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.    

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

Indonesia is the world's third biggest CO2 emitter, owing to its forestry emissions. According to the World Bank, its emission figures for 2007 are 3 billion tons of CO2 per annum (about half that of the US), and this is mostly from illegal logging and palm oil plantations for biofuels.

Indonesia is the best example of how key it is to preserve the world's rainforests.

For a population of 230 million, many of whom live under the poverty line, this means the carbon footprint per capita is 11.1 tons p.a. (which is 2.2 tons more than EU emissions).

Indonesia emits 5 times as much through deforestation than other means (energy production), so its emissions problem could be addressed rapidly without a radical transformation of its economy, but simply through forestry preservation. This would bring its emissions down to about 450 million tons p.a.

In Copenhagen the UN-REDD programme (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in developing countries) is going to play a key role in determining emission cuts in countries like Indonesia (as well as other smaller rainforest-owning countries). However, UN-REDD is still at its infancy. At the moment it has only 7 programmes, with a trust fund of $37 million, which was only set up a year ago. This is loose change to even start addressing the problem.

Indonesia has a project approved in the UN-REDD framework for $5.6m and the province of Papua New Guinea another one for $6.4m. Potentially Indonesia should be the main recipient of these funds together with Brazil.

The REDD trust fund is at the moment smaller than the budget of a round-of-the-mill Hollywood movie.

These are tiny figures to create any form of incentive for a country where the palm oil industry is growing at 13% p.a. and there are huge financial interests to continue with deforestation and the drainage of peatlands.

Papua's forests in the island of New Guinea have a vast wilderness spanning 42 million hectares, and its carbon sink capacity is comparable to the EU's annual GHG emissions. At the current rate of deforestation (such as is experienced in Bormeo and Sumatra), most of it will be gone by 2030. This is what we stand to lose - it will cause an alarming reduction of the Earth's capacity to sequester CO2 from the atmosphere.

My concern with UN-REDD funds is that this system can only work if the government officials involved make good use of the funds. Indonesia's notoriously corrupt regime is a doubtful candidate to carry out this task and the likelihood is that forest degradation will continue, with or without the REDD subsidies.

Illegal logging is directly correlated with poverty, and the root causes of it have to be addressed. Otherwise loggers are bound to move away from protected areas and carry on logging elsewhere. This activity is virtually impossible to police in large areas of forest.

Indonesia needs to articulate a credible proposal to be a worthy recipient of UN-REDD funds. It must eradicate both illegal and legal logging and confine land conversion to areas of shrub and grassland, where palm oil can be produced, not through the depletion of rainforests. Once it can show it can manage its rainforests as protected carbon sinks and ultimately as financial assets then the case for UN-REDD funds will be a no-brainer.

Brunella

Just a quick reflection on the prospects of a deal in Copenhagen. A Sunday afternoon is a perfect time to recap the positions of the different countries and conjecture how likely it is for them to find a converging position.

What will happen if they don't? Kyoto comes to an end in 2012 but if there is no agreement on a new treaty there is in principle no reason why countries wouldn't agree to extend the validity of Kyoto, particularly to enable the continuation of CDM and carbon trading. Developing countries would vastly favour this outcome (particularly because it lets them off the hook re emission reductions), but realistically they are aware that climate change is serious, and they realise they need to participate in curbing emissions at home and turning to low-carbon technologies to continue their economic development.

China and Brazil are two examples of developing economies with a high degree of scientific awareness of climate change issues. In particular Brazil - they pioneered some global warming prediction models that have been widely used in the scientific community. The Chinese also, contrary to popular belief, do not need convincing that global warming is happening, and if they appear irresponsible to the world by building one coal fired power station after another every single week it is more to do with the fact that they believe that the onus is on the countries with the largest cumulative share of carbon emissions (read US and UK) to bear the burden of the cost of climate change mitigation.

The problem with this logic is that the centre of gravity of where the culprits are located coincides with the centre of gravity of debt in the world. The United States can ill afford to fund China's path to decarbonisation, let alone the United Kingdom (even less now that it is not a world power as it was in the times that it used to be a hugely pollutant industrial pioneer) and if China cannot show some flexibility on this, especially in view of its huge trade surplus and foreign reserves north of  $2.2 trillion then it is difficult to find a point of convergence.

The technology transfer advocated by developing countries (and spearheaded by India) for which the US, EU and Japan are supposed to foot the bill is widely expected to range anywhere between the low hundreds of billions of dollars to $1 trillion. This is less than 45% China's foreign reserves (and with an annual trade surplus of $300bn they will soon catch up), and although I am not suggesting that China ought to foot the bill for the entire global warming mitigation process (although it could afford to), there would be an objective case to suggest that it contributed, rather other western countries, who are almost on the brink of default or very seriously crippled by massive debt.

I think that Obama has already given the game away by announcing he will only show up for a photo-shoot. He knows that there will be no historic deal so he won't miss the party. It is a real shame, especially since the public expects so much from this meeting and so many delegates are going to travel there to trumpet their concerns. Copenhagen will simply be a declaration of intentions and it's only in 2010 when the real work must begin.

Brunella

India is one of the main CO2 emitters in the world but unlike other developing countries it does not want to set itself emission reduction targets. It is advocating a continuation of Kyoto, whereby developing countries are under no obligation to reduce emissions.

India's carbon footprint is 1.4 billion tons of CO2 per annum (that's 23.3% that of the US), but in per capita terms, India only emits 1.2 tons per inhabitant, which is per se a model of sustainability. The problem is that 400 million people are without electricity, and it is predicted that economic development will reach these people sooner than expected, so India's carbon footprint can skyrocket in the coming decades to China's levels or beyond if the generation of electricity and economic development moves forward with old technologies and fossil fuel burning.

Of course no one wants to halt economic development anywhere in the world. Our challenge must be to combat climate change while keeping the lights on. This also applies to the developed world. No one should listen to the greener-than-thou who advocate to turn the heating down and the lights off, and reduce your comfort levels; turning your standby off will make no difference to climate change if utilities keep on burning coal. Our small collective efforts have negligible impact and the onus is on governments to articulate energy policy to decarbonise the production of electricity. We as individuals cannot do it: it's beyond our control.

I think that India eyes with suspicion the West's insistence to curb its carbon emissions, and interprets it as an obstacle to its own development. After all India's share to cumulative carbon emissions is about 2%, so it bears no responsibility for global warming.

However there are signs of dissent within the Indian government, perhaps because they themselves predict their carbon footprint will grow exponentially if something is not done about it. A leaked letter from the Indian environment minister argues that it would be in India's interest to curb emissions.

The highly visible president of the Maldives Mohamed Nasheed has been relentessly advocating for a technology transfer from developed countries to developing ones to fund their development during a transition of a low carbon economy. It is not clear how astronomical these figures are, but they could be on the high end of the hundreds of billions of dollars, comparable only to last year's financial bailout. India and China are the two obvious recipients of this financial interest, and this will be a key negotiating element to find a convergence of targets.

The timing is however all wrong, with the developed world still recovering from the credit crunch and maybe on the eve of plunging into a second dip with problems such as Dubai looming and other countries finding it hard to meet their debt liabilities.

It's not the right time to write blank cheques to the developing world, and developed countries may find they simply cannot afford to foot the bill.

Brunella

I turn my attention to the main GHG emitter of the world, who is single-handedly responsible for one third of all cumulative CO2 emissions since 1850, the United States. Although in terms of annual emissions China has now overtaken the US (both are coasting around the 6 billion metric tonnes of CO2 emitted per annum), China's cumulative emissions since 1850 are less than 8%.

It can also be argued that the US as main importer of Chinese goods is running a huge bill in terms of indirect emissions, in addition to its own direct emissions, and therefore is party to China's annual emissions. Taking into account indirect emissions from the consumption of manufactured goods would put the US very comfortably on the top position of net emitter per annum as well as in cumulative terms. The US imports about one third of China's manufacturing output (followed by the EU and Japan, as close second and third net importers -according to figures of the CRS Report for Congress "China's trade with the US and the world" 2007) and therefore its indirect emissions are in the region of 1/3 of China's annual emissions, that is about 2 billion tonnes of CO2 - that gives the US a grand total of annual emissions (direct plus indirect) in the region of 8 billion tons of CO2 p.a.

The new US administration is certainly diametrically opposed to the previous one, but on emission cuts it is still guaranteed to fall short of expectations.

The news is that Obama will pledge to cut CO2 emissions by 17%, which is already considered by the EU "lower than we would like", but even that level of cuts might be immensely tricky to the US president to turn into law, overcoming all the hurdles of the US legislative complexities.

The EU is pledging to cut emissions by 20-30% by 2020 (compared to 1990 levels). That means that annual emissions would drop from today's 4.3 billion tons to somewhere between 3 to 3.4 billion. The US's pledge by contrast would mean a drop from today's 6 billion to 5 billion.

As a ballpark figure, our atmosphere is receiving more than double the amount of CO2 than it can process through its natural carbon cycle. In order for us to stabilitise the CO2 concentration therefore all countries need to cut emissions as a matter of urgency by 50%, at least. Given that developing countries do not have ambitious targets, if at all, the US and EU need to have aspire to more drastic cuts.

If all countries cut their emissions by 50%, this would mean that the US annual emissions should drop from 6 billion tons to 3 billion, and the EU's from 4.2 to 2.1 billion. The EU pledge of cutting emissions to the 3-3.4 billion level leaves us with an excess of 0.9-1.3 billion with respect to what should be the target reduction, and the US pledge leaves us with an excess of 2 billion tons. This means that between the US and the EU an excess CO2 of over 3 billion tons of CO2 will be emitted per annum between now and 2020 (even if the pledges they advocate where carried out right now, rather than gradually between now and 2020).

Brunella