Countdown to Copenhagen
Greenpeace has turned it’s front webpage into a giant countdown clock leading to Copenhagen to highlight how little time we have left to cut a real deal on climate change. I quite like it.
Temperature increases, global emissions and loss of ice at the Arctic and Antarctic have now overshot scientists’ worst case scenarios. The Arctic icecap has entered what’s been called a ‘death spiral‘. For the first time in human history, you can take a ship right around the North Pole. There may be no summer ice left at all at the North Pole within five years. Many are calling for the world to be put on a war footing.
No Right Turn also has a good post about what is at stake for NZ in Poznan.
According to Radio New Zealand [audio] this morning, we’re primarily looking for a change in the rules around agriculture. Half of New Zealand’s emissions currently come from agriculture, and rather than working to reduce or offset them, the government has decided that it is easier simply to try and get them not to count. Voila! Instant emissions reduction, without changing the underlying reality one iota. This is a cynical tactic, which will not do a thing to help the situation (and in fact will give a false picture of its seriousness).
Fortunately, National’s lurch into climate change denial is likely to fundamentally undercut our special pleading at Poznan. No-one is going to listen to a country which has just dumped its only policy for controlling emissions and is conducting a fundamental review of the science.
Meanwhile, the Listener wonders whether National will get lost on the road map to change. I think they have already lost their way, based on our embarrasing stance in Poznan. It’s ironic, given National’s election campaign for change.
December 1st, 2008 at 3:39 pm
Go to:
http://nzclimatescience.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id= 384&Itemid=1
And read the piece from the UK Sunday Times “The fool’s game of carbon trading” and then go the last paragraphs “Stinking rich”.
Isn’t this one of your heros - who you are so upset about keeping out of NZ?
Stinking rich
For clever City boys, carbon markets are a marvellous way of turning muck into brass. Daniel Co, a Filipino pig farmer, used to shovel the dung from his 10,000 animals into ponds on his Uni-Rich Agro Industrial farm. The manure generated thousands of tons of methane, a global warming gas, but Co did not want to spend £110,000 on kit to trap the gas.
Then EcoSecurities, a British carbon trading firm, worked out that anything that captured the methane would entitle the farmer annually to nearly 3,000 “certified emission reductions” – the nearest thing to a carbon trading currency.
EcoSecurities did the paperwork for Co and gave him just over £2 per certificate. He put in the methane-capture kit, generating power and saving about £24,000 a year in utility bills. EcoSecurities sells the CERs for about £10 each to a French bank, which sells them on to power plants that need to offset emissions. The consumer pays through higher bills. A nice little earner for everyone except the poor mugs (us) at the end of the chain – but can it save the planet?
December 1st, 2008 at 3:56 pm
Why do you keep using the term “embarrassing”? I notice JS used it, too.
Embarrassing for whom?
December 1st, 2008 at 4:04 pm
Greenpeace has turned it’s front webpage into a giant countdown clock leading to Copenhagen to highlight how little time we have left to cut a real deal on climate change. I quite like it.
So do I, except we need a fairer mechanism than a set of arbitary caps based on a time (1990) when Europe & America were rich and China & India were poor. Any approach on those lines will be a failure when China & India will reject the inferior slice of the pie. The world cannot afford failure, we cannot afford to continue to support any Kyoto type unfairness.
December 1st, 2008 at 4:24 pm
Owen,
Ecosecurities is not making any money on carbon trading. They have made a loss for the last three years. Share price was a high of 1.85 pounds. Is now 37pence.
The only one who got rich was the founder who sold a large parcel of shares to Credit Suise.
Link to their financial performance in the red faced posting of Jeanette.
December 1st, 2008 at 4:47 pm
Owen - nobody here is upset about EcoSecurities except Gerrit, who is truly hung up on them! We could care less if they were here or not, but simply point out that they were ready to open up shop here but pulled out at the last minute due to the government’s waffling on climate change science.
December 1st, 2008 at 5:00 pm
Not at all upset frog, They may have been re4ady to open shop here, but your interpretation is that the National government waffling, Whereas I’m pointing out that they dont have any cash to invest anywhere and judging by their books, not likely to get any capital from a bank either.
Blaming a government is a handy excuse to hide the fact that basically the chance of them borrowing money for investment, with their track record is pretty close to zero.
December 1st, 2008 at 5:04 pm
So they cannot even turn a profit on their scams.
But if they showed their profits they would have to pay tax.
I wonder where the real profits are recorded.
December 1st, 2008 at 5:55 pm
When looking at data, the environment is a mixed bag
By Bjorn Lomborg
Commentary by
Tuesday, November 25, 200
Have you noticed how environmental campaigners almost inevitably say that not only is global warming happening and bad, but also that what we are seeing is even worse than expected?
This is odd, because any reasonable understanding of how science proceeds would expect that, as we refine our knowledge, we find that things are sometimes worse and sometimes better than we expected, and that the most likely distribution would be about 50-50. Environmental campaigners, however, almost invariably see it as 100-0.
If we are regularly being surprised in just one direction; if our models get blindsided by an ever-worsening reality, that does not bode well for our scientific approach. Indeed, one can argue that if the models constantly get something wrong, it is probably because the models are wrong. And if we cannot trust our models, we cannot know what policy action to take if we want to make a difference.
Yet, if new facts constantly show us that the consequences of climate change are getting worse and worse, high-minded arguments about the scientific method might not carry much weight. Certainly, this seems to be the prevailing bet in the spin on global warming. It is, again, worse than we thought, and, despite our failing models, we will gamble on knowing just what to do: Cut carbon-dioxide emissions dramatically.
But it is simply not correct that climate data are systematically worse than expected; in many respects, they are spot on, or even better than expected. That we hear otherwise is an indication of the media’s addiction to worst-case stories, but that makes a poor foundation for smart policies.
The most obvious point about global warming is that the planet is heating up. It has warmed about 1 degree Celsius over the past century, and is predicted by the United Nations’ climate panel (IPCC) to warm between 1.6 and 3.8 degrees during this century, mainly owing to increased carbon dioxide. An average of all 38 available standard runs from the IPCC shows that models expect a temperature increase in this decade of about 0.2 degrees.
But this is not at all what we have seen. And this is true for all surface temperature measures, and even more so for both satellite measures. Temperatures in this decade have not been worse than expected; in fact, they have not even been increasing. They have actually decreased by between 0.01 and 0.1 degrees per year. On the most important indicator of global warming, temperature development, we ought to hear that the data are actually much better than expected.
Likewise, and arguably much more importantly, the heat content of the world’s oceans has been dropping for the past four years where we have measurements. Whereas energy in terms of temperature can disappear relatively easily from the light atmosphere, it is unclear where the heat from global warming should have gone - and certainly this is again much better than expected.
We hear constantly about how the Arctic sea ice is disappearing faster than expected, and this is true. But most serious scientists also allow that global warming is only part of the explanation. Another part is that the so-called Arctic Oscillation of wind patterns over the Arctic Ocean is now in a state that it does not allow build-up of old ice, but immediately flushes most ice into the North Atlantic.
More importantly, we rarely hear that the Antarctic sea ice is not only not declining, but is above average for the past year. IPCC models would expect declining sea ice in both hemispheres, but, whereas the Arctic is doing worse than expected, Antarctica is doing better. Ironically, the Associated Press, along with many other news outlets, told us in 2007 that the “Arctic is screaming,” and that the Northwest Passage was open “for the first time in recorded history.” Yet the BBC reported in 2000 that the fabled Northwest Passage was already without ice.
We are constantly inundated with stories of how sea levels will rise, and how one study after another finds that it will be much worse than what the IPCC predicts. But most models find results within the IPCC range of a sea-level increase of 18 to 59 centimeters this century. This is of course why the thousands of IPCC scientists projected that range. Yet studies claiming 1 meter or more obviously make for better headlines.
Since 1992, we have had satellites measuring the rise in global sea levels, and they have shown a stable increase of 3.2 millimeters per year - spot on compared to the IPCC projection. Moreover, over the last two years, sea levels have not increased at all - actually, they show a slight drop. Should we not be told that this is much better than expected?
Hurricanes were the stock image of Al Gore’s famous film on climate change, and certainly the United States was battered in 2004 and 2005, leading to wild claims of ever stronger and costlier storms in the future. But in the two years since, the costs have been well below average, virtually disappearing in 2006. That is definitely better than expected.
Gore quoted MIT hurricane researcher Kerry Emmanuel to support an alleged scientific consensus that global warming is making hurricanes much more damaging. But Emmanuel has now published a new study showing that even in a dramatically warming world, hurricane frequency and intensity may not substantially rise during the next two centuries. That conclusion did not get much exposure in the media.
Of course, not all things are less bad than we thought. But one-sided exaggeration is not the way forward. We urgently need balance if we are to make sensible choices.
Bjorn Lomborg, author of “The Skeptical Environmentalist” and “Cool It,” is head of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, and an adjunct professor at Copenhagen Business School. THE DAILY STAR publishes this commentary in collaboration with Project Syndicate (www.project-syndicate.org).
December 2nd, 2008 at 8:21 pm
Greenpeace should have a population counter showing the number of people on the planet as well as their countdown clock. Population control is still the taboo subject - it is political suicide to mention it and that might also apply to environmental activists. Worldwatch is calling population the elephant in the cupboard but there are not many groups out there willing to mention population control. If global warming is caused by human activities it seems obvious to do something about the population. Maybe we will be the generation that sees Malthus’s prediction come true.
December 4th, 2008 at 1:10 pm
Lomborg doesn’t IMHO understand that the economic value of a habitable planet. He doesn’t understand the workings of the IPCC and its science. He wants to keep growing because that’s the economics he was born using and he doesn’t take on board the failure of monetarism and the resurrection of the once ridiculed Austrian school. Almost everything he “knows” is wrong. For Earth’s sake, why would I listen to him?
Or you. Shall I dissect this tract ?
BJ
December 24th, 2008 at 12:58 am
Definition: “The IPCC assesses the scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant for the understanding of the risk of human-induced climate change.” The problem with this organisation is that NO ONE can PROVE that global-warming (if other than from natural fluctuations) is caused by humans and/or their activities.
Therefore the only sensible conclusion is that this corrupt body has been setup with an agenda to control the populace of all countries via governmental control. And once the “top-body” driving the IPCC has all governments doing, blindly, what it wants (read taxation), it can consider itself to be the “one-world” goverment body, at the top of the tree (an ironic, non-intended pun). And we’ll all be paying a fee for simply breathing out co2.
Those of us with our feet on the ground can see through the sham that is [referred to as] “human-induced” global warming. Models fed with scurrilously-incorrect information produce scurrilously-incorrect results. To base future predictions on computer modelling is theatre and farce. Lomborg has it right. We are not fooled, and this is the precise reason for National toppling Labour in this countries last election. We’re at last seeing sensible and logical policies being put in place to counter the personally-intrusive agendas of socialist Labour and the ideologically-driven mad-hatter Greens.
Thank God National is at least prevailing to balance the bad influence of the IPCC, hopefully this will prevent NZ paying out precious money [via what essentially are needless penalties] to a corrupt body that cannot justify its own existance.
Zippy
December 24th, 2008 at 10:19 am
Yup Zippy, even a paranoid can have enemies.