Johann Hari: The truths Copenhagen ignored
The politicians have chosen low taxes and oil money today over survival tomorrow
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Independent Minds
So that's it. The world's worst polluters – the people who are drastically altering the climate – gathered here in Copenhagen to announce they were going to carry on cooking, in defiance of all the scientific warnings.
They didn't seal the deal; they sealed the coffin for the world's low-lying islands, its glaciers, its North Pole, and millions of lives.
Those of us who watched this conference with open eyes aren't surprised. Every day, practical, intelligent solutions that would cut our emissions of warming gases have been offered by scientists, developing countries and protesters – and they have been systematically vetoed by the governments of North America and Europe.
It's worth recounting a few of the ideas that were summarily dismissed – because when the world finally resolves to find a real solution, we will have to revive them.
Discarded Idea One: The International Environmental Court. Any cuts that leaders claim they would like as a result of Copenhagen will be purely voluntary. If a government decides not to follow them, nothing will happen, except a mild blush, and disastrous warming. Canada signed up to cut its emissions at Kyoto, and then increased them by 26 per cent – and there were no consequences. Copenhagen could unleash a hundred Canadas.
The brave, articulate Bolivian delegates – who have seen their glaciers melt at a terrifying pace – objected. They said if countries are serious about reducing emissions, their cuts need to be policed by an International Environmental Court that has the power to punish people. This is hardly impractical. When our leaders and their corporate lobbies really care about an issue – say, on trade – they pool their sovereignty this way in a second. The World Trade Organisation fines and sanctions nations severely if (say) they don't follow strict copyright laws. Is a safe climate less important than a trademark?
Discarded Idea Two: Leave the fossil fuels in the ground. At meetings here, an extraordinary piece of hypocrisy has been pointed out by the new international chair of Friends of the Earth, Nnimmo Bassey, and the environmental writer George Monbiot. The governments of the world say they want drastically to cut their use of fossil fuels, yet at the same time they are enthusiastically digging up any fossil fuels they can find, and hunting for more. They are holding a fire extinguisher in one hand and a flame-thrower in the other.
Only one of these instincts can prevail. A study published earlier this year in the journal Nature showed that we can use only – at an absolute maximum – 60 per cent of all the oil, coal and gas we have already discovered if we are going to stay the right side of catastrophic runaway warming. So the first step in any rational climate deal would be an immediate moratorium on searching for more fossil fuels, and fair plans for how to decide which of the existing stock we will leave unused. As Bassey put it: "Keep the coal in the hole. Keep the oil in the soil. Keep the tar sand in the land." This option wasn't even discussed by our leaders.
Discarded Idea Three: Climate debt. The rich world has been responsible for 70 per cent of the warming gases in the atmosphere – yet 70 per cent of the effects are being felt in the developing world. Holland can build vast dykes to prevent its land flooding; Bangladesh can only drown. There is a cruel inverse relationship between cause and effect: the polluter doesn't pay.
So we have racked up a climate debt. We broke it; they paid. At this summit, for the first time, the poor countries rose in disgust. Their chief negotiator pointed out that the compensation offered "won't even pay for the coffins". The cliché that environmentalism is a rich person's ideology just gasped its final CO2-rich breath. As Naomi Klein put it: "At this summit, the pole of environmentalism has moved south."
When we are dividing up who has the right to emit the few remaining warming gases that the atmosphere can absorb, we need to realise that we are badly overdrawn. We have used up our share of warming gases, and then some. Yet the US and EU have dismissed the idea of climate debt out of hand. How can we get a lasting deal that every country agrees to if we ignore this basic principle of justice? Why should the poorest restrain themselves when the rich refuse to?
A deal based on these real ideas would actually cool the atmosphere. The alternatives championed at Copenhagen by the rich world – carbon offsetting, carbon trading, carbon capture – won't. They are a global placebo. The critics who say the real solutions are "unrealistic" don't seem to realise that their alternative is more implausible still: civilisation continuing merrily on a planet whose natural processes are rapidly breaking down.
Throughout the negotiations here, the world's low-lying island states have clung to the real ideas as a life raft, because they are the only way to save their countries from a swelling sea. It has been extraordinary to watch their representatives – quiet, sombre people with sad eyes – as they were forced to plead for their own existence. They tried persuasion and hard science and lyrical hymns of love for their lands, and all were ignored.
These discarded ideas – and dozens more like them – show once again that man-made global warming can be stopped. The intellectual blueprints exist just as surely as the technological blueprints. There would be sacrifices, yes – but they are considerably less than the sacrifices made by our grandparents in their greatest fight.
We will have to pay higher taxes and fly less to make the leap to a renewably powered world – but we will still be able to live an abundant life where we are warm and free and well fed. The only real losers will be the fossil fuel corporations and the petro-dictatorships.
But our politicians have not chosen this sane path. No: they have chosen inertia and low taxes and oil money today over survival tomorrow. The true face of our current system – and of Copenhagen – can be seen in the life-saving ideas it has so casually tossed into the bin.
'You can watch Johann explaining some of the appalling loopholes being smuggled into the Copenhagen treaty here
j.hari@independent.co.uk
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Comments
It's hardly even political; we adapt to changing environment & circumstances, or we go extinct: simple.
The "settled science" is about to become seriously unsettled.
There are four separate enquiries into "climategate", and the Russians have just alleged that their climate data has been seriously cherrypicked by CRU.
Furthermore, the CLOUD experiment at CERN is just getting under way. If the results from this are positive, it will invalidate every computer climate model in existence for having ignored a major physical effect.
This is truly one of the most ignorant and offensive things I have ever read in my life. Please crawl back to the daily mail.
hari, you are a complete joke. do some research, man.
That means that the entire edifice of 19th and 20th century thermal physics, from Joseph Fourier and George Tyndall, Svante Arrhenius and Ludwig Boltzmann onwards, that the entire edifice of all technological progress to date, is about to be knocked over.
What this means, oh dear margaret222, that at leaswt one of the following four statements.
1. Earth is heated by sunlight (300-8000 nm), and stays the same temperature by giving off earthlight (3000-50000 nm).
2. CO2 doesn't stop sunlight getting in.
3. CO2 does stop earthlight getting out.
4. The more CO2 the less earthlight gets out.
Tell us, margaret222, o dear enlightened one, which of these four statements is not correct.
You and me, babe, let's move to Bangladesh, or Alaska, and see who's right.
thomasgoodey, mate, you're welcome to join us.
Now his senate will do what special interests paid them for : Shoot anything reached in Copenhagen , no matter how small, down...
Saturday, 19 December 2009 at 06:43 am (UTC)
"I'm delighted and reassured by margaret222's news that the science of global warming is about to be refuted.
What this means, oh dear margaret222, that at least one of the following four statements.
1. Earth is heated by sunlight (300-8000 nm), and stays the same temperature by giving off earthlight (3000-50000 nm).
2. CO2 doesn't stop sunlight getting in.
3. CO2 does stop earthlight getting out.
4. The more CO2 the less earthlight gets out.
Tell us, margaret222, o dear enlightened one, which of these four statements is not correct."
1. More or less correct
2. Correct
3. Incorrect
4. Grossly oversimplified. CO2 absorption of radiation in its absorption bands declines logarithmically. From memory, the first 20ppm absorbs more than 50% of the total. We are now in the area of tiny changes for any increase. Think dark screens being placed over a window, where the first absorbs say 50% of light, the second half the remaining 50% , the third half the remaining 25%, and so on.
Anyhow, given a choice between 2 degrees of warming and two degrees of cooling, I know which one I would choose every time. The Mediaeval Warm Period was great for humanity, the Little Ice Age was'nt.
Do you realise Mr Hari, we are back in ancient times when the High Priests who advised Caesar sacrificed animals and read their entrails to divine the future? Today of course the High Priests use computers, but still hide behind their baffling rites and rituals and interpretations of the Natural World.
If "science" could predict the climate, a dynamic, multi-elemental, chaotic system, and its efect on Nature, another multi-elemental, dynamic, chaotic system, with any degree of certainty, it could also predict winning lottery numbers. It cannot do the latter for exactly the same reasons it cannot do the former.
What is so tragic about this is "leaders" and journalists seem totally taken in by it all, whereas the People see it for what it is. Even Caesar knew it was all a set up.
Time to deal with real problems in the present than plotting to slay imagined dragons in a far off, unknown realm.
Read my lips. There is NO scientific evidence that a single trace gas has taken control of the climate.
Stop, please, presenting evidence of warming as evidence of cause. You just look silly.
World population when I was born in 1938 2 billion - now in 2009 - 6.7 billion and rising and I'm not even dead yet.
In a word Global Warming hysteria is a diversionary tactic on the part of unscrupulous politicians, funding hungry scientists and very unscrupulous financiers like Gore who is making billions out of carbon credit trading. The sensation seeking media are complicit in this fraud as they love controversy, sensationalism and scare stories. In the case of the deluded, social engineering Left and all other assorted Trots and Marxists, they will automatically gravitate to any 'issue' which tends to demonstate the evil of capitalism, they would have us all back in the stone age, by the way at the end oif the stone age 12,000 years ago the last ice age came to an end! Carbon Footprint - rubbish!
2. You use PRIMARY DATA, not 'homogenised' data.
3. You minimise the urban heat island effect by only using rural stations or at the very least mirroring the ratio of urban to rural landmass in the temperature station dataset.
4. You present the science honestly, including oceanic modulations, explaining yo-yo effects etc and you don't scaremonger incessantly.
5. You engage pragmatically with current energy suppliers to negotiate a phased change-over.
6. You don't engage in a 'world communism must beat world capitalism' political diatribe.
7. You ensure that money pledged is real money spent on real projects benefitting real people.
8. You don't take orders from Robert Mugabe.
9. You spend the next 30 years continuing to collect data professionally whilst initiating the green economy in a pragmatic, stepwise manner.
10. You come up with a global climate model which integrates solar inputs, lunar oscillations, oceanic modulations, earth tilt and earth geomagnetism as well as greenhouse gases.
11. You ensure that you do not modify data to fit models, you modify models to fit data.
In short, you engage like an adult. To fellow adults.
Socialists unfortunately believe they are a superior species who must keep the rest under control.
You are not. You are like everyone else. Power hungry, ruthless and manipulative.
Never forget that.
Conservatives unfortunately think they are smarter than everyone else. They will do anything to ensure that their current privileged position is not threatened.
They are scared that everyone is like them. Selfish, arrogant, ruthless and paranoid.
Never forget that.
Other than that I pretty much agree with the points listed. We need more independent science. Even if it turns out there is little we can do I'd rather know for sure. What a lot of people seem to forget is that this is the most complex scientific issue we have ever tried to get a grip on and no one set of data is going to either prove or disprove the climate model. Not until we've figured out how all the factors influence each other can we say we've solved it, if that day ever comes.
As ideas go, that's right up there with square wheels. At a stroke, destroy western economies (where will the 'brave, articulate' Bolivians get their handouts then?), shut down hospitals, condemn the elderly who created our wealth and prosperity to a precipitate, freezing death, litter the country with useless planes, trains buses and cars (and G-Whiz's), shut down TV, radio, the internet and printing presses and completely destroy any means of creating the technology to realise alternative energy sources.
Of course we're still digging it up! If you feel so strongly about it, do your bit and reduce demand. Cut off your electricity and gas supplies, don't use technology at all and for pity's sake, stop wasting energy delivering this sort of drivel.
You may notice that the snow is early this year.
It is hyperbole like Broonie's "fifty days" statement that disconnect voters from politicians (although I sometimes think that this is exactly what politicians want so as they can act without any democratic accountability).
The ruling classes have always tried to rule using fear. In this so-called post-Christian era it is now the politicians who threaten us with a fire and brimstone ending if we don't mend our ways.
Thomas Jefferson once said "When the people fear the Government there is tyranny. When the Government fear the people there is liberty" and truer words have seldom been spoken.
p.s. does anyone remember the very first Earth Day? Weren't we told that we faced global destruction due to a coming Ice Age?
OMG......these dreadful people in charge of us now worldwide....I am very very sorry to say the world needs another war.
Karl Marx was right and I am certainly no communist. "When you can't sell your goods- you give them away- when you can no longer give them away you have a war."
Is it not a law of nature that a species will expand and 'fill' its environment, even if, through lack of predators, it eventually to leads to population collapse and all that that entails. Do we as a collective have free will or will we just follow nature's course?
In a nutshell.
Excellent work Johann
Get real there is no way this will happen.
And these politicians expect us to believe anything they say?
In future, send the scientists only, say 100 experts, that's enough. Let them decide what's needed. Then send a simple email to each national leader telling them what's needed. And let's ensure the science is right - not controversial, not rocky, not hysterical, but backed up by proper proofs, so the so-called deniers must be included in this.
I'm not sure if the majority opinion is right or wrong although I expect it's a bit of both, but no way will I have sanctimonious our unelected PM Gordon Brown and his type playing games with us and our taxes - and that's what it's all about at this conference. He's over there to avoid the chaos back home that he's helped to create, looking to be another "world leader" like Blair....... and passing out billions of our money as well. Time the amount offered suited exactly to the GDP of each country.
To Al Gore's has just gone up by another million.