Scientific Alliance

This time last year, the Copenhagen climate change conference (technically the 15th Conference of the Parties to the UN Climate Change Convention, COP15)) was being widely hyped in the media. This was to be the make-or-break conference, which would come up with a workable international agreement to follow on from the Kyoto protocol. In particular, it was to be the first agreement bringing in both the USA and China and other major emerging economies.

In fact the conference turned out to be a failure by any standards. An unprecedented 45,000 delegates registered to attend. 22,000 of these were from NGOs, and there were a further 5,000 journalists. Not all these people will have travelled for the conference but, since the conference centre held only 15,000 people, it was inevitable that many thousands would be left queuing for hours, only to find they were not admitted. This would have been frustrating enough on a balmy summer’s day, but winter in Copenhagen must have added another layer of misery. Not only were there major logistical problems, but it rapidly became clear that no binding agreement would be reached. The negotiating text simply had too many basic issues unresolved and national interests of key players meant that a workable compromise was impossible.

The final result was the Copenhagen declaration, agreed by a small group of world leaders in a back room at a meeting which President Obama had to gatecrash. Many reasons have been put forward for this failure. The climategate emails were seen by many as a deliberate spoiler, although their real effect was probably minimal. An early version of a Danish draft agreement, apparently being put together in good faith by the hosts in an attempt to overcome the barriers presented by the official negotiating text, was leaked to the press near the start of the conference. Michael Jacobs, a former UK government adviser, is quoted by the BBC’s Roger Harrabin as saying “I am confident it was a deliberate tactic to destroy the conference. It’s a shame that we didn’t expose the fact that representatives of all of the major countries - including those who’d said ‘we’ve never seen this text’ were actually at a meeting to discuss it the previous week.”

Again, the real impact was negligible. George Dvorsky, a director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies put forward five reasons for the failure at Copenhagen: 1. Nation states are far too self-serving 2. Democracies are too ill-equipped and irresolute to deal with pending crises 3. Isolationist and avaricious China 4. The powerful corporatist megastructure 5.

Weak consensus on the reason for global warming Although I am loathe to characterise all true believers in man-made climate change as primarily left-ish politically, this analysis does encapsulate much of the narrative which comes from that part of the political spectrum, driven by a certainty that something has to be done and that people cannot be allowed to decide for themselves. Mr Dvorsky summarises his preferred way forward as follows “Given the failure of Copenhagen, I’m inclined to believe that semi-annual conferences are not the way to go.

Instead, I’d like to see the United Nations assemble an international and permanent emergency session that is parliamentary in nature (i.e. representative and accountable) and dedicated to debating and acting on the problem of anthropogenic climate change (a sub-parliament, if you will). The decisions of this governing board would be binding and impact on all the nations of the world.” Setting aside the politics and ethical judgements, his view of human nature and selfish interests (in the non-pejorative sense) is as good a rationale for what happened as we are likely to get. But whatever your view of the world, the failure of Copenhagen was something of a watershed in the climate change saga.

Expectations have inevitably been dampened. Negotiations over the past months in preparation for COP16 in Cancun seem to have been fractious and inconclusive. Many fewer delegates have registered to attend the conference and media coverage has been far less intense. Nevertheless, thousands will still turn up, whether to do the negotiating or to encourage others to reach an agreement. Some still seem to be hopeful. Christiana Figueres, Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC, says in the organisation’s newsletter “I am confident that Cancun will be a success, where the stage is set for a concrete, positive outcome.” But note that there is no reference to arriving at a binding post-Kyoto agreement. With statements like this, any form of agreement can be hailed as a success. And the public mood is still being massaged in the run up to next week’s conference.

Mikhail Gorbachev had an article in the New York Times headlined “Let’s get serious about climate change talks”. The World Meteorological Organization has talked of record levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (a continuation of the current inexorable upward trend) and there are expectations of 2010 being a record warm year, publicised this week by the UK Met Office. But the consensus seems to be that the only real hope is to keep the momentum of talks going. In the current economic environment, it is clear that any slowing of the process would be hard to reverse. The situation could end up like the stalled Doha round of WTO talks, with the difference being that there is a good chance these will be revived at some stage. If UNFCCC negotiations were to stop, the chances of restarting them without some unassailable proof that rising carbon dioxide levels are driving dangerous climate change would be effectively zero. It looks likely that the climate change agenda will make little further progress over the next few years, but certainly not for want of trying by those committed to the cause. The ‘fact’ that our species is a blight on the planet will continue to drive many of them.

Recently, for example, the primatologist and UN peace messenger Jane Goodall spoke to a group of Belgian schoolchildren and teachers at the European Parliament. Her message, as reported under the headline UN envoy says humans are ‘destroying’ the planet, was that protecting tropical forests was both good for wildlife and one of the most important ways of slowing climate change. But, as for many activists, her message is supported by dubious ‘facts’ ("&more and more people eat more and more meat, they want cheap meat. The animals are fed unnatural diets so they produce huge amounts of methane gas which is a big contributor to the greenhouse effect.") and has more than a hint of double standards (“‘I travel 300 days a year on aircraft that spew C02 into the atmosphere so I am clearly contributing to the production of greenhouse gas emissions’, she said. She hoped, however, that increased environmental protection measures would help ‘absorb’ her personal impact on the environment.")

Beyond Cancun, and as we enter the post-Kyoto period in just over a year, we can expect to see little progress towards the binding international targets which have long been the goal of the talks. But the momentum of policy changes will mean that mitigation activities continue. Politicians will still take the opportunity to raise ‘green’ taxes, large amounts of taxpayers’ money will be sunk into renewable energy projects which do little to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and financial institutions will continue to make money from emissions trading.

Eventually, chickens will come home to roost. Either the whole ambitious project to force a reduction in fossil fuel use will turn out to be a failed, costly and unnecessary detour in global development or hard evidence (not the output of computer models) will give conclusive support to the enhanced greenhouse effect hypothesis, at which stage resources can be used to implement the necessary policies. In the meantime, the debate about evidence and appropriate responses has to continue.

The Scientific Alliance (info@scientific-alliance.org),St John’s Innovation Centre, Cowley Road, Cambridge CB4 0WS
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Inconvenient Truth About Green Agenda
Before climate conference, U.N. official admits it’s about ‘redistributing’ wealth. See Marc Morano on this surprising admission here.