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Friday, 18 December 2009
Crunch time in Copenhagen
Looking on from afar, it is hard to judge how the climate change negotiations are going - for every 'breakthrough' story there is a counterbalancing 'deadlock' tale. But today is the day that all the world leaders are going to have to face reality - can they agree or can't they? The biggest driver now will be face - which world leader wants to have been seen to have stood in the way of success?I'm always an optimist, so here's my worst case scenario...
1. Not getting an agreement does not stop individual action on a national level.
2. The political capital of having so many of the world's leaders turn up makes that local action much more likely. This is now a mainstream issue, not one for environment ministries.
3. The discussions have brought home some inconvenient truths about who is responsible for climate change (rich nations) and who's feeling the pain most (poor nations). A world where Tuvalu can take on China is the sort of world where I want to live.
4. Not even the best efforts of the denial dinosaurs, CRU e-mail hack and all, could impact on the process*.
5. Business can lead where Governments fear to tread. The increased awareness amongst the general public will boost green markets, lower resistance to innovations and reduce tolerance of high carbon behaviour. Green performance is already a source of competitive advantage and it will become more so.
If, through some unlikely last minute breakthrough, a legally binding agreement is made, then it is game on. High carbon businesses will soon become fossils, low carbon business will boom. I'm an optimist, I live in hope!
* If you want a bit of festive Friday fun, watch Ian Plimer, darling of the denial circuit, squirm as his "science" comes under scrutiny on Australian TV.
Labels: climate change, climate change denial, copenhagen
# posted by Gareth Kane : 07:00
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Monday, 14 December 2009
You can't kill a zombie
Ben Goldacre writes the regular Bad Science column in the Guardian. Normally he sticks to medical issues, particularly the MMR scare, but he turned his scathing eye to climate change denial this week and gave us a new phrase - "zombie arguments". These are the arguments that keep coming back no matter how many times you blow them to smithereens - global cooling in the 70s, mediaeval warm period, no warming since 1998 and all the usual suspects. You can try using the well rehearsed responses listed at Grist, New Scientist or try the heavy artillery of scientific argument at Real Climate, but you won't kill zombies with mere facts - they keep coming back.BTW, I had lunch on Saturday with a leading climatologist. He's very relieved that none of his e-mails to Phil Jones at CRU have been through the denialists' distortion mill, and says that Phil Jones is a true gent and completely above reproach. The New Scientist debunking of the e-mail allegations is worth a read - there really is nothing in the allegations.
Labels: climate change denial
# posted by Gareth Kane : 07:00
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Wednesday, 25 November 2009
Copenhagen's hotting up...
You can always tell when things are coming to a crunch when the game gets dirty. If you are reading this blog, then you are probably aware that the University of East Anglia's IT system has been illegally hacked and e-mails between the UEA's Climate Research Unit and other climatologists leaked onto the web. This has thrown the climate change sceptics into a frenzy of outrage/delight and boosted the conspiracy theories about international socialism creating the climate change hoax to enslave the people... but if you look at the e-mails objectively, in context and with a sense of perspective, it's a load of fuss over nothing.The timing is of course important as it brings the sceptics and deniers back into the media just when they want to be there. The same thing happened with the first Earth Summit in 1992 and around the Kyoto Protocol discussions a few years later. These attempts to muddy the waters are deliberate to protect vested interests and are to be expected, but their influence has been waning as big business shifts away from the denial camp and starts to engage proactively with the issues. A shift to morally and legally dubious tactics such as hacking could be seen as a sign of desperation.
On the other hand, I'm becoming increasingly convinced that the 'global binding deal' approach is the wrong one. It is very unlikely that such a deal could please people in Idaho and Indonesia, or Birmingham and Brunei. It also feeds the fears of those the deniers are trying to influence - people don't like being told what to do by some remote entity. There must be a model of flexible interlocking national programmes where each country can set, and vary, its own targets and programmes, with mechanisms to cover trade between them. Then we could have, in the words of Elvis, a little less conversation, a little more action.
Labels: climate change, climate change denial, copenhagen
# posted by Gareth Kane : 07:00
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Wednesday, 9 September 2009
Denial is a funny ol' game...
I'm currently in mid-spat with a industrial trade organisation I'm a member of. In their regular Friday mail-out, the 'Did You Know?' section appeared to be a cut'n'paste job on the blurb from a climate change denial book by mining geologist Ian Plimmer. Plimmer's book has been ripped to shreds for repeating some of the oldest and most discredited climate change myths while ignoring the science, but it keeps bouncing back to the public arena.After sleeping on it, I decided to stand up for science. So I complained and asked for a retraction. I was offered a chance to put my own view across in next week's edition, so I thought "fair enough" and wrote two paragraphs ripping into Plimmer's work and contrasting it with the scientific consensus. This was rejected as being a retraction - which I thought was the point. I sent off a strongly worded response and they've gone quiet.
So why am I bothering? Is it really that important?
Well, yes, it is.
1. OK, I'm a pedant - I hate people mindlessly repeating nonsense in a work context (if another trainer tells me communication is 93% non-verbal, I'll try out a made up language on them...).
2. This industrial sector contains many companies at threat from the shift to a low carbon economy and many who could flourish in that low carbon economy if they are nimble and prescient enough to change. If these people take a business as usual approach thinking climate change is just a political fad, they're sunk.
So can't these eminent business people think for themselves? That's a difficult question to answer. No valve manufacturer flourished in the transistor age, few people foresaw the current financial crisis and our newspapers are wilting under attack from cyberspace. Clever people do fail to see the road ahead. The reason is denial - "it will never happen to me". I am seriously concerned that the continued oxygen of publicity given to professional climate change deniers will make industrialists sit back and say 'we'll wait until the smoke clears' when they need to act now.
But it may be more complicated than that. There is a description in today's Guardian of a 2004 psychology experiment which presented CIA documents which showed there were no WMDs in Iraq to pro-war conservatives. Strangely the evidence made the subjects more, not less, convinced that WMDs existed. In other words confronting people who are wrong about an issue with evidence that they are wrong pushes them into denial. So maybe it is right that my response is not published... who knows?
Labels: climate change denial
# posted by Gareth Kane : 07:00
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A highly accessible, practical guide to those who want to introduce sustainability into their business or organization quickly and effectively.
