UN sticks with climate agenda - but what prospects?
Reports suggesting that UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is retiring from the climate change agenda have had commentators wondering a) what it means for prospects of a new global climate agreement and b) whether the UN remains committed to the issue.
What appears to be happening is that two realities have converged.
One consists of indications that a new global deal remains some way away - certainly further away than the next UN climate summit in Durban, South Africa.
The other is that a much more major event - Rio+20, Stockholm+40, Earth Summit Mark 2, Earth Summit 2012, whatever you like to call it - is now firmly on the horizon.
It's happening in May 2012, which means that the UN chief and his officials need to devote a lot of energy to it now if it's to make a significant impact.
With only a certain number of expert staff and resources to call on, some important people in Mr Ban's office will now be spending much more of their time looking to Rio, and correspondingly less to Durban - that's all.
That the UN remains committed to the goal of a new global climate agreement can be seen from the fact that Mr Ban chose climate change as the issue to flag up during his speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos:
"Climate change is showing us that the old model is more than obsolete. It has rendered it extremely dangerous. It is a recipe for natural disaster. It is a global suicide attack."
So that's the commitment question. But what about the prospects for that elusive global deal this year?
Not good, reading between the lines.
Since the last UN summit in Cancun, Mexico, developments suggest that a number of major governments are backtracking - not from their headline commitments, but - possibly more importantly - from the actions needed to achieve those commitments.
We have seen Japan abandon its emissions trading plan over concerns on competitiveness.
Australia has just scrapped a number of initiatives aimed at promoting green technology, such as the Green Car Innovation Fund, in order to pump more aid into flood-struck Queensland.
These moves come on top of the Canadian government's defeat of climate legislation back in November.
Meanwhile, in what's politically still the most important country in this context - the US - although the administration is ploughing ahead with proposals aimed at curbing carbon through the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), what's equally clear is that opponents are building up a major head of steam.
For President Obama and his team, this raises two questions: a) can the EPA maintain its mandate in the face of opposition? and b) how will the fight play out politically?
Rio 2012 will have to find room in a packed agenda - how will rising temperatures fit in?
(If you want to catch up with everything that happened in Cancun in just two minutes, by the way, and have a smile on the way, try this hand-puppeted account from the UK Youth Climate Coalition.)
This is the phase of the year when ideas are being gathered on how the UN climate process should run leading up to the end-of-year summit.
But this time, the existence of Rio+20 provides additional context.
Rio, and Stockholm before it, were not centred on climate change, even through the issue raised its head at both events.
Instead they looked across the piece at the sustainability of human societies.
This is where Rio+20 is heading as well. So what role should it play on climate change? Is it a place for big thinking or for smaller-scale, more tangible action? Should it give new impetus to the existing thrust of UN negotiations, or aim for a fundamental re-shaping of the process?
For people who have spent the last 20 years striving to bring countries to agreement on climate change, does Rio+20 present an opportunity or a threat?
The UN itself is pushing the theme of the "green economy" for Rio. But what exactly is that? And how are the twin ingredients of environmental protection and economic growth to be prioritised relative to each other?
These are not straightforward questions, but they do bear down intimately on climate change as well as on other environmental issues.
And they ought logically to play some role in shaping the UN climate process for the next decade, as well as shaping the policies of governments who will presumably sign up to whatever comes out of Rio, albeit - presumably - after the usual protracted wranglings and last-minute fudges.
~RS~q~RS~~RS~z~RS~56~RS~)
I'm Richard Black, environment correspondent for the BBC News website. This is my take on what's happening to our shared environment as the human population grows and our use of nature's resources increases.
© MMXI
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What does this mean in real terms? Will others follow?
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Well, one can only hope that by the time 2012 gets here and we've endured what is likely to be yet another record cold winter, that the whole cAGW meme will be a dead duck and we can get onto more pressing matters.
It amuses me that people can harp on about the impending doom of a slightly warming planet and the needs to spend trillions combating it (the hubris) yet on the other hand bemoan the rising food shortages and rampant disease(s) problems in the world.
Solve one by ignoring the other (ignore as appropriate to world view...)
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“Instead they looked across the piece at the sustainability of human societies.”
Richard has hit the nail on the head, we have to fundamentally change society, green cars and green economies are nothing more than nicotine patches, the only way to end our addiction is to go cold turkey. We must return to the land in organised communes, consume only what we produce and accept that our freedoms are limited by the needs of others and the ability if the earth to provide.
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"a number of major governments are backtracking - not from their headline commitments, but - possibly more importantly - from the actions needed to achieve those commitments."
This is how the demise of the AGW idea will play out. The idea was fatally damaged by the very people who set out to promote it. As soon as they sought to convert it from informed opinion to robust science, it was doomed. It was inevitable that large numbers of people would then expect to see a degree of rigour that the AGW idea could never display.
Then, instead of carrying out some damage limitation by accepting the rank of a pseudo-science, many AGW advocates continued to proclaim it as a true science, superior to physics. So superior that physicists who did not accept AGW had no right to an opinion. After all, what do physicists know about it?
The death-throes of AGW will be protracted and painful, but the end is certain. It will eventually cease to be fashionable, and finally will just be remembered as some silly idea that people used to believe in the olden days.
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Ban Ki Moon must be retiring I should think. He has I understand had a rather astonishing anti capitalist rant, which argues that he no longer cares whether any one thinks he is still in possession of his marbles or not.
With a bit of luck old Patchy may remove himself from the scene at the same time.
As you say Paul an agreement on the world governance of climate(or even tidal movements) by the time of Durban now looks unlikely. But every development you describe in each of the various countries seems to suggest that each and every one of them is rowing back from the climate vortex that was threatening to swallow them.
I rather suspect now that hell will freeze over before there is any worldwide agreement on the control of CO2 emissions.
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As a rule of thumb, our worst errors are the ones we are not alerted to, the ones we are not constantly on the lookout to avoid.
As these people rave on about the dangers of global warming-cooling (or whatever they claim to have "told you so" about with hindsight) they seem dangerously oblivious to the familiar and regular old danger of famine.
Since the 1960s, Guardian readers have baa-baa'd their conformist rhetoric of "there is no real shortage of food -- we have an excess of it -- the real problem is unequal distribution".
But we must, repeat must, maintain a vast excess of food -- so much of an excess that wealthy people throw food away without a second thought. If you think that's obscene, grow up and live with it. Otherwise, rising costs for the poor make a perceived (or actually approaching) shortage of food the basis for a profitable enterprise. And then, because of market forces, costs spiral upwards. Inevitably, there comes a point at which the poor can no longer afford to eat.
It would be lovely not to have to deal with those forces, but in the real world we cannot avoid them. Humans will exchange things for profit whether or not we'd prefer they didn't.
When global warming-cooling is but a quaint archaic joke (and we're almost there now) famines will take their toll, possibly on as grand a scale as they have done in the past -- again and again as the inevitable result of human folly.
Don't forget who alerted you to the danger!
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This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the House Rules.
Richard,
Given that food inflation is the spark that launched the political unrest in Tunisia and Egypt (with probably more to come), perhaps you would like to do a blog about the wonders of biofuel and its impact on food supplies and prices?
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5. bandythebane wrote:
"Ban Ki Moon must be retiring I should think. He has I understand had a rather astonishing anti capitalist rant, which argues that he no longer cares whether any one thinks he is still in possession of his marbles or not."
You mean this rant?
http://hauntingthelibrary.wordpress.com/2011/01/28/un-sec-gen-capitalism-is-environmental-suicide-says-we-need-a-revolution/
Watermelons of the World Unite!
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OK. I see my initial comment on this has gone into 'further consideration' purgatory, no doubt never to make it into blog heaven, so here it is again without most of my inconvenient comments:
Richard seems to be unaware of this:
“Extra climate summit to focus on Kyoto successor
UN confirms Bangkok talks in April…
28 Jan 2011
Climate negotiators will stage an extra round of talks this year as they attempt to thrash out a deal to replace the expiring Kyoto Protocol.
UN officials said a five-day session will be held in Bangkok in April on top of planned meetings in Bonn in June and ahead of the annual summit of environment ministers in Durban at the end of the year…
Even though the Bangkok talks will gather senior negotiators from almost 200 countries, a further session is likely to be held between Bonn and Durban, officials said, after the false start of Copenhagen and incremental progress last month in Cancun.”
http://www.businessgreen.com/bg/news/1940380/extra-climate-summit-focus-kyoto-successor
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We need to reduce the population, so that there are fewer people for each of us to disagree with....
Oh, and a useful side-effect would be that they can eat, and pollute, etc, in a sustainable way.
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bandythebane
"he no longer cares whether any one thinks he is still in possession of his marbles or not"
what a fruitcake eh?.....apart from the fact he's right.
my penny's worth for the cuckoo's nest here.
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Wow. Just saw a 'teaser' clip for a BBC4 program apparently running tonight, here:
[Unsuitable/Broken URL removed by Moderator]
Tsk, tsk.
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Those on here trying to pretend that concern about climate change is dwindling -- Bowman; Labmonkey; Vic Smith -- need to get up to speed. For what it's worth, public concern in the UK remains steady at around 83%.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/jan/31/public-belief-climate-change?intcmp=122
I like the last bit; "An analysis of those who think climate change poses no threat reveals them to be predominantly men (70%) and about twice as likely to be over 65 and to have voted Conservative in 2010 than the general population". I wonder how true that is?
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I don't suppose Richard or anyone at the UN has read this yet. My only question about it is how did it ever get published by the PNAS?
Synchronized Northern Hemisphere climate change and solar magnetic cycles during the Maunder Minimum
http://www.pnas.org/content/107/48/20697.abstract
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bowmanthebard
'Don't forget who alerted you to the danger!'
You must have watched the same film as me.
CanadianRockies
VERY interesting, and so is the one available link from the abstract. I see it all so much more clearly now.
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“Granddad, what was global warming?”
“Put some more coal on the fire lad and I will tell you.”
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JaneBasingstoke
Back to an earlier thread. The birds in my dream were redwings but with the flight pattern exactly like the video footage you showed me but in many more funnels, all coming in from my left hand field of view. We don't get Redwings in GB, except in very cold weather and all I came up with on the RSPB site were swallows. I have seen a few Redwing before, many years ago during a very cold winter. I only looked up 'Redwings' when the word popped into my head after combining 'red' and 'wing.' Weird, 'fruitcake' or what?
Back to the present thread.
If we have to maintain high levels of food production, where the hell will governments store the surplus? (in case of famine and crop failures)
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@ sensiblegrannie:
American redwings are a sort of blackbird whose males have a very distinctive "jungle"-type sound (as well as a rather exotic "tropical" appearance). To most Americans, they are a sign of summer.
European redwings are a type of thrush, and (like fieldfares) we tend to see them in winter when cold weather forces them out of farmlands to look for food in suburban gardens.
Without meaning to over-analyze your dream, I would see the first as a symbolic of heat/summer in the New World or West, and the second as a sign of cold/winter in the Old World or East.
(There are many other differences between them: for example, redwing blackbirds are sexually dimorphic, redwing thrushes are not.)
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18. At 10:20am on 01 Feb 2011, sensiblegrannie wrote:
If we have to maintain high levels of food production, where the hell will governments store the surplus?
Butter will be stored on butter mountains, wine will be stored in wine lakes. We know how big those things are, because we see them all over the place, don't we?
A lot of people (myself included) have a visceral horror of wasted food. Even without my parents' experiences of rationing and shortage, I'd say I'd probably still just hate to see food thrown out. I also hate seeing rich people doing frivolous, self-indulgent and vulgar things with their money while poor people suffer from lack of money (and hence lack of freedom). Sometimes I feel a twinge of moral outrage -- nay, a puritanical attitude, no less!
The climate debate is acrimonious because there are puritanical attitudes and ideology on both sides. Each side thinks the other is more or less morally corrupt.
BUT -- we must not allow our personal distastes to become an ideology that guides public policy. Waste and frivolous spending is the inevitable result of "plenty", and "plenty" is good for the poor as well as the rich, however irritating it may be on a personal level.
I get the impression that a lot of enemies of economic growth are simply allowing personal distaste for excess and inequality to guide their opinions on all sorts of unrelated matters -- including climate change. The image of a perfect, bucolic, equal, growth-free, waste-free world with "communities" living in harmony leads them to embrace loony-bin pseudoscience.
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You are right of course Rossglory if what you mean is that Ban Ki Moon is expressing what the underlying agenda of the UN and its IPCC organ really is.
Perhaps Ban should ask his son to explain it to him. He at least has an MBA and has presumably unlike Ban himself some slight grasp of the basics of economics?
Once he retires, which it seems surely he will, can we look forward to him disappearing into a monastery after donating all the cash the capitalist system has lavished on him to Greenpeace or WWF?
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20. At 11:38am on 01 Feb 2011, bowmanthebard wrote:
Butter will be stored on butter mountains, wine will be stored in wine lakes. We know how big those things are, because we see them all over the place, don't we?
In the big rock candy mountain.
To the climate engineers:
Have they started SWCE engineering? If they have started it, do they have the technology to clean up the mess if it all goes horribly wrong?
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Governments are just the handmaidens of big business and banking so anything they attempt is mainly for the media and has little to do with actual change. People in many countries are making efforts and making purchases differently and this is how change occurs. Politicians are shallow and offer little and take much. These things will change either because of a crisis or because people act differently. Governments are simply unreliable and people need to stop thinking that they need their permission to act. Technology allows for organization and social media is becoming a major force for change. The political are very suspicious of the truth...they lack familiarity.
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"UN sticks with climate agenda - but what prospects?"
The UN is corrupt and utterly useless. The bogus climate agenda is just another scam.
One can only hope that the UN's prospects are limited and that eventually Governments pull the plug on the UN. Until then, the UN will stand as a perfect example of colossal waste and greed.
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Seems like a few people are starting to join up the dots.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atr16CR6Lus
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/brazil/110120/climate-change-floods-natural-disasters
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/its-time-to-talk-of-climate-change-20110113-19pr3.html
Of course, nothing can be proved; but it takes a certain sort of person to deny the possibility.
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You may be right John Russell. Perhaps the sky is about to fall, but I am not going to get too excited about the second biggest flood in Brisbane since 1962 or the third biggest since 1896.
Anyway wasn't global warming supposed to produce persistent drought in Queensland and isn't that the reason why the dams and overflow channels to divert the flood were never built.
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John Russell #25 wrote:
nothing can be proved; but it takes a certain sort of person to deny the possibility
You're absolutely right that no theory can be proved; nor can any theory be disproved. So it would take a very foolish sort of person to deny the very possibility of disasters caused by manmade global warming, and an equally foolish person to deny the very possibility of disasters caused by manmade steps to avoid global warming (such as the famines I keep predicting caused by out-of-control food prices).
All we have in the real world are guesses that are more or less well-considered, more or less well-tested, more or less well-reasoned. We do not have have numerical measures of how good a guess is -- that fantasy too is for the birds, and it is usually inspired by philosophical confusion.
If there are people who deny the very possibility of disasters caused by manmade global warming, they do not deserve to be called "sceptics". The very same applies to anyone who denies the possibility of disasters caused by manmade economic idiocy. We've seen many more of the latter than the former, it should be noted.
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#19. bowmanthebard wrote:
(sensible grannie)
"American redwings are a sort of blackbird whose males have a very distinctive "jungle"-type sound (as well as a rather exotic "tropical" appearance). To most Americans, they are a sign of summer."
Well, bowmanthe bard, I suppose one could describe the male's song like that, or describe the males as "tropical" looking (the females are plain streaked brown, and do not sing of course) but since they winter in large parts of the U.S. I don't suppose many Americans see them as a "sign of summer." That would be more true for Canadians but even that is a stretch because they arrrive on most Canadian nesting grounds quite early. They typically nest in cattail marshes, and forage around them, and are super-abundant in/around large marshes on the prairies.
We have a nice little nesting colony of them - 5 -10 pairs annually - around the beaver pond/marsh complex on our land. They typically arrive here early in April and leave by early July after the nesting season is completed so, for most of the actual summer, they are gone to greener pastures from here.
It was Red-winged Blackbirds that so famously 'fell out of the sky' recently, in a town where an estimated 300,000 of them roosted in the winter. They are an extremely abundant bird and in some American wintering areas they are considered to be a nuisance on agricultural areas... so those farmers are not so thrilled about them.
The North American blackbird that I think does sound 'jungley' and does look more 'tropical' is the Yellow-headed Blackbird, which similarly nests in (more fertile marshes, and does mostly winter in Mexico.
But there are many species of blackbirds in North America (in a distinct family Icteridae), most of which do look just plain black from a distance, although closer views and/or the right lighting shows them to have beautiful sheens of purples or dull orange in one case. The exceptions are the two just noted and the Western and Eastern Meadowlarks, which are very yellow and generally beautiful (and which have a song that for many people is more of a seasonal signal).
However, this 'blackbird' family also includes orioles, which do fit your description of a bird of summer much better, and are so spectacularly beautiful that they look very exotic... and they do winter in the tropics. Most of them also breed south of Canada; we have one species (near) here, at the northern edge of their breeeding range.
You need to look at a bird book or google to see how beautiful these orioles are. You could have some marvellous dreams with orioles grannie!
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@bowmanthebard writes: "...such as the famines I keep predicting caused by out-of-control food prices".
Out-of-control food prices don't cause famines, Bowman. That's just blaming the messenger. Out-of-control food prices will be caused by the end of 'easy oil', aided and abetted by water shortages and soil depletion -- and multiplied by over-population.
And BTW, you're far from the only one warning of food supply failure; I've been warning of it for years. You might like to take a look at the article below. I think you will guess who I am amongst the comments. Even leaving aside the problems of climate change I think food production will soon be in turmoil. What is it they say, "9 meals from anarchy"?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/damian-carrington-blog/2011/jan/28/climate-change-food-bubble
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CanadianRockies #28 wrote:
I suppose one could describe the male's song like that, or describe the males as "tropical" looking (the females are plain streaked brown, and do not sing of course) but since they winter in large parts of the U.S. I don't suppose many Americans see them as a "sign of summer."
They were widely seen as summer visitors when I lived in Chicago, which I've just checked is on the northern edge of their "year round resident" area. I saw cardinals and parakeets all year round, but I don't think I ever saw a redwing blackbird except in summer.
As for "jungle sounds" and "tropical appearance", you'll have to put yourself in the shoes of people who have spent most of their lives in the British Isles (as I have, apart from a few years here and there such as the 5 in Chicago). Apart from drunken revellers, as far as wildlife goes these islands are mostly silent at night. Zero sounds of crickets; the frogs are mute; our equivalent of the nighthawk is very rare. Most of us are pretty unfamiliar with the hot, chirruping, croaking, bird-cry filled night of America.
Interestingly, the colors here are as muted as the sounds. The blue tit (chickadee) is a cheeky chappie in powder blue and pale yellow rather than anything like a parrot. The thrushes (including our redwing) are a tasteful-looking lot in various subtle tweeds, with a bit of rust here, grey there.
It's interesting how continents can have "flavors" such as extra bright colors (America) or extra lethal venoms (Australia), and I assume it's a combination of semi-accidental factors such as available sunlight, sexual selection, long periods of seasonal dormancy, and so on. The American descendants of the "European" starling have noticeably different coloring in the US, despite being introduced fairly recently.
But to return to the main point: honestly, most people in the British Isles would see the redwing blackbird as a very exotic, bird-of-paradise-type version of our own (tasteful) blackbird.
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John Russell ##29 wrote:
And BTW, you're far from the only one warning of food supply failure; I've been warning of it for years.
But you and that Guardian person misunderstand why the human population changes over the centuries. You need a crash course in the absolute basics of evolutionary theory.
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Entertaining cartoon about the Great (Climate) Debate, although they did confuse the cause of the glacier melt on Kilimanjaro with all glacier melt...
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/02/01/bbc4s-meet-the-skeptics/#comment-587951
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#30. bowmanthebard
Yes, everything is relative, and if Red-winged Blackbirds were not so common here they would indeed seem exotic and spectacular. The males definitely are beautiful. I wish we had Cardinals, but no such luck. And any Euro bird that strayed over here would seem 'exotic.'
Not sure what "parakeets" you would have seen around Chicago though? Or maybe it was something that looked like one?
And interesting about the differences you detect in Starlings. Since you are 'the bard' I am guessing that you know about the Shakespeare connection to their DISASTEROUS introduction to this continent. Apart from being serious agricultural pests they also had major impacts on native cavity nesting birds like bluebirds, as they could outcompete them for nest sites. That prompted the building of huge numbers of nest boxes by AMATEUR and VOLUNTEER naturalists which has helped in most areas, and in some areas those bluebird populations have fully rebounded, and in some areas where nest sites were always limited, there are more bluebirds than before.
Sorry to hear about your relatively drab birds. We have a lot of very colourful ones, and the most colourful group are our 'warblers' which are different than Euro 'warblers'... but unfortunately are only here in the summer.
I have been a birder for almost 50 years now, so could gab on ad infinitum about birds but won't here as it is far off topic. Wish Richard would do a blog about birds, and not another one of these global level mush pieces but rather something specific one could get their teeth/beak into. Even this would be interesting to explore:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/jan/20/uk-wild-bird-numbers
P.S. At the moment outside my window there are three colourful species visiting the bird feeder and the seeds beneath it, which you might want to google to appreciate: Pine Grosbeaks, Evening Grosbeaks, and White-winged Crossbills. The latter are also found across northern Eurasia and I would expect they get to the UK some years as their populations and movements are erratic, depending on spruce cone crops. We had a great spruce cone crop here this year - they occur in roughly 11 year cycles - so lots of them this year, probably nested here last summer and probably will again soon (they nest at any time of the year if there is food available).
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@bowmanthebard writes: "But you and that Guardian person misunderstand why the human population changes over the centuries."
We've never been here before; 7 billion humans on the planet. Past paradigmns are no longer relevant. Expect the 'black swan'.
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The article is interesting. Did the UN give up yet? And if not, what can they do, as various countries have made general promises, but are not showing any signs of actually doing anything that might be helpful to reduce CO2 production.
The reaction of most commenters here is that they'd rather deny that the problem exists, and keep laughing until the world is in real serious trouble, that can not so easily be avoided by just reducing our CO2 polution.
Maybe it is time countries that do want to do something start to talk about import tariffs against products made by also producing large amounts of unnecessary greenhouse gasses. If the economy is the only thing people are willing to think of, give them something economical to think about.
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