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A U.N. human rights investigator warned the United States Tuesday that its use of unmanned warplanes to carry out targeted executions may violate international law.

Philip Alston said that unless the Obama administration explains the legal basis for targeting particular individuals and the measures it is taking to comply with international humanitarian law which prohibits arbitrary executions, “it will increasingly be perceived as carrying out indiscriminate killings in violation of international law.”

Alston, the U.N. Human Rights Council’s investigator on extrajudicial, summary and arbitrary executions, raised the issue of U.S. Predator drones in a report to the General Assembly’s human rights committee and at a news conference afterwards, saying he has become increasingly concerned at the dramatic increase in their use, especially in Afghanistan and Pakistan, since June.

We know how Progressives like Obama love kowtowing to folks at the UN (witness the allowing of human rights inspectors in our major cities regarding housing), so, what will Dear Leader do? This might give him the out it seems to desperately want, after all his campaign promises, without appearing weak (too late!) In fact, it might give him the out he probably wants to abandon the War on Terrorism, er, excuse me, Operation Overseas Contingency. The far left Progressives who form the base of the Democrat Party, and are, one could argue, the actual middle point for the Party, mostly want to abandon Afghanistan and the WoT, and have for a long time.

So, this is a test for the Bamster. Despite the reticence to commit to the troop surge in Afghanistan and renaming the WoT, as well as some pretty speeches, he has actually done a decent job, mostly out of the public eye. He escalated drone strikes not only in Afghanistan, but in Pakistan. He has stuck with the Bush plan to leave Iraq. He has kept rendition. Gitmo is nowhere close to being closed. Will he listen to the UN, or tell them to go fly a metal kite in a thunderstorm?

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But most pertinent of all, of course, are the growing volume of statistics.

According to the National Climatic Data Centre, Earth’s hottest recorded year was 1998.

If you put the same question to NASA, scientists will say it was 1934, followed by 1998. The next three runner-ups are 1921, 2006 and 1931.

Which all blows a rather large hole in the argument that the earth is hurtling towards an inescapable heat death prompted by man’s abuse of the environment.

Indeed, some experts believe we should forget global warming and turn our attention to an entirely differently phenomenon – global cooling.

The evidence for both remains inconclusive, which is unlikely to help the legions of world leaders meeting in Copenhagen in December to negotiate a new climate change deal.

Unfortunately, they could have a 100 year blizzard in Copenhagen (something not likely to happen. Copenhagen tends to get little snow, and the temps tend to be moderate for the region, with little freezing) and world leaders will still pass whatever idiocy they have up their sleeves. Air Force One could get stuck on the tarmac because of massive snow and ice, and he will still sign whatever is passed. Because it is all about control, not science.

And, as far as control goes, Lord Christopher Monckton had this to say (from Fightin’ Words)

I read that treaty. And what it says is this, that a world government is going to be created. The word “government” actually appears as the first of three purposes of the new entity. The second purpose is the transfer of wealth from the countries of the West to third world countries, in satisfication of what is called, coyly, “climate debt” – because we’ve been burning CO2 and they haven’t. We’ve been screwing up the climate and they haven’t. And the third purpose of this new entity, this government, is enforcement.

How many of you think that the word “election” or “democracy” or “vote” or “ballot” occurs anywhere in the 200 pages of that treaty? Quite right, it doesn’t appear once. So, at last, the communists who piled out of the Berlin Wall and into the environmental movement, who took over Greenpeace so that my friends who funded it left within a year, because [the communists] captured it – Now the apotheosis as at hand. They are about to impose a communist world government on the world. You have a president who has very strong sympathies with that point of view. He’s going to sign it. He’ll sign anything. He’s a Nobel Peace Prize [winner]; of course he’ll sign it.

As the saying goes, read the whole thing.

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“The Obama administration has marked its first foray into the UN human rights establishment by backing calls for limits on freedom of expression. The newly-minted American policy was rolled out at the latest session of the UN Human Rights Council, which ended in Geneva on Friday. American diplomats were there for the first time as full Council members and intent on making friends.

President Obama chose to join the Council despite the fact that the Organization of the Islamic Conference holds the balance of power and human rights abusers are among its lead actors, including China, Cuba, and Saudi Arabia. Islamic states quickly interpreted the president’s penchant for “engagement” as meaning fundamental rights were now up for grabs. Few would have predicted, however, that the shift would begin with America’s most treasured freedom.

The Obama administration decided that a revamped freedom of expression resolution, extracted from Canadian hands, would be an ideal emblem for its new engagement policy. So it cosponsored a resolution on the subject with none other than Egypt–a country characterized by an absence of freedom of expression.

The new resolution, championed by the Obama administration, has a number of disturbing elements. It emphasizes that “the exercise of the right to freedom of expression carries with it special duties and responsibilities . . .” which include taking action against anything meeting the description of “negative racial and religious stereotyping.” It also purports to “recognize . . . the moral and social responsibilities of the media” and supports “the media’s elaboration of voluntary codes of professional ethical conduct” in relation to “combating racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance.”

Pakistan’s Ambassador Zamir Akram, speaking on behalf of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, made it clear that they understand the resolution and its protection against religious stereotyping as allowing free speech to be trumped by anything that defames or negatively stereotypes religion. The idea of protecting the human rights “of religions” instead of individuals is a favorite of those countries that do not protect free speech and which use religion–as defined by government–to curtail it.

More here

Posted by John Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.). For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. To keep up with attacks on free speech see TONGUE-TIED. Also, don’t forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me here

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The US threatened to derail a deal on global climate change today in a public showdown with China by expressing deep opposition to the existing Kyoto protocol. The US team also urged other rich countries to join it in setting up a new legal agreement which would, unlike Kyoto, force all countries to reduce emissions.

The Senate rejected it and Clinton refused to sign on because it would “result in serious harm to the US economy” as well as not including developing nations. Like China and India. Bush 43 rejected it for the same reasons.

In a day of high international rhetoric, chief US negotiator Jonathan Pershing said the US had moved significantly in the last year. “There has been a startling change in the US position. There is now engagement. We have had a 10-fold increase finance from the US. We have put $80bn into a green economic stimulus package. One year ago there was no commitment to a global agreement.”

But he forcefully outlined America’s opposition to the Kyoto protocol. “We are not going to be in the Kyoto protocol. We are not going to be part of an agreement that we cannot meet. We say a new agreement has to [be signed] by all countries. Things have changed since Kyoto. Where countries were in 1990 and today is very different. We cannot be stuck with an agreement 20 years old. We want action from all countries.”

At least the Obama admin. is staying strong for the moment in wanting an agreement that all nations are going to destroy their economies and takes us back to partying like it is 1799. How soon till President Neophyte caves?

In other AGW news, when we say that AGW is like a religion for the Left, well……..

A man who claims he was unfairly dismissed from his job because he believes in climate change is attempting to have his environmental views recognised under religious law.

Tim Nicholson, 42, says his beliefs on the environment are so strong they led to clashes with other senior staff at Grainger, one of the UK’s biggest property companies.

In March, employment judge David Neath gave Nicholson permission to take the firm to a tribunal over his treatment. The company is challenging the ruling, arguing that environmental beliefs are not the same as religious or philosophical ones.

Oooooooo-kay.

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The International Monetary Fund, acting at the behest of leaders of the Group of 20 nations, is examining how a tax on financial institutions could be applied globally. …

Neither the size nor use of revenue from such a tax has been decided. Brazil’s finance minister, Guido Mantega, said when ministers met in Pittsburgh recently they discussed using proceeds to help finance developing countries during crises. Another possibility, discussed in a recent IMF report, would be to “pre-finance a bailout fund” to handle financial institutions deemed “too big to fail.” …

That is, when foreign governments inflict socialist power grabs like Chairman Zero’s seizure of GM and Chrysler, Americans will be sent the bill. Looting the “financial sector” means looting you, since any shortfalls suffered by Goldman Sucks and friends will be made up with free money from their Big Government cronies. After all, the financial sector is too big to fail — and too well connected.

In case anyone imagines that money handed over to the IMF will go anywhere but straight down the toilet:

Last year, World Bank President Robert Zoellick urged sovereign-wealth funds and state-owned pension plans to invest 1% of their holdings in equity in sub-Saharan Africa, a proposal he called a “1% solution.”

This is great news for Robert Mugabe, who could always use a new palace or two.

As Cliff Kinkaid notes, global taxes may hit us before we see them coming:

One can’t exclude the possibility of such a tax being slipped into a health care or cap-and-trade bill that the Congress or the public could not have time to read before passage.

After all, Demonrat Congresscritters can’t be expected to read the laws they rubber-stamp on behalf of Chairman Zero, who unsurprisingly is completely on board with plans to enslave American taxpayers on behalf of the world community.

The “Leader’s Statement” endorsed by President Obama and released at the [Pittsburgh G-20] declares on page 10 that “We task the IMF to prepare a report for our next meeting with regard to the range of options countries have adopted or are considering as to how the financial sector could make a fair and substantial contribution toward paying for any burdens associated with government interventions to repair the banking system.”

The term “fair and substantial contribution” is code for a global tax.

Naturally our moonbat rulers will spin the tax as an attack on the capitalist fat cats their media enablers relentlessly demonize. But the bill will be passed along to normal Americans.

One proposal, popular at the United Nations for decades and long-advocated by Fidel Castro, is the Tobin Tax, named after Yale University economist James Tobin. Such a tax, which could affect stocks, mutual funds, and pensions, could generate hundreds of billions of dollars a year. Indeed, Steven Solomon, a former staff reporter at Forbes, says in his book, The Confidence Game, that such a proposal “might net some $13 trillion a year…” because it is based on taking a percentage of money from the trillions of dollars exchanged daily in global financial markets.

The percentage looted will inevitably creep upward, as with all taxes.

Meanwhile, President Obama used his recent speech to the United Nations to declare, “We have fully embraced the Millennium Development Goals.” He left unsaid what this means. It has been calculated that this will cost the U.S. $845 billion to meet U.N. demands for a certain percentage of Gross National Product to go for official foreign aid to the rest of the world. Compliance with the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) was incorporated into the Global Poverty Act that Obama had introduced as a U.S. senator but which never passed.

A global tax of the kind envisioned in the G-20 document could help provide the revenue to fulfill Obama’s promise to comply with the MDGs.

If you think our economy is staggering now, wait until the Community Activist in Chief loads the entire world onto its back.

On a tip from Sal. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.

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With enough technological advances, the world could get to a dramatically lower level of greenhouse gas emissions at a cost of between one and three percent of global GDP per year, according to a report issued Tuesday by a group of economists. That price tag is in line with previous economic estimates aimed at meeting more modest climate goals.

Eh. It’s only a 1-3 percent loss of GDP. Globally. No big deal. We can all live with walking to work, buying a smaller house, being unemployed, knitting clothes for our kids, right?

The authors of the report assumed that a doubling of carbon concentrations in the atmosphere would translate into an average global temperature rise of 10.8 degrees Fahrenheit, twice as much as what some traditional climate models have suggested. According to their analysis, policymakers could reduce carbon concentrations in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million by either 2100 or 2200.

Hmm, it’s sounding like those “economists” – and, I thought only climatologists were allowed to chime in? – have a bit of an agenda. That can’t be right, right? The media would never trumpet anyone with any sort of bias, right? Just who are these economists that wrote the report for The Economics for Equality and The Environment (E3 Network)?

Economists in the E3 Network believe:

• A clean and safe environment is a birthright of every person. It is not a commodity to be distributed on the basis of purchasing power, nor a privilege to be distributed on the basis of political power.
• Safeguarding the natural environment is inseparable from promoting social justice. Without a fair distribution of wealth and power, neither the free market nor government regulation will guarantee environmental quality and human well-being.
• Today’s environmental challenges demand new thinking. By engaging with real-world problems economists can help craft effective solutions and build a more just and sustainable future.

To these ends, we assist democratic and participatory decision-making in public policies to protect people and the environment.

Ah. Far Left Progressives. Who receive their funding from the Ecotrust, a group whose mission creep turned them from people concerned about the environment into a group concerned with “social justice.” Which also feeds off of tax payer money.

A group of eight leading climate economists has a message for United States senators now considering a bill to cap emissions: don’t think of long-term mitigation costs as a massive expenditure, but rather a form of reasonably-priced “planetary climate insurance.”

Only left wing climate alarmists would call for destroying the world wide economy in the name of “planetary climate insurance.” Do you ever get the feeling that they aren’t really thinking about the best interests of actual people? You can certainly expect energy prices to rise significantly, since those “alternative energy sources” are barely viable. Too bad more and more and more actual scientists are coming out to say that the whole AGW movement is the same that comes from the backside of a cow.

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Successful countries are called upon to severely restrict economic activity; backwards hellholes — usually ruled by socialist tyrants — face no such restrictions. But that’s not enough to guarantee equal poverty for all, so they slipped in a clause on page 122 decreeing that some countries will be expected to:

(a) Compensate for damage to the [less developed countries'] economy and also compensate for lost opportunities, resources, lives, land and dignity, as many will become environmental refugees;

(b) Africa, in the context of environmental justice, should be equitably compensated for environmental, social and economic losses arising from the implementation of response measures.

The environmental refugee business is science fiction out of an Al Gore fever dream, but the damage to our economy if we are forced to buy “opportunities, resources, lives, land and dignity” for the entire Third World with our economy shackled in pointless CO2 restrictions will be quite real. The phrase “environmental justice” is Newspeak for “spreading the wealth around” until there isn’t any left to spread, while masking the injustice in sanctimonious ecofreak blather.

Liberal elitists dream of a one-world government under the thumb of which everyone but them is a half-starved, powerless peasant with zero chance of ever accomplishing anything, because anything we create will only be expropriated. The United Nations exists for a single purpose: to make this nightmare come true. Comrade Obama is on board with the program, as is every last liar in the governmedia who pays lip service to the nonexistent global warming crisis.

Via What’s Up With That? On a tip from WUWT reader. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.

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Holdren’s odd views from the past, including statements in books published in the 1970s that suggested forced sterilizations and social pressure for abortions, among other things.

This guy advocated sneaking contraceptives into American water supplies! But more recently, Holdren gave a speech advocating Obama’s ideals of socialism and “spreading the wealth”.

HOLDREN: There has been a strain of what many people call “US exceptionalism” in the United States, the notion that the United States is so big, so important, so powerful, so technologically advanced that it can and should do what it wants. I think this strain is misguided.

Q: Will Americans need to reduce their living standards? Is that politically viable, or will technology [unintelligible] do it?

H: I think ultimately that the rate of growth of material consumption is going to have to come down, and there’s going to have to be a degree of redistribution of how much we consume, in terms of energy and material resources, in order to leave room for people who are poor to become more prosperous.

Ed Morrissey:

This interview strongly suggests that Obama’s science czar got picked not for his dedication to science but for his redistributionist views under the cloak of climate change.

Since the American people elected Obama after hearing the same philosophy from him, I’m not sure this bit is enough to sink the guy. It is, however, revealing and when combined with his proposals of compulsory abortion on American women, and many other extreme views he is not fit for any government office. He very well could be Obama’s biggest radical.

Some critics have noted Holdren’s penchant for making apocalyptic predictions that never come to pass, and categorizing all criticism of his alarmist views as not only wrong but dangerous. What none has yet noted is that Holdren is a globalist who has endorsed “surrender of sovereignty” to “a comprehensive Planetary Regime” that would control all the world’s resources, direct global redistribution of wealth, oversee the “de-development” of the West, control a World Army and taxation regime, and enforce world population limits. He has castigated the United States as “the meanest of wealthy countries,” written a justification of compulsory abortion for American women, advocated drastically lowering the U.S. standard of living, and left the door open to trying global warming “deniers” for crimes against humanity. Such is Barack Obama’s idea of a clear-headed adviser on matters of scientific policy.

Ace:

Van Jones, John Holdren. Ever get the sneaking suspicion that climate porn isn’t really about the climate at all, but rather plain old Marxism with a fresh coat of green paint over the faded and cracked red?

We demand this radical should step down now!

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It was bound to happen. That is, someone was due to blame the catastrophic wildfires in California on global warming.

Rep. Linda Sanchez, the Democratic congresswoman from California’s 39th Congressional District, appeared on MSNBC’s Sept. 1 “Andrea Mitchell Reports” and did just that. She told the show’s fill-in host Tamron Hall that these wildfires have increased in “magnitude” over the years. And she knew why.

The increase couldn’t have anything to do with the extreme environmentalists blocking controlled burns and clearing of brush, now, could it? Hmm, that is a Man-bag made problem though, eh?

Moving on, looks like Britain is going to have a wee bit of a problem shortly

Demand for power from homes and businesses will exceed supply from the national grid within eight years, according to official figures.

The shortage of supplies will hit the equivalent of [as]many as 16 million families for at least one hour during the year, it is forecast.

Not since the early 1970s when the three-day week was introduced to preserve coal has Britain faced the prospect of rationing energy use.

The gap between Britain’s energy needs and demand throws fresh doubt on the Government’s assertion that renewable energy can make up for dwindling nuclear and coal capabilities.

In other words, the pie in the sky ideas, mostly still on the drawing board or in their infancy, just ain’t going to cut it, as we say here in the South. Now, most of us “skeptics/deniers” are not against alternative sources. We just do not think that they should be forced to be used till they are ready. Let’s use what works for the time being, while working to make alternatives workable. Of course, envirowacko’s end up blocking those, too.

Last up, wartime!

Developing nations need a 600-billion-dollar “Marshall Plan” annually to tackle climate change with support from rich nations on a scale not seen outside wartime recovery, a UN report said Tuesday.

Touching on a core stumbling block in global climate talks, the report said that poor nations needed a huge investment programme from rich nations to shift to clean energy, and to adapt to the weather changes and damage wrought by global warming.

The transformation would require “a level of international support and solidarity rarely mustered outside a wartime setting,” according to the survey by the UN’s department of economic and social affairs.

You know what they really need? Cheap and dependable power. Like we have in the 1st World, where our lifestyles are fueled (no pun intended) by readily available power at all times, giving people the luxury to complain about “clean energy.” These same people do not live in huts with dirt floors, worrying about screw-worms, lice, malaria, cholera, sanitation, water quality, and so on. 3rd Worlders aren’t able to stand around sipping cocktails, scarfing down chilled shrimp and caviar, while moaning about the plight of what global warming will do to them. And, you know what? For all sorts of reasons, many 3rd world regions are telling the Climahysterics to piss off.

BTW, a Right Wing News read emailed me about where to find all sorts of these types of AGW stories. There are lots of great sites available. One thing I do is search “global warming” and “climate change” at Google News. There are a ton of great sites out there, such as Planet Gore, Watts Up With That?, Climate Realists, IceCap, Junk Science, and Gore Lied, among others. I am leaving lots out, of course. Two linked up sites that you should check every day are Climate Depot and Tom Nelson. Climate Depot also has a huge amount of links to sites dealing with global warming, and is one of the main sites I check. Mostly, I look at stories more about politics and such, rather than the science of AGW.

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