U.S. President Barack Obama speaks at the Copenhagen Climate Conference.
Credit: AFP
"Future generations will rue the years of inaction," Steve Sawyer, a veteran observer who heads the Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC), a Brussels green industry association, says grimly. "Some generations will rue it very much - those that survive."
In 2000, the world placed its faith in the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the brainchild of the famous Rio summit.
But the following year, the vehicle started to shake and its wheels began to rattle when U.S. President George W. Bush abandoned the Kyoto Protocol, the sole treaty to set down targets for curbing carbon gases.
Crippled by the walkout of the world's wealthiest economy and biggest carbon emitter, Kyoto limped along, failing to brake a relentless surge in heat-trapping gases.
In 2007, in its landmark Fourth Assessment Report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a blunt warning. Without swift action to slow, halt and reverse the growth in emissions, the world was on course for between 1.8 and 4 ºC of warming, the U.N.'s top climate scientists said.
By century's end, hundreds of millions could be at threat from drought, flood, storms, rising seas, disease, malnutrition and homelessness.
The shock report reduced the lobby of climate sceptics to a rump, galvanised public opinion and nailed climate change to the top of the political agenda.
On December 18 2009 in Copenhagen, leaders' rhetoric - and the U.N. format itself - were put to the test. The day had been billed as the moment when humankind would unite, each nation pledging a sacrifice towards a global pact that, from 2013, would shrink climate change from mortal peril to manageable risk.
Instead, it became a finger-pointing fiasco. Terrified the talks would collapse, a couple of dozen leaders from the most powerful countries - including the United States, the European Union, Japan, China, India and Brazil - huddled over a so-called "Copenhagen Accord."
They gathered around a table, frenziedly adding or crossing out text on the planet's future before eventually settling on the lowest common denominator.
They set a suggested goal of limiting warming to 2 ºC - but did not say when carbon emissions should peak, which scientists say has to be around the middle of the next decade. Nor did they identify key staging points in the medium or long term, in 2020 and 2050. And national pledges on carbon emissions were voluntary, carrying no penalty if breached.
Within hours, the document was savaged when it was put to the wider community of nations. The most outspoken lashed it as a "coup d'etat" against the U.N. system, a stitch-up by an elite, a betrayal of the poor and a slap to expert opinion.
In the end, the critics were sidelined. The conference gavelled the Accord through without even putting it to a vote. U.N. credibility lay in ruins and the blame game began.
The coming dark ages
I doubt if our grandchildren will have time to revile the lost decade. They will be too busy scraping a living in a world that has suffered total social collapse. The world population is growing exponentially, and no exponential growth curve can continue forever. Something ultimately has to give. How and when will it give? Most likely there will be a total collapse of our social fabric following a series of local and global nuclear wars.
Back to the dark ages!
Thank God!
I, for one, thank God that the "Dopenhagen" conference went down in flames.
Had the conference come up with the treaty it originally intended:
1. We would have been saddled with a world government (the word "government" appears several times in the original text) that would usurp local political power from the elected representatives of the individual nations, or their current dictators, depending on which end of the spectrum said nation was on.
2. There was no provision for any sort of elections, referendae, votes, nor even anything vaguely similar to America's Bill of Rights.
3. The form of the government proposed at "Dopenhagen" was an oligarchy of unaccountable bureaucrats with the power to tax, redistribute wealth, and destroy the free market with a command-and-control system. We saw how well that worked in the old Soviet Union.
4. China, Brazil, India, indeed, the entire Third World would have been turned into expensive welfare clients, thanks to the payment of "carbon debts". The actual people of the Third World would be left in squalor, scrabbling in the dirt, burning scrap wood for fuel, and hunting bush meat for sustenance while their alleged "leaders" (not noted for their democratic values) cash in on the Developed World's largesse. Like the banning of DDT, "Dopenhagen" aimed to kill millions in the Third World.
Oh, and Mr. Ingham! What hubris to call the "noughties" the "lost decade"! How about a little perspective here? The fact is that every generation thought that theirs was the beginning of the next Dark Age. Every generation thinks that the past was the "Golden Age". Rarely do those sentiments translate into reality.
And I seriously doubt that it will do so in the coming decades. Sure, climate changes. It changes all the time. We have some minimal influence on it, but not much. Condemning all the world to poverty and the tyranny of a world government (You think your local officials aren't responsive now? Just wait until they have to answer to Brussels!) won't solve the non-problem of climate change.
Let's try some humility and perspective, Folks! We just ain't that big!
Data or opinion.
Let's stick to facts.
Mann et al fudged the "hockey-stick" graph. Briffa et al fudged the Yamal tree ring study. Dozens of pre AGW papers say that 2000 was cooler than 1000. If the highly paid and qualified scientists are cooking the data we need to review all their work and get back to basics. Check the data collection and do the analysis again.
The UN IPCC model are all proving to be wrong. Yes, the air should be warming at 10,000m height but it is not. Non of the models predicted the current cooling and thickening of both Poles. It's time to re-evaluate.
We have plenty of real problems to address so let's spend our money on them rather than expensive talk-fests which could have been arranged by a series of enhanced internet conferences. Politicians cannot help themselves when we go giving them our money.
Al Gore's eco movies is utter twoddle. We need to get back to core science and throw out the eco freaks and rock singers who failed science at school.
How about we start by requiring that science journalists have a science degree and Environment Ministers and Senators have suitable qualification and work experience to understand the job.
JPAK. Blue Mtns, Oz.