Global swindle watch

At a Global Warming Swindle...whoops...Climate Change conference in Poland, the US was castigated for failing to agree to emissions reductions that would effectively return us to the stone age, while Brazil was hailed for announcing plans "to significantly slow the destruction of the Amazon rain forest by 2017. Scientists say that would reduce global warming by slashing the amount of carbon dioxide emitted when trees are burned."

So, let me get this straight. While the rest of the world wants us to cut our carbon emissions to levels roughly equivalent to those of a hunter-gatherer society, Brazil says that in around 8 or 9 years they'll get around to slowing the destruction of the "lungs of the planet". And yet we're the bad guys and they're the good guys. Alrighty, then.

And let's not forget how well the last international accord worked out:

The Kyoto treaty was agreed upon in late 1997 and countries started signing and ratifying it in 1998. A list of countries and their carbon dioxide emissions due to consumption of fossil fuels is available from the U.S. government. If we look at that data and compare 2004 (latest year for which data is available) to 1997 (last year before the Kyoto treaty was signed), we find the following.

• Emissions worldwide increased 18.0%.
• Emissions from countries that signed the treaty increased 21.1%.
• Emissions from non-signers increased 10.0%.
• Emissions from the U.S. increased 6.6%.

Let's also not forget that a growing body of evidence indicates that the anthropogenic global warming/climate change theory is a crock of shit.