U.N. Wants New Global Taxes

A 1 percent tax on billionaires around the world. A tax on all currency trading in the U.S. dollar, the euro, the Japanese yen and the British pound sterling. Another “tiny” tax on all financial transactions, including stock and bond trading, and trading in financial derivatives. New taxes on carbon emissions and on airline tickets. A royalty on all undersea mineral resources extracted more than 100 miles offshore of any nation’s territory.

The United Nations is at it again: finding new and “innovative” ways to create global taxes that would transfer hundreds of billions, and even trillions, of dollars from the rich nations of the world — especially the U.S. — to poorer ones, in line with U.N.-directed economic, social and environmental development.

via Fox News.

The U.N. is proving itself to be a net negative.  I don’t agree much with the U.N. or Ted Turner but the latter made a great point once about how the U.N. gave Nikita Khrushchev the forum to bang his shoe and tell the world how the Soviet Union felt.  It doesn’t really matter whether Khrushchev actually banged his shoe or not.  The fact that he was able to stand up and speak his peace was perhaps enough to avoid another world war.

The U.N. is good at that; a place to permit leaders to go and speak their peace.

It sucks at absolutely everything else.

Allen West Samples a U.N. Speech

Florida Congressman Allen West had harsh criticism for Barack Obama after the President’s speech at the United Nations today.

In a Facebook post Tuesday, the Tea Party favorite accused Obama of continuing to “offer up apologies instead of defending our hard earned First Amendment right to freedom of speech,” and slammed the President for not referring to the attacks on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi as a terrorist attack.

Then West offers what his own statement to the United Nations “would have been:”

“The future does not belong to those who attack our Embassies and Consulates and kill our Ambassadors. The Angel of Death in the form of an American Bald Eagle will visit you and wreak havoc and destruction upon your existence.”

via Business Insider.

Yep, that sounds about right.

Himalayan Glaciers Lost No Ice in 10 Years

The authors of the U.N.’s climate policy guide were red-faced two years ago when it was revealed that they had inaccurately forecast that the Himalayan glaciers would melt completely in 25 years, vanishing by the year 2035.

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, ultimately issued a statement offering regret for what turned out to be a poorly vetted statement.

A new report published Thursday, Feb. 9, in the science journal Nature offers the first comprehensive study of the world’s glaciers and ice caps, and one of its conclusions has shocked scientists. Using GRACE, a pair of orbiting satellites racing around the planet at an altitude of 300 miles, it comes to the eye-popping conclusion that the Himalayas have barely melted at all in the past 10 years.  …

Some previous estimates of ice loss in the high Asia mountains had predicted up to 50 billion tons of melting ice annually, said Wahr, who is also a fellow at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences. Instead, results from GRACE pin the estimated ice loss from those peaks — including ranges like the Himalayas and the nearby Pamir and Tien Shan — at only about 4 billion tons of ice annually.

Bristol University glaciologist Jonathan Bamber, who was not part of the research team, told the Guardian that such a level of melting was practically insignificant.

“The very unexpected result was the negligible mass loss from high mountain Asia, which is not significantly different from zero,” he told the Guardian.

via Fox News.

What the?!  This is the problem with some (not all) scientists.  There is the whole scientific method which is appropriate; but too many of these global warming folks seem to forget that you must rely on the results of testing (a/k/a observations) to enforce your conclusions.  When the results (i.e. observations) are not in-line with your hypothesis (i.e. conjecture) then your hypothesis WAS WRONG.

i.e. Why is this guy — who was so clearly wrong years ago — still working at the U.N.?  And how much are we paying him to be wrong all the time?

The problem with society and the media that they continue to give attention to these “scientists” who are wrong, and then wrong, and then wrong, again and again.  We should not pay any attention to their their kooky ideas.

How this news story should read is:

Disgraced scientist, Rajendra Pachauri, once the former head of the U.N.’s IPCC and who was also the director of TERI has officially been proved wrong by actual scientific observations.  Mr. Pachauri, once a prominent raising star in the scientific community is now selling cars in southern Kentucky.  When contacted he stated, “I now realize I was wrong for many years issuing false reports based on bogus data but there can be no doubt that now is the time to get into a new Ford Feista which is both cute and gets great gas mileage.”