via The Religious Right Sets New World-Record for Projection : Dispatches from the Culture Wars.

 

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 21st September 2010.

The closer it comes, the worse it looks. The best outcome anyone now expects from December’s climate summit in Mexico is that some delegates might stay awake during the meetings. When talks fail once, as they did in Copenhagen, governments lose interest. They don’t want to be associated with failure, they don’t want to pour time and energy into a broken process. Nine years after the world trade negotiations moved to Mexico after failing in Qatar, they remain in diplomatic limbo. Nothing in the preparations for the climate talks suggests any other outcome.

A meeting in China at the beginning of October is supposed to clear the way for Cancun(1). The hosts have already made it clear that it’s going nowhere: there are, a top Chinese climate change official explains, still “huge differences between developed and developing countries”(2). Everyone blames everyone else for the failure at Copenhagen. Everyone insists that everyone else should move.

But no one cares enough to make a fight of it. The disagreements are simultaneously entrenched and muted. The doctor’s certificate has not been issued; perhaps, to save face, it never will be. But the harsh reality we have to grasp is that the process is dead.

In 2012 the only global deal for limiting greenhouse gas emissions – the Kyoto Protocol – expires. There is no realistic prospect that it will be replaced before it elapses: the existing treaty took five years to negotiate and a further eight years to come into force. In terms of real hopes for global action on climate change, we are now far behind where we were in 1997, or even 1992. It’s not just that we have lost 18 precious years. Throughout the age of good intentions and grand announcements we spiralled backwards.

Nor do regional and national commitments offer more hope. An analysis published a few days ago by the campaigning group Sandbag estimates the amount of carbon that will have been saved by the end of the second phase of the EU’s emissions trading system, in 2012(3). After the hopeless failure of the scheme’s first phase we were promised that the real carbon cuts would start to bite between 2008 and 2012. So how much carbon will it save by then? Less than one third of one per cent.

Worse still, the reduction in industrial output caused by the recession has allowed big polluters to build up a bank of carbon permits which they can carry into the next phase of the trading scheme. If nothing is done to annul them or to crank down the proposed carbon cap (which, given the strength of industrial lobbies and the weakness of government resolve, is unlikely) these spare permits will vitiate phase three as well. Unlike the Kyoto Protocol, the EU’s emissions trading system will remain alive. It will also remain completely useless.

Plenty of nations – such as the United Kingdom – have produced what appear to be robust national plans for cutting greenhouse gases. With one exception (the Maldives), their targets fall far short of the reductions needed to prevent more than two degrees of global warming.

Even so, none of them are real. Missing from the proposed cuts are the net greenhouse gas emissions we have outsourced to other countries and now import in the form of manufactured goods. Were these included in the UK’s accounts, alongside the aviation, shipping and tourism gases excluded from official figures, the UK’s emissions would rise by 48%(4). Rather than cutting our contribution to global warming by 19% since 1990, as the government boasts, we have increased it by around 29%(5). It’s the same story in most developed nations. Our apparent success results entirely from failures elsewhere.

Hanging over everything is the growing recognition that the United States isn’t going to play. Not this year, perhaps not in any year. If Congress couldn’t pass a climate bill so feeble that it consisted of little but loopholes while Barack Obama was president and the Democrats had a majority in both houses, where does hope lie for action in other circumstances? Last Tuesday the Guardian reported that of 48 Republican contenders for the Senate elections in November only one accepted that manmade climate change is taking place(6). Who was he? Mike Castle of Delaware. The following day he was defeated by the Tea Party candidate Christine O’Donnell, producing a full house of science deniers. The Enlightenment? Fun while it lasted.

What all this means is that there is not a single effective instrument for containing manmade global warming anywhere on earth. The response to climate change, which was described by Lord Stern as “a result of the greatest market failure the world has seen”(7), is the greatest political failure the world has ever seen.

Nature won’t wait for us. The US government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reports that the first eight months of 2010 were as hot as the first 8 months of 1998 – the warmest ever recorded(8). But there’s a crucial difference. 1998 had a record El Nino – the warm phase of the natural Pacific temperature oscillation. The 2010 El Nino was smaller (an anomaly peaking at roughly 1.8, rather than 2.5C), and brief by comparison to those of recent years(9). Since May the oscillation has been in its cool phase (La Nina)(10): even so, June, July and August this year were the second warmest on record(11). The stronger the warnings, the less capable of action we become.

Where does this leave us? How should we respond to the reality we have tried not see: that in 18 years of promise and bluster nothing has happened? Environmentalists tend to blame themselves for these failures. Perhaps we should have made people feel better about their lives. Or worse. Perhaps we should have done more to foster hope. Or despair. Perhaps we were too fixated on grand visions. Or techno-fixes. Perhaps we got too close to business. Or not close enough. The truth is that there is not and never was a strategy certain of success, as the powers ranged against us have always been stronger than we are.

Greens are a puny force, by comparison to industrial lobby groups, the cowardice of governments and the natural human tendency to deny what we don’t want to see. To compensate for our weakness, we indulged a fantasy of benign paternalistic power, acting, though the political mechanisms were inscrutable, in the wider interests of humankind. We allowed ourselves to believe that, with a little prompting and protest, somewhere, in a distant institutional sphere, compromised but decent people would take care of us. They won’t. They weren’t ever going to do so. So what do we do now?

I don’t know. These failures have exposed not only familiar political problems, but deep-rooted human weakness. All I know is that we must stop dreaming about an institutional response that will never materialise and start facing a political reality we’ve sought to avoid. The conversation starts here.

www.monbiot.com

via Monbiot.com » The Process Is Dead.

 

Are We Stuck With ‘Blah, Blah, Blah, … Bang’?

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

I was struck by a comment that followed my latest piece on cutting disaster risks, reacting to this line: “Only direct experience seems to trigger change.”

Yeah. It seems Homo S “Sapiens” at large needs to first get hit by the wall before changing path. There will be always someone debating (denying) the science (evidence) of walls and bricks. We can’t falsify the theory about that wall ahead, so it’s no science, blah, blah, blah, … bang. — Florifulgurator (Dadaist, Germany)

David P. Ropeik

This characterization of the human habit of dawdling in the face of looming risks reminded me of earlier contributions here on global warming by David Ropeik, a former journalist and longtime student of risk communication. [UPDATE, 8/4: Some people have concerns about his affiliations with industry.] His book (with George Gray), “Risk: A Practical Guide for Deciding What’s Really Safe and What’s Really Dangerous in the World Around You (Houghton Mifflin, 2002), is a clear-eyed guide to why we often get in harm’s way and also fear the wrong things. (Here’s a 2002 Times interview with Mr. Ropeik on the “fear factor.”)

I think it’s worth considering his comments as a group here, and opening a conversation about whether we have the capacity to shift from our sprint of the past couple of centuries to a more reasoned marathon pace good for the long haul. Should there be an Intergovernmental Panel on Human Nature?

Here’s one of David’s posts, deconstructing why the psychology of climate makes it such a hard fit for the political arena:

Talking, rather than acting, remains a political option because the electorates on which the pols rely for their jobs are not sufficiently threatened by climate change, personally, to make it an issue on which politicians have to act. The psychological literature on the perception of risk has shown that we fear, and demand protection from, risks that can happen to us, not to polar bears or ice caps.

We say in surveys that we are concerned about climate change, the way we have always said in surveys that we are concerned about the environment. But the environment has never been much of a voting issue, nor will climate change become one, until we as individuals truly feel that something bad might happen to us. Which makes McCain sound perceptive, because long term issues like climate change do not portend tangible imminent threat. And without a sense of being personally threatened, we don’t act much more than those yakking Senators do.

Until a majority of us feel personally threatened by specific and significant negative impacts of climate change, we’re just not going to be concerned enough to act. It’s frustrating, since the discipline of risk communication is available to the climate change communicators, but they don’t appear to be paying attention to what it has to offer.

More on this at onrisk.blogspot.com.

The science of human behavior, particularly the psychology of risk perception, robustly shows that we use two systems to make judgments about risk; reason and affect, facts and feelings. It is simply naïve to disregard this inescapable truth and presume that reason and intellect alone will carry the day. That’s just not how the human animal behaves. Even as potentially catastrophic as climate change might be, if people don’t sense climate change as a direct personal threat, reason alone won’t convince them that the costs of action are worth it.

There are still too few scientists and policy leaders describing the potential impacts of climate change on a local level. This is an admittedly dicey business because it’s hard to know specifically what changing the climate of the planet is going to do to Denver or Delhi or Dusseldorf. But there is plenty of scientific evidence of the harm climate change might do at the local level. These potential local risks need to be emphasized, in the concrete terms that will give people more of an idea of what climate change might do to them.

My concern about the last paragraph above is related to the high level of uncertainty in regional climate predictions. Note how the word “might” has to be used to stay true to the science, which would immediately deflate the concreteness that David says is necessary to trigger action. Does this mean it’s an impossible task?

via Are We Stuck With ‘Blah, Blah, Blah, … Bang’? – Dot Earth Blog – NYTimes.com.

 

via “Planet or Death!” — Bolivian President Evo Morales’ Courageous Speech at World People’s Conference on Climate Change | | AlterNet.

 

via Monbiot.com » An Eruption of Reality.

 

One could assume that the US assessment of the oil decline was exposed through this particular publication perhaps due to some arrangement that Barack Obama made with Nicolas Sarkozy. (Maybe it is an indirect way to alert the French while keeping most Americans still in the dark on the topic, so that the latter bunch can ignorantly carry onward as usual. After all, no unsettling prognosis should disturb their slow return into shopoholic ways that keep the economy, particularly China's, on which the US federal government depends for loans, going strong.)

All considered, there was not, as far as I know, even a ten-second blurb about Sweetnam's message issued via newscasts in New England where I live. At the time of his declaration, their reports primarily covered ad nauseam the recent flood again … and again.

In a similar vein, no reporter discussing the deluge dared to raise the point that worsening extreme weather is on the way with climate change consequences in the mix, along with oil's relationship to these outcomes. Moreover, imagine the effect on the Dow or NASDAQ if Sweetnam's estimation and a discussion of connected economic ramifications got splashed all across the USA.

via t r u t h o u t | After Peak Oil, Are We Heading Toward Social Collapse?.

 

A new popular sport in some media these days is “climate scientist bashing”. Instead of dealing soberly with the climate problem they prefer to attack climate scientists, i.e. the bearers of bad news. The German magazine DER SPIEGEL has played this game last week under the suggestive heading “Die Wolkenschieber” – which literally translated can mean both “the cloud movers” and “the cloud traffickers” (available in English here ). The article continues on this level, alleging “sloppy work, falsifications and exaggerations”. By doing so DER SPIEGEL digs deeply into the old relic box of “climate skeptics” and freely helps itself on their websites instead of critically researching the issues at hand.

Read the whole article…

 

The world is much closer to running out of oil than official estimates admit, according to a whistleblower at the International Energy Agency who claims it has been deliberately underplaying a looming shortage for fear of triggering panic buying.

The senior official claims the US has played an influential role in encouraging the watchdog to underplay the rate of decline from existing oil fields while overplaying the chances of finding new reserves.

The allegations raise serious questions about the accuracy of the organisation’s latest World Energy Outlook on oil demand and supply to be published tomorrow – which is used by the British and many other governments to help guide their wider energy and climate change policies.

Read more:

Key oil figures were distorted by US pressure, says whistleblower

Too fearful to publicise peak oil reality

 

The tragedy of climate commons

 

For more than a decade the Global Climate Coalition, a group representing industries with profits tied to fossil fuels, led an aggressive lobbying and public relations campaign against the idea that emissions of heat-trapping gases could lead to global warming.

“The role of greenhouse gases in climate change is not well understood,” the coalition said in a scientific “backgrounder” provided to lawmakers and journalists through the early 1990s, adding that “scientists differ” on the issue.

But a document filed in a federal lawsuit demonstrates that even as the coalition worked to sway opinion, its own scientific and technical experts were advising that the science backing the role of greenhouse gases in global warming could not be refuted.

“The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied,” the experts wrote in an internal report compiled for the coalition in 1995.

The coalition was financed by fees from large corporations and trade groups representing the oil, coal and auto industries, among others. In 1997, the year an international climate agreement that came to be known as the Kyoto Protocol was negotiated, its budget totaled $1.68 million, according to tax records obtained by environmental groups.

Read more…

 

The jist of his message? Even if you don’t “believe” in anthropogenic climate change, there are many good reasons to get off our addiction to fossil fuels, and do it fast.

 

Well, here’s a great dismantling of that “documentary” by George Monbiot:

Distortions, Falsehoods, Fabrications