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  • 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.

  • Our voice needs to be heard at Copenhagen

     

    If Copenhagen achieves nothing, the resulting delay to securing these vital agreements will be a terrible sentence for all human beings and the planet. The earth is a unique global ecosystem in which everything is interrelated. Today, misery afflicts many peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America. Tomorrow other countries will face extinction too.

    Innocent Hodzongi Programmes director, Environment Africa, Zimbabwe

    Lloyd Simwaka Progressio country director, Malawi

    José Ramon Avila Director of the National Association of NGOs, Honduras

     

    António Pacheco Director, Social and Economic Development Association of Santa Marta, El Salvador

    María Elena Salas Dias Director, Cajamarca Ideas Centre, Peru

    Dinorah Granadeiro Executive director, NGO Forum, Timor-Leste

    Victor Ochoa President, Campamento Environmental Movement, Honduras

    Dr Angel Ibarra Director, Salvadorian Ecological Union, El Salvador

    Ego Lemos Founding director, Permaculture Timor-Leste, East Timor

    María Elena Mendez Director, Centre for Women’s Studies, Honduras

    Anna Zucchetti Director, GEA Group, Peru

    Kevin Ndemera Progressio Country Director, Zimbabwe

    Antonio Gaybor Executive secretary, National Water Resources Forum, Ecuador

    Manuel Ernesto Cruz Director, Youth Development Foundation, El Salvador

    Deometrio do Amaral Executive director, Haburas Foundation, Timor-Leste

    Carmen Medina Progressio country ­ director, El Salvador

    Larry José Madrigal Rajo General co-ordinator, Bartolomé de las Casas Centre, El Salvador

    Dulce Marlen Contreras Co-ordinator of Rural Women’s Association of La Paz, Honduras

    Luís Camacho Progressio country director, Ecuador

    Lidia Castillo Director, Centre for the Investigation and Promotion of Human Rights, El Salvador

    Roque Rivera Executive director, Popol Nah Tun, Honduras

    Jesús Garza Co-ordinator of the Honduran Coalition for People’s Action, Honduras

    Marianela Gibaja Progressio country director, Peru

    Dr Juan Almendares Bonilla Founding director, Mother Earth Movement, Honduras

    Xiomara Ventura Progressio Country Director, Honduras

    Maximus Tahu Researcher, La’o Hamutuk, Timor-Leste

    Juvinal Dias Researcher, La’o Hamutuk, Timor-Leste

    Jesus Garza Coordinator, The Honduran Coalition for People’s Action, Honduras

    Tibor van Staveren Progressio country director, Timor-Leste

    Dr Jeannette Alvarado Director, Maquilishuat Foundation, El Salvador

    • As one who was at Seattle to see the WTO‘s open-market blitzkrieg temporarily halted, I wholeheartedly agree with Madeleine Bunting’s perceptive bookending of the noughties with Seattle and Copenhagen (Protesters in Seattle warned us what was coming, but we didn’t listen, 14 December). However, she is not correct to imply that the movement “differed dramatically” over alternatives to economic globalisation. There was a general consensus that to control finance and global corporations there needed to be a return to countries having the will and the ability to protect, nurture and rebuild their local economies. This would also entail the political control of such damaging corporate forces and a change in the end goal of trade and financial rules that have allowed big business and banks to prosper, while trashing local economies and the environment.

    The twin towers and the wars on terror diverted attention from these priorities. Tackling the global economic crisis presents new opportunities for this “protect the local, globally” approach to solve the triple credit, climate and oil-supply crunches. An example of this is the Green New Deal proposal. This emphasises a massive £50bn-a-year local jobs and business programme to decarbonise the UK economy. It involves comprehensive measures to gut the power of finance and details a fairer global taxation system to fund such programmes in poorer countries. It is the latest step along the path that first received global coverage in Seattle. Indeed to compensate for the disaster of the last 10 years, the Green New Deal needs to become a key blueprint for campaigns and government policies in the 2010s.

    Colin Hines

    Convener, Green New Deal Group

    • Reading George Monbiot’s article (This is bigger than climate change. It is a battle to redefine humanity, 15 December), I felt a Freudian subconscious must have been at work. He managed to refer to “our crowded planet”, the human race being “hedged in” by the consequences of its own actions, that we are acting in “defiance of natural constraints”, that we are no longer able to “swing our fists regardless of whose nose might be in the way”, and that “perpetual growth cannot be accommodated on a finite planet”. As if to ram home the point, he even concludes with a reference to “another great unmentionable”. Was he, I thought, going to join other leading environmentalists like Jonathan Porritt and David Attenborough, and agree that we should all be treating population growth as a serious issue? Alas, no. The particular “unmentionable” turned out to be the folly of searching for more oil at a time when we should be phasing out its use. The real unmentionable remains, in his world, just that.

    Chris Padley

    Market Rasen, Lincolnshire

     

    • George Monbiot again attempts to make the subliminal link between those who disagree with the consensus view on climate change and Holocaust deniers (Comment, 8 December). However, he fails to admit the real scandal of the leaked emails. As Karl Popper taught us, scepticism is a cardinal virtue, and this is particularly true in sciences that rely upon the interpretation of historical data and the output of theoretical models. In this respect climate science is similar to my own subject, financial economics, and there are important lessons to learn from the way that discipline has developed. In the 1970s the Chicago School dominated finance, and leading journals would not accept articles contradicting the rational expectations/market efficiency paradigm. Over the subsequent decades, counter-evidence and alternative theoretical explanations of market behaviour began the emerge at the margins of the discipline. Now, the contrary view has become so persuasive that the certainties of 40 years ago appear naive. However, the academic lockout put back the development of the subject for a generation.

    My reading of this affair is that climate science, like finance in the 1970s, is at an immature stage of development. There are heavy consequences when scientists forget Popper’s dictum that good science seeks to refute, not confirm. With climate science the stakes are high, and so we need the very best of science. That is why I am on the side of the sceptics.

    Emeritus Professor Bob Ryan

    Nettleton Shrub, Wiltshire

  • Copenhagen: Only the numbers count- and they add up to hell on earth

     

     

    First number to know: 350. It’s what scientists have been saying for two years is the maximum amount of carbon dioxide we can safely have in the atmosphere, measured in parts per million. Those scientists have been joined by an unprecedented outpouring from civil society: in late October, activists put on what CNN called “the most widespread day of political action in the planet’s history,” with 5,200 demonstrations in 181 countries, all rallying around that number. Three thousand vigils last weekend across the planet spelled out the number in candles. Thousands of churches rang their bells 350 times on Sunday, and yesterday the World Parliament of Religions, meeting in Melbourne and representing the “largest interreligious gathering on earth” sent an emergency 350 declaration here to Copenhagen.

     

    The second number: 100. That’s (roughly) how many countries are backing a 350 target here at Copenhagen. That’s more than half the nations in attendance – unfortunately, they’re the small, poor ones. But it’s amazing to see them, in the face of enormous pressure, keeping the idea of real action alive. Yesterday Mohamed Nasheed, president of the Maldives, spoke to a roaring crowd of thousands: “We know what the laws of physics say: the most important number in the world is 350.”

     

    The third number: 4%. That’s how much the US is offering to cut its emissions from their 1990 levels by 2020. Scientists tell us that the developed world would need to reduce by at least 40% to get us back on a 350 track, so the American offer is exactly an order or magnitude off. And they’re not alone. All the rich countries, not to mention China, are looking to do as little as possible and still escape here with some kind of agreement they can hide behind.

     

    The fourth number – and the most important one. When the folks at Climate Interactive plug in every promise made at these talks (the American offer on the table, the Chinese promise to reduce “energy intensity”, the EU pledges, and so on) their software tells them almost instantly how much carbon they would eventually produce. When they hit the button last night, the program showed that by 2100 the world’s CO2 concentrations (currently 390) would be – drumroll please – 770. That is, we would live in hell, or at least a place with a similar temperature.

     

    So that’s the scorecard. You may hear a lot of happy talk from world leaders over the next few days as they “reach a historic agreement”. But that’s how it all adds up.

     

    • Bill McKibben is the coordinator of 350.org