Copenhagen Day 11 – "brink of collapse"

Day 11

The Copenhagen talks are verging on collapse, as the last official day nears, and there has been hardly an inch of movement towards any agreement.

Despite two years of build-up and almost a fortnight of intense negotiations, there is now widespread pessimism about whether the talks can come up with a binding deal.

Mr Rudd said that those who carry the responsibility for historical emissions of greenhouse gases cannot absolve themselves from responsibility for future actions.

But he said developing nations needed to acknowledge that if they did not act to bring down their own emissions they would soon be responsible for 50 per cent of all carbon emissions in the atmosphere.

With all the talk about whether leaders should work on strengthening the Kyoto protocol or whether they should draft a new agreement, Mr Rudd said there was a fear that arguments over the form of an agreement would triumph over decisions on the substance of it. (source)

And in the same article, there’s some cognitive dissonance from the UN:

UN chief negotiator Yvo de Boer says negotiations are progressing and he is optimistic.

Happy pills at work again. Dennis Shanahan, in The Australian points out that Kevin Rudd’s, and Labor’s (and, we should point out, Malcolm Turnbull’s), position on the ETS, that it should have been passed before Copenhagen, now looks like “hollow self-aggrandisement”:

If there is no real agreement and it’s all put off to Mexico next July, there will be no vindication for Rudd’s pressure on passing the CPRS before Copenhagen and Abbott will be able to say he’s saved Australia from racing ahead of the rest of the world and committing to targets other nations have baulked at.

Rudd’s rhetoric on this issue, the whole need for urgency, the need for moral leadership from Australia for the rest of the world and the need to have an ETS as a bargaining chip will be seen as hollow self aggrandisement.

The developing nations have also attacked Australia for talking the talk but failing to deliver, as Rudd’s emphasis on his arrival in Copenhagen has shifted to avoiding the Kyoto Protocol – the real climate-change difference and debate at the last election – to protecting Australia’s economic interests.

The small nations – and some of the largest – think Australia has been talking about taking great strides for international acclaim and domestic advantage but intending, all along, to avoid the progress Rudd defined as “real targets against real timelines”. (source)

What makes me smile (and despair) at the same time, it the UN view that the climate is like an electric heater, with just one dial. Set the dial, in this case CO2, and you set the temperature. This is picked up everywhere in all the media, like this article in The Telegraph (UK):

A leaked UN document emerged last night that shows the current proposals for a deal at Copenhagen will ‘put at risk the very viability of our civilisation on Earth’.

The document is an internal briefing paper drawn up by the UN Framework Committee on Climate Change that is in charge of the talks.

It says that even the most ambitious emission reduction targets currently offered by developed and developing countries, including the EU and US, would set the world on course for warming of around 5.4F (3C).

This could cause a rise in sea levels, droughts, floods and mass extinction of species. (source)

To call this simplistic doesn’t even come close. I know politicians generally have trouble walking and chewing gum, but it is nothing short of delusional to believe that the CO2 dial is the only dial on the climate system! They really believe that adjusting the concentration of a harmless trace gas by a few parts per million will determine the climatic fate of the planet? Their problem is they have no perspective. Politicians, and UN wonks, live in ivory towers, and have no concept of anything beyond their offices, let alone beyond the surface of the planet. They have no concept of the vastness of the forces at work here. They have no concept that the earth is a tiny speck of dirt in the universal scale, and that it is subject to so many powerful influences that they do not even know exist.

That they genuinely believe there is a direct relationship between the CO2 dial and temperature tells you all you need to know about Copenhagen.