In an attempt to obscure the success of last week's climate events in New York, Anthony Watts over at WUWT quotes a frequent guest blogger on the site, Eric Worrall, who states, "Now that its all over, the climate spinners are already hard at work, desperately trying to reframe the New York climate shambles as a win for the environment."
However, coverage of the People's Climate March was anything but desperate — with headlines extolling the record breaking outpouring of civil society members — and the UN Climate Summit has been widely touted as a historic and successful moment in which government and business leaders made commitments and affirmed a common wish to reach an international agreement next year in Paris.
Nevertheless, Watts — in what appears to be an ironically desperate attempt to reframe the Summit as a failure — zooms in on the government and business pledge to halt deforestation by 2030 calling it a "truly empty, painless piece of spin." According to Watts, "Forests are already recovering worldwide, thanks to globalization, cheap energy and economic development." These trends, says Watts, save forests by leading "the younger generation to abandon subsistence farms hacked out of the jungle" (never mind the fact that deforestation increased rapidly in the last 50 years relative to historical rates to make land available for housing and urbanization, timber, and large scale cash crops).
Suffice it to say, whether Watts likes it or not, the Summit's deforestation pledge is the kind of broad scale, multi-stakeholder initiative necessary to make substantive emissions reductions and is exactly the kind of momentum we need in the lead up to Paris.