Predictions for Copenhagen

[2020hindsight]

Any thoughts?

The pollution promises made

countries / cuts in emissions so far promised

Scotland / 80% by 2050
European Union / 80% by 2050
United States / maybe 71% by 2050
Canada / 20% by 2020
Russia / stay at 1990 levels
Brazil / 10-20% by 2020
Mexico / 10% by 2014
Australia / 60% by 2050
South Africa / 40% by 2050
China, India and other Asian countries / reduce ‘emissions intensity’ 20% by 2020
Other countries / business as usual

source: European Environment Agency

http://en.cop15.dk/?gclid=CPHEtoXY0psCFcIvpAodBGPZKA
late extra :-

President Dmitry Medvedev rounded off last week's G8 summit by pledging that Russia would cut its greenhouse gas emissions at least 50 percent compared with 1990 levels.

Note that the UN Climate Change Conference is on between Dec 7 to Dec 18 2009.
About 150 days time

PS this poll closes about 3 weeks before that (130 days) - to stop people voting when all the voting intentions surrounding the conference have been disclosed.

 

[Largesse]

to be honest, i don't care as long as the governments all implement cap and trade schemes.

so i can make a fortune when i get a job at an IDB

 

[Buckeroo]

Any thoughts?

So, when do the people of the European Union begin moving into their caves?

Cheers

 

[spooly74]

f. None

THE US President, Barack Obama, has urged world leaders to banish their pessimism about thrashing out a climate-change deal with developing countries, heralding a new era for the US and citing Australia's carbon capture project for plaudits.

However, just hours later Mr Rudd was overheard pouring cold water on the prospects for a deal at the Copenhagen talks in December.

"Right now I don't think we are on track to get an agreement at Copenhagen," Mr Rudd told the Danish Prime Minister, Lars Lokke Rasmussen.

His comments were picked up by TV microphones.

http://www.smh.com.au/environment/g...ns-on-rudds-victory-parade-20090710-dg23.html

 

[So_Cynical]

Nothing spectacular will come outa Copenhagen...there will be a general consensus to do more (concerned looks, nodding heads and pretty speeches) with no short term, binding targets.

Politically the world is not ready to take this too seriously...all 2050 targets are a joke.

 

[wayneL]

Here's my prediction:

Thousands of delegates and their staff will leave their large centrally heated and airconditioned homes, in large V8 powered limousines, will fly to Copenhagen in comfort in jet aircraft, be chauffer driven, again in large V8 powered vehicles, to plush energy hungry hotels.

They will expend vast amounts of energy heating/cooling/lighting the conference centre and being shuttled backwards and forwards to their hotels. Tonnes of CO2 and methane will be emitted by copious quantities of bullsh!t

Then they will repeat the process returning home.

A will be proclaimed that people are using too much energy.

Meanwhile, the planet continues to cool, other real environmental problems ignored.

Go figure

 

[2020hindsight]

Giddens was great on Lateline last night ..
Transcript and video here ...

(Sadly I've had to seriously summarise it - excerpts follow).

http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2008/s2624800.htm
Giddens discusses climate change and politics
Brilliant..
accentuating the positives...

Giddens discusses climate change and politics
ABC Lateline 13/07/2009
Reporter: Leigh Sales
Lord Anthony Giddens, author of the Politics of Climate Change, joins Lateline to discuss issues raised by Al Gore's visit to Australia.

LEIGH SALES, PRESENTER: To discuss the issues raised by Al Gore's visit, we were joined a short time ago by Lord Anthony Giddens, from the London School of Economics. He's the author of The Politics of Climate Change, and is perhaps best-known for championing the centrist political philosophy, the ‘third way', embraced by both Tony Blair and Bill Clinton.

Lord Giddens, we just heard the view that people should have the pants scared off them on climate change to compel them to act. That's the exact opposite of your view, I believe?

ANTHONY GIDDENS, LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS: Yes, I think we have to look for more climate change positives, ... certainly it's important to point out the risks, but we've also got to focus on clean energy and other things which people can relate to in a direct way which will have the same effect of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions.

LEIGH SALES: You basically argue in your book that the green movement shouldn't be allowed to take the lead on the climate change response. Why is that?

ANTHONY GIDDENS: ... The green movement started off essentially as an anti-political movement in Germany, and today, the key issue for climate change is to normalise it - is to bring it into the centre of everyday, ordinary democratic politics. ...

LEIGH SALES: You write that you're quite hostile to endeavours such as getting people to take individual action to reduce their carbon footprint. Why is that?

ANTHONY GIDDENS: I'm not hostile to people taking action. We need to persuade citizens to change their lifestyle habits - I'm not hostile to that at all. But we have to combine that with large-scale investment.

We're facing a problem of tremendous difficulty, because this is an oil-based, fossil fuel-based civilisation in which we live, and the amount of our dependence on those fuels is gigantic. So we have to have an extended revolution in energy, and that's going to mean big, big investment. But it does have to go along with lifestyle change. So, no, I'm not against people making changes in their lives which is going to be part and parcel of the whole package, certainly.

LEIGH SALES: But I think that, the way that I read it, you make the argument that it's unrealistic to assume that everyone is going to live like the most committed environmentalist and be motivated to act on climate change by embracing policies that are policies of deprivation, if you like.

ANTHONY GIDDENS: Well, we've got a long way to go before most citizens take on board the core issues. .... that's going to mean large-scale mobilisation by governments and hopefully by the international community too, and we need strong business leadership - we need a lot of investment.

LEIGH SALES: I'll ask you about the so-called climate sceptics in a little more detail later. But if I could put one of their arguments to you, that there's a kind of a religious fervour on the believer side of the argument. We've had Al Gore in Australia today, for example, training his climate-change disciples. Do you see any merit in their point?

ANTHONY GIDDENS: Well, I see merit in scepticism, because, after all, all of this is filtered through the findings of the scientific community. Science is about scepticism. We should always be probing the weak spots. We should be looking for uncertainties in arguments. But I don't think it's - no, not a quasi-religious issue, because you have the whole weight-of-the-world scientific community behind the finding that climate change is caused by human activity, that it is steeply accelerating because of the emissions in the air. We don't want that to become just a rigorous, undocumented orthodoxy, but it is very much backed up by a host of scientific findings.

LEIGH SALES: Do you believe that climate-change sceptics are motivated by the principles of the scientific method, as you just outlined them? Or is it more political?

ANTHONY GIDDENS: I think it's to some extent political, because the very unfortunate factor of the climate-change debate across the world is it tends to be locked into the Left/Right dimension, and people on the political Right tend to be more sceptical of climate change arguments. It's Right-of-centre newspapers and so on that publish the climate change sceptics. The left have seen itself, as it were, as the avant garde of climate change. One of my beliefs that I argue for in my book is that climate change is not a Left/Right issue at all. We have to try and get away from those kinds of divisions. We need mainstream support, which means collaboration between political parties. So I think, as far as possible, we have to act against that. But it is true that climate-change sceptics tend to be towards the political right.

LEIGH SALES: Why do you think the issue has become one of these cultural war type issues?

ANTHONY GIDDENS: Well, I think, you know, a major thing is what in my book I call "Giddens' paradox", that is, we're dealing with something we've never had to cope with before politically, which is abstract risk, largely located in the future, catastrophic in nature, but not visible in our day-to-day lives. And for that reason, it's not very tangible and that's why there are all these discussions and debates around it. There are no enemies either. People say Al Gore says we should mobilise like fighting a war, but in the case of climate change there are no enemies to mobilise against. So, it's very different from any political issue, I think, that we've ever had to confront as collective humanity before. So, it's not surprising that there's a swirl of controversy around it all.

LEIGH SALES: When we look at the overall body of scientific opinion on climate change, what weight do climate sceptics have?

ANTHONY GIDDENS: Well in the scientific community, I think very little; probably only about one to two per cent of scientists working in the climate area are climate-change sceptics. Among the public, much larger. I looked at lots of surveys across the industrial countries. In many of those countries over 40 per cent of the population are climate-change sceptics. That is, if you ask them, "Do scientists agree that climate change is dangerous and is caused by human activity, and that scientists agree about this?," about 40 per cent of the population will say, "No, that isn't the case," whereas in fact it is the case. So you've got a tremendous gap between the consensus of the scientific community and public opinion, which somehow has to be bridged in a relatively short period.

LEIGH SALES: And how do you account for that gap?

ANTHONY GIDDENS: Well, I think part of it is because the climate change sceptics, as I say, being locked into a wider confrontation of political parties, do tend to get quite a lot of attention. They represent, as it were, a kind of Rightist critique of climate-change policy. Plus the fact that it is something quite different from orthodox political issues anyway. So, we're all struggling to sort of cope with the immensity of the issue and you're bound to get a lot of continuing controversy. And I think insofar as I said before, scepticism is based on looking rationally at scientific findings - there is obviously a justification for that. The problem is when it shades over into a sort of illiterate demagoguery of its own.

wow he don't hold back, does he...

LEIGH SALES: So for the average person who don't know much about science, ... who are they supposed to trust and believe in this discussion?

ANTHONY GIDDENS: ...

LEIGH SALES: So are those the sort of things that we need to look at now to mobilise governments and people to action - that sort of economic necessity, I suppose?

ANTHONY GIDDENS: Well, I think what we need to do is we need to find areas where reducing emissions, increasing proportion of energy coming from renewable sources, does actually make businesses more competitive; where the changes that are needed also link to profitability for business ...

Plenty more there, but I'll call this his summary :-

I'm in favour of climate-change positive - not just concentrating on costs and not only concentrating on dangers, concentrating also on opportunities. And you may know that there are two American environmentalists who said that Martin Luther King would never have got anyone to follow him in the way in which they did if he'd said, "I have a catastrophe". We need a sort of dream. We need a vision of a low-carbon economy and a future society which will have positives, not just the negative avoidance of risk.

Finally his prediction for Copenhagen :-

LEIGH SALES: Well, do you bring that hopefulness and positive attitude to the potential outcome from Copenhagen? Are you optimistic there?

ANTHONY GIDDENS: Well, ... I do hope that the Copenhagen meetings are successful, but I think there are reasons to doubt how far concrete agreements will be reached. Very hard to reach agreement when you've got 180 or so countries trying to do so. When you do reach agreements they tend to be at very low level, as they were in Kyoto. ...
....

LEIGH SALES: Lord Giddens, thank you very much for joining us.

ANTHONY GIDDENS: Thanks very much.

Interesting, no mention of nuclear throughout the article?

 

[2020hindsight]

Chu to set the stage for Obama in China
US Energy Secretary Steven Chu (left) and Commerce Secretary Gary Locke, both of Chinese descent, are going to China this week to press for an intensified joint effort between the two countries against global warming.

http://en.cop15.dk/news/view+news?newsid=1702

"The potential (for the United States and China to work together on climate issues) is very large and the need is very serious," said Kenneth Lieberthal, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institute, a US think tank.

Locke, a former governor from the export-oriented state of Washington, is eager to showcase opportunities for China to reduce carbon dioxide emissions using US solar, wind, hydro and other renewable technologies.

probably using patents that were originally Aussie

 

[basilio]

Good story from Giddens last night 2020. Well nuanced and certainly picks up the need to create a positive picture for the future.

His take on how climate sceptics have simply disregarded almost all the scientific understanding in the field is (IMHO) spot on.

 

[2020hindsight]

His take on how climate sceptics have simply disregarded almost all the scientific understanding in the field is (IMHO) spot on.

no argument from me bas - other than the fact that a lot of so-called sceptics are in fact locked in denial.

PS as for Giddens, how clever is the bloke that he can string sentences together like that - under the spotlight of instantaneous interview (even if prerecorded, can't tell for sure - but it didn't appear to have any breaks) - and you read it later, and you wonder if you could have said it as well even if you had had a week to work on the answers.

btw, here's my prediction....

That Copenhagen will have more effect on the direction and magnitude and longevity of future trends in investments. - than anything since the world wars and the world depressions.

 

[Calliope]

btw, here's my prediction....

That Copenhagen will have more effect on the direction and magnitude and longevity of future trends in investments. - than anything since the world wars and the world depressions.

A very gloomy prediction indeed. But I agree.

 

[2020hindsight]

A very gloomy prediction indeed. But I agree.

I seem to recall you said something vaguely (very vaguely) similar once calliope - that the global financial crisis would make action on GW/CC unnecessary. Sorry, but I can't agree with that one.

 

[wayneL]

A couple of posts from one of the other threads FYI

Here's another interesting article:

http://www.gaia-technology.com/sa/newsletters/newsletters.cfm

Basically, there are not enough fossil fuel reserves to fulfil the IPCC's modelling assumptions.



OOPS.

Also neatly skewers the ocean acidification argument.

and

From http://climatesanity.wordpress.com/2009/04/18/kyotos-impact-on-atmospheric-co2/ (a very good blog BTW)

:::

...

 

[2020hindsight]

yes but as Anthony Giddens said back there, Copenhagen will be more influenced by what 98% of the climate scientists think, than it will by what 40% of the population think, influenced as they are by the billions spent by Exxon to disseminate spurious and misleading pseudo-science on the matter. (well documented).

 

[wayneL]

yes but as Anthony Giddens said back there, Copenhagen will be more influenced by what 98% of the climate scientists think, than it will by what 40% of the population think, influenced as they are by the billions spent by Exxon to disseminate spurious and misleading pseudo-science on the matter. (well documented).

Confirmation bias. Spurious and misleading pseudo-science is encountered on both sides as is evident by the glaring mistake in fossil fuel reserves... and many other examples.

There are vested interests on both sides.

The trick here is to identify the true culprit in climate change. There is not one, but many, some natural, some man made, some regional, some global.

Copenhagen's focus is on a minor player in global climate, viz, co2. Therefore it is useless and unholistic; a waste of time and carbon fuels carting delegates all over the world.

 

[wayneL]

BTW I will continue to direct folks to one of the only honest brokers in the whole schmozzle ==>> http://climatesci.org

 

[Calliope]

I seem to recall you said something vaguely (very vaguely) similar once calliope - that the global financial crisis would make action on GW/CC unnecessary. Sorry, but I can't agree with that one.

No you are not wired to agree with me, but on the other hand I agree with you that the effects of Copenhagen could be more damaging than two world wars and the depressions.

 

[2020hindsight]

1. The trick here is to identify the true culprit in climate change. There is not one, but many, some natural, some man made, some regional, some global.

2. Copenhagen's focus is on a minor player in global climate, viz, co2.

1. agree
2. disagree ( that co2 / GHG is / are minor)

 

[wayneL]

2. disagree ( that co2 / GHG is / are minor)

Source of the chart and evidence of accuracy please.

Again refer to honest broker http://climatesci.org

 

[2020hindsight]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attribution_of_recent_climate_change
Half way down the page.
Surprised you weren't aware of it.

Note that similar wiki websites give a stack of scientific references (aften originating from IPCC) disputing your claim that Antartica is cooling - and pointing out that the peninsula is definitely heating, while some other plaes are heating, and some are cooling.