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  • Support the Island Leaders now

    Australian Greens Senator Christine Milne

    A message from Australian Greens Senator Christine Milne

    		 Join the campaign online

     

    Dear friend,

    I am writing to you again from Copenhagen, where the conference has been reverberating for days with the brave voices of island leaders.

    The island leaders, from Tuvalu to the Maldives, Grenada to Kiribati, are pleading for serious climate action from developed and developing countries alike. They rightly point out that the kind of weak deal that rich countries like Australia have on offer is a suicide pact for them and they will not sign it.

    Support the island leaders now!

    But Kevin Rudd responded to this heartfelt plea from the world’s most vulnerable people by trying to bully them into submission. He picked up the phone and started to call Pacific leaders, berating them for what he called their “unproductive stance”. You can read about it in my blogs from Copenhagen on our website.

    These island leaders will be coming under immense pressure from the world’s largest and richest countries in the next few days. Those who want a political outcome more than they want a meaningful safe climate outcome are pressuring the islands to pull back and accept a weak deal.

    Island leaders need our support now!

    Stand with Tuvalu impromptu protest pic

    All Australians who support the brave stand taken by island leaders should get behind them now.

    We need to tell them not to listen to Mr Rudd, and reassure them that many Australians stand with the islands in their call for survival.

    Please take a few minutes to email these leaders to give them your support.

    Yours in hope,

    Christine

     

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    Please do not reply to this message – contact us via www.christinemilne.org.au
    Authorised by Australian Greens Senator Christine Milne,

    Parliament House
    Canberra, ACT 2600

    www.greensmps.org.au

     

  • Copenhagen diary: ‘We are on the Titanic and sinking fast.

     

     

    Such drafts that are emerging are vague in the extreme. By midnight on Tuesday – 72 hours before this whole process is due to wrap up – American negotiators were demanding that all appearances of the world “shall” – which would signify a binding commitment – be replaced by the word “should”.

     

    There is not even agreement on how many agreements there should be. Developing countries – led by China – would like to see an extention of the existing Kyoto protocol. Industrialised countries – such as Japan – would like to see Kyoto scrapped, or folded into a new agreement.

     

    Here is what the representative from the tiny island state of Tuvalu has to say about the progress of negotiations: “I have a feeling of dread that we are on the Titanic and sinking fast, but we can’t get the lifeboats because the president says we don’t need lifeboats.”

     

    Sleep deprivation

     

    There are just 48 hours or so until the end of the talks and the smaller nations are already shattered, beginning to stagger round in deep confusion. One Bolivian ambassador had 40 minutes’ sleep last night and faces dozens of meetings today; an Indian minister says he went to 60 meetings with individual countries yesterday; the G77 negotiators are walking around in a daze. Some say this steroid-style of negotiation is deliberately intended to exhaust and befuddle anyone but the largest delegations. A medical doctor here says: “Confusion is a change in mental status in which a person is not able to think with his or her usual level of clarity. It has multiple causes, including injuries, medical conditions, medications, environmental factors and UN conferences.” That last bit’s a joke.

     

    Forest champion

     

    Good to see MP “Bio” Barry Gardiner, education minister but former minister for bugs, beetles, bluebottles and all other living creatures at the department of the environment. Suitably sporting a spider’s web tie, Gardiner is here with Globe International, a group of legislators from around the world, and he’s deeply concerned about the forest negotiations. “What it needs is bigger payments for early action by countries, incentives and stabilisation”.

     

    Prescott steps in

     

    Stirring stuff today from former environment secretary John Prescott who negotiated the Kyoto treaty by banging heads together in Japan 11 years ago. This morning he was in the Danish parliament taking on the US special envoy on climate change, Todd Stern, for saying emissions is “just maths” and calling on the US to go way beyond the 17% cut on the table. Todd’s comments, Prescott said, “offend anyone with a sense of fairness and certainly goes against the agreed UN principle that governs climate change negotiations”.

     

    Copenhagen online

     

    What exactly are the negotiators and world leaders signing up to in our name and what are the implications? It’s almost impossible for anyone to know. Decisions are being made at a bewildering speed, there is little consultation, no chance to reflect and no way of influencing the process. A new website has just been launched – COP15Planet – which invites groups here in Copenhagen, or around the world, to share their expert opinion. I

  • Copenhagen loopholes could mean rise in emissions, report says

     

     

    The most serious loophole is known as “hot air”. Countries such as Russia and Ukraine were set targets to reduce emissions in 1997 when the Kyoto treaty was signed. They were also awarded carbon pollution permits for some of their expected emissions, to trade with nation that could cut carbon more cheaply. But since then their heavy industries have crashed, meaning their targets have been surpassed and they have billions of unused carbon credits which they want to carry over into the next round of targets.

     

    “Russia could be allowed to emit more than 30% more than today, Ukraine over 50%, and they could still meet their targets. In addition, they can sell the surplus credits to another country, allowing the country that buys them to emit more,” says the report. In the worst case, it says, this loophole could result in more than 15% more greenhouse gases going into the atmosphere.

     

    The second loophole allows rich countries to “creatively account” for emissions from forestry and land use changes. If a country can show that its forestry activities emit more carbon than they store away, UN rules allow it not to account for these emissions. But if their forestry activities do store away carbon, they can account for this sequestration and receive carbon credits. “It’s like claiming that building a new coal-fired power plant every year was a planned development and that the resulting emissions increases should not be accounted for,” said the report.

     

    The third loophole identified is carbon offsetting. This allows rich countries to emit more greenhouse gases than their target by paying for emission reductions in other countries. Friends of the Earth estimates that the use of offsets would lead to up to 9 per cent of cuts on 1990 emissions being wiped out from the cuts offered by rich countries.

     

    A further 5% of emission cuts could be avoided if no agreement can be reached on aviation and shipping which account for as much as 5% of all global emissions. Andy Atkins, executive director of Friends of the Earth, said: “Rich countries must realise that these loopholes are making a mockery of the targets they have put on the table. We need cuts in line with what the science demands – cuts of at least 40 per cent by 2020. Unless rich countries plug these gaping holes, any agreement in Copenhagen will be as leaky as a sieve.”

  • Connie hedegaard resigns as president of Copenhagen summit

     

     

    “With so many heads of state and government having arrived it’s appropriate that the prime minister of Denmark presides,” Hedegaard told the 193-nation meeting. “However, the prime minister has appointed me as his special representative and I will thus continue to negotiate the…outcome with my colleagues,” she said.

     

    She said the move was procedural. Separately, Hedegaard has been criticised by African nations for favouring rich nations in the negotiations.

     

  • Friends of the earth among acivists barred from Copenhagen conference centre .

     

     

    The Bella Centre is the focal point for climate activists who are aiming to invade the summit today. Around the city, some 150 arrests have been made this morning as part of an intensification of security to keep the lid on actions in the conference centre as the first of 115 world leaders arrives in Copenhagen amid the major protests.

     

    In a separate development, hundreds of non-government groups are to be individually banned from the centre or have their numbers slashed from tomorrow to make way for world leaders. Only 1,000 people from civil society will be allowed in to the conference hall tomorrow, and 90 on Friday.

     

    This has provoked dismay with many delegates seeing it as a deliberate attempt to muzzle public voices and criticism of world leaders.

     

    Andy Atkins, director of Friends of the Earth said, “We understand there has been unhappiness at some of the actions inside, but no formal explanation has been given. It is completely out of order. People are outraged at what is going on. Big mainstream organisations are being muzzled. This is madness”.

     

    Around 50 members of the group staged a sit-in at the inner lobby of the Bella centre. Friends of the Earth international is the largest international environmental federation in the world with groups in more than 70 countries.

     

    Tck Tck Tck is a global alliance of environment, development, church and human rights groups , Avaaz is a web based pressure group which has organised thousands of climate meetings around the world. Together they cliam to represent more than 10m people.

     

    “So many people are being excluded. The process is farcical. Civil society is being shut up, developing countries are being shut up, critical voices are being shut up,” said Nicola Bullard, working with Focus on The Global South, a member of the climate justice movement.

     

    “There’s a lot of frustration among civil society that we are not moving quickly enough. There are obstructionist tactics. There are debates and arguments. As civil society we feel that they don’t care,” said Tom Goldtooth, a Bolivian with the Indigeous Environmental Network. “We feel they are negotiating for the sake of corporations instead of for the betterment of the people of the world.”

     

     

  • How climate change sceptic Ian Plimer dodges valid criticism

     

    The new Australian opposition leader, Tony Abbott, was converted to the sceptic cause by reading the book, or so Plimer says. And the backbench Tory MP Douglas Carswell said it overturned his belief that climate change is a human-caused phenomenon.

    But it has also come in for stinging criticism from scientists and others. Bob Ward, director of public relations and policy at Lord Nicholas Stern’s Grantham Institute at the London School of Economics said the book is “full of inaccurate statements and misrepresentations of global temperature data”.

    Plimer has refused to answer a series of questions put by George Monbiot about specific claims he makes in the book, but our interview gave me the opportunity to put some of those – and others’ questions – to him.

    I found him to be one of the most difficult and evasive interviewees I have spoken to in my career, frequently veering off on tangents rather than answering the question I had put.

    Strangely, Plimer was only vaguely aware of the criticisms that have been levelled at Heaven and Earth and appeared to have little interest in dealing with them. He gave me the impression that engaging with his critics was beneath him. That seemed to me an odd attitude for a scientist to take. He did say though that when he returned home from promoting the book he planned to write a less technical follow-up to Heaven and Earth that would address some of the criticisms.

    The first figure in Heaven and Earth makes a bold claim:

     

    This diagram shows that the hypothesis that human emissions of CO2 create global warming is invalid.

     

    It is a graph running from 1990 to 2025 and shows five different plots of global temperature. One of these plots is the so-called HadCRUT temperature series produced by the Met Office’s Hadley Centre and Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.

    Plimer’s first mistake is to refer to this plot as a “computer prediction” of temperature when this is in fact the measured global average temperature. But more significantly, the final point on his graph is a long way from where it should be. The figure for 2008 is placed much lower than the correct figure (at 0.1C above the 1961-1990 average instead of 0.437). That might not sound like much, but it wrongly gives the impression there has been a massive recent cooling – something Plimer says the climate modellers have not predicted.

    His broader point appears to be that if climate models cannot predict warming over the course of a decade, what hope do they have of getting the forecast right for 2050 and beyond? Leaving aside the misplaced data point, Plimer appears to have misunderstood what climate models can and can’t do. It may seem paradoxical, but predicting the year-by-year fluctuations in global temperature is actually a lot harder than predicting the general trend. No one who understands climate modelling would expect a perfect fit on such a short timescale.

    “His premise that the models do not represent the [real data] is flawed,” said a spokesperson for the Met Office. “The models never claim to predict the individual variability from year to year. However, they do clearly show the trend over longer periods of time.”

    Elsewhere in the book, Plimer appears to have conflated a US temperature record and the global average temperature. On page 99 he writes “Nasa now states that […] the warmest year was 1934.” The Nasa dataset he is referring to covers the US only but he seems to be referring to the world average.

    Again, Plimer does not appear to accept that the world is warming. But in fact, the hottest year on record is 1998 and eight of the 10 hottest years ever recorded have occurred this century.

    When I put the mistake to him he responded: “The 1930s in North America and probably the rest of the world were a hot period of time.” But what about increased global average temperature since then? “That has been disputed by many of my colleagues who I have a great regard for because they’ve been the people involved in putting measurements together … I do dispute that as do many other people who are far more qualified in atmospheric sciences than I.”

    He appears to be taking the bizarre position that the world has not warmed since the 1930s. Even global warming critic Lord Nigel Lawson doesn’t say silly things like that.

    Now Plimer is not a climate scientist so you can perhaps forgive his glaring errors when writing about that field, but one thing he might hope to get right would be his own field of geology. Sadly not.

    On page 413 of the book he repeats the old canard that “Volcanoes produce more CO2 than the world’s cars and industries combined”. It was a claim that he famously made in a recent interview by Justin Webb on the BBC’s Today programme. Webb did not challenge him, but I put it to Plimer that the website of the US Geological Survey (USGS) states: “Human activities release more than 130 times the amount of CO2 emitted by volcanoes.“

    Plimer’s response was that the USGS is only talking about terrestrial volcanoes and has not incorporated CO2 produced by undersea eruptions at mid-ocean ridges. “85% of the world’s volcanoes we neither see nor measure,” he said. “They leak out huge amounts of carbon dioxide… That does not come into the USGS figures nor does it come into the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change‘s figures.”

    If he is right, that is an astonishing omission and an oversight that would force a huge reassessment of climate science.

    But when I check with the USGS they are very explicit. According to volcanologist Dr Terrence Gerlach:

     

    I can confirm to you that the “130 times” figure on the USGS website is an estimate that includes all volcanoes – submarine as well as subaerial … Geoscientists have two methods for estimating the CO2 output of the mid-oceanic ridges. There were estimates for the CO2 output of the mid-oceanic ridges before there were estimates for the global output of subaerial volcanoes.

     

    These are just three of the many criticisms that have been made about Heaven and Earth. Plimer dismissed them as “pathetic nit-picking” but if his book is influencing politicians and public opinion around the world then I think his arguments deserve close scrutiny.

    He likes to argue that his position on global warming is dismissed by mainstream scientists because they are part of a “fundamentalist religion” and a “mafia”. In fact, his arguments are rejected because they are just plain wrong.