About this time, I usually get a feel for how the COP talks will pan out. With the developing nations walking out, and the Chinese acting like some pimp shepherding them out, just because the developed nations refused to create a social welfare system to fund the developed world, the talks are now at a stalemate. It does not bode well, not just for these talks, but for years to come, because the developed nations are insisting on kicking this welfare scheme into the long grass until at least 2020 and the developing nations don’t like it.
But the real atmosphere comes through in this report of the Australian delegation:
“They wore T-shirts and gorged on snacks throughout the negotiation. That gives some indication of the manner they are behaving in,”
And the Poles who are hosting it, are treating the talks with a similar degree of contempt. Whoever thought of running a coal conference alongside and getting them to sponsor the talks really has a sense of humour. But then sacking their environmental chief who is running the show in a reshuffle, was a real cherry on the cake.
So, as you can imagine, good news is thin on the ground. Typical headlines are:
- Report: Climate protection goal slipping away Rich and Poor Nations Spar Over Climate Damages
- Warming seen worse as nations fail to meet carbon goals
- Fasting for Climate Justice at the UN Climate Negotiations
- UN climate talks chairman sacked
- Rich and poor in aid deadlock
- G77 Walk-out at COP19 as Rich Countries Use Delaying Tactics
- Dispatch from the UN Warsaw climate conference: Gender day
- Australia dashes G20 climate hopes
But normally the ever optimistic Guardian manage to find some saving grace to enthuse about. But not this time. Their report is positively gloomy:
The current goal of the negotiations is to forge an agreement, to be signed in Paris in 2015 and to come into force by 2020, that would involve substantial reductions in greenhouse gas emissions from all the major economies, as well as commitments from poorer countries. But this meeting is just a staging point on the road to that goal – there is as yet no draft text for an agreement, no consensus on what a new deal should involve, or what legal form it should take.
(http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/nov/19/un-climate-talks-warsaw-poland)
And lest we forget, earlier Japan has dropped its target (much to the delight of China who used this opportunity to shed a few more green crocodile tears).
So, with Australia and many other countries ditching any replacement to Kyoto, the talks have become a ritualistic public show intended only to give the illusion of trying to do something. The result is those attending are now participating in what has become a meaningless talking shop with no prospect of any progress for years.
However, I must not forget the unerring ability of the UN to pull a pig’s ear out of a silk’s purse and spin it into a ballgown.
So, yet again we can look forward to the communique announcing the huge progress and goodwill toward a new agreement, agreeing to agree, that sometime in the future, they should agree to meet, to have another attempt, to agree to agree, but then not just to meet to agree to agree, but to meet to agree to meet to agree to agree.
I am so looking forward to watching the gullible British press and media swallow that communique and tell us it was another success.
This is not a success … it is a slow death of Kyoto by a 1000 meetings.
I find the climate talks very depressing but probably not for the same reason as you. I want a solid agreement to be reached and I want to see progress made towards tackling this problem.
I’m not sure whether you ever watched Simon Lamb’s movie, Thin Ice which was very good, but he went and sat in on some climate talks and he described it as very depressing where “time seemed to stand still”.
I have missed something on this scheme. The rationale is to compensate the developing countries for the future adverse consequences of climate change. It is a very small fund relative to the predicted adverse consequences of climate change*, so any sharing out would have to be targeted to be most effective. So where are the precise predictions, by country, of these likely adverse consequences? If millions of lives are at risk, then that information would be far more valuable than the cash.
*The fund is meant to be $100 bn. I don’t know whether that is an annual or total fund figure. Global costs of climate change are predicted by Stern to be 5% to 10% of global output by 2100. Global output is currently $85,000 bn, and growing by around 5% a year.
Hi Rachel how much will temperature drop by complete decarbonisation of the atmosphere and would it matter as we would all then be dead.
I don’t think the temperature will drop at all. It will continue to rise for a bit because we have committed to changes still yet to be realised. There is an inertia in the climate system.
And yes, I will be dead before most of the worst changes happen but that doesn’t mean I don’t think people of the future matter. They do.
One particularly funny aspect is watching the dawning realisation about compensation. Those idiots who have been blithely blaming existing emissions for weather disasters are now trying to U turn as the victims of WEATHER try to create a CLIMATE compensation culture. Well who couldn’t see that one coming? Seems it’s not such a useful stick they were beating the public with last week.
I don’t know but 99% of the money will end up in the hands of administrators and crooks. I leave it to your imagination how big the hatched area in that venn diagram would be.
It is now completely dead, sure more meetings will happen over the years, but this will be to please those who believe there is a problem.
At the least it is a great knees up for those who attend .
This shambles seems to have gone entirely unreported by our state broadcaster.
How different from Copenhagen when they were regaling us with threats of only 2 weeks to save the world. One might almost think the BBC was a propaganda organisation filtering the news to promote fear.
Their dead horse whipping arm must be tired.
I’d put up with these if there was genuine progress, even on cutting CO2. Action on climate change has been all about other people doing stuff.
One group is there to unashamedly redistribute other people’s money, which actually makes CO2 emissions worse. Rich countries have the vague idea that if only everyone agreed, then the CO2 would automatically fall and new technologies would spring forth. They also hope that if they introduce taxes then all other countries would fall into line and not undercut them. Poor countries agree but won’t limit themselves until they’ve had an unspecified amount of prosperity. Stalemate.
These jamborees have stop until there is a significant change in thinking.
I find the approach of governments to be extremely cynical. I know environmentalists, occasionally I am an environmentalist, I’m even a high profile environmentalist locally.
So, watching all those people trudge off to each climate meeting full of expectation and hopes, knowing that world governments have no intention of signing any deal is quite sad.
My honest view, is that governments who get lobbied all the time and have this model and that model predicting the direst consequences unless they immediately do something, will be highly sceptical of the ability of any model to predict the future.
As such, unless or until someone can show that the models do predict the future, then they will only do what is necessary to avoid loosing votes to people who feel this issue is important, whilst not spending so much that they loose votes (often to the same people) who don’t want to pay higher prices and taxes.
So, except for the Australians and Poles, everyone else is just trying to look like they are doing something to keep the environmental voter happy and not commit to anything that will upset anyone on taxes and higher prices.
So no wonder people get frustrated and no wonder they try to take it out on us sceptics. But we are the ones who are telling you the truth, the ones stringing you along are the politicians.
If they had any sense they would suspend the talks awaiting a definite increase in global temperature. Because unless or until there is a rise, no government is going to sign up to anything except meaningless & shallow PR stunts.
When WIkipedia was active, it was quite noticeable how quiet it would go during these COP meetings. E.g. is William Connolley here?
Perhaps we could make them longer! Perhaps we should set up a permanent 24/7 /12 permanent talks located on an island somewhere – with their own special internet link to their own special version of Wikipedia?
We could go further … they could have an entirely carbon neutral society where all the electricity is produced from one enormous windmill and a solar panel on the coast (in lighthouses the bird perch on top and gradually they decrease their output)
I always think of cutting CO2 a bit like a kid wanting a pony. Before getting it, the creature is exciting but once they have the thing on their hands, they realise it just involves being taken for a ride and getting knee deep in sh*t. What they really want is a carousel horse that goes round and round in circles till they feel dizzy. The climate conferences are the funfair version of AGW.
The politicians are discovering that the public and businesses are not controlled wooden animals doomed to do exactly as we’re directed. CO2 did not drop just because they said it must. They don’t really want the hassel of the thing but are still at the point where they hope someone else will take up the responsibility.
Too true. The more they bang on about it while there is no more science to show people, the less interested they’ll be if/when new stuff comes in.
What do you mean by a “definite increase in global temperature”? The temperature has gone up by 0.8C in 100 years. How much more definite do you want?
You are right. As you say the politicians thought this would be some magic way to cut CO2 make them look green and popular and that no one would notice the £100s if not £1000s this is going to cost your average family.
But this has got a sting in the tail, because we have only just begun to see the cost of this policy. Even if they stop everything right now, the cost is still going to keep rising because they’ve committed to some massive infrastructure projects to support this green non-science.
So support is going to be tumbling … as prices keep rising … and people are going to start to get even more angry because they will feel deceived and are paying for something that was never really needed.
Perhaps a better way to explain this is that politician’s lives are like the quote from Men in Black “there’s always a Galactian battleship about to annihilate plant earth”. Life is always a crisis for the politician. So what they are going to do is to look at the most recent trend and the question they’ll be asking is this: “will this blow up on me before the next election?”
Or to put it another way … will more people vote for me for saving the local hospital for acting tough on crime or for raising their fuel bills to stop it getting a bit warmer?
So, what I mean is that politicians won’t act on this until it looks like a bigger crisis to their electorate than all the other crisis their electors expect them to have dealt with yesterday.
So, all I was saying is that until the graph starts going up again, I can’t see any politician wanting to make themselves unpopular for something that doesn’t look like a priority by putting up fuel bills.
Oh, I see. Sadly, I think you are right. Politicians only seem to care about the next few years. This is why the climate change problem is so difficult to solve: it require long-term goals.
That is why we need a critical press and funded opposition groups. So, I’m very happy to see people like Greenpeace and FOE working on issues where if there weren’t these groups the debate would be completely dominated by e.g. big oil companies. That does create long-term pressure which has forced government to act on things like air pollution.
Having been a member of the green party and worked in the wind industry and having friends in academia, I found that the normal industry v. environmentalist battle wasn’t present. Instead the oil companies like Shell were pushing wind, the environmentalists were pushing wind, the wind companies were pushing wind, the government and academia were pushing wind.
And … I’m the kind of person who can’t help stepping in when the fight is unfair.
Rachel, another way to look at it – imagine if you’ve only ever seen Al’s movie and were most impressed by his graph showing CO2 and temperature in lock step, and the shameless bit of showmanship with the lift and CO2 rocketing up. People (and politicians) were sold on the idea temperature would mirror that. Scientists and activists echoed that graph with ‘fastest ever’ and ‘unprecedented’.
To you 0.8ºC is big. To me it looks like climate sensitivity might be the lab value of 1.2ºC for a doubling of CO2. To the public and most politicians it’s pathetic. It’s almost something they can’t understand. They have been told that we have [insert number] years to save the planet. They’ve been bombarded with confusing messages on tv and in the movies. They don’t know if they should be planting cactus or buying a team of huskies if it goes all Day After Tomorrow.
They were not told to expect decade long pauses or weather that didn’t seem a lot different from before.
At the same time that the public were being hyped up on stories about hurricanes on steroids, they were told they needed ‘free’ wind power to cut CO2. Celebs told them how they could put less water in the kettle and screw in a few low energy light bulbs and we’d all be saved! Yay!
And then the bills started arriving and far from quickly achieving our goal of a low energy future, we’re as far away as ever. If you knew nothing about the complexities of AGW, what would you be thinking right now?