open Democracy News Analysis - Climate change, global politics , Andrew Pendleton - Comments

precycled on "The global politics of climate-change: after the G8 "

precycled — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 08:04:56 +0000

Imagine you lived in a (rather unfortunate) town with huge tracts of ice at both ends. Many townsfolk were worrying because the ice was suddenly and dramatically melting. "Don't worry", you say, "I've noticed that it's getting cooler in my house so there can't be any warming problem". I would humbly suggest considering the massive flows of (latent) heat being sucked up by the phase change from ice to water. If the remaining ice is telling us something, the message is probably not, "don't worry there's no problem".

Thanks to the IPPR for this article and the wise emphasis on collaboration throughout civil society. I run a think-tank called BlindSpot which explores opportunities for rapidly reversing tough global problems. If it helps your Global Climate Network I can contribute my research, through the NATO Science Programme, on a radical economic approach to climate stabilisation and global security. Please see my UN page http://www.climateneutral.unep.org/cnn_members.aspx?m=195 for a summary called BlindSpot Climate Briefing.

Thanks also for the link to the book, Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change. On that link it costs £80, but it's also available as a free download from DEFRA's page http://www.defra.gov.uk/environment/climatechange/research/dangerous-cc/index.htm. This book is a useful stepping stone to more relevant work which considers how to reduce atmospheric waste gases, not just waste emissions. There is a nice paper on biomass/bio-char by Peter Read and an important point by Terry Barker and friends that climate investments add to economic growth by boosting spending and global resource productivity.

James Greyson

Blythboy on "The global politics of climate-change: after the G8 "

Blythboy — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 17:02:32 +0000

I quote from Chris Brooker,

"The idea that the IPCC represents any kind of genuine scientific "consensus" is a complete fiction.

A gain and again there have been examples of how evidence has been manipulated to promote the official line, the most glaring instance being the notorious "hockey stick".

Initially the advocates of global warming had one huge problem. Evidence from all over the world indicated that the earth was hotter 1,000 years ago than it is today.

This was so generally accepted that the first two IPCC reports included a graph, based on work by Sir John Houghton himself, showing that temperatures were higher in what is known as the Mediaeval Warming period than they were in the 1990s.

The trouble was that this blew a mighty hole in the thesis that warming was caused only by recent man-made CO2.

Then in 1999 an obscure young US physicist, Michael Mann, came up with a new graph like nothing seen before.

Instead of the familiar rises and falls in temperature over the past 1,000 years, the line ran virtually flat, only curving up dramatically at the end in a hockey-stick shape to show recent decades as easily the hottest on record.

This was just what the IPCC wanted, The Mediaeval Warming had simply been wiped from the record.
When its next report came along in 2001, Mann's graph was given top billing, appearing right at the top of page one of the Summary for Policymakers and five more times in the report proper.

But then two Canadian computer analysts, Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, got to work on how Mann had arrived at his graph.

When, with great difficulty, they eventually persuaded Mann to hand over his data, it turned out he had built into his programme an algorithm which would produce a hockey stick shape whatever data were fed into it.

Even numbers from the phonebook would come out looking like a hockey stick.

By the time of its latest report, last year, the IPCC had an even greater problem. Far from continuing to rise in line with rising CO2, as its computer models predicted they should, global temperatures since the abnormally hot year of 1998 had flattened out at a lower level and were even falling – a trend confirmed by Nasa's satellite readings over the past 18 months.

So pronounced has this been that even scientists supporting the warmist thesis now concede that, due to changes in ocean currents, we can expect a decade or more of "cooling", before the "underlying warming trend" reappears.

The point is that none of this was predicted by the computer models on which the IPCC relies.
Among the ever-growing mountain of informed criticism of the IPCC's methods, a detailed study by an Australian analyst John McLean (to find it, Google "Prejudiced authors, prejudiced findings") shows just how incestuously linked are most of the core group of academics whose models underpin everything the IPCC wishes us to believe about global warming.

The significance of the past year is not just that the vaunted "consensus" on the forces driving our climate has been blown apart as never before, but that a new "counter-consensus" has been emerging among thousands of scientists across the world, given expression in last March's Manhattan Declaration by the so-called Non-Governmental Panel on Climate Change.

This wholly repudiates the IPCC process, showing how its computer models are hopelessly biased, based on unreliable data and programmed to ignore many of the genuine drivers of climate change, from variations in solar activity to those cyclical shifts in ocean currents.

As it was put by Roger Cohen, a senior US physicist formerly involved with the IPCC process, who long accepted its orthodoxy: "I was appalled at how flimsy the case is. I was also appalled at the behaviour of many of those who helped produce the IPCC reports and by many of those who promote it.
"In particular I am referring to the arrogance, the activities aimed at shutting down debate; the outright fabrications; the mindless defence of bogus science; and the politicisation of the IPCC process and the science process itself."

Climate Guru on "The global politics of climate-change: after the G8 "

Climate Guru — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 11:10:14 +0000

This is a very clear account of some of the doublespeak that comes out of G8 leaders. Well done to the ippr for bringing together civil society in this new network.

Climate change, global politics , Andrew Pendleton

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 10:43:57 +0000

The stock response of many campaigners and activists to the sorts of headline announcements that emerge from G8 summits is that the devil is in the detail. Whether the topic is development aid or climate change, their consistently wary advice is: "Read the small print". In the aftermath of the 2008 summit in Hokkaido, Japan, the reverse is true: for although the Japanese government hosts had sought to make climate change a central theme of the gathering, it is the lack of detail in the final summit statement on this issue that bedevils the G8 leaders' approach.

Andrew Pendleton is a senior research fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research (ippr) in London.

The media presentation might suggest otherwise - for since the meeting of the world's leading economies on 7-9 July came to a close, an army of headlines, features and opinion-pieces has been branded with the words "at least 50%" - the G8's agreed aim for cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. In semantic terms, this is a step forward from the Heiligendamm, Germany summit communiqué in 2007, when the leaders said only that they would "seriously consider" such a target.

True, words matter - but so does the thinking behind them. So while any movement that might ease and hasten United Nations negotiations on a new, global climate agreement is welcome, fixing on numerical emissions cuts without explaining their significance or how they can be achieved could prove unhelpful.

In this light, a closer look at the Hokkaido statement reveals three critical piece of missing information.

First, the G8 chose not to specify a baseline year and so left open the question "at least 50% of what?" In climate-change circles, 1990 is most often used as the yardstick against which cuts are judged, but US emissions have increased by 16% between then and now. It is easy to see why the G8 left open this question - to get United States buy-in - but it renders their promise lame before it has even entered the race.

Also in openDemocracy on the G8 summit in Japan:

Simon Maxwell, "Development in a downturn" (4 July 2008),

Ann Pettifor, "The G8 in a global mess: 1920s and 1980s lessons" (7 July 2008),

Noriko Hama, "The recycling of the G8: ghosts at the table" (11 July 2008).

Second, the G8's emissions-reduction ambitions are global. What this implies is that the US and the European Union, China and India - and everywhere else, all the way to Burkina Faso - have (at a minimum) to halve their emissions by 2050. The leading countries of the global south who were invited to Hokkaido for talks - Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa (the self-styled G5) - were, understandably, very quick to highlight this inequity.

While much is said and written about rapidly rising emissions in these and other developing countries, they are still arriviste emitters. In historical terms it is the United States, Britain, and Germany that have done more than others to over-saturate the atmosphere with carbon. Even now, citizens of the EU emit twice per head than their Chinese neighbours and are many times wealthier.

Third, while a long-term target for cutting emissions is an important political reference-point, policy today would be influenced much more keenly by shorter-term targets. In 2007, the United Nations's climate experts challenged leaders of industrialised countries to set 2020 reduction targets of between 25% and 40% below 1990 levels. The G8 have not risen to this challenge.

A thinking cap

These omissions of detail may prove politically unwise as well unhelpful to the international talks. The G5 states met up for their own summit before joining in the G8 discussions. This, as South Africa's environment minister Marthinus van Schalkwyk subsequently noted, produced more detail, clarity and - importantly - unity on climate change than the G8 meeting. For example, the G5 argue that industrialised nations ought to aim for an 80%-95% cut by 2050, leaving poorer nations with a much lighter load and more resources to lift people's standards of living.

openDemocracy writers debate the politics of climate change:

John Elkington & Geoff Lye, "Climate change's right and wrong fixes" (2 February 2007),

Dougald Hine, "Climate change: a question of democracy" (2 March 2007),

Oliver Tickell, "Live Earth's limits" (6 July 2007),

David Shearman, "Democracy and climate change: a story of failure" (7 November 2007),

Camilla Toulmin, "Bali: no time to lose" (30 November 2007),

openDemocracy writers, "Was Bali a success?" (18 December 2007),

Mike Hulme, "Climate change: from issue to magnifier" (19 October 2007).

True, the very fact that Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa are relative newcomers to the league of high emitters and continue to emit less per capita gives them a certain right to demand more ambitious action from their G8 counterparts. But there is political ballast as well as moral force in their case: as well as being more financially liquid than Europe and the US, some of the G5 have more detailed plans for addressing climate change than some of the G8.

To remain relevant in these shifting circumstances, G8 leaders need to develop more active and coherent thinking that matches the initiative of their G5 counterparts. The latest scientific evidence suggests that even halving world emissions by 2050 (from a 1990 baseline) will fall some way short of avoiding dangerous climate change - but in working towards that much-heralded "50%" goal, what will matter politically is who takes what share of whatever cut is eventually seen as necessary. What does the G8 think? The small print at Hokkaido offers few clues.

A global network

The nub of this is that the politics of winning commitment from the developed world to ambitious emissions-reduction targets are very tough, especially during an economic downturn. The global north and south are divided by fear and mistrust, and an orthodoxy of economic competitiveness still eclipses most other considerations. It is here that civil society, including independent think-tanks, can play a crucial role in developing practical ideas that address the difficult political questions head on.

The US-based climate initiative EcoEquity, for example, has produced some revealing calculations of principle-based fair shares in its Greenhouse Development Rights proposal. The Institute of Public Policy Research (ippr), meanwhile, is bringing together some of the brightest and most influential analysts of climate policy from around the world in the Global Climate Network.

This collaboration between think-tanks in countries key to avoiding climate catastrophe will soon be hard at work helping to propose practical and positive solutions to the hard politics of action on climate change. We believe we can help governments beat a pathway towards an ambitious and fair post- 2012 agreement. But we must act fast, lest the devil takes possession not only of the detail but the entire soul of the climate-change debate.

Average rating

(2 votes)