DURBAN CLIMATE CHANGE CONFERENCE: Occasionally international treaties conflict with each other. The last days of the Durban climate talks was one of those times. The United Nations’ Convention on Climate Change clashed with its Convention against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment, as negotiators struggled for 72 sleepless hours to snatch agreement from the jaws of mental collapse and political exhaustion and defeat.
The Durban talks finally concluded on Sunday, almost two days late. Their formal and informal outcomes are notable. But the results are also uneven, in part uncertain, and ultimately inadequate.
In formally establishing a Green Climate Fund, the conference took a major and necessary step in building the financial architecture for climate protection. The Fund will mobilise US$100 billion of public and private funds per annum by 2020, to support developing countries’ mitigation and adaptation efforts
Similarly, China’s stated commitment to adopt binding emissions targets by 2020 can be seen as a significant breakthrough as well as diplomatically astute positioning by the planet’s major emitter.
However, how one views the centrepiece outcome of the conference – the Durban Agreement or Durban Platform – depends on where you stand on the politics and on the science.
The Agreement was shaped around a proposal promoted at the conference by the European Union and a range of developing countries and small island states. It is merely an agreement to negotiate a new agreement.
Such a cynical summary understates just how potentially important a step this represents, given the collapsing momentum of negotiations following Copenhagen in 2009 and the zombie-like status of the Kyoto Protocol. This protocol – neither dead nor alive – has haunted negotiations over the past five years.
The Durban Agreement creates a new body – the Ad Hoc Working Group on the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action. It will negotiate a comprehensive global compact for emissions reduction “with legal force”, for agreement in 2015.
If successful, this will take us beyond the current raft of voluntary national mitigation promises and targets outlined at Copenhagen and agreed at Cancun. It will replace them with a coherent and legally enforceable set of emissions-reduction commitments by all major emitting nations. More importantly, it will provide a transition away from the deep and irresolvable divisions posed by the Kyoto Protocol for developed and developing countries and, in particular, the United States.
The new Ad Hoc Group replaces two similar Ad Hoc groups formed to take climate negotiations along the Bali Path and sweeps the opponents and proponents of the Kyoto Protocol into the one inclusive process. In this sense, the possible outcome will be stronger than and supplant those under the Kyoto Protocol. It will explicitly embrace the United State, China and India – the planet’s three largest emitters – for the first time and therefore increase the sweep of international climate regulatory ambition to cover most of the planet’s emissions.
But those who have followed global climate negotiations for a while are feeling an uncomfortable sense of deja vue. The Durban Agreement and its roadmap and timeframe are reminiscent of the 2007 Bali Roadmap that was to deliver a legally binding treaty at Copenhagen in 2009.
The underlying differences and tensions between developed and developing countries, and also now between major developing counties such as China and India, remain – albeit now in the one tent. Meanwhile the United States will continue to be held hostage by its domestic balance of conservative forces in Congress and, potentially, a Republican outcome in the 2012 Presidential election.
How important the long-sought legally binding agreement is (as opposed to possibly stronger voluntary ones) is also questionable. Professor Dan Bodansky of Arizona State University argues that there is ultimately little difference between the two.
In the absence of a tough sanctions regime, the legal status of a new compact may be of little value. It is this which has been called into question by Canada’s rejection of the Kyoto Protocol.
Having massively blown out its emissions by 30% above its Kyoto-prescribed target of –6% below 1990 levels by 2012, Canada should be in trouble. In the absence of any sanction for this breach (one which would cost the Canadian government in excess of US$6 billion), the effectiveness of any future legal agreement is called into doubt.
At the end of the day, therefore, the discussion comes back to what individual nations are willing and capable of doing when faced with the challenge posed by climate science.
It is here that a final, powerful lingering note of despair should accompany any assessment of these talks. Negotiators, lulled by their processes or numbed by their sense of the limited potential for rapid movement in international climate negotiations, have come away with a sense of misplaced relief at the scale of their small advance at Durban.
Yet the Durban Agreement – like previous climate agreements – continues as if the underlying science were negotiable. Any agreement in 2015 will most likely not come into force before 2020. In the meantime, current inadequate national reduction targets remain in force. Climate scientist estimate these will lead to catastrophic global warming of 4 degrees or more by 2100 and beyond.
Bear in mind that global emissions have been increasing rather than decreasing in recent years. Global carbon emissions last year rose at their fastest rate in more than four decades, up nearly 6% – about double the annual rate of increase over the past decade.
The “ambition gap” is growing between current mitigation efforts and what climate science demands for a safe climate. Efforts to bridge this gap will be even more costly and difficult – economically, socially and ecologically – given the additional loss of time that the Durban Agreement implies.
Under these circumstances, the Gillard Government – which at Durban basked in international approval of Australia’s new carbon price – needs to recognize that urgent task of substantial emissions reduction must be underway well before the Durban process delivers its outcomes, too late, at the end of this decade.
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Comments (17)
Tim Scanlon
(Climate and Agronomic Extension at Department of Agriculture and Food - Western Australia)
Now I suppose it is up to us, the people, to push our governments to act quickly and with enough purpose to combat climate change.
Of course it is also up to us as individuals to make a difference. I've already noticed the $$ difference from turning a few appliances off rather than leave them on standby. Most of my friends haven't had a power bill in the past 12 months since going solar. Now if I could just get work to install skylights instead of using so many lights.
Garry Claridge
Systems Analyst - Software Developer (logged in via email @gmail.com)
As Tim has suggested it is now up to us (was also thinking that after Copenhagen). As individuals, families, and community groups we, collectively, need to take responsibility.
I believe we may also need strong leadership by many people in respected positions to enable a feeling of encouragement.
However, we also need all levels of Government to embrace concepts such as those of "Beyond Zero Emissions" and to begin actions to initiate the realisation of these concepts.
Mike Hansen
Mr (logged in via email @gmail.com)
The UK Guardian has assessments from a range of participants including WWF and Greenpeace.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/dec/12/durban-climate-deal-verdict
Mark Harrigan
Dr (logged in via email @tpg.com.au)
Thanks Mike - I think Oliver Hughes (last somment on the Guardian link) provided the best summary for me
"Let me be clear: this was not enough. Not even close. This was meeting expectations lowered beyond all expectations. Rescuing defeat from the jaws of worse defeat. In the long-run, Durban will be nothing but a footnote in a narrative of missed opportunities and willful ignorance.
The youth of the world cannot and should not accept what Durban delivered. We're sleepwalking towards calamity, and the world's governments just agreed to wake up at some point down the line."
Whilst Durban maybe made a tiny step forward - all we have done is increased the global cost of taking action and made sure there will be higher pain than needed in the future - but I guess it often takes a crisis or things to get a lot worse before serious action is taken
Douglas Cotton
(logged in via Facebook)
Readers may be interested to know that, on page 330 of "Slaying the Sky Dragon," Dr Charles Anderson (physicist with 38 years' experience) deduces, after several pages of detailed calculations based on empirical data that, even if the absorbtion of re-radiated photons by the surface did take place, then .... ....
the WARMING EFFECT of carbon dioxide would be "ONLY 13% of THE COOLING EFFECT, the latter due to keeping heat away from the surface by absorbing the incoming solar radiation, a significant portion of which is in the IR spectrum." ....
(This is exactly one of the mechanisms I postulated well before obtaining the book.)
Douglas Cotton
(logged in via Facebook)
The answer would have to be "no agreement at all" - hopefully the information below will halt future action - despite the farce we have just witnessed at Durban.
I have to admit I was wrong.
I was wrong in allowing myself to be sucked into believing that “back radiation” gets absorbed by the land surfaces and oceans and thus causes extra warming.
Last night I was up till 2.20am reading a book which I received yesterday by mail from the US. It is billed on the back cover as ...
“the…
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Mark Harrigan
Dr (logged in via email @tpg.com.au)
The only valid statement in the post above is Mr Cotton admitting "I was wrong"
Indeed he is wrong - about everything he posts on climate science, Even his hero - Dr Roy Spencer - acknowledges the existence of the Greenhouse Effect - as do all credible scientists - By this post Mr Cotton has truly donned the official uniform of the tin foil hat brigade.
It's pseduo-scientific blather like this that is an impediment to action. At least Durban took a small step forward.
I wonder if Mr Cotton would have the courage to talk to this young woman
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Ko3e6G_7GY4#
I doubt it
Douglas Cotton
(logged in via Facebook)
It's the FLAT EARTH science of AGW that is pseudo-science, Dr Harrigan. To treat the Earth as if it were a flat disc with no day or night and then to assume that the radiative temperature based on the fourth root of the average of day and night radiation would be the same as (in the spherical world) that calculated by taking the average of TWO temperatures (day and night) each calculated using the fourth root of the actual radiation in daylight and that at night beggars belief. The result is about…
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Mark Harrigan
Dr (logged in via email @tpg.com.au)
Silent about Roy Spencer I see.
Mr Cotton is free to have his claims submitted to the peer review process - as indeed are the authors of the gripping fantasy novel "slaying the sky dragon" all of whom have apparently been watching too much Yu-Gi-Oh.
But seriously, why don't the authors, or any of the deniers here, simply write a coherent outline of their best arguments against the expert consensus and publish it in the peer-reviewed literature?
Why don’t they turn up to the relevant scientific conferences and give a talk on their theories?
The answer is simple: they don’t have any arguments that have any scientific merit.
Douglas Cotton
(logged in via Facebook)
I have never claimed Spencer was totally correct by a long shot. I just referred to his papers showing that net radiative transfer at TOA was not as great as the models predicted, and nor was the rate of increase in temperatures in the lower troposphere. Of course I know Spencer still clings to the basics of the AGW hypothesis, but probably just thinks sensitivity is overstated.
Anyway, I know you probably won't wade through all the text in this linked item, so I have selected the following…
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Douglas Cotton
(logged in via Facebook)
Sorry, in the above post the paragraph "My concept ..." and "C O P Y" should have been above the previous paragraph as I guess was obvious.
I have now read Nahle's 6 November 2011 experiment which I consider perfectly sound and which proves back radiation does not warm the surface.
http://principia-scientific.org/publications/New_Concise_Experiment_on_Backradiation.pdf
Hence the AGW hypothesis is debunked unless Nahle is proved wrong in his deductions from the data. The experiment could obviously be repeated by IPCC, Trenberth or anyone if they dared..
Mark Harrigan
Dr (logged in via email @tpg.com.au)
Principia Scientific is a private organisation funded and founded by climate science deniers and publishers of the fantasy novel "slaying the sky dragon" as a fraudulent front group to appear to be a peer reviewed scientific journal. In fact it is no such thing.
On it's own website it claims Principia Scientific International “…was conceived after 22 international climate experts and authors joined forces to write the climate science bestseller, ‘Slaying the Sky Dragon: Death of the Greenhouse…
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David Arthur
n/a (logged in via email @fastel.com.au)
Gday Doug, so now there's someone called Nahle saying that when photons get to the earth's surface, photons sent back to the surface from the upper atmosphere behave differently to photons that started their journey to the earth's surface at the sun?
Regarding cold objects not warming hot objects, remember that all objects emit thermal radiation proportional to the fourth power of their temperature. An object at a typical temperature for a warmish day, 300K, emits about 33% more thermal energy than the same object at freezing point of water (~273K). But that does NOT mean that the object at 273K emits NO radiation - far from it.
Hence Nahle is debunked a priori; that is, it is not even POSSIBLE that Nahle could be correct.
IPCC, by the way, does not conduct research per se. Every few years, it assesses (reviews) research to that date.
Douglas Cotton
(logged in via Facebook)
http://co2insanity.com/2011/11/08/no-virginia-cooler-objects-cannot-make-warmer-objects-even-warmer-still/
David Arthur
n/a (logged in via email @fastel.com.au)
This stuff about night-time optical temperature being about 165 K?
Nonsense, observations of earth don't bear it out.
It might apply to observations of the moon, where there is no atmosphere.
David Arthur
n/a (logged in via email @fastel.com.au)
Thanks Doug. You got this book from America, you say? Are these blokes are up for a Nobel Prize? How about a Pulitzer?
I was a small child during the heyday of TV serial Westerns - "F Troop", "The Cisco Kid", "Bonanza", "Gunsmoke", "Zorro", and so on. So, which archetypal character is strongest in my memory?
That's right, the Travelling Snake Oil Salesman.
God Bless America!
God Bless Freedom of Speech!
God Bless Writing for Your Market!
David Arthur
n/a (logged in via email @fastel.com.au)
Emission trading schemes are dependent on co-ordinated international action. I've given up caring about international agreements altogether, particularly as Australia doesn't need an international agreement to implement a revenue-neutral consumption tax on fossil fuel carbon.
CEDA papers by Geoff Carmody and Michael Porter ("Consumption-based emissions policy: a vaccine for the CPRS 'trade flu'?" and "Reforms in the greenhouse era: who pays, and how?" respectively) were written in the expectation…
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