usmbguest5318
Gold Member
While Wallace-Wells' editorial makes for interesting reading, I'm not of a mind that his perspective or representation of the matter is spot on. I may agree with him or not, but I don't see him as someone on whose opinion/remarks I can rely. He strikes me as someone who's slightly more given to "grinding an axe" than he is to, with complete factual accuracy, presenting facts and from them developing legitimate premises wherefrom in turn are developed sound/cogent inferences and conclusions.The Paris Climate Accords Are Looking More and More Like Fantasy
I said after Trump pulled out it was doa....every alarmist guy called bs..
Guess what s0ns....wrong again
Don't get me wrong, his positions aren't typically flat-out weak; but he's developed a track record of putting a good deal of effort into presenting positions that are also not strong. I guess that makes some of his positions/arguments of mediocre strength. That may be good enough for some people, but I'm not among one of those people.
As goes his position about the Paris accord, well, it's certainly plausible and it has a decent measure of probability for the U.S. a major world player as goes climate mis-/management. Thus I'm not rejecting his "headline" conclusion, but insofar as the U.S. isn't currently a member of the Paris Accord, I see that agreement's ongoing success/failure as something its member nations must bring to fruition to whatever extent they can given the U.S.' non-participation. Accordingly, I'm not going to read his essay to find out precisely how strong or weak it is.
When have these summits ever been successful? The answer is.... never....and that was WITH American $$. The bars they set on emissions laughable but more hysterical is what they could even realistically achieve on temp decrease. Only a complete nut would call it even a marginal successYour thinking the answer is "never" reflects either your naivete, inanity, ignorance or novelty, or some combination of those, or perhaps and quite probably all four. The success or failure of political and international summit, a negotiation meeting, between/among sovereign entities is defined by what be the goals of the negotiation. Among those goals is never the goal of "lasting forever." History is replete with successful summits. Here are but a few of the "big ones":
Apparently you think think treaties are negotiated, agreement and signatures obtained via "Vulcan mind meld" or something other than a summit.
- Yalta -- Sought to find agreement among the Allies for the apportionment of Germany after WWII. It did.
- President Nixon with Premier Chou En-lai -- Sought to restore communication between the U.S. and China. It did.
- President Carter, Prime Minister Menachem Begin of Israel and President Anwar Sadat of Egypt -- Sought to obtain a signed peace agreement between Israel and Egypt. It did.
- Reagan and Gorbachev "Fireside Chat" -- Sought to establish rapport that would in turn facilitate the two countries later being able to arrive at nuclear arms agreements. It did.
- Council of Nicea (325 A.D.) -- Sought to obtain among the whole of Christendom ecumenical concordance about what be the nature of Christian faith. It did.
- Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) -- Sought to divide newly discovered lands outside of Europe between Spain and Portugal. It did. Indeed, it is why Brazil is today a Portuguese speaking country and the rest of Mexico, Central and South America are Spanish speaking countries.
- Summit at Münster and Osnabrück (1648) -- Sought to end the Thirty Years' War. It did. Treaty/Peace of Westphalia.
- Paris Summit (1783) -- Produced the Treaty of Paris which, as the oldest agreement signed by the United States, is AFAIK still in effect. It sought to end the American Revolution and secured recognition of the United States' sovereignty by other world powers of the day, most notably France and England, and defined the borders of the newly formed nation. It did.
- Summit at Versailles -- Sought to obtain agreement among Europe's powers to end WWI. It did. It's product is called the Treaty of Versailles (1919)
- Congress of Vienna (1814–15) -- The agreement's necessity resulted from Napoleon's defeat. Sought to define what land Europe would be designated as being part of what country. It did.
Map of Europe in 1812
- 500+ pages of treaties and agreements between the U.S. and other nations that remained in effect as of 2017.
- Partial list of the treaties contained in the above document: United States Treaties and International Agreements: 1776-1949
TY.
Perhaps he did mean to indicate "climate summits" rather than summits in general; however, if he did intend the former meaning, his remark is no less inaccurate. Success or failure of any negotiation depends only on what be the goals of negotiating. Obviously there may be some achieved goals and some unachieved goals, but any goal achieved necessarily means success of some measure has been obtained by the negotiators. One can debate the qualitative merit of the success, but one cannot credibly deny that success happened, yet that's precisely what the other member asserted.
A treaty is existential evidence of a summit's success; the participants sought to agree on something and they did; thus they signed a treaty, an agreement. Accordingly, there have been at least a few successful climate summits:
- [Rio] Earth Summit (1992) -- This summit was a success in that it sought to and did produce the following agreements:
- Paris Accords -- This summit produced the Paris Agreement. Looking at the timeline of its development, it's clear that the Paris agreement is the result of multiple meetings, all of which, insofar as they resulted in the Paris Agreement, were successful.
So while it may be the member intended "climate summits," if he did, his remark would still be inaccurate.
Note:
- AFAIK, the distinguishing characteristic of a "summit" is that, unlike other types of meetings, multiple supreme heads of state, business, governments, etc. (as fitting given the nature and scope of the negotiation/agreements being discussed/finalized) must be among the participants at a summit. In other words, summits are meetings in which the participating principals do not need to need to obtain anyone else's permission to agree to or reject whatever be under consideration. That's not to say the principal's decision cannot later be overridden. It's to say only that as goes the decision(s) being made, the principals present have the authority to make the decision; they are their respective group's representatives with whom "the buck stops," so to speak.
- Several things make the other member's remark inaccurate:
- "Never" -- "Never" is an extremely difficult quality to achieve.
- "Climate" -- "Climate," intended or not is a very simple word to have omitted had it been what one meant. It's inclusion would have added precision, but not accuracy.
- "Treaty" -- "Treaty," would have added precision, but not accuracy because it's far too early to determine which terms of the treaty have achieved their goals. One cannot assert success or failure when the measurement point by which success or failure is quantified/qualified has not arrived.
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