Sydney Morning Hearld -

Business warms to change
New research on global warming has caused a split at the top end of town, writes Deborah Snow.

WESTPAC chief executive David Morgan had an interesting story to tell at an invitation-only breakfast for a handful of journalists in Sydney last week.

The anecdote concerned a recent private conversation with the head of the giant General Electric Company in the US, Jeff Immelt.

"He said to me he was virtually certain that the first action of the next president of the United States, be it Republican or Democrat, would be to initiate urgent action on climate change. And he wasn't saying that as a casual political comment ... he is [allocating] billions of dollars worth of investment in the confidence of that development."

George Bush and John Howard have both cold-shouldered the case for more direct government intervention to combat global warming.

But last Thursday Morgan - and five other top businesss executives - put their heads above the parapet with the launch of the Australian Business Roundtable on Climate Change, a powerful new voice which wants business and government to respond more rapidly to inexorably rising world temperatures.
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It is also an open rebuke to the Business Council of Australia, the body which represents the chief executives of Australia's top 100 companies. The council was so wracked with division the last time it debated the issue nearly four years ago that it wound up deadlocked and decided not to take a position at all.

Morgan told journalists last week that the council's debate had been "immature", and signalled that he and other members of the roundtable would now be going back into that forum to try to move it forward. "The thing that has been missing is some fact base about the economics," he said.
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The fact that these business leaders are basing their action and opinions on "a recent private conversation with the head of the giant General Electric Company in the US, Jeff Immelt" is pretty scary!

Let me see, who would MAXINE listen to about "global warming" ... 60 scientists or ... the head of a company that left Katie Couric on the air for fifteen years just to have her bolt off to be the on-air cornerstone of the competition’s news division.