Cancún 2010

The Cancún Climate Summit 2010 has just opened and I think I can predict the outcome. After the failure of the Copenhagen conference, there is a lot of pressure to produce a formula for combating climate change. The problem is that the majority of the World does not want an imposed solution.

There are a number of barriers to agreeing a solution; the most important is that once doubt has been expressed over whether climate change is man-made or not, nobody is going to accept a solution based on that uncertain premise. Is climate change natural or man-made? As long as the discussion is polarised between two unrealistic propositions, any progress in the argument is impossible. Climate Change is both natural and man-made.

The real discussion should be whether changes in energy sources and energy use can have any effect on the changing climate. Any proposal has to accept that in World terms there is a majority who are simply not prepared to limit their economic progress for what they see as an unproved principle. The science has shown what is happening, but the following derived policies remain unproved. The developed world continues to press ahead with their economic progress, based on oil and other fossil fuels, and the underdeveloped nations are demanding their fair share of that progress.

There is an worrying problem with this situation which is that the developed nations are at present using up the majority of the World's resources. The peasant economies are no longer prepared to support the developed economies. It has been estimated that we would need three or more planets to provide for a universal higher level of development.

Any plan to slow Global Climate Change has many barriers to overcome first. Fundamental religion is one. While around 50% of the American population and a large proportion of the world's population believe that the Earth is only a few thousand years old since the Creation, no Climate Change argument can make sense. How can these many individuals be expected to lower their standard of living to "save the Planet"? Many have a belief the God will provide for their future, quietly forgetting the wrath of the Almighty expressed on those who offended in the past.

We are in a roughly 120,000 year transition period between ice ages. After many climate variations the upturn in average temperature and carbon dioxide levels began about 17,000 years ago as shown by the analysis of Antarctic ice cores. A similar graph is shown in the reports of the International Panel on Climate Change. These IPCC reports are well sourced and scientifically presented, but it is the policies derived from them which are open to question. It is important to make this distinction between scientific research and the subsequent political demands. A major source of confusion is that these policies are based on rising temperatures over only 7000 years, not the whole cyclic pattern which reveals the longer term natural cycle.

To make the Climate Change science palatable, it has been over-simplified, equating human fossil carbon emissions with an average Global temperature rise. If you put these partial graphs together, there is a close correlation over 7000 years, but a coincidence is not a proof of a cause and effect. Indeed you could conclude that a temerature rise is causing the increase in atmospheric carbon. Both graphs are approximately exponential and thus look the same shape. The reality is that average Global temperatures have been rising for 17,000 years, but there has been a marked upturn over the last few hundred years from human activity. The situation is much worse that the proposed solutions would suggest.

The solution sought in Cancun is a global reduction in the rise of carbon emissions in percentages of current use, or based on 1990 levels, or another stated time. Here a global lack of expertise in mathematics does not help. What is being discussed is a drop in the rate of rise of emissions, which is still a rise. However this is obfuscated by the political language used. We are not being asked to reduce our emissions, but to slow their rate of rise. To reduce our emissions, we would need to reduce our rate of fossil fuel extractions, but that is not on the agenda.

The IPCC has produced guidelines based on the assumption that the Globe can cope with continued emissions, but there is nothing in the science that confirms this. The IPCC advice is based on an average Global temperature rise being limited to 2deg C which has to assume that the oceans can absorb a continuing stream of carbon dioxide without creating a new problem. Oceanographers can confirm this absorption, but they are getting increasingly agitated over the acidification of the oceans which is very measurable and the effect of this on marine life cycles could be disastrous.

It is dangerous to base our climate policies on these shaky propositions. The IPCC political recommendations are not backed by the IPCC scientific reports but are drawn up to be a maximum of what is felt acceptable to conferences like Cancun.

Even the proposed limited action will be unacceptable to both the developed and the underdeveloped nations. The best that can be expected from Cancun is a fudge, and plenty of fudges are available. Good fudges are "excess emissions", "reduction in carbon intensity" and "relative to year yyyy". These disguise increases in emissions as reductions to the mathematically illiterate, which is unfortunately the majority.

Take "carbon intensity". This is carbon emissions relative to economic growth and thus energy use, in other words a net rise. A cut of one or two percent per year can sound impressive if stated as a 20:20 cut for instance, but in reality if you multiply this by the economic growth rate which is comparable to the energy use, it comes out as a large net increase in carbon emissions. A developing country with a 6% annual growth rate like India or China comes out over 10 years as a 70% rise and over 20 years represents a rise of 320%.

The only way to reduce real carbon emissions from fossil fuels is to reduce the use of fossil fuels and there are no proposals on the table in Cancun to do this. You would soon recognise any move to reduce fossil fuel extraction by the reactions from the fossil fuel suppliers, but I hear no screaming. Any such demand would be political suicide.

It is very useful for activists to focus all our attention on carbon and carbon emissions. There is an industry based on supposed "carbon reduction" sometimes bordering on a religion which I call "Greensmug". A true Greensmug believer will change their lightbulbs and insist that others do likewise and simply ignore what we have done over centuries of urban living to the Earth's surface. Glaring examples are deforestation, agriculture and overfishing, topped of by emitting 1,000,000,000,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels so far and there's another 1,000,000,000,000 tonnes due to go up in the next 50 years. We have made wholesale changes to our Planet while accepting these as normal. To reverse these changes it is only logical to reverse this process, not to add to it.

Humans have also reproduced very successfully to a position where we cannot even now support all of 7 billion people adequately. What is worse is that the Earth cannot supply the resources to give an acceptable level of support to all of these 7 billion. It's not the Planet that needs saving it's us. Where do we start? I suggest that we have unwittingly geoengineered ourselves into this position and we can only geoengineer our way out of it. For good or ill, we are now in charge of our Planet whether we like it or not.