Copenhagen: not as bad as it could've been.

It's a pity there weren't a few bankers around the Bella Centre in Copenhagen last week – then there might have been a deal. Perhaps Greenpeace should've flown a task force of Wall Street's finest on the final day since investment bankers are the only people who seem able to get world leaders to open their wallets. I fear the planet won't wake up to the reality of climate change until Goldman Sachs is faced with imminent bonus failure because the stock exchange is on fire. And even then clever brokers will no doubt be turning a few bucks by trading on Armageddon futures. 


Money and war are the only things that get politicians talking with intent – and it was ever thus. But this doesn't mean that Copenhagen was a complete waste of time. Talking rarely is - especially about climate change. This unprecedented meeting of the world leaders was a step forward, even if the non-agreement looks like two steps back. The environment is low on the public's priority list and largely ignored by the financial interests, who these days define the limits of the possible. Getting a 193 world leaders, from Sudan to the USA, to come together and agree at least that man-made climate change is a reality and must be tackled was itself an achievement - a legal document was probably asking too much. 


The developing nations called Copenhagen “a super-power stitch up”, which is what it was always going to be. The future of this planet will be decided by America and China, because they are the biggest economies and the biggest polluters. Nothing matters if they aren't on board, and now they are – sort of. President Obama and Wen Jiabao came together at the eleventh hour to deliver an agreement: a non-binding commitment to hold climate warming to 2%; a system of monitoring progress (which the Chinese were very unhappy about);$100bn for developing countries, if they go along with it; and an agreement to disagree again next year in Mexico. The theatre of Copenhagen demonstrated, finally, that we now live in a new bi-polar world. As temperatures rise, the dispossessed and low-lying countries will watch anxiously as their fate to be decided by 'Chinamerica'. 

The fundamental divide, that will dominate all diplomatic efforts to contain climate change, is between the rich world, which unwittingly caused the current global warming, and the poor world whose attempt to become rich will cause the next and probably final round of it. The rich countries have a case: we don't want the developing world to make the same mistakes we did on the way up. The developing world has a case: that the wealthy countries should demonstrate their remorse by paying the cost of giving the third world a carbon-free leg up. Bridging this divided is difficult but not impossible, since many of the developing countries – in Africa for example – face extinction if nothing is done and temperatures reach even 2% above present levels. That focuses minds. The problem is focussing the minds of western electorates who live to consume and still don't get it. 

  Copenhagen climaxed in bewilderment and rancour – much of it synthetic, predictable. The media largely dismissed it all as 'climate chaos' – fulfilling its own prophecy that things would end in confusion and disarray. The climate change 'deniers' have had a field day. The environmentalists expressed shock and dismay at the failure to come up with a legally binding target for cutting greenhouse emissions. “Copenhagen is a crime scene” said Greenpeace, “with the guilty men and women fleeing for the airport in shame.” But the real climate “criminals” weren't freezing in Copenhagen but rushing around the Christmas shopping malls of the northern hemisphere largely oblivious to the shenanigans at COP15. They are the voters who, even after nearly twenty years of climate science, remain unconvinced. It's just too easy to blame Obama and Brown – they lacked the power of public commitment behind them. 


But of course, it may never happen. There is, according to the scientists, about a 10% chance that climate change is not caused by us. Most of the world seem happy to live as 'tenpercenters', self-centred sceptics who hope they'll be gone before they know whether their gamble paid off. The men in white coats are no longer figures of authority in society, and the public reserves the right to reject scientific evidence. The playground antics of some environmental activists – people in polar bear suits trying to disrupt crucial climate talks – give Joe Mondeo another reason for sitting back and cracking open a can of Strongbow.


There's no point whining about it – this is just how things are. Democratic politics is not going to deliver resolute action on climate change. Not short of a climate catastrophe, anyway. Western voters simply will not elect any party that tells them to give up their cars and face the inconvenience of living in a no growth, low carbon environment. The developing world will not accept that they must pay for our profligacy.  Fortunately we don't live a pure democracy, but a representative one in which political leaders are expected to act responsibly on the basis of the best advice available to them. The much maligned political classes have the task of saving us from ourselves. 


Which is why we should offer two cheers at least to the Copenhagen climateers. Yes, even Gordon Brown, who has been an island of sanity in the madness and deserves credit for his efforts. Why does he bother, you ask. There are no votes in it. The reason is posterity, the judgement of history. Imagine, twenty five years hence, if the climate really is in chaos, how will these politicians be judged if they fail to make a serious effort today? What will the Daily Mail be saying then, assuming tabloid journalism still exists? Politicians would probably find themselves in court like war criminals for failing to act on the huge body of scientific evidence about the damaging impact of C02 emissions. Political leaders can't afford to be tenpercenters. They can't say they were only obeying orders either, even though in a democratic sense they are. So, lament the failure of Copenhagen by all means but recognise that we get the climate change summits we deserve. Until the people are convinced, we have to make do with jaw jaw. 

Copenhagen - does anybody really care?

    There’s an advert currently playing Scottish cinemas paid for by the environmental campaign group, Plane Stupid.  It shows polar bears falling from the sky, bouncing off tall buildings, and then landing in bloody heaps on the city streets.  Killed by plane emissions. It’s pretty disgusting, and when it was shown at a cinema last week the largely youthful audience erupted in derision.  “That’s bloody ridiculous. F@@@ing ar@@holes” was one of the comments I overheard.  I fear there may be a bit of consumer resistance here, guys. 

   There may be very little scientific doubt about the reality of man made climate change, but there are signs that, right now, a lot of ordinary people just don’t want to know.  It’s not just the internet, which has become a seething hotbed of climate change “denial” as the green campaigners put it.  It’s not just the conventional media, that tend to give the isolated opponents of anthropogenic climate change equal status with the vast majority of climate scientists.  Even before the scandal at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, where some hacked emails suggested that researchers might have manipulated some of the figures, evidence was growing that the public are increasingly sceptical.

    An Ipsos Mori poll in the Guardian last year dismayed campaigners by showing that a majority of people in Britain are not convinced by the case for climate change and that many believe that green taxes are just ‘stealth’ taxes.    A recent populus poll in the Times suggested that only a quarter of people believe that climate change is the most serious problem the world faces.  Research earlier this year by the University of Cardiff, suggests that  number of people who do not trust climate scientists about global warming has doubled in the last five years. In America, despite the arrival of Barack Obama, climate change scepticism is also on the march. A Pew poll in October found that 57% of Americans believe the earth is warming, down from 71% in April 2008.  Only 36% put this down to human activities, compared with 47% last year.  

   Now, it isn’t all bad.  Most people do believe that the climate is changing and that we need to be concerned about it.  But this disconnect between the scientific establishment and the public is extremely worrying, not least on the eve of a Copenhagen Summit which many believe will end in deadlock. It has emboldened countries like Saudi Arabia, that rely on oil for a living, to start saying that the climate case is unproven.  Simultaneously, the galaxy of green organisations, which used to be so much part of British youth culture, seem to have lost their voice. This may be because the environmentalists are now part of the establishment.  Gordon Brown increasingly sounds like a spokesman for Greenpeace, condemning “flat earthers” who deny global warming.

    Since the Stern Report two years ago, governments across the world have largely fallien into line behind the case for anthropogenic climate change.  This has left a vacuum of dissent which is being filled by the sometimes rabid climate sceptics of the blogosphere.  There is endemic suspicion today of politicians and scientists - it is one of the defining characteristics of the age of paranoia.  The mere fact that governments think the climate is changing is enough to make many antiestablishment minded people believe that the whole thing must be a hoax.  Or just a false alarm - like the millennium bug, bird flu, BSE or any of a hundred health scares over the last decade. 

   The internet has allowed this climate scepticism to flourish. Indeed, the undermining of the case for man made climate change may be the first major achievement of the blogosphere - its first dubious entry into public affairs.  The sheer volume of negative commentary on climate change on the internet is astonishing, and is enough to make any casual internet surfer believe that climate change is at best just a questionable theory. The environmentalists, for all their early adoption of the internet, don’t seem to be able to mobilise effectively on it.  Scientists don’t blog - or if they do it is on erudite websites that don't come up on Google. 

    The argument is over in the scientific community.  All the national science academies of the industrialised countries accept that the climate is changing and that we are largely responsible.  So do all the world’s leading scientific organisations like the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Royal Colleges,  the European Science Foundation, the US National Research Council.  The Meteorological Office, American Meteorological Society, the World Meteorological Organisations. These organisations endorse the assessment of the 2,500 scientists of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, that there is about a 90% chance that it is happening and we are responsible. You can't buck the scientific consensus.  But it doesn’t mean a thing if the public don’t believe it. 

"Climate Change is a Lie and a Fraud"

  Well, that's what a lot of people think following the revelations at the University of East Anglia, where climate scientists appeared to be manipulating data on global warming.

  But if this is really what you think, you are pitting yourself against the overwhelming consensus among scientists world-wide.

  There is not a single credible scientific organisation - as opposed to individual scientists -  in the world that still disputes the case for climate change.

    All the national academies of science of all the industrialised countries accept the case for man made climate change.

     Here's a list of the world's leading scientific organisations that have looked at anthropogenic climate change.  Click on the links to see why they think this.

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

U.S. Global Change Research Program

European Science Foundation

American Association for the Advancement of Science

American Geophysical Union

National Research Council (US)

American Geophysical Union

Arctic Climate Impact Assessment

Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Societies

European Federation of Geologists

European Geosciences Union

American Meteorological Society

Royal Meteorological Society

World Meteorological Organization

Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society

Society of American Foresters

World Federation of Public Health Associations

American Institute of Physics

American Physical Society





Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences







European Academy of Sciences and Arts

International Council of Academies of Engineering and Technological Sciences





International Council of Academies of Engineering and Technological Sciences