UK pushes for twin-track deal on climate change
Britain prepared to extend Kyoto if developing nations agree to a new, global treaty
Britain proposed a new twin-track climate deal yesterday to end the logjam which has affected international talks on global warming since the failed Copenhagen climate conference last December.
In a surprise policy U-turn, the Climate and Energy Secretary, Ed Miliband, announced that the Government would agree to an extension of the current international climate treaty, the Kyoto protocol – something developing countries have insisted on but which has so far been rejected by the UK and the European Union as a whole.
Britain would accept a renewed Kyoto, Mr Miliband said, alongside the entirely new, legally binding global deal it has been pursuing. In effect there could be two separate international climate treaties, covering emissions cuts by different countries.
The move is ultimately likely to put pressure on China, one of the countries which blocked agreement at Copenhagen and now the world's biggest CO2 emitter, to join in a comprehensive new climate arrangement covering the whole world.
But if China was intransigent at the talks in the Danish capital, it was British and EU insistence on abandoning the 1997 Kyoto treaty which was the immediate cause of the talks' breakdown, and nearly led to a complete and humiliating collapse of two years of negotiations between 192 countries.
In the end, a limited ad-hoc agreement, the "Copenhagen Accord", was put together by world leaders during the conference's final day but it fell far short of the legally binding global warming treaty, with detailed targets for cutting global emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2, which had been Copenhagen's original objective.
In announcing yesterday that Britain would accept a renewal (technically, a "second commitment period") of Kyoto, Mr Miliband was in effect starting the climate talks all over again by sending a clear signal – and making a large concession – to developing countries, for whom maintaining the 1997 treaty had taken on almost totemic status.
"We are interested in trying to break the deadlock and find ways through some of the issues raised in Copenhagen," he said. "We do not want to let a technical argument about whether we have one treaty or two derail the process. We are determined to show flexibility as long as there is no undermining of environmental principles."
Developing countries have strongly supported Kyoto because it commits them to do nothing, at least initially, while getting rich countries to take on legally binding emissions targets. The poorer countries see this as a just reflection of the fact that most of the man-made greenhouses gases in the atmosphere were put there by countries such as the US and Britain, which should therefore be the first to take action.
But more than that, the treaty – indeed, almost the word Kyoto itself – had come to be seen as a talisman of the good faith of rich countries, while abandoning it tantamount to a betrayal of the developing nations.
In its place, Britain wanted a new treaty which would bring in all countries of the world, including the US – which George W Bush withdrew from Kyoto in 2001 – and commit the developing countries for the first time to cut back their own emissions, which from now on will far exceed the CO2 output of the developed world. China overtook the US as the world's biggest CO2 emitter in 2007.
Britain fought hard to achieve this new deal in behind-the-scenes negotiations, and persisted in the position despite many warnings that the poorer countries were simply too attached to Kyoto to give it up. In the end, the draft text of the non-Kyoto deal was leaked, widely criticised by developing countries as a betrayal, and the talks ran into the ground.
Britain still wants the new arrangement, binding on all countries, and yesterday Mr Miliband insisted that it was the only way forward.
As the price of attaining it, he said the UK would accept a renewal of Kyoto, so that there would in effect be two international climate treaties running in parallel. But he stressed that Britain would not accept one without the other.
In part, this is a response to the bloody nose the Government was given in Denmark, and a recognition that its hard-line, no-Kyoto policy was unrealistic. But it is also smart politics, as it will remove the objections of developing countries, but box China into a corner with its own objections to a new legal deal.
"We are uncompromising about the need for a legal framework covering everyone, but we are willing to be flexible about the precise form that takes," Mr Miliband said. "By making these proposals, we can take away this myth that developed countries were trying to destroy Kyoto and get on with a legal treaty."
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by Arthur Robinson, Ph.D. | March 3, 2010
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/image
http://greenexplorer.ovi.com/getinspire
Maybe they're just part of the global conspiracy too!
Our planet is on the cusp of an Ice Age. Many sources of data that provide our knowledge base of long-term climate change indicate that the warm, twelve thousand year-long Holocene period is over. Earth will shortly return to Ice Age conditions for the next 100,000 years.
Ice cores, ocean sediment cores, the geologic record, and studies of ancient plant and animal populations all demonstrate a regular cyclic pattern of Ice Age glacial maximums which each last about 100,000 years, separated by intervening warm interglacial�s, each lasting about 12,000 years.
Long-term climate data shows a strong correlation with three astronomical phases known as the Milankovich cycles. The Milankovich cycles include the tilt of the earth, which varies over a 41,000-year period; the shape of the earths orbit which changes over a period of 100,000 years, and the Precession of the Equinoxes known as the earths wobble which rotates gradually in the direction of earths axis every 26,000 years.
According to the Milankovich theory of Ice Age causation, these three astronomical cycles each affect the amount of solar radiation, which reaches the earth. These phases act together to produce an Ice Age interspersed with warm interglacial periods. In short, climate change is a regular and natural event.
The French mathematician Joseph Adhemar first presented elements of the astronomical theory of Ice Age causation in 1842, the English prodigy Joseph Croll developed it further in 1875, and the Serbian mathematician Milutin Milankovich in the 1920s and 30s established the theory in its present form. In 1976 the prestigious journal �Science� published a landmark paper by John Imbrie, James Hays, and Nicholas Shackleton entitled �Variations in the Earth's orbit: Pacemaker of the Ice Ages,� which described the correlation which the trio of scientist/authors had found between the climate data obtained from ocean sediment cores and the patterns of the astronomical Milankovich cycles. Since the late 1970s, the Milankovich theory has remained the predominant theory to account for Ice Age causation among climate scientists, and hence the Milankovich theory is described in textbooks of climatology and in encyclopedia articles about the Ice Ages.
Do you seriously believe that the US military is concerned with the Environment?
" Maybe they're just part of the global conspiracy too! " ...Nah, they're just free spirits roaming around the world firing their 'love' bombs willy nilly at little villages of fear, rejuvinating them with enlightenment and tranquil harmony.
I'm sure the Afghan sheep herder will be relieved to hear, after his wife and children have had their limbs blown off that the tank that delivered the fatal blow to his family has the lowest CO2 emissions in its class!
Confident predictions of catastrophe are unwarranted..
"The notion that complex climate "catastrophes" are simply a matter of the response of a single number, GATA, to a single forcing, CO2 (or solar forcing for that matter), represents a gigantic step backward in the science of climate. Many disasters associated with warming are simply normal occurrences whose existence is falsely claimed to be evidence of warming. And all these examples involve phenomena that are dependent on the confluence of many factors. "
Professor Lindzen is professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Sourcewatch on Richard Linzen:
Sourcewatch on that Heartland Institute:
I won't bore you with a list of the cash payments that Philip Morris made to Heartland. Suffice it to say that it's so embarrassing Heartland stopped disclosing its finances.
Lindzen too has become more careful about covering up his source of income but it hasn't always been so:
So the man is clearly a shill but even so, he could be a good scientist, even if he is morally deficient, as witnessed by his following statement to the BBC:
Sadly, Lindzen is not only a shill but a quack. His pet theory of convective cooling has been shot down in flames:
So, had a good read, my denialist chums? Who am I kidding? You never got past the first sentence, did you? But you all have an opinion nevertheless, don't you? You're way too smart to be fooled by thousands of IPCC scientists. The guys paid by Big Oil, they're the ones you trust. You know those old sayings about truth coming out of the mouths of childeren and fools? They weren't talking about you.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfWDAmT1
DR ROY SPENCER : Testimony before Senate on Climate Change (reject AGW)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qzf6z-oH
http://greenexplorer.ovi.com/getinspire
Maybe they're just part of the global conspiracy too!
Our planet is on the cusp of an Ice Age. Many sources of data that provide our knowledge base of long-term climate change indicate that the warm, twelve thousand year-long Holocene period is over. Earth will shortly return to Ice Age conditions for the next 100,000 years.
Ice cores, ocean sediment cores, the geologic record, and studies of ancient plant and animal populations all demonstrate a regular cyclic pattern of Ice Age glacial maximums which each last about 100,000 years, separated by intervening warm interglacial�s, each lasting about 12,000 years.
Long-term climate data shows a strong correlation with three astronomical phases known as the Milankovich cycles. The Milankovich cycles include the tilt of the earth, which varies over a 41,000-year period; the shape of the earths orbit which changes over a period of 100,000 years, and the Precession of the Equinoxes known as the earths wobble which rotates gradually in the direction of earths axis every 26,000 years.
According to the Milankovich theory of Ice Age causation, these three astronomical cycles each affect the amount of solar radiation, which reaches the earth. These phases act together to produce an Ice Age interspersed with warm interglacial periods. In short, climate change is a regular and natural event.
The French mathematician Joseph Adhemar first presented elements of the astronomical theory of Ice Age causation in 1842, the English prodigy Joseph Croll developed it further in 1875, and the Serbian mathematician Milutin Milankovich in the 1920s and 30s established the theory in its present form. In 1976 the prestigious journal �Science� published a landmark paper by John Imbrie, James Hays, and Nicholas Shackleton entitled �Variations in the Earth's orbit: Pacemaker of the Ice Ages,� which described the correlation which the trio of scientist/authors had found between the climate data obtained from ocean sediment cores and the patterns of the astronomical Milankovich cycles. Since the late 1970s, the Milankovich theory has remained the predominant theory to account for Ice Age causation among climate scientists, and hence the Milankovich theory is described in textbooks of climatology and in encyclopedia articles about the Ice Ages.
Our planet is on the cusp of an Ice Age. Many sources of data that provide our knowledge base of long-term climate change indicate that the warm, twelve thousand year-long Holocene period is over. Earth will shortly return to Ice Age conditions for the next 100,000 years.
Ice cores, ocean sediment cores, the geologic record, and studies of ancient plant and animal populations all demonstrate a regular cyclic pattern of Ice Age glacial maximums which each last about 100,000 years, separated by intervening warm interglacial�s, each lasting about 12,000 years.
Long-term climate data shows a strong correlation with three astronomical phases known as the Milankovich cycles. The Milankovich cycles include the tilt of the earth, which varies over a 41,000-year period; the shape of the earths orbit which changes over a period of 100,000 years, and the Precession of the Equinoxes known as the earths wobble which rotates gradually in the direction of earths axis every 26,000 years.
According to the Milankovich theory of Ice Age causation, these three astronomical cycles each affect the amount of solar radiation, which reaches the earth. These phases act together to produce an Ice Age interspersed with warm interglacial periods. In short, climate change is a regular and natural event.
The French mathematician Joseph Adhemar first presented elements of the astronomical theory of Ice Age causation in 1842, the English prodigy Joseph Croll developed it further in 1875, and the Serbian mathematician Milutin Milankovich in the 1920s and 30s established the theory in its present form. In 1976 the prestigious journal �Science� published a landmark paper by John Imbrie, James Hays, and Nicholas Shackleton entitled �Variations in the Earth's orbit: Pacemaker of the Ice Ages,� which described the correlation which the trio of scientist/authors had found between the climate data obtained from ocean sediment cores and the patterns of the astronomical Milankovich cycles. Since the late 1970s, the Milankovich theory has remained the predominant theory to account for Ice Age causation among climate scientists, and hence the Milankovich theory is described in textbooks of climatology and in encyclopedia articles about the Ice Ages.
It seems ridiculous to me to say that global temperatures are "in freefall". The decade 2000-2009 was the warmest on record according to all three of the main global databases, and 2009 was either the second or third warmest year, depending upon which database you go by (differences between databases are small). If you plot out global annual mean temperatures for the last 130-150 years (i.e. the time during which "real" temperature records have been available) you will see several lull periods in an otherwise continuing overall upward trend. These leveling off periods (which, like all groups of years are of course very zig-zaggy)can be related to oceanic cycles such as the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, a downward trend in which matched the leveling/cooling period in the mid 20th century, for example.
No one claims that there aren't other cyclical processes at work, but the Milankovitch cycle is not relevant to the AGW timescale for the reasons I have stated above and in my post yesterday.
When I made some of the above points yesterday you responded by a spurt of rather unpleasant invective and name-calling, which I see seems to have been removed from the thread. I hope that if you feel moved to reply to this you will at least use some polite logical argument, instead of rudely firing off from the hip.
The amount of CO2 emitted per person per day is not negligible. It is equivalent to the emission of a car in a 5 km stretch.
If we multiply the 1,140 grams/day by 6 billion persons then, just for breathing, humanity emits per year some 2.5 billion tons of CO2 . . . a considerable amount, more than the reduction required by the Kyoto Protocol (that reduction is a bit less than 1 billion tons, 5% of the 1990 emission).
But the net balance between the carbon absorbed by feeding and the carbon emitted by breathing is almost zero, so is the same how many people we are. Nevertheless a little bit of the carbon we eat is transformed in methane, wich molecule has a greater potential of warming than the CO2 ...
In other words, no amount of CO/2 reduction (however profitable for advocates of AGW) is going to make one jot of difference to the warming/cooling of this planet.
And you know it.
The whole point is that we have released masses of carbon into the active system that were effectively locked away from it for many millions of years.
The effect of the proportion of carbon that is consumed by humans and released as methane instead of CO2 is infinitessimally small by comparison with the above processes. Remember that all the carbon you consume in food was originally extracted from the atmosphere by plants. And when plants lose CO2 by respiration they lose no more than they extracted from the air in the first place.
Studies of both natural and managed ecosystems suggest that all sectors of the biosphere will be benefited by the ongoing rise in the air's CO2 content, with the greatest relative benefits going to those areas currently possessing the lowest growth potentials, due either to a lack of needed resources or the presence of environmental stresses. Wishing to reap these benefits now, however, many commercial greenhouse operators flood their facilities with extra CO2 and profit today from the added prowess that will be possessed by the plants of tomorrow, just as we currently reap the benefits - among which is an actual doubling of plant water use efficiency - that have resulted from the doubling of the air's CO2 content that has occurred since the peak of the last ice age some 18,000 years ago.
These ongoing CO2-induced enhancements of vegetative productivity and water use efficiency are major forces in helping ecosystems maintain their biodiversity; for with more primary production, more species are enabled to maintain their numbers at levels required to ensure their continued viability. In addition, it has been demonstrated that plants of different species share resources via fungal linkages among their root systems. And as the flows of water and nutrients through these fungal conduits typically move from plants that possess sufficient quantities of these substances to those that lack them, this phenomenon promotes coexistence and ecosystem species richness.
CO2-induced carbon sequestration has been observed in the soils of several agro-ecosystems; and the potential for it to occur in natural grasslands and savannas has been clearly demonstrated. Of all of Earth's ecosystems, however, forests hold the greatest potential for removing CO2 from the atmosphere and storing its carbon; and they can do so via processes that remain viable for millennia.
In fact, there is considerable evidence that Earth's forests are already sequestering vast amounts of carbon in response to the aerial fertilization effect of the ongoing rise in the air's CO2 content that is fueling increases in forest productivity and range expansions across the globe.
In other words, CO2 isn't the "threat" you claim it to be.
And you know it!
Simply put, he's saying that carbon is naturally and historically in-balance and that it is only human actions - releasing stored carbon - which are increasing the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. Incidentally, this has increased by around 35% since industrialisation.
The problem is that the release of CO2 is not static - it's accelerating rapidly as countries like China, India, Brazil, etc develop; as the world population increases; and as the global capacity to absorb this excess CO2 in carbon-sinks like forests and the oceans is being diminished (also by human actions).
So, what do we do? Wait for your promised ice-age which may be thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years away? Or, do we control ourselves and stabilise the situation? Power is nothing without control!
Most Asian countries unfortunately have a very poor track record on all enviroinmental issues, be it from pollution of the air, rivers or sea, de-forestation and protection of the environment and species in general. To wait for them to suddenly sign up to binding targets is like expecting a Swiss banker to come clean about money laundering...it won't happen.
We have a responsibility to our children and future generations to start acting now, on our own, even though it may create some "difficulties" in trade.
In light of other current topics, from Mr. Brown's 'Rivers of ex-voters' speech to Mr. Miliband's 'we've met some guys who want us to give them more of your money', on matters of immigration, population and climate change ambition and joined up government, any input on why we need 250,000 extra homes/year (reiterated on the TV news today), much less where these might end up, presumably consuming nothing at all and emitting only pixie dust?
The famous "Hockey stick curve" was shown to be at best a programming error and at worst fraud - this will soon be decided in the courts.
The Vladivistock ice core samples turned around and bit Koyoto when better analysis showed that CO2 did not cause a rise in temperature - but that CO2 increased after the temperature went up - with a lag of about 800 years.
The climate models predicted that global warming would be gretest at the poles - but the Scott Amundsen weather station at the South Pole has shown no change in the last 30 years.
If there is another Koyoto then it should be about making politicians criminally responsible and about controlling politicians - not about climate. Guess who is set to become the first "carbon credit billionaire" - yes, Al Gore. That's what it's all about folks.
I believe I already explained who bankrolls The Heartland Institute.
However, your post about the top polluter not signing up because the other polluters aren't is at least topical, unlike the spam posted by the other denialists. Ok, let's talk about treaties. When Copenhagen collapsed, everybody blamed China:
Now they tell us it was the EU that sank the deal:
The only reason the Indy tells us that is to play up to Gordy's PR stunt - another pathetic, shameless, and desperate bid to con the public and wheedle a few poll points. Crash Gordon is saving the world yet again, you heard it here first. And that's the only reason that the Indy has temporarily desisted from bashing China for the Copenhagen fiasco.