Tag: UNESCO

Trump should keep the UN out of Okefenokee swamp

There is an uninvited guest poised to take up permanent residence in southeast Georgia’s fabled Okefenokee Swamp, and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum should send the intruder packing.

One month before leaving office, the Biden administration’s Interior Department – without consulting local officials or residents – nominated the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge to be designated as a World Heritage Site under the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Seven months later, in July 2025, the Trump administration announced its withdrawal from UNESCO, a step that goes into effect on Dec. 31, 2026.

From CFACT

By Bonner Cohen, Ph. D.

There is an uninvited guest poised to take up permanent residence in southeast Georgia’s fabled Okefenokee Swamp, and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum should send the intruder packing.

One month before leaving office, the Biden administration’s Interior Department – without consulting local officials or residents – nominated the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge to be designated as a World Heritage Site under the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Seven months later, in July 2025, the Trump administration announced its withdrawal from UNESCO, a step that goes into effect on Dec. 31, 2026.

“Continued involvement in UNESCO is not in the national interest of the United States,” the State Department said in announcing the withdrawal. “UNESCO works to advance divisive social and cultural causes and maintains an outsized focus on the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals, a globalist ideological agenda for international development at odds with our America First foreign policy.”

If exiting UNESCO is such a good idea, and it is, precisely for the reasons the State Department stated, then why hasn’t the Okefenokee’s nomination to become a World Heritage Site been yanked by the Trump Interior Department?

Covering over 407,000 acres on the Georgia-Florida border, the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge is North America’s largest intact freshwater ecosystem. The Okefenokee features thousands of alligators, along with black bears, deer, waterfowl, cypress forests, and peat (decayed vegetation)-based floating islands known as “trembling earth.”

The Biden administration sought to assure the public that World Heritage Site status would not impinge on U.S. sovereignty over the Okefenokee. “UNESCO only monitors the current conditions and potential threats to the designated properties,” it said in a statement. “The Refuge would continue to be wholly owned and managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.”

But monitoring “potential threats” to the swamp by an U.N.-affiliated organization notably hostile to the United States is exactly what locals fear. While the wildlife refuge itself would still be managed by the FWS, what is to keep surrounding areas from being declared “buffer zones” to better “protect” the swamp?

All three Georgia counties surrounding the swamp – Charlton, Ware, and Clinch – have adopted ordinances opposing the UNESCO bid. “I don’t like any organization I would consider an entangling alliance,” Charlton County Commissioner Drew Jones told CFACT policy analyst Gabriella Hoffman. “There could be concerns about the property adjacent to the swamp. They could come along and say no hunting, no clearcutting, no herbiciding outside the refuge boundary.  They could say, ’Oh, we need a buffer zone.’”

Those suspicions were raised last fall, when the swamp was visited by a delegation from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), a global coalition of government agencies, academic institutions, and other agencies. The IUCN is an official adviser to the World Heritage Committee, the body that will decide whether the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge becomes a World Heritage Site, if the Trump administration allows the nomination to go forward.

On Oct. 24, delegates from the IUCN met with residents for about an hour in nearby Folkston. According to Travis Sanctuary, co-founder of Americans for the Okefenokee, the meeting did not go as the IUCN had hoped. Reflecting the views of most of those present, State Representative John Corbett, whose district includes the Okefenokee, spoke out against the designation.

Indeed, the IUCN is hardly a disinterested party when it comes to setting global conservation priorities. On its website, the group posts a blog saying, “Over the past several years, IUCN Member EARTHDAY.ORG has led a campaign to embed climate education in countries’ [Nationally Determined Contributions], the core climate pledges under the Paris Agreement that guide policy, investment, and long-term planning.”  The Trump administration, it is worth remembering, has withdrawn the U.S. from the Paris Climate Agreement.

“Climate change is now the biggest threat to some of the planet’s most beautiful locations: natural World Heritage sites,” UNESCO adds on its website. The IUCN, UNESCO, and their affiliated organizations should be seen by neighbors of the Okefenokee as akin to invasive species, determined to transform the local political ecosystem into a colony of just the kind of global elitism the Trump administration has so forcefully rejected.

That is why Interior Secretary Burgum should rescind the nomination and keep the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge safely within the America-First fold. This would align nicely not only with the exit from UNESCO; it would complement the Trump administration’s recent withdrawal from 66 international organizations, including the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change. Trump’s Board of Peace — originally created to oversee the American-mediated ceasefire in Gaza and since expanded to cover other conflicts the U.N. has failed to resolve — is further proof that alternatives to sclerotic, self-serving international bodies exist.

UNESCO is just such an outfit and should not be allowed anywhere near the majestic Okefenokee.

This article originally appeared at The Daily Caller

UK Funds UN Crackdown on Climate Dissent

Britain is one of the main financial backers for this attempt to stifle debate about climate change

From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

Britain is one of the main financial backers for this attempt to stifle debate about climate change:

The Global Initiative for Information Integrity on Climate Change is a joint partnership between the Brazilian Government, the UN Secretariat and UNESCO.

Bringing together countries, international organizations, and stakeholders worldwide, it aims to promote and defend information integrity on climate change, address disinformation, and enhance climate change awareness and action. It includes a global fund which will finance research into disinformation on climate change and initiatives to promote information integrity.

“Without access to reliable information about climate disruption we can never hope to overcome it. Through this initiative, we will support the journalists and researchers investigating climate issues, sometimes at great risk to themselves, and fight the climate-related disinformation running rampant on social media.”

Audrey AzoulayUNESCO’s Director-General

“We must fight the coordinated disinformation campaigns impeding global progress on climate change, ranging from outright denial to greenwashing to harassment of climate scientists. Through this Initiative, we will work with researchers and partners to strengthen action against climate disinformation.”

António GuterresUN Secretary-General

“Actions to combat climate change are also greatly affected by denialism and disinformation. Countries cannot tackle this problem individually. This initiative will bring together countries, international organizations, and networks of researchers to support joint efforts to combat disinformation and promote actions in preparation for COP30 in Brazil.”

Luiz Inácio Lula da SilvaPresident of Brazil

https://www.unesco.org/en/information-integrity-climate-change

It’s a bit rich, given the torrent of disinformation emanating from the UN!

What they want, of course, is to suppress any information that casts doubt on the official line about climate change.

It appears that the UK will bear a large share of the funding, as the only other contributors are Chile, Denmark, France, Morocco and Sweden.

It’s good to know our taxes are being so wisely spent!

Meanwhile the head of OFCOM, Melanie Dawes, is still a Member of the WEF’s Global Coalition for Digital Safety, tasked with suppressing “disinformation”:

https://www.weforum.org/people/melanie-dawes/

After a trillion tons of CO2, the Great Barrier Reef hits record coral cover third year in a row

Sixty percent of all human CO2 emissions have been emitted since 1985 but today the corals are healthier than ever

From JoNova

By Jo Nova

Sixty percent of all human CO2 emissions have been emitted since 1985 but today the corals are healthier than ever

In 1985 humans were emitting only 19.6 billion tons of CO2 each year, and now we emit 37 billion tons. In the meantime AIMS have been dragging divers thousands of kilometers over the reefs to inspect the coral cover. These are the most detailed underwater surveys on the largest reef system in the world, and they show that far from being bleached to hell, the corals are more abundant than we have ever seen them.

As Peter Ridd points out, when the reef was doing badly, AIMS was happy to combine the data on the whole reef, so we could lament its demise. But lately AIMS splits it into separate sections and if Peter Ridd didn’t check the numbers, who would know it was a record across the full 2,300 kilometer length of the reef? And that may be exactly the point. As Ridd reminds us, in 2012 the AIMS team predicted the coral cover in the central and southern regions would decline to 5 – 10 percent cover by 2022. Instead the whole reef is thriving at 30 percent.

Meanwhile preposterous power games continue

UNESCO has been threatening to slap an endangered label on the reef for years. They would have looked ridiculous if they had done this whilst corals were at a record high. But that didn’t stop them demanding tribute and conditions anyway, as if Australia can’t manage the reef by itself. Our Prime Minister should have laughed at them and cut UN funding until they start making sense.

The resilient Great Barrier Reef fights back

By Graham Lloyd, The Australian

The UNESCO recommendation that the World Heritage Committee not proscribe the reef as “in danger” at its meeting next month no doubt has come as a big relief for government but it still has plenty of strings attached. To keep favour with UNESCO, governments must ban all gillnet fishing by mid-2027 and more closely supervise land activities stretching hundreds of kilometres inland from the coastline, and further still from the reef itself. It must also keep the billions of dollars flowing for research and reef management.

 Who runs the country, is it our elected government or a foreign committee at the service of third world dictators?

The Greens, unfortunately, still struggle with big-numbers, or any numbers at all:

The Greens say the UNESCO decision is a “triumph of lobbying and spin over science”.  “The burning of fossil fuels is ­literally cooking our oceans and degrading marine ecosystems across the globe, and nowhere else has this been more politicised than on the Great Barrier Reef,” says Greens spokesman Senator Peter Whish-Wilson.

And who is politicizing The Great Barrier Reef more than The hyperbolic Greens themselves? No wonder Greens voters were the most confused in the AEF survey.

Ten years after our corals hit a record low, our survey showed that half the country didn’t realize the reef has recovered. Only 3% knew the corals were at a record high, and nearly half the Green voters were as wrong as they possibly could be — they thought coral cover was at a record low.

The full AIMS report will be released in August. There have been some bleaching events both before and after the survey, and as is normal, we won’t know for months whether any corals actually died or whether it  was just the normal home renovation that corals go through when they get stressed. It’s common for corals to throw out the zooanthellae as temperatures change and let in newer house-guests that are better acclimatized. Since sea levels near Queensland were 1 -2 meters higher 6,000 years ago, and the world was a lot warmer, corals can clearly look after themselves.

As Peter Ridd says the biggest threats to the reef are cyclones and crown-of-thorns starfish plagues, neither of which appear to be any worse now than they were years ago.

REFERENCES

Cumulative CO₂ emissions by world region: OWID (CO2 cumulative emissions were 687 bt in 1985 and 1,700 billion by 2022)

Australia Academy of Science Now a Woke Joke

The Australian Academy of Science is now a joke.

From Science Matters

 By Ron Clutz

The GBR is the largest reef system on Earth and runs for over 1,400 miles down the eastern side of Australia.

Peter Ridd explains at Spectator Australia The astonishingly woke Australian Academy of Science.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images

The Australian Academy of Science (AAS) recently released a report Reef Futures Roundtable, which is ostensibly about the doomed Great Barrier Reef. However, the report only demonstrates that the AAS, Australia’s peak science body, has become not just unscientific, but anti-scientific. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it has also become astonishingly Woke.

The AAS report predictably concluded that the Great Barrier Reef
could already be ‘irreversibly’ damaged.

The fact that UNESCO has just declared it not endangered did not rate a mention, and neither did the latest two years of statistics showing the reef is at record high coral levels. Remarkably, the report does not contain a single fact or figure to support any of its claims about the reef – except the area of the reef is 340,000 square kilometres. There are no figures, no percentages.

The recovery in the northern GBR actually started around 2017. Last year the coral declined slightly from 36.5% to 35.7%, and was easily within the margin of error calculated by the AIMS. Typhoon Tiffany passed through at the end of the previous reporting season, and could have been responsible for some loss. Central and Sounthern sections of GBR showed similar gains.

Nowhere does it mention that coral grows 30 per cent faster for every degree increase in water temperatures. Or that there is 100 per cent more coral on the reef today than in 2012. Or that just 1 per cent of the reef has the potential to be impacted by farm sediment, fertiliser or pesticides, even in the slightest way. Or that the sea level has fallen by 1 metre in the last 5,000 years.

The problem with this completely unanalytical approach
is seen in the ‘interventions’ it recommends to fix the reef.

Their impracticality is breathtaking. For example, it suggests ‘solar radiation management’ – shading the reef from the sun with man-made fog and clouds to prevent the water heating up and causing coral bleaching. The only number cited in the entire report – the area of the reef, which is as big as Germany – should have given them a hint that this is crazy. How are you going to make a cloud as big as Germany and keep it anchored over the reef for the whole summer over the next few hundred years? And you will also have to stop hot water flowing into the reef from the Coral Sea at the same time. That would require a dam 2,000 kilometres long and 100 metres high.

While a simple calculation is all that is required to reveal the absurdity of this idea, modern science is full of people who are almost completely non-quantitative and, as such, impractical and virtually useless as scientists.

Next there is rubble stabilisation. The supposed experts worry that the Great Barrier Reef will break up from climate change. Each of the 3,000 reefs is an almost solid lump of calcium carbonate rock (fragments of coral glued together over eons) a few kilometres wide and 100 metres high. How this is going to be broken up by some climate change magic is unexplained. But even if that were to happen, are they seriously suggesting we can wire it back together with steel reinforcing and concrete? Just do the calculation on how much concrete and steel this would entail.

The unscientific nature of the AAS report is largely a result of its anti-scientific approach. The report is actually a parody of wokeness and romantic mythology. This starts with the way the roundtable committees of ‘experts’, whom they questioned about the reef, were formed. Each roundtable had two chairs, a non-Indigenous chair, and a specially selected Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander chair. The romantic mythology about the special knowledge of any person with Indigenous heritage pervades the entire document, and starts in the foreword by the head of the AAS.

As the Academy approached the task of planning this project it became immediately obvious that there was no separating nature and culture when it comes to the GBR. Land and sea cannot be separated. No priority can be selected on an ecological basis alone. Having a Traditional Knowledges co-Chair in each roundtable allowed for different sources of knowledge to be shared and to form a basis for a number of the observations featured in this report.

Having a diversity of ideas and scientific thought would have gone some of the way to curing the AAS of the groupthink which renders its report risible. And the views and experience of people from the coral islands of the Torres Straits and northern Great Barrier Reef could have been used to great effect. These people tend to be deeply practical about the reef – like almost all seafaring people who live and work on the reef. And practical people know you cannot bolt the reef, which is the size of Germany, down to the seafloor.

But selecting people for their ‘roundtables’ on the basis of their ethnicity
rather than their scientific or real-world experience
is a fundamentally anti-scientific approach.

But it gets worse. The dearth of statistics about the reef are made up for by an abundance of data on the gender identification of all those who participated in the ‘roundtables’. There is also the Indigenous percentage. And not just of those who participated, but also of those who were invited to participate but did not. One could quibble and point out that those claiming to be male or female added up to exactly 100 per cent in all categories, indicating a terrifying lack of diversity on the LGBQTI+++ spectrum. But there is no question, on the important matters for the Woke brigade, that this report is brimming with instructive statistics.

The AAS ascribes such importance to facts and figures on gender and race,
but not to scientific facts.

This demonstrates it is anti-science. Science is about evidence and logic. It does not matter whether one is male or female or whatever else, it is still impossible to make clouds as big as Germany for the next hundred years. That is called a fact, and facts do not vary with race, gender, or any ideology.

I have been saying for some time that many of our science institutions have become totally untrustworthy. By its wilful abandonment of quantitative analysis, the AAS has destroyed its reputation as a source of useful scientific advice. The media loves a bad news story – they should focus on what has happened to a once-esteemed organisation.

The Australian Academy of Science is now a joke.

Peter Ridd is an Adjunct Fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs.

See Also Barrier Reef Great Again

Recently I watched an extraordinary netflix documentary which took us on a journey discovering the rich variety of reef life, including microscopic creatures not shown in videos before. It was highly educational and thoroughly delightful . . . until suddenly it wasn’t. Spoiler Alert: Puff returns as an adult to the reef where he was born after leaving it to mature in a mangrove marsh. Alas, he finds the coral dead and blackened, and the narrator warns us: Warming oceans killed the reef and we must change the way we live for the sake of Puff and the other reef creatures. There may have been more to the fire and brimstone ending, but I was so turned off that I turned it off.

Coral at the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) faces another year of exile from the climate scare headlines with news that the record levels reported in 2021-22 have been sustained in the latest annual period to May 2023. A small drop in the three main areas of the reef was well within margin of error territory, with the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) reporting that regional average hard coral cover in 2022-2023 was similar to last year at 35.7%. Most reefs underwent little change during the year.

Intellectually ‘bankrupt’ scientists are running down the Great Barrier Reef

Marine Physicist Dr Peter Ridd says the Great Barrier Reef is in magnificent condition and “intellectually bankrupt” scientists keep trying to run it down.

Sky News Australia

Marine Physicist Dr Peter Ridd says the Great Barrier Reef is in magnificent condition and “intellectually bankrupt” scientists keep trying to run it down.