Copenhagen ended without an agreement but a lot of progress has been made, so we shouldn't be too discouraged.

For the first time ever, specific proposals have been discussed to fund REDD (reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation) and there's widespread support from many countries to put a price on the preservation and rehabilitation of the rainforests, and to allocate funds to do so.

The "accord" presented (a five-page draft document presented by the UNFCC without specific signatories and certainly not ratified) contains a statement of funding REDD with up to $30 billion during the period prior to the expiry of Kyoto (i.e. 2010-2012) and setting up a "Copenhagen Green Climate Fund" that will put together up to $100 billion per year by 2020 to "address" the needs of developing countries.

This so-called accord is remarkably unspecific, but the explicit inclusion of REDD in all this is very good news.

The devil is in the detail and all of it is missing. It's not clear where this money is going to come from and how it's going to be spent, when and if put together, and in particular the REDD scheme needs a detailed protocol of verification and disclosure so that it achieves the right objective. We are not there yet.

This accord was put together in haste pressumably in the early hours of Friday morning and tweaked by world leaders during the day, and by all accounts it's a very sloppy document, containing meaningless statements such as the intention of keeping global warming under 2C (I am afraid we don't have such supernatural powers or control over the laws of physics). The Appendix contains a table of emission reduction targets for 2020 and it is tellingly blank. A statement of intentions that emission reductions would be worked out sooner rather than later during 2010 would have reassured the markets.

The first predictable reaction to this uncertainty has been a nose-dive in the price of carbon. The long term damage is that carbon markets are left to their own without any clear sense of direction.

Copenhagen has shown that the UN can always be counted on to mount a circus, and a very slow moving one. Perhaps this demonstrates that  serious climate change agreement can only happen outside of this framework.  After all, world leaders haven't taken this meeting seriously, only showing up in the last minute and trying to dash off a poorly structured document just to save face.

Actually one can say that we don't need the nearly 200 countries that took part in Copenhagen to agree on a consistent and strong climate change treaty. We just need to put together the top 10 emitters around a table and agree on specific emission cuts and the logistics -and  costs- of how to achieve them. The agreement will be global, but to be blunt, we don't particularly need to know the opinion of countries whose emissions are negligible - the emissions game has relatively few players. And more to the point, we certainly do not need the oil/gas rich countries to sit around the table determined to derail the talks, as has happened in Copenhagen.

The challenge in all this is to get the US to extricate itself from the financial interests of the oil industry. It is difficult. We already know that we will never persuade the likes of Saudi Arabia or Russia to support global decarbonisation and turn the taps off. Decarbonisation will only happen by addressing energy policy consistently and creating capacity for low-carbon energy, effectively reducing demand for fossil fuels as much as possible (the supply side is not something we can aspire to change).

Mikel Susperregi

Perhaps one of the most significant statements that has come out of Copenhagen this week is that the US is not prepared to commit public funds to pay for the “technology transfer” to decarbonise China.  

It’s not exactly surprising that a debt laden nation does not want to give billions of dollars (and go deeper into the red) to a country with significant foreign reserves and a trade surplus that makes it better equipped than any to decarbonise itself. The US believes other developed countries are worthier recipients of the technology transfer fund (now estimated at around $100bn per annum), and all of them put together do match in order of magnitude (around 6 billion tonnes of CO2)  the environmental impact of China’s emissions (and future potential emissions). 

This is not what the Chinese wanted to hear though, and it could give them the pretext to walk or blame the US for the failure of the talks. However the US position makes perfect sense. After all China is already the single largest recipient of carbon trading funds within the CDM, and as carbon trading forecast to boom exponentially in the coming years, China will continue to receive billions of dollars every year for carbon credits originated there. In conclusion, it can expect to receive the lion’s share of private money from carbon trading even if it will not get any of the US taxpayer’s dollars.  

It is important that in addition to the technology transfer, we allocate aid to rainforest countries to protect their assets. Retaining and expanding the Earth’s capacity to absorb carbon is as important --if not more-- than cutting emissions. 

London’s ambitions to become a low-carbon leader 

London is already a world leader in finance, and carbon finance in particular. The office of the Mayor of London now has ambitions to make London the greenest city in the world. 

Yesterday I attended a workshop of business leaders at City Hall to discuss the prospects of decarbonising London’s transport and businesses, and it was very interesting to see that the discussions on transport were dominated by the electric car, which got most of the discussion time, rather than public transport. The consensus was that the use of electric cars should be incentivised more strongly.  

At the moment the borough of Westminster is the leading example of central London boroughs in allowing free parking to EVs in all pay-and-display bays. Westminster’s example should be adopted by all local authorities, also introducing a larger number of recharging points. 

Electric cars will prepare London to be decarbonised in a radical way. The important challenge then will be that the increased demand in electricity should be sourced from renewables and low-carbon sources, such as nuclear energy. 

Businesses also depend on clean energy to decarbonise their operations, so fundamentally the decarbonisation of London relies pivotally on a consistent low-carbon energy generation strategy.   

Scientists at the Met Office are responding to the unprecedented attack on the science of climate change by putting together a statement in support of the overwhelming scientific evidence demonstrating global warming, that will be signed by many in the science community in the UK. I think the list of signatories will be long.  

The timing of the attacks is significant, and the sceptics, emboldened by a handful of hacked emails are being very orchestrated. The question is who is behind all this. The Times and the Telegraph are running stories today suggesting that the FSB might be the culprit behind the attacks. (Well, thankfully no climate scientist has tasted polonium - yet). Apparently the hacking originated from the Siberian town of Tomsk, also known for originating other notorious cyber attacks, such as on Estonia and Georgia. And the data was hosted by a company called Tomline, allegedly with a shadowy track record. 

In Russia there’re many IT companies operating as hackers-for-hire working for international cyber terrorism, so ultimately anybody could be behind the attack. It is clear though that it has taken some effort. 13 years of data and thousands of emails have been processed, read and selected snippets fed to the world’s media just in the nick of time for the Copenhagen talks.  

The access and echo that the stories have received in some of the world’s most influential media is also significant. Today Forbes.com runs a battery of stories fuelling the sceptic discourse, and bloggers in the Telegraph and Republican media and networks are running similar stories. Obviously no one is suggesting that these media are bankrolled by a conspiracy of sceptics, but there are many corporate interests to keep the fossil fuel tap open, rather than closed, and quite simply the largest and most successful companies in the world have made their fortunes out of oil, gas and coal. It is not inconceivable that some of these interests are backing the access to the media that the sceptic discourse is enjoying.  

In order cases, such as the Spectator in the UK, it’s pure ignorance.  

The surprising thing of all this is that we’ve had a relatively easy ride so far. It’d be naïve to think that countries like Saudi Arabia, Russia and corporate interests in the United States will stand by while the climate change movement succeeds in securing an international agreement that will undermine their key financial interests. Saudi Arabia and Russia make no secrets of their intention to derail Copenhagen but maybe this is simply a taste of things to come, and the heat is bound to go up and gloves to come off as we move forward. 

After all American oil companies succeeded in putting a stop on the electric car industry for many years, and they are certainly not above dirty tricks. I think now things are different – they know that the scientific evidence is overwhelming and even they need a planet to live on, so there is a limit to the resistance that the oil and gas industry will put up, but they won’t go without a fight. 

It’s good to keep the focus on the right place and away from these distractions.  Nicholas Stern from the LSE writes today on the FT an excellent article emphasising that business should be the driving force to take our economies to decarbonisation (and to fund it also in developing countries). This is key, because our governments will certainly not be able to afford it.    

Writing in yesterday’s Nature, a group of academics says that if Copenhagen leads to a “weak” agreement then temperature rises could reach 4C, and to stay under 2C we have to aim for the most ambitious and dramatic emission cuts (although as discussed yesterday emission cuts don’t guarantee any outcome).  

A global temperature rise of 4C would mean plummeting food yields, water scarcity for about 3 bn people, heatwaves, floods, droughts.. It’s the climate porn scenario sceptics talk about. But most importantly 40% of ecosystems would switch from being carbon sinks to becoming net carbon emitters, and hundreds of gigatonnes of CO2 –dwarfing by orders of magnitude all the carbon we have emitted-- that is now locked away in vast volumes of mile-deep permafrost could be released within a span of decades. Almost all high-latitude forest and large parts of the Amazon forest could be lost.  

The problem with any global warming prediction is that it leads to a decrease in the planet’s carbon sinks. Forests are affected by warming and they are at risk if the water cycle is disrupted in key geographical latitudes.  

It may be the case that all efforts to tackle reforestation in the tropics and rainforest owning countries will be in vain by the end of the century if global warming changes our ecosystems significantly. This means that in order to plan ahead to manage mitigation we need to look for efficient carbon sinks, extrapolating what “efficient” means not now but in several decades’ time, in a warmer world. This could mean that large-scale reforestation in Europe and the United States can be in the long term a clever thing to do as it may be the case that in future tropical rainforests will be net carbon emitters and forests in higher latitudes could possibly lock away carbon more rapidly and as efficiently as tropical rainforests do now.  

After all, restoring Europe’s forests to about 75% of their natural extent in the nineteenth century could increase the Earth’s carbon sink capacity by as much as 10%, and this percentage would be much greater if Europe becomes a warmer and wetter place.    

One of the most important targets that will be discussed in Copenhagen is to limit the global rise in temperatures to 2C.

Politicians like to talk about this, to have a clear picture of the extent of global warming, and 2C is widely accepted as the boundary where we cross into really dangerous territory. The problem with this argument is that we don’t have any control over global temperatures, we can only control our emissions.  
 

Sir David King rightly says in today’s FT that we mustn’t lose sight of the real objective, which is to keep the CO2 concentration under 450 ppm. (I would add to that: well under 450 ppm). Even at that level our chances of a temperature increase of 2C or lower will be less than 50%. If we continue with “business as usual”, we are adding 2 ppm per year to the existing concentration and we will reach and cross the 450 ppm threshold in the year 2045.  

I think it’s important to emphasise that curbing emissions is all we can do and we do not have the ability to curb temperatures, so setting a target at 2C is meaningless. 

For any given level of concentration of CO2 there’s a probability distribution for the resulting temperature rises. This looks like a bell-shaped curve where the tail on the right is “fatter” than on the left – this means that the likeliest temperature is not exactly at the peak but slightly shifted to the right. For the concentration of 450 ppm of GHG (in CO2-equivalent) the likeliest range (the bulk of the peak of the distribution) is between 2C and 3.5C, and the likeliest temperature increase is 2.5C (in order to have a fifty-fifty chance to reach 2C we should be at about 430 ppm).  

Even today, if all GHG emissions dropped to zero, the likelihood of a 2C would not be negligible: the probability is about 15%. This is low, but it is not within the realm of the impossible. Our constant excess of emissions shifts the probability curve constantly to higher values and the probability of reaching higher increases grows every year.  

I think we need to face the possibility that even within our best endeavours staying below 2C might be beyond our reach, and we need to plan ahead for a very different world in a few decades’ time, where we can anticipate that countries will struggle to get their necessary share of the planet’s resources, especially water.  

The most meaningful target to aim for is to restore the equilibrium of the planet’s carbon cycle. That is the long term goal. And to achieve that we need to curb emissions to remain not under 450 ppm, but under 350 ppm, which is the natural concentration that our atmosphere can sustainably cope with.

When economists sit down and scratch their heads to find a solution for a problem, the first word that comes to mind is “tax”.  So it’s no wonder that many leading economists of the world think that a carbon tax will solve global warming.  

Unless a carbon tax is used as a form of revenue for environmental purposes and to fund decarbonisation, it’d be a hard sell. In ordinary circumstances there is no appetite for new taxes, and in the current climate to sell the idea of a carbon tax is nearly impossible.  

Usually the idea of a carbon tax is discussed versus cap-and-trade as though they’re mutually exclusive. There is no objective reason why this should be so. A carbon tax can be introduced in developed countries as a form of value added tax to reflect the carbon footprint of goods and services and to incentivise decarbonisation.

In this way, when products follow a strict code of carbon disclosure, they can be taxed according to their environmental cost (and this could include toxicity and level of sustainability, not just GHG emissions). This tax could then be reclaimed by businesses who offset their emissions or fund projects to remedy their environmental impact.   

The revenue collected will then be used to give grants to those businesses who take measures to reduce their impact.  In effect this form of carbon tax creates three tiers where those businesses who minimise their environmental impact receive the greatest financial incentive.  

A uniform carbon price or carbon tax worldwide would be completely unrealistic because of the huge wealth gap between developed and developing nations.  

Cap and trade has got a bad reputation because in the EU it has miserably failed to deliver emission cuts. CDM is also widely criticised for delivering carbon credits of questionable additionality, creating a bloated market of carbon assets to the service of financial interests but not necessarily the best formula for climate change mitigation. This can and should change in future.  

Potentially carbon trading could deliver the economic benefits that developing countries require to fund decarbonisation. Public money alone will not be sufficient to fund a technology transfer that developing countries need to grow and curb their GHG emissions at the same time. At the moment, developing countries are taking positions to show up at Copenhagen and demand around $500bn per year for “technology transfer” whilst developed nations are only prepared to commit $100bn per year (and even that might be tricky to pull off).   

It is probably too late now to expect that Copenhagen will give us a global emissions trading mechanism that will effectively make up the shortfall but this should be articulated sometime in the next year, as it is our best chance to fund decarbonisation, rather than through a carbon tax.   

I think it’s unhelpful to have the climate sceptics trumpeting at this stage the contents of some private emails that in their view demonstrate global warming is a big con. It is an unwelcome distraction from the Herculean task that is on the agenda next week.  

If a bundle of informal emails from the head of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia is the best they can do to underpin their case, then bring on the debate, I say. That won’t change the fact that the excess concentration of CO2 is retaining heat in the atmosphere, and if they want to explain to me by which thermodynamic process the excess 15 gigatons of CO2 that we are pumping every year into an already out-of-kilter carbon cycle is having no impact on the heat balance, then I am more than willing to sit back and listen. 

 The leaked emails apparently show discussions between Prof Phil Jones at CRU and others where the sceptics claim there’s evidence of tampering with the data and hiding the reality of global cooling. This “evidence” is very questionable. Scientists as a matter of routine remove statistical aberrations from graphs when processing data, although the methodology must the made explicit in the published papers. Mike Mann, the first scientist to publish in Nature in 1998 the famous “hockey stick” plot showing a peak of temperature in the last century is believed to have processed data in this way.  

In fact the whole point in assessing global trends is to remove local variations from the data. Phil Jones discussed on an email a methodology to remove local variations from tree ring data, a suggestion that from the scientific point of view doesn’t sound crazy to me.  

There’s the more serious charge of an apparent reluctance to comply with  Freedom of Information requests --with suggestions to delete compromising emails--, which if true would be illegal. There clearly needs to be an investigation into all this, including the illegal hacking of private email. After all even scientists are entitled to their private chats without expecting these to be all over the papers. 

The funny thing that’s come out of all this is the indignation in some of the papers and blogs about the scientists concerned. How can we trust scientists! They are all plotting to keep their jobs! Follow the money! They are fiddling with the data to keep this global warming con going and get more and more grants! 

Well, I should know a thing or two about how scientists work, being one myself --  and the first (and most important) scientific truth in my opinion is that, for every crazy idea you can come up with, you will always find a scientific following (often of very respectable tenured people). You can grab any journal on Theoretical Physics and find tons of articles on alternative theories of gravity. Now, you probably know that General Relativity is widely accepted as the paradigm of how the force of gravity works. That doesn’t stop lots of researchers from publishing their suggested alternative scenarios, most of which are incompatible. I wouldn’t dare to call them sceptics or verbally abuse them. It’s how it is – science in the making is a big mess of conflicting ideas. 

And that is in the realm of the published work. Let us not even go to private email, where you may be brainstorming to yourself while emailing a colleague all sorts of questions or insecurities about your theory. One would die of shame at even the possibility of seeing these embryonic thoughts in print on a national newspaper! 

This is why I wouldn’t be surprised to see climate scientists doubt their own beliefs -  I would expect them to, if they are doing their job.  

I wouldn’t like to badmouth East Anglia University - in every other respect an academic backwater except for the CRU’s close involvement with the IPCC. However, I didn’t know that the CRU was the epicentre of climate change research in the UK, let alone in the world.  

Well, it isn’t. To cite an example, the Department of Physics at Oxford, with a 5* top rating in research excellence has launched an excellent site, trillionthtonne.org, to illustrate that for the most likely temperature increase to be under 2C then cumulative emissions must be under 1 trillion tonnes of carbon. The site shows a counter that moves forward keeping track of all emissions and our decreasing likelihood of achieving the 2C target.  

The list of eminent scientific institutions with few or no links to the IPCC but with a clear acceptance of the global warming paradigm is immense. The sceptics only peddle the lone voices such as Ian Pilmer and non-scientists like Lord Lawson. Where are their arguments? They are most welcome to publish their research and I am most willing to listen to their arguments, if indeed there’re any.

Mikel