Afternoon:
9°c
With just over two weeks to go, it simply is not going to be enough to roll your eyes and bluff: “Pah! Copenhagen. What do those eejits know?”
If “global climate change summit” and “Copenhagen” remain mutually exclusive terms to you, then here's what those over-informed environmentalists/spotty greeno-commies/clean-tech hedge fund managers are talking about:
Copenhagen is, er...
Home of Europe's second most important single currency dissenter. And, as the home of Hans Christian Andersen, a specialist in fairy-tale endings. And home to probably the best brewery tour in the world if things aren't going so well. Copenhagen will, also, for 12 days next month host the biggest climate change conference in history. COP15, the shorthand jargon for the 15th United Nations climate change convention, is billed as the last chance for a new global treaty on carbon dioxide emissions.
It is the big follow-up to the Kyoto Treaty in 1997 which came into force in 2005 but which runs out in 2012.
Suspect everyone will be flying there...
Most of the 20,000 politicians, delegates, campaigners and media will be going by air, much to the hollow laughter and censorious finger-wagging of the Green lobby. The train or the ferry would be more carbon-friendly. Campaigners at Muddycarbonfootprint.com say walking would be even better.
Going by bicycle would, however, mean fewer overnight stops and fewer chances to emit carbon on the way. Although anyone checking this out on muddycarbonfootprint.com may want to get themselves a life before finding out whether the website exists.
Will there be G20-style riots worth staying in to watch on telly?
Theoretically, a conference about saving the planet should be peaceable. But 21st-century climate change campaigners are fantastically confrontational. As political failure at Copenhagen grows ever more likely, taking on water cannon and tear gas may be the only way to expose our dithering global leaders and pep up what will otherwise be blanket but asinine media coverage.
So Copenhagen is going to be a failure?
You bet. The world's biggest economy, the US, is Kyoto's most famous non-signatory. And China and India appear to be its most flagrant abusers (they are in fact signatories but did not agree to the emissions cuts signed to by much of the West).
Basic politics says China and India will not sign up to the economic suicide of limiting their own industrial development. Republican politics in the US says America will not sign anything unless China and India sign the same thing.
Barack Obama is a Democrat, of course, but he has a sceptical home audience. More important, the US Senate would have to ratify something many see as harming America's long walk out of recession.
In fact, Obama has already conceded defeat, saying Copenhagen crept up on him too quickly. Instead, he will push for a new Kyoto II, possibly in Mexico City in 2010. Trouble is that is even nearer the mid-term Congressional elections, risking a quasi-referendum on Obama and his Green credentials.
This climate change thingy exists then?
Pick up a paper this week and on one page you'll read about the heaviest snowfalls on the Great Wall of China on record, flash floods across South-east Asia and people sunbathing in Varna, the eastern European port that is normally being buffeted by blizzards this time of year. And Dennis Quaid and Jake Gyllenhaal wouldn't have made The Day After Tomorrow if it weren't true, would they?
Still there are plenty of climate change deniers. Jeremy Clarkson believes it is all a “big bucket of nonsense”, peddled by Channel 4 News and The Guardian.
Ryanair's Michael O'Leary calls the campaigners “hairy dungaree and sandal wearing climate change alarmists” who are directly descended from “the CND nutters of the 1970s”.
Perhaps it is no coincidence they make their livelihood out of gas-guzzling.
So what exactly is the science?
Water vapour, carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide together make up what we call the greenhouse gases: they trap and emit the sun's heat. The science fact is that CO2 emitted from burning coal, oil and natural gas is accumulating in the atmosphere. The science theory is that this will increase global temperature and screw up the world's meteorology. And here are some statistics which may even be true: Between 1990 and 2007 global CO2 emission grew by one-third. In the same period China's emission rose by 150% to the point that it vies with the US as the world biggest polluter.
So this Copenhagen solution, which is not going to happen, would have been what?
The signing-up of the US and China. Then get the industrialised nations to agree how much they will further reduce their emissions; get the big emerging nations like China and India to limit their emissions growth; and work out who will foot the bill for the Third World to change too. Which all adds up to what your average cricket fan will recognise as some form of Duckworth-Lewis calculation, guaranteeing that those who should lose will end up the winners. And vice-versa.
And are we allowed to ask: “What does it mean for me?”
The good news is nothing at all. For Now. The UK is one of the good guys of climate change. Post-Kyoto, we set ambitious targets, made them even tougher and are currently making a good fist of not missing the targets by a mile. The bad news is that we are already paying for Kyoto through record high domestic energy bills subsidising the construction of wind farms and the like.
The really bad news is that Copenhagen may already have come too late to prevent irreversible climate change.Surrey may well become the new Provence but only until it and the rest of Europe gets caught up in an orgy of climate change-induced global war. Or if that doesn't happen, we'll just spend the next few decades worrying about it.
