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  • Copenhagen talks break down as developing nations split over ‘Tuvalu’ protocol

     

     

    The crisis, partly precipitated by revelations yesterday that the host country Denmark had proposed a text which could have seen the death of the Kyoto protocol, threatens to divide the powerful G77 plus China group of 130 developing countries.

     

    Tuvalu, a Pacific island state politically and financially close to Australia, proposed a new protocol which would have the advantage of potentially forcing deeper global emission cuts, but could lead to other developing countries – rather than rich nations – having to make those cuts.

     

    Many developing nations cherish the legally binding commitments that Kyoto places on industrialised nations and fiercely oppose proposals that would change this.

     

    Tuvalu was immediately supported by other small island states, including Grenada, Trinidad and Tobago and several African states. But it was opposed by 15 countries, including the powerful nations of China, Saudi Arabia and India. One of the two negotiating tracks was then suspended for several hours as no consensus could be reached.

     

    Civil society groups including the TckTckTck campaign and 350.org demonstrated outside the meeting in favour of Tuvalu, chanting: “Tuvalu is the new deal.”

     

    Observers said a G77 plus China rift at this early stage in the conference was a serious setback for the big developing countries. Small island states, least developed countries and Africa have so far worked together in public with the G77.

     

     

    In a separate development, a new draft text prepared by Denmark and other rich countries is known to make several compromises to developing countries. Sources close to the Danish prime minister, Lars Løkke Rasmussen, today indicated that the text contains a commitment to complete a legally binding agreement by December 2010. This is significantly more time than is wanted by the UK prime minister, Gordon Brown, and the UN secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, but is thought to be necessary to complete the legal work.

     

    The new text also also says that countries will work towards agreeing a new commitment period for the Kyoto protocol. This has been holding up talks because developing countries fear the Kyoto protocol will be abandoned. The document also makes reference to the present negotiations, in an apparent move to deflect criticisms that the UN process is being undermined by back-room manouevering.

     

     

    Elsewhere today, Britain, Mexico, Norway and Australia tabled a paper that strongly backs a major new climate fund for developing countries. This would be run by a board which would be accountable to the UN, where priority would be given to spending in the poorest and most vulnerable countries. It addresses the vexed question of how cash for developing countries to adapt to climate change should be raised and distributed.

     

    Britain has proposed that an fund of $10bn (£6.2bn) be set up immediately to pay poorer nations between 2012 and 2015. Developing countries want $400bn (£246bn) to come on stream a year by 2020.

     

    While the voices of climate sceptics have largely been drowned out in Copenhagen, former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin has intervened in the debate, saying President Barack Obama’s “cap and tax” plan for cutting US greenhouse gas emissions would be an economic catastrophe. In a Washington Post article, which made no mention of climate change, she said Obama’s plan would outsource energy supplies to China, Russia and Saudi Arabia. Obama’s fiscal stimulus package gave $94bn for green measures in the US, second only to China.

  • Brain food: how voter’s whims could scupper Copenhagen

     

    General principles often get lost in political translation. US voters typically oppose free trade – until they go shopping for Chinese electronics. They’re hostile to immigration, but are loyal customers at their Korean corner store. Political theorists put this disconnect down to public ignorance, or a sense of individual powerlessness (especially against giant lobby groups) but American academic Bryan Caplan has another explanation: “Voters are worse than ignorant. They are irrational – and vote accordingly.“

    In fact, he believes such voters are “rationally irrational”. In a large democracy, no single ballot paper settles the result, so there’s no point in someone swotting up on the options. As long as voters pay no direct cost for supporting a policy, they’ll call for whichever seems most pleasant or socially respectable. But when there’s a price, the option lightest on the wallet usually wins.

    This helps explain why green policies often stall at Westminster, says Mathew Humphrey at Nottingham University. The British tell pollsters that climate change is more important to them than religion, but a recent Times survey found that even greens aren’t willing to fly less. In this way, the fight against global catastrophe is reduced to a clarion call to, um, unplug the mobile-phone charger.

    Governments can, of course, impose change and leave it to voters to adjust; Whitehall has launched a big drive for renewable energy that will add thousands to household fuel bills. But for Humphrey, the phenomenon of rational irrationality “makes me pessimistic about the ability of democratic governments to fight climate change”. Caplan is even more pointed: the cover of his latest book depicts the electorate as a flock of sheep.

  • Aussies swelter through hottest six months on record.

     

    “Australia had the third-warmest year on record with three exceptional heatwaves,” Mr Jarraud said.

    The WMO report said the heatwaves happened in January/February, when the hot weather contributed to the disastrous Victorian bushfires, in August and again in November.

    Related Coverage

    The presence of El Nino conditions underway in the Pacific saw near-record rises in sea surface temperatures and most parts of Australia experienced an exceptionally mild winter.

    Maximum temperatures were also well above the national average, with 3.2C above normal, the largest ever recorded in any month.

    Dr David Jones, head of climate analysis at the Bureau of Meteorology’s national climate centre, said one of the biggest impacts in the last year had been the absence of cold, with a massive decline in sea ice in the Arctic.

    “The last six months have been the warmest six months on record for Australia,” Dr Jones said.

    “We expect 2009 will be either the second warmest year on record for Australia or the third warmest.”

    He said the results were not surprising.

    “Every decade’s been getting warmer for the last 70 years.

    “Clearly climate change hasn’t stopped, global warming hasn’t stopped.”

    The outlook for the summer is consistent, Dr Jones said, with warm daytime conditions in northeast Australia forecast to continue.

  • The climate denial tndustry is out to duoe the public. And it’s working

     

    The second observation is the tendency of those who don’t give a fig about science to maximise their importance. The denial industry, which has no interest in establishing the truth about global warming, insists that these emails, which concern three or four scientists and just one or two lines of evidence, destroy the entire canon of climate science.

    Even if you were to exclude every line of evidence that could possibly be disputed – the proxy records, the computer models, the complex science of clouds and ocean currents – the evidence for man-made global warming would still be unequivocal. You can see it in the measured temperature record, which goes back to 1850; in the shrinkage of glaciers and the thinning of sea ice; in the responses of wild animals and plants and the rapidly changing crop zones.

    No other explanation for these shifts makes sense. Solar cycles have been out of synch with the temperature record for 40 years. The Milankovic cycle, which describes variations in the Earth’s orbit, doesn’t explain it either. But the warming trend is closely correlated with the accumulation of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere. The impact of these gases can be demonstrated in the laboratory. To assert that they do not have the same effect in the atmosphere, a novel and radical theory would be required. No such theory exists. The science is not fixed – no science ever is – but it is as firm as science can be. The evidence for man-made global warming remains as strong as the evidence linking smoking to lung cancer or HIV to Aids.

    The third observation is the contrast between the global scandal these emails have provoked and the muted response to 20 years of revelations about the propaganda planted by fossil fuel companies. I have placed on the Guardian’s website four case studies; each of which provides a shocking example of how the denial industry works.

    Two of them are drawn from Climate Cover-Up, the fascinating, funny and beautifully written new book by James Hoggan and Richard Littlemore. If every allegation it contained could not be traced back to leaked documents (I have checked all the sources), their findings would be unbelievable. Nothing exposed by the hacking of the Climatic Research Unit’s server is one tenth as bad as the least of these revelations.

    When I use the term denial industry, I’m referring to those who are paid to say that man-made global warming isn’t happening. The great majority of people who believe this have not been paid: they have been duped. Reading Climate Cover-Up, you keep stumbling across familiar phrases and concepts which you can see every day on the comment threads. The book shows that these memes were planted by PR companies and hired experts.

    The first case study I’ve posted reveals how a coalition of US coal companies sought to persuade people that the science is uncertain. It listed the two social groups it was trying to reach – “Target 1: Older, less educated males”; “Target 2: Younger, lower income women” – and the methods by which it would reach them. One of its findings was that “members of the public feel more confident expressing opinions on others’ motivations and tactics than they do expressing opinions on scientific issues”.

    Remember this the next time you hear people claiming that climate scientists are only in it for the money, or that environmentalists are trying to create a communist world government: these ideas were devised and broadcast by energy companies. The people who inform me, apparently without irony, that “your article is an ad hominem attack, you four-eyed, big-nosed, commie sack of shit”, or “you scaremongers will destroy the entire world economy and take us back to the Stone Age”, are the unwitting recruits of campaigns they have never heard of.

    The second case study reveals how Dr Patrick Michaels, one of a handful of climate change deniers with a qualification in climate science, has been lavishly paid by companies seeking to protect their profits from burning coal. As far as I can discover, none of the media outlets who use him as a commentator – including the Guardian – has disclosed this interest at the time of his appearance. Michaels is one of many people commenting on climate change who presents himself as an independent expert while being secretly paid for his services by fossil fuel companies.

    The third example shows how a list published by the Heartland Institute (which has been sponsored by oil company Exxon) of 500 scientists “whose research contradicts man-made global warming scares” turns out to be nothing of the kind: as soon as these scientists found out what the institute was saying about them, many angrily demanded that their names be removed. Twenty months later, they are still on the list. The fourth example shows how, during the Bush presidency, White House officials worked with oil companies to remove regulators they didn’t like and to doctor official documents about climate change.

    In Climate Cover-Up, in Ross Gelbspan’s books The Heat is On and Boiling Point, in my book Heat, and on the websites DeSmogBlog.com and exxonsecrets.org, you can find dozens of such examples. Together they expose a systematic, well-funded campaign to con the public. To judge by the comments you can read on this paper’s website, it has worked.

    But people behind these campaigns know that their claims are untrue. One of the biggest was run by the Global Climate Coalition, which represented ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, the American Petroleum Institute and several big motor manufacturers. In 1995 the coalition’s own scientists reported that “the scientific basis for the greenhouse effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well-established and cannot be denied”. The coalition hid this finding from the public, and spent millions of dollars seeking to persuade people that the opposite was true.

    These people haven’t fooled themselves, but they might have fooled you. Who, among those of you who claim that climate scientists are liars and environmentalists are stooges, has thought it through for yourself?

  • Copenhagen climate summit in disarray after ‘Danish text ‘ leak

     

     

    The agreement, leaked to the Guardian, is a departure from the Kyoto protocol‘s principle that rich nations, which have emitted the bulk of the CO2, should take on firm and binding commitments to reduce greenhouse gases, while poorer nations were not compelled to act. The draft hands effective control of climate change finance to the World Bank; would abandon the Kyoto protocol – the only legally binding treaty that the world has on emissions reductions; and would make any money to help poor countries adapt to climate change dependent on them taking a range of actions.

     

    The document was described last night by one senior diplomat as “a very dangerous document for developing countries. It is a fundamental reworking of the UN balance of obligations. It is to be superimposed without discussion on the talks”.

     

    A confidential analysis of the text by developing countries also seen by the Guardian shows deep unease over details of the text. In particular, it is understood to:

     

    • Force developing countries to agree to specific emission cuts and measures that were not part of the original UN agreement;

    • Divide poor countries further by creating a new category of developing countries called “the most vulnerable”;

    • Weaken the UN’s role in handling climate finance;

    • Not allow poor countries to emit more than 1.44 tonnes of carbon per person by 2050, while allowing rich countries to emit 2.67 tonnes.

     

    Developing countries that have seen the text are understood to be furious that it is being promoted by rich countries without their knowledge and without discussion in the negotiations.

     

    “It is being done in secret. Clearly the intention is to get [Barack] Obama and the leaders of other rich countries to muscle it through when they arrive next week. It effectively is the end of the UN process,” said one diplomat, who asked to remain nameless.

     

    Antonio Hill, climate policy adviser for Oxfam International, said: “This is only a draft but it highlights the risk that when the big countries come together, the small ones get hurting. On every count the emission cuts need to be scaled up. It allows too many loopholes and does not suggest anything like the 40% cuts that science is saying is needed.”

    Hill continued: “It proposes a green fund to be run by a board but the big risk is that it will run by the World Bank and the Global Environment Facility [a partnership of 10 agencies including the World Bank and the UN Environment Programme] and not the UN. That would be a step backwards, and it tries to put constraints on developing countries when none were negotiated in earlier UN climate talks.”

     

    The text was intended by Denmark and rich countries to be a working framework, which would be adapted by countries over the next week. It is particularly inflammatory because it sidelines the UN negotiating process and suggests that rich countries are desperate for world leaders to have a text to work from when they arrive next week.

     

    Few numbers or figures are included in the text because these would be filled in later by world leaders. However, it seeks to hold temperature rises to 2C and mentions the sum of $10bn a year to help poor countries adapt to climate change from 2012-15.

     

    • For news and analysis of the UN climate talks in Copenhagen sign up for the Guardian’s environment email newsletter Green light.

  • Expert view: Let the people see our climate as the scientists do

     

    We collect a number of data sets to study our climate through such things as sunshine, rainfall, winds and temperature. The HadCRUT dataset is based on the measurements of surface temperature from close to 5,000 stations, going back to 1850. The latest version of HadCRUT includes observations from both land and sea (the HadCRUT3 data). The raw station data is put on to a grid and shows variations against the 30-year average from 1961-90. The difference from this average gives us a reference point against which we can see how the temperature varies from one year to the next.

    The basic data is collected from a series of stations, all of which have to meet a standard criteria for how they place their thermometers and to make sure these are properly calibrated. That is quite important as you want to be sure that any changes are not down to differences in the way measurements are made. This means we have a very high quality of data, with low error-bars associated with the observations. The collected data is also quality-controlled to cope with obvious mistakes and misreporting.

    One important point to note is that the basic data is not collected from some strange locations in some mysterious way. This data is the basic information that is also regularly used in our everyday weather forecasting work.

    Good science by its nature should always be transparent and robust, that’s how it works. Scientists collaborate by sharing information with each other and comparing results. It is through this comparison that we understand where the uncertainty lies and how we can focus our efforts to improve knowledge and understanding.

    The important thing about the problems surrounding the University of East Anglia, and the questions it has raised in people’s minds about climate science, is that lots of groups around the world have done similar things to the scientists there, and they’ve all been showing similar results. That gives us some confidence the information we’re getting from the data is well-founded.

    Paul Hardaker is chief executive of the Royal Meteorological Society