Copenhagen has been an unmitigated disaster.
The abject failure of the historical and the future major emitters to agree to minor cuts in their income growth is very likely to lead to massive disruption and loss of life within 50 years. It has highlighted the extent to which we tend to believe what is convenient rather than what is likely.
I applaud the resolution by the “real third world” that the global temperature increase must be restricted to less than 1.50 and that we must stabilise CO2 concentrations at 350ppm. This is roughly what the science requires and these are the people who will be most affected, either because they live at sea level or because they are subsistence farmers who will have to deal with increasing variability in their climate.
However the so called developed world and the rapidly developing countries have tried throughout the conference to water down the resolutions and remove any concrete emission based goals. I feel the USA must take the major blame for the failure, as they have just not put any realistic offers on the table despite Obama’s posturing, and seem to think they can bully the rest of the world into doing something they are obviously not prepared to do. However Chinese per capita emissions are now quite close to many European countries (2007 figures China 4.8, Romania 4.6, Portugal 5.7, Switzerland 5.8 and France 6.4) and are still growing extremely fast. In China, India and many other emerging countries the low emissions from the large bulk of the rural population is disguising the fact that many urban areas are already well above European levels.
So I am afraid James Hansen, wh0 has been one of the most hard line of climatologists, and whose forecasts have often been described as alarmist, only to be proven correct later, has again been vindicated when he said any agreement likely to emerge from the negotiations would be so deeply flawed that it would be better to start again from scratch.
A couple more quotes from the conference. Evo Morales: “Our objective is to save humanity and not just half of humanity.” And Hugo Chávez: “The total income of the 500 richest people in the world is greater than the 450 million poorest… We have to change direction.”
In an article called Selling our Future Lester Brown states
“China now consumes more grain than the United States. It consumes almost twice as much meat, roughly three times as much coal, and nearly four times as much steel. But what would happen if China’s 1.3 billion people were to consume commodities at the same rate as the United States’ 300 million? For this exercise, we look at how an 8 percent annual economic growth rate in China (a conservative projection) would put per capita income in China at U.S. levels by 2024. At that point, if each person in China were to consume paper at the current American rate, China would need more paper than is produced worldwide today (there go the world’s forests). China would require over half of the current world grain supply. China would also need 90 million barrels of oil per day; however, the world currently produces less than 86 million and is unlikely to produce much more than that in the future. These projections serve not to blame China for its consumption but rather to illustrate that the western economic model—with meat-rich diets, fossil-fuel powered utilities, and automobile-dependent transportation—will not work on a global scale because there are simply not enough resources.”
We are within five years of reaching 400ppm which has a 25% chance of exceeding the two degree “guardrail” and precipitating positive feedbacks that seem to have caused several previous mass extinctions. It seems obvious that we need an emergency effort, but the developed world’s politicians have just told us we can fix the problems by recycling our toothpicks and sticking a few bandaids on things. This will end in tears.
James Hansen was again criticized for calling for a campaign of civil disobedience. I suspect this is now the only alternative to catastrophe.
