Tag: Copenhagen

Copenhagen: opening thoughts

Delegates at the opening ceremony for COP15 — the 15th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in Copenhagen — had to sit through this video, so I think you should too. 😉 It’s a fitting introduction to the next couple of weeks. There are not enough hours in the day for me to be able to cover everything that’s happening, but I hope to be able to provide occasional perspective, and pointers to interesting material.

Some key issues:

  • Can the global community pull together, or is the gap between the positions of the rich world and developing nations too big to bridge?
  • If a global deal can be done, will it be able to deliver emissions reductions on the scale required to avoid damaging change?
  • Will a deal build on Kyoto, or will a new framework emerge?
  • What will all this diplomatic tussling mean for New Zealand’s interests, and what role will Nick Smith, Tim Groser and John Key play?

A lot of the underlying tensions are already emerging, as the leak of a negotiating position document — the “Danish text” agreed by key developed nations (including NZ) is causing outrage in developing countries. The Guardian spells it out:

The UN Copenhagen climate talks are in disarray today after developing countries reacted furiously to leaked documents that show world leaders will next week be asked to sign an agreement that hands more power to rich countries and sidelines the UN’s role in all future climate change negotiations.

The document is also being interpreted by developing countries as setting unequal limits on per capita carbon emissions for developed and developing countries in 2050; meaning that people in rich countries would be permitted to emit nearly twice as much under the proposals.

While the diplomatic games begin, commentators sharpen their pens. Bill McKibben thinks the whole thing will be a disaster:

Itñ€ℱs like nothing weñ€ℱve ever faced before — and weñ€ℱre facing it as if itñ€ℱs just like everything else. Thatñ€ℱs the problem.

To help me keep an eye on all this, I’ll be using a number of resources. Apart from my usual array of RSS and Twitter feeds, I’ll be keeping an eye on the Guardian‘s amazingly diverse coverage (and blogs), the BBC (try the animated 800,000 years of climate history) and the COP15 web site (they provide good news coverage, and if you have the time, they’re providing live feeds to a lot of stuff). Press journalist David Williams is blogging his time at the conference, and the Science Media Centre has a page listing useful resources — aimed at the media, but there’s a lot of good stuff in there for the interested reader.

Fourteen days to seal history’s judgment on this generation

coplogoThis editorial was published yesterday by 56 newspapers around the world in 20 languages including Chinese, Arabic and Russian. No newspapers in New Zealand or Australia carried the message. As a call to action, I believe it’s worth featuring here in full, and I am happy to endorse both the content and the sentiment expressed. The text was drafted by a Guardian team during more than a month of consultations with editors from more than 20 of the papers involved. Like the Guardian most of the newspapers took the unusual step of featuring the editorial on their front page.

Today 56 newspapers in 45 countries take the unprecedented step of speaking with one voice through a common editorial. We do so because humanity faces a profound emergency.

Unless we combine to take decisive action, climate change will ravage our planet, and with it our prosperity and security. The dangers have been becoming apparent for a generation. Now the facts have started to speak: 11 of the past 14 years have been the warmest on record, the Arctic ice-cap is melting and last year’s inflamed oil and food prices provide a foretaste of future havoc. In scientific journals the question is no longer whether humans are to blame, but how little time we have got left to limit the damage. Yet so far the world’s response has been feeble and half-hearted.

Climate change has been caused over centuries, has consequences that will endure for all time and our prospects of taming it will be determined in the next 14 days. We call on the representatives of the 192 countries gathered in Copenhagen not to hesitate, not to fall into dispute, not to blame each other but to seize opportunity from the greatest modern failure of politics. This should not be a fight between the rich world and the poor world, or between east and west. Climate change affects everyone, and must be solved by everyone.

The science is complex but the facts are clear. The world needs to take steps to limit temperature rises to 2ÂșC, an aim that will require global emissions to peak and begin falling within the next 5-10 years. A bigger rise of 3-4ÂșC — the smallest increase we can prudently expect to follow inaction — would parch continents, turning farmland into desert. Half of all species could become extinct, untold millions of people would be displaced, whole nations drowned by the sea. The controversy over emails by British researchers that suggest they tried to suppress inconvenient data has muddied the waters but failed to dent the mass of evidence on which these predictions are based.

Few believe that Copenhagen can any longer produce a fully polished treaty; real progress towards one could only begin with the arrival of President Obama in the White House and the reversal of years of US obstructionism. Even now the world finds itself at the mercy of American domestic politics, for the president cannot fully commit to the action required until the US Congress has done so.

But the politicians in Copenhagen can and must agree the essential elements of a fair and effective deal and, crucially, a firm timetable for turning it into a treaty. Next June’s UN climate meeting in Bonn should be their deadline. As one negotiator put it: “We can go into extra time but we can’t afford a replay.”

At the deal’s heart must be a settlement between the rich world and the developing world covering how the burden of fighting climate change will be divided — and how we will share a newly precious resource: the trillion or so tonnes of carbon that we can emit before the mercury rises to dangerous levels.

Rich nations like to point to the arithmetic truth that there can be no solution until developing giants such as China take more radical steps than they have so far. But the rich world is responsible for most of the accumulated carbon in the atmosphere – three-quarters of all carbon dioxide emitted since 1850. It must now take a lead, and every developed country must commit to deep cuts which will reduce their emissions within a decade to very substantially less than their 1990 level.

Developing countries can point out they did not cause the bulk of the problem, and also that the poorest regions of the world will be hardest hit. But they will increasingly contribute to warming, and must thus pledge meaningful and quantifiable action of their own. Though both fell short of what some had hoped for, the recent commitments to emissions targets by the world’s biggest polluters, the United States and China, were important steps in the right direction.

Social justice demands that the industrialised world digs deep into its pockets and pledges cash to help poorer countries adapt to climate change, and clean technologies to enable them to grow economically without growing their emissions. The architecture of a future treaty must also be pinned down – with rigorous multilateral monitoring, fair rewards for protecting forests, and the credible assessment of “exported emissions” so that the burden can eventually be more equitably shared between those who produce polluting products and those who consume them. And fairness requires that the burden placed on individual developed countries should take into account their ability to bear it; for instance newer EU members, often much poorer than “old Europe”, must not suffer more than their richer partners.

The transformation will be costly, but many times less than the bill for bailing out global finance — and far less costly than the consequences of doing nothing.

Many of us, particularly in the developed world, will have to change our lifestyles. The era of flights that cost less than the taxi ride to the airport is drawing to a close. We will have to shop, eat and travel more intelligently. We will have to pay more for our energy, and use less of it.

But the shift to a low-carbon society holds out the prospect of more opportunity than sacrifice. Already some countries have recognized that embracing the transformation can bring growth, jobs and better quality lives. The flow of capital tells its own story: last year for the first time more was invested in renewable forms of energy than producing electricity from fossil fuels.

Kicking our carbon habit within a few short decades will require a feat of engineering and innovation to match anything in our history. But whereas putting a man on the moon or splitting the atom were born of conflict and competition, the coming carbon race must be driven by a collaborative effort to achieve collective salvation.

Overcoming climate change will take a triumph of optimism over pessimism, of vision over short-sightedness, of what Abraham Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature”.

It is in that spirit that 56 newspapers from around the world have united behind this editorial. If we, with such different national and political perspectives, can agree on what must be done then surely our leaders can too.

The politicians in Copenhagen have the power to shape history’s judgment on this generation: one that saw a challenge and rose to it, or one so stupid that we saw calamity coming but did nothing to avert it. We implore them to make the right choice.

Links: Guardian original, how the editorial was compiled, the 56 newspapers. Distributed under a Creative Commons license.

A thread of hope

The following column was published in the Waikato Times on 1st December

Do we lament that the Copenhagen Conference is evidently not going to produce a binding global deal to tackle climate change?  Or can we take comfort from the likelihood that it will produce an agreement in principle and proceed to further legal negotiations with a deadline for their conclusion?  In other words a delay, not a failure.

The cruel reality is that President Obama, who needs no convincing as to the seriousness of the challenge, has not yet seen legislation from the Senate which will seal a US commitment to emissions reduction. It seems likely that he will see it, but not before Copenhagen and therefore not in time for the US to yet be fully confident of what it can offer to the global deal.

When one considers how for the eight years of the Bush-Cheney administration the US acted as an anti-scientific spoiler of international negotiations it may be understandable that less than a year later they are not yet quite ready for what they so long delayed. The complicated American system of government is not easily harnessed to the change of direction. The President has to carry Congress with him.

To counter disappointment it may be worth remembering the political progress that is apparent. The science of climate change is now overwhelming and widely accepted by world political leaders. They know that emissions of greenhouse gases by human agency must start to lessen almost immediately, drop substantially within the next decade, and continue to fall heavily as the century proceeds. If this doesn’t happen, the prospect for humanity is dire.  Obama, Brown, Sarkozy, Merkel, and many others say as much. Even Medvedev has recently sounded the alarm after years in which Russia seemed lukewarm on the issue.

And this has happened in spite of the organised forces of denial which continue to work feverishly on public perception to blunt the impact the science ought to have. We still see letters to the editor and opinion pieces claiming that temperature is going down, not up, that thousands of scientists disagree with their colleagues, that any changes are just naturally occurring variations, and so on.  None of it true, but well packaged and unceasing.

However although it has helped delay effective action for many years since it was first launched by vested corporate interests, denial of the science is no longer entertained by educated political leadership. That’s progress.

Of course it’s worth nothing if not translated into effective remedial measures. Politicians are notorious evaders but on a matter now accepted to be of such serious consequence there are surely enough among them who will push for adequate action. Copenhagen may not be the time when it is all stitched up, but legal agreements not too long afterwards would be acceptable.

The November meeting between President Obama and President Hu Jintao in China was encouraging.  These two powers are central to a global deal.  Without them it will not work. They are the two largest emitters of greenhouse gases.  The fact that they are now talking and working together on the issue is of great significance.  Their meeting announced unexpected bi-lateral agreement on a variety of areas of practical cooperation including clean energy research, electric vehicles, an energy efficiency action plan, and a number of other quite specific matters. This is beyond sterile arguments about the respective responsibilities of developed and developing countries.  It’s affirmative joint action.

Their statement on the Copenhagen Conference was similarly positive, and carried no suggestion of drawing back from the task of finding a common legal agreement.

I don’t think we should surrender hope yet.

Marvellous distempered: the Copenhagen diagnosis

The Copenhagen climate conference (COP15) opens its doors in a little under two weeks. To update participants on the science of climate a new assessment report, The Copenhagen Diagnosis, was released yesterday, and it makes grim reading. Designed to inform “a target readership of policy-makers, stakeholders, the media and the broader public” about the evidence that’s emerged since the 2005 cut-off for the IPCC’s Fourth Report, it is especially strong on the accumulating signs of climate change as it happens.

Evidence of melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets supports a revision of the expected sea level rise by the end of the century: it “may well exceed” a metre. The rapid sea ice loss in the Arctic in recent years highlights the risks of methane releases from permafrost, but the most direct message is that with global carbon emissions surging up to and beyond the highest of the IPCC’s scenarios, and with pretty strict limits on the amount of carbon we can add to the atmosphere and stay under a 2ÂșC rise, we need to start cutting emissions soon.

Here’s what the emissions growth looks like:

CopCO2emissions.jpg

And here’s what we need to do to stay under 2ÂșC:

CopDiagtargets.jpg

It’s a simple enough message. The longer we leave it before starting to cut emissions, the steeper the cuts will need to be. And there’s an obvious corollary: steep cuts will be more expensive. Inaction now means more cost in the future. Where does that leave any government promising to “balance the economy and the environment”?

Below the fold: the full executive summary.

Continue reading “Marvellous distempered: the Copenhagen diagnosis”

Four degrees too far

The British government has stepped up its pre-Copenhagen campaign for a global emissions deal, yesterday releasing this interactive map of what a 4ÂÂșC temperature increase would mean for the world. Click on the map to explore the impacts listed across the bottom. A larger (full page) version is available here, and background here and here. At the launch in the Science Museum in London, Ed Miliband, the Energy and Climate Change Secretary emphasised the urgency:

ñ€ƓBritainñ€ℱs scientists have helped to illustrate the catastrophic effects that will result if the world fails to limit the global temperature rise to 2 degrees. With less than 50 days left before agreement must be reached, the UKñ€ℱs going all out to persuade the world of the need to raise its ambitions so we get a deal that protects us from a 4 degree world.ñ€

The 4ÂÂșC projection can be thought of as a plausible worst case scenario – the sort of outcome that we have to take seriously when deciding on emissions reductions. Based on modelling done at the UK Met Office’s Hadley Centre (discussed at this recent conference, BBC coverage here), the map shows what could happen if global emissions continue to rise unchecked — but not when we would get there. Some model runs suggest it could be as early as the 2060s. One key point to note: a 4ÂÂșC rise in the global average does not mean a 4ÂÂșC rise everywhere. Some places (like NZ) will be shielded from the full warming by cool oceans, but in the Arctic, for instance, the rise could be as much as 15ÂÂșC, and over continental interiors such as the USA and Asia 6 – 8ÂÂșC. Large parts of central Australia will be 6ÂÂșC hotter — as will much of Antarctica. The planet will be radically transformed, and not in a good way. More coverage at the Telegraph, Independent and Guardian.