Don’t let us down: UN #climatechange talks in #Cancun
From The Independent on Sunday…
As world leaders meet in Mexico, people in poor countries fear little will be done
MY VIEW: We have enough hard visual evidence, we have a very clear picture of the worst case scenario(s). Surely, past is the time for more talk; now it’s onwards to action!…?
Chris Huhne: Cancun needs realism, not blind hope
No one expects a binding deal on climate change in Cancun next month, but we can make real progress – just as we did in the past on key international agreements. The Montreal Protocol on the ozone layer – the only international environmental agreement that every country in the world is party to – is more than 20 years old, and has steadily improved with age. It was described by Kofi Annan, the former secretary general of the UN, as the world’s most successful treaty, and it is working. The concentration of ozone-depleting substances in the atmosphere is decreasing, and there are early signs that the ozone layer is recovering. Over the next fortnight, much airtime will be given to sceptics – not just about climate change, but about the very process of international negotiations. Next time an armchair theorist holds forth on the impossibility of global agreements, remember the lessons of Montreal.
The UK’s position on climate change is ambitious: a legally binding global deal is firmly in our national interest – and in the planet’s interest too. It is our best chance of keeping global temperatures within two degrees Celsius of pre-industrial levels, without which we will increasingly face dangerous and extreme weather. Achieving a deal will not be easy. Success will demand careful negotiation, compromise – and time. To properly judge progress, we need to put the negotiations into the historical context of other negotiations that were both complex and dealt with powerful economic interests.In the European Union, when a process is particularly complicated, you must make incremental progress. Countries wishing to join the EU must clear a number of separate hurdles. You have to make solid progress on chapter after chapter, knowing that you are nowhere until everything has been agreed. In their complexity, the climate change negotiations are similar to the trade agreements that have defined modern commerce and shaped the global system of trade. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade was agreed in 1949, yet it would take four and a half decades of evolution before the World Trade Organisation and its legally binding disputes procedures were born. Of course, we do not have half a century to get to grips with climate change: the situation is far too urgent for that. But we should not expect an instant-coffee deal – just add water and stir. Rome was not built in a week, or even a year. It takes time to get negotiations right.This time round, in Cancun, our expectations will be different. The search is for a renewed sense of momentum, not the finished product. But we are not starting from scratch. Twenty years ago this week, the UN General Assembly commenced negotiations on what became the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. It would be another seven years before the Kyoto Protocol was agreed, and a further eight before it came into force. Establishing a worthy successor to Kyoto – with a legal framework encompassing all – will be the culmination of a process that started just two months after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Like the trade or environmental agreements that preceded them, the UN climate change negotiations are also complex, multilateral and deal with powerful vested interests. They will take a number of years to fully conclude. The key test of the negotiations is whether they are making enough progress each year, not whether they produce the polished, final deal this year or even next. Progress toward a binding global agreement will be painstaking. Yet there are reasons to be confident that it will ultimately be successful. First, concern about economic development and objections from industry are consistently overwrought – and over-reported. From the Clean Air Act of 1956 to the Montreal Protocol of 1987, there have always been voices willing to claim that the cost of action far outweighs the benefits. Yet, in a recent paper for the Institute for Economic Modelling, the Oxford economist David F Hendry argues that “in no case has there been a notable impact on any country’s gross national product from solving these problems”. My own department commissioned a study to examine the risk of a competitive threat to our businesses under an emissions trading scheme. Contrary to popular belief, it found a tougher EU emissions reduction target would have a minimal effect on output. Second, we have to see the flexibility needed today alongside agreements we have already made. The commitment we seek on the measurement, reporting and verification of progress on cutting carbon emissions does not infringe on national sovereignty as much as Article IV of the International Monetary Fund agreement, which provides for detailed annual surveillance of the economies and finances of member states.If we accept that economic success is collective, surely we should also accept that global climate change is a threat to us all? The Montreal Protocol showed that, when credible scientific evidence identifies a common threat, the international community can come together to secure an equitable agreement that restricts pollution and protects a common natural resource. We are realistic about prospects for Cancun. We seek progress, but don’t expect finality. The difficult political conditions and the complexity of the task cannot be underestimated, but the Mexicans who are leading the process have learned lessons from Copenhagen last year. Ministers will have a shorter and more manageable list of decisions to take. From deforestation to long-term climate finance, we can reach our destination in the only way anyone ever did: one step after another. We can regain momentum, and send a clear and vital signal to the world that international environmental agreements are achievable, workable and effective. They just need a little time.
Chris Huhne MP is Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change
The article in full: Progress towards an agreement to limit climate change is possible at talks in Mexico this week. But it will be slow
As government ministers from more than 190 countries gather today in the Mexican city of Cancun for the start of talks aimed at minimising the impact of climate change, the need for a deal could scarcely be more pressing. The stakes are high, the expectations are low. There is scant sign of the dramatic cuts in emissions of greenhouse gases needed to stop global warming exceeding 2C and devastating vast areas of the planet.Failure to achieve meaningful progress could seal the fate of hundreds of millions of people living in some of the poorest parts of the world and in greatest danger from rising sea levels, drought and famine.
Forget ‘climategate’; amid the rows, the world is still undergoing climate change!
The Telegraph blogger James Delingpole today writes:
As Andrew Bolt puts it, this scandal could well be “the greatest in modern science”. These alleged emails – supposedly exchanged by some of the most prominent scientists pushing AGW theory – suggest:
Conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more.
The Guardian yesterday
The emails stolen from the University of East Anglia in November have cast an uncomfortable light on the behind-the-scenes actions of some of the most senior and respected climate scientists in the world. The affair raises serious questions about access to data and the way scientific peer review can be used to stifle dissent. But is the science of climate change fatally flawed by the climategate revelations? Absolutely not. Nothing uncovered in the emails destroys the argument that humans are warming the planet.
MY VIEW:
MY VIEW: The blogger James Delingpole, lauded as ‘writer, journalist and broadcaster who is right about everything’, cuts into the ’climate-gate’ as a bit of joyful attack on scientists. We uses – or more to the point, ‘misuses’ his blog, to comntinue the ‘war of words’ that has become know as ’climate-gate’
Re The Guardian I couldn’t agree more! The ‘climategate’ furor this week, over emails and reports, surprised and disappointed. These unhelpful discussions – as well as distracting from the key messages – also assisted the ‘climate skeptics’ accusation that climate change was not happening. Indeed, if it was so, that predicted rates were inaccurate, and therefore the science was in question, the whole debate was also ‘hot air’.
The reality is this: amid the rows, one truth: the world is warming. We, as humanity in all its guises, need to take steps to change our lifestyles, through policy and behaviour, to become more sustainable – as individuals, as a society, as nations together.
The media was fixated about emails and reports based on un-peered articles, to the extent that a hole Newsnight programme was dedicated to stirring up unnecessary and potential conflict between two scientists.
From The Guardian article in full:
The emails stolen from the University of East Anglia in November have cast an uncomfortable light on the behind-the-scenes actions of some of the most senior and respected climate scientists in the world. The affair raises serious questions about access to data and the way scientific peer review can be used to stifle dissent. But is the science of climate change fatally flawed by the climategate revelations? Absolutely not. Nothing uncovered in the emails destroys the argument that humans are warming the planet.
None of the 1,073 emails plus 3,587 files containing documents, raw data and computer code upsets the 200-year-old science behind the “greenhouse effect” of gases like carbon dioxide, which traps solar heat and warm the atmosphere. Nothing changes the fact that carbon dioxide is accumulating in the atmosphere thanks to human emissions from burning carbon-based fuels like coal and oil. Nor the calculations of physicists that for every square metre of the earth’s surface, 1.6 watts more energy now enters the atmosphere than leaves it.
And we know the world is warming as a result. Thousands of thermometers in areas remote from any conceivable local urban influences tell us that. The oceans are warming too. And we have the evidence of our own eyes. The great majority of the world’s glaciers are retreating, Arctic sea ice is disappearing, sea levels are rising ever faster, trees are climbing up hillsides and permafrost is melting. These are not statistical artefacts or the result of scientists cherry-picking their data.
Equally, many of the most widely publicised claims from sceptics about what is in the emails are demonstrably unfounded. There is no conspiracy to “hide the decline” in temperatures. Nor that a lack of warming in the data is a “travesty” – still less of attempts to fix the data.
But, within the narrower confines of assembling a reliable history of global temperature, the emails have done significant damage to the credibility of scientists. They show that in their desire to give the world a clear message that humans are heating the planet here and now, a group of scientists cut corners and down-play uncertainties in their calculations. Their opponents charge that they then covered their tracks by being secretive with their data and suppressing dissent.
Taken with the recent revelations about shortcomings in reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), this suggests a wider problem of scientific sloppiness, but not of outright fraud. Many scientists believe their community has to own up to that, and put its house in order.
Part of the problem is secrecy in science. Climatologist Judy Curry of the Georgia Institute of Technology, who has been trying to make peace between her colleagues and the sceptics, says the various data sets connected to the famous “hockey stick” temperature graph and Phil Jones’s thermometer data sets “stand out as lacking transparency”. Science is too much of a closed shop, she says. Outsiders need to be let into the ivory towers for the good of science itself. “Einstein didn’t start his career at Princeton, but rather at a post office.” Bring on the bloggers. Maybe there’s an Einstein among them.
The doors of the labs are being opened whether scientists like it or not. The Information Commissioner’s office last week released a statement saying that the University of East Anglia had “not dealt with [FoI requests] as they should have been under the legislation”. There is evidence in the emails that some scientists at the Climatic Research Unit wanted to delete files rather than hand them over – although it is not clear whether any deliberate deletions actually happened.
Probably nobody anticipated that a law intended to unwrap state secrets might end up freeing data from scientists’ computers. But the science community now urgently needs to figure out how to respond to this altered landscape – or scientists will end up in court before long.
The need to open up science is made all the greater by the question raised in the emails about the “gold standard”, the peer review system. In many fields of research, peer review creates serious conflicts of interest in which, as the emails have revealed, senior researchers can act in a way that could have the effect of blackballing the research papers of their critics. The dangers are all the greater when, again as the emails show, the conventions of anonymity in peer review are not rigorously upheld.
Finally, “climategate” raises questions about the IPCC report-writing process, in which many of the emailers have been involved. Governments set up the IPCC 20 years ago to get scientists to speak with one voice on climate change. But often there is no clear consensus. Scientists are trained to disagree. That’s how science advances. The tensions created by the pressure to agree are clear in dozens of the emails.
One of Jones’s colleagues at the University of East Anglia, climatologist Mike Hulme, says: “Climate scientists will have to work harder to earn the warranted trust of the public – and maybe that is no bad thing.” And he thinks the IPCC may have run its course.
While science gets its house in order, we need some perspective. In the midst of a cold winter it may be hard to convince ourselves, but the world is still warming. Humanity is still to blame. And we still, urgently, need to do something about it.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/05/climate-change-hacked-emails
Geoffrey Lean, Telegraph blog
Climate change conversations : emails to a skeptic
From The Independent last night…. A series of Questions & Answers has produced a very interesting discussion and led to a huge reader response…
World-renowned physicist Professor Freeman Dyson has been described as a ‘force-of-nature intellect’. He’s also one of the world’s foremost climate change sceptics. In this email exchange, our science editor, Steve Connor, asks the Princeton scholar why he’s one of the few true intellectuals to be so dismissive of the global-warming consensus
From: Steve Connor
To: Freeman Dyson
You are one of the most famous living scientists, credited as a visionary who has reshaped scientific thinking. Some have called you the “heir to Einstein”, yet you are also a “climate sceptic” who questions the consensus on global warming and its link with carbon dioxide emissions. Could we start by finding where we agree? I take it you accept for instance that carbon dioxide is a powerful greenhouse gas that warms the planet (1); that atmospheric concentrations of CO2 have risen since direct measurements began several decades ago (2); and that CO2 is almost certainly higher now than for at least the past 800,000 years (3), if you take longer records into account, such as ice-core data.
Would you also accept that CO2 levels have been increasing as a result of burning fossil fuels and that global temperatures have been rising for the past 50 years at least, and possibly for longer (4)? Computer models have shown that the increase in global temperatures can only be explained by the increase in atmospheric CO2 concentrations (5). Climate scientists say there is no other reasonable explanation for the warming they insist is happening (6), which is why we need to consider doing something about it (7). What part of this do you accept and what do you reject?
From: Freeman Dyson
To: Steve Connor
First of all, please cut out the mention of Einstein. To compare me to Einstein is silly and annoying.
Answers to your questions are: yes (1), yes (2), yes (3), maybe (4), no (5), no (6), no (7).
There are six good reasons for saying no to the last three assertions. First, the computer models are very good at solving the equations of fluid dynamics but very bad at describing the real world. The real world is full of things like clouds and vegetation and soil and dust which the models describe very poorly. Second, we do not know whether the recent changes in climate are on balance doing more harm than good. The strongest warming is in cold places like Greenland. More people die from cold in winter than die from heat in summer. Third, there are many other causes of climate change besides human activities, as we know from studying the past. Fourth, the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is strongly coupled with other carbon reservoirs in the biosphere, vegetation and top-soil, which are as large or larger. It is misleading to consider only the atmosphere and ocean, as the climate models do, and ignore the other reservoirs. Fifth, the biological effects of CO2 in the atmosphere are beneficial, both to food crops and to natural vegetation. The biological effects are better known and probably more important than the climatic effects. Sixth, summing up the other five reasons, the climate of the earth is an immensely complicated system and nobody is close to understanding it.
That will do for the first set of questions. Now it is your turn.
From: Steve Connor
To: Freeman Dyson
So you accept that carbon dioxide is a powerful greenhouse gas that warms the planet, that concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere have been rising since direct measurements began several decades ago, and that CO2 is almost certainly higher now than for at least the past 800,000 years. You think it “maybe” right that CO2 levels have been increasing as a result of fossil fuel burning but you don’t accept that global temperatures have been rising nor that the increase in carbon dioxide has anything to do with that supposed trend. And finally, you have little or no faith in the computer models of the climate.
As a physicist you must be aware of the calculations of estimated increases in global average temperatures due to the positive radiative forcing of the extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere – the heat “captured” by CO2. The mainstream estimate suggests that doubling CO2 from pre-industrial levels would increase global average temperatures by about 3C. If you accept that CO2 levels have never been higher, but not that global average temperatures have increased, where has the extra trapped heat gone to? Can we deal with this before we go on?
From: Freeman Dyson
To: Steve Connor
No thank-you! The whole point of this discussion is that I am interested in a far wider range of questions, while you are trying to keep us talking about narrow technical questions that I consider unimportant.
You ask me where the extra trapped heat has gone, but I do not agree with the models that say the extra trapped heat exists. I cannot answer your question because I disagree with your assumptions.
From: Steve Connor
To: Freeman Dyson
Sorry you feel that way, I hope we can get back on track. I was only trying to find out where your problem lies with respect to the scientific consensus on global warming. As you know these models are used by large, prestigious science organisations such as NASA, NOAA and the Met Office, which use them to make pretty accurate predictions about the weather every day. The scientists who handle these models point out that they can accurately match up the computer predictions to real climatic trends in the past, and that it is only when they add CO2 influences to the models that they can explain recent global warming. There is a scientific consensus that CO2 emissions are having a discernible influence on the global climate and I was attempting to find out more precisely why you part company from this consensus.
You have written eloquently about the need for heretics in science who question the accepted dogma. There are a number of notable instances in science where heretics have indeed been proven to be right (Alfred Wegener and continental drift) but many more, less notable examples where they have been shown to be wrong and, in time, will be forgotten (remember Peter Duesberg or Andrew Wakefield?). So it was in the light of your heretical stance on climate science that I’d like to know why we should believe a few lone heretics – albeit eminent ones such as yourself – rather than the vast body of scientists who have a plethora of published work to back up their claims? It’s an important question because it’s about who we, the public, should believe on scientific matters and why?
From: Freeman Dyson
To: Steve Connor
When I was in high-school in England in the 1930s, we learned that continents had been drifting according to the evidence collected by Wegener. It was a great mystery to understand how this happened, but not much doubt that it happened. So it came as a surprise to me later to learn that there had been a consensus against Wegener. If there was a consensus, it was among a small group of experts rather than among the broader public. I think that the situation today with global warming is similar. Among my friends, I do not find much of a consensus. Most of us are sceptical and do not pretend to be experts. My impression is that the experts are deluded because they have been studying the details of climate models for 30 years and they come to believe the models are real. After 30 years they lose the ability to think outside the models. And it is normal for experts in a narrow area to think alike and develop a settled dogma. The dogma is sometimes right and sometimes wrong. In astronomy this happens all the time, and it is great fun to see new observations that prove the old dogmas wrong.
Unfortunately things are different in climate science because the arguments have become heavily politicised. To say that the dogmas are wrong has become politically incorrect. As a result, the media generally exaggerate the degree of consensus and also exaggerate the importance of the questions.
I am glad we are now talking about more general issues and not about technical details. I do not pretend to be an expert about the details.
From: Steve Connor
To: Freeman Dyson
Well, I’ll try to keep it general, but it may involve talking specifics. One of my own academic mentors once explained to me that science is really just a very useful intellectual tool for teaching us about the world, just as philosophy teaches us how to think. The trouble for non-scientists is that we have to rely on professional scientists to tell us what they are finding out. But as you say yourself, it is even difficult sometimes for scientists in one field of endeavour to truly get to grips with the details in a different discipline. So, as a layman, I look at the wealth of evidence being presented to me on climate change, and the qualifications and track record of those presenting their results in the peer-reviewed literature, and I make a judgement. Do I believe in the small minority of mavericks, many of whom do not have a published track record, or the vast majority who do? Do I go with the heterodox or the orthodox?
Politicians of course have to do the same but they have to make important decisions, or not as the case may be. And the problem with climate change, as you know, is that if we wait until we are absolutely certain beyond any doubt whatsover that global temperatures are rising dangerously as a result of carbon dioxide emissions, it will be too late to do anything about it because of the in-built inertia of the climate system. Even if we stopped carbon dioxide emissions overnight immediately, temperatures would still be expected to increase for some years to come before they stabilise.
So I guess my question would be, what if you are wrong? What if all the other scientists connected with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UK Met Office, NASA, NOAA, the World Meteorological Organisation, and just about every reputable university and institute doing research on climate science, happen to be right? Isn’t it a bit risky for me and the rest of the general public to dismiss this vast canon of climate science as just “fuss” about global warming when all I’ve got to go on is a minority opinion?
From: Freeman Dyson
To: Steve Connor
I have this unfortunate habit of answering email immediately, which is in the long run not sustainable. So I will answer this one and then remain silent for three days.
Of course I am not expecting you to agree with me. The most I expect is that you might listen to what I am saying. I am saying that all predictions concerning climate are highly uncertain. On the other hand, the remedies proposed by the experts are enormously costly and damaging, especially to China and other developing countries. On a smaller scale, we have seen great harm done to poor people around the world by the conversion of maize from a food crop to an energy crop. This harm resulted directly from the political alliance between American farmers and global-warming politicians. Unfortunately the global warming hysteria, as I see it, is driven by politics more than by science. If it happens that I am wrong and the climate experts are right, it is still true that the remedies are far worse than the disease that they claim to cure.
I wish that The Independent would live up to its name and present a less one-sided view of the issues.
From: Steve Connor
To: Freeman Dyson
Just to return to Alfred Wegener for one moment. Although he wasn’t the first to note that the continents seem to slot together like a jigsaw, such as the west coast of Africa and the east coast of South America, he was a visionary who actually went out to find the geological evidence to support his idea of continental drift. However, as you say, he didn’t have a mechanism for how this “drift” happened. So it is perhaps understandable that many of his peers dismissed his theory in the 1930s. It was only with the discovery of plate tectonics 30 years later that everyone could agree on the true mechanism, which replaced Wegener’s discredited theory of the continents somehow forging their way through the crust of the ocean basins. This doesn’t in any way undermine his heroic contribution to science, and I say heroic in the true sense of the word given that he died in 1930 on his 50th birthday while trekking across Greenland – his body was never recovered and is now presumably encased in ice and moving slowly to the sea.
The point I want to make is that it may well have been right for the scientific “establishment” of the 1930s to be sceptical of Wegener’s theory until more convincing evidence emerged, which it eventually did. The experts, rather than the public, could see the flaws in Wegener’s argument which is why there was a scientific consensus against him. You are saying that the situation today with global warming is similar. However, surely an important difference this time is that it is the scientific consensus that is warning us of the dangers of continuing emissions of carbon dioxide, and that this consensus is saying quite categorically that if we wait until utterly definitive evidence emerges of dangerous climate change it will be too late to do anything about it.
One of the problems I have with the climate “sceptics” is that they keep changing their arguments. First they say that there is no such thing as global warming, thereby dismissing all the many thousands of records of land and sea temperatures over the past century or so. Then they say that carbon dioxide emissions are not causing the Earth to warm up, thereby defying basic physics. If that fails, they say that a bit of extra heat or carbon dioxide might not be that bad – it may be true that more people die from cold than heat, but how many die of drought and famine? And true, carbon dioxide boosts plant growth, but did you see the recent research suggesting a possible link between two atypical droughts in the Amazon in 2005 and 2010, when the rainforest became a net emitter of carbon dioxide, with higher sea-surface temperatures in the tropical Atlantic? Plants need water, not just carbon dioxide.
And if all else seems to fail, the final line of argument of the “climate sceptics” is that, “OK, carbon dioxide may have something to do with rising temperatures but what the heck, we can’t do anything about it because the cure is worse than the disease”. It seems to me that although there are still many uncertainties, much of the science of climate change is pretty settled, more so than you will admit to. To continue to report on “both sides” as you suggest is rather like ringing up the Flat Earth Society and asking them to comment on new discoveries in plate tectonics.
From: Freeman Dyson
To: Steve Connor
My three days of silence are over, and I decided I have no wish to continue this discussion. Your last message just repeats the same old party line that we have many good reasons to distrust. You complain that people who are sceptical about the party line do not agree about other things. Why should we agree? The whole point of science is to encourage disagreement and keep an open mind. That is why I blame The Independent for seriously misleading your readers. You give them the party line and discourage them from disagreeing.
With all due respect, I say good-bye and express the hope that you will one day join the sceptics. Scepticism is as important for a good journalist as it is for a good scientist.
Yours sincerely, Freeman Dyson
From: Steve Connor
To: Freeman Dyson
Sorry you feel that way. Thank you anyway.
Steve Connor
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/letters-to-a-heretic-an-email-conversation-with-climate-change-sceptic-professor-freeman-dyson-2224912.html
Freeman Dyson website
http://www.sns.ias.edu/~dyson/
More climate change discussions
http://www.supereco.com/person/freeman-dyson/
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