The Age of Global Warming: A History (53 page)

The scientists at NOAA had good reason to be cautious. As a scientific concept, global weirding is, well, weird. Following Popper’s criterion of falsifiability, the more a theory states that certain things cannot happen, the stronger the theory is. The problem with global weirding is that it doesn’t preclude anything – rather it suggests the opposite. Anything could happen. 

And how is weirdness measured? In Britain in 1975, near the start of a three-decade rise in global average temperatures in a record-breaking hot summer, the weather suddenly turned cold in the first week of June. Derbyshire was playing Lancashire in a county cricket championship match at Buxton. It started to rain, then snow. ‘When I went out to inspect the wicket, the snow was level with the top of my boots. I’d never seen anything like it,’ recalled umpire Dickie Bird.
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Is summer snow in Buxton more or less ‘weird’ than winter snow in Washington?

Despite this, global weirding captures a reality that changes in global average temperature do not. We only experience local temperature and local weather. No one experiences a global average temperature – a statistical artefact created by climate scientists. As measured by global average temperature, 2010 was one of the warmest years on record. Yet what was experienced by Mongolian nomads, the inhabitants of Beijing or Senator Inhofe’s grandchildren in their igloo was quite different. If climate scientists had not been pre-disposed to worry about global warming, would anyone have noticed that 2010 was statistically one of the warmest years on record?  

The lack of observed warming during the first decade of the new century began to create a stir among climate scientists. In May 2009, Phil Jones, Britain’s best known climate scientist, reassured a colleague in a government funding agency. ‘Bottom line – the no upward trend has to continue for a total of fifteen years before we get worried,’ Jones wrote – giving himself more time by dating the fifteen years from 2004/05, and not 1998, as that was an El Niño year.
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It was as if a doctor was dismayed rather than pleased to find a patient’s disease hadn’t progressed as fast as he had anticipated. In such a situation, most people would find themselves another doctor.

While climate scientists might be over-committed to the idea of climate warming, political leaders most over-invested in global warming turned out to be Copenhagen’s biggest political casualties. No politician had toiled as hard as Gordon Brown. Trailing in the polls, a breakthrough at Copenhagen was Brown’s last chance of pulling around his electoral fortunes, even though, when talking climate change, it often sounded like a foreign language Brown hadn’t mastered. In the May 2010 election, Brown led Labour to its worst defeat since 1983. 

For Australia’s Kevin Rudd, Copenhagen was, in the words of opposition leader Tony Abbott, ‘an unmitigated disaster’.
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Before the 2007 election, Rudd had described climate change as ‘the greatest moral, economic and environmental challenge of our generation’.
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He then upped the stakes. Rudd dismissed opposition arguments to delay introducing cap-and-trade legislation until the outcome of Copenhagen was clear. ‘The argument that we must not act until others do is an argument that has been used by political cowards since time immemorial,’ Rudd said in November 2009. ‘There are two stark choices – action or inaction. The resolve of the Australian Government is clear – we choose action, and we do so because Australia’s fundamental economic and environmental interests lie in action,’ Rudd declared.
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An RAAF plane was put on standby to fly Rudd to Copenhagen at short notice. A provisional delegate list numbered one hundred and fourteen Australians, including Rudd’s official photographer, compared to a seventy-one-strong UK delegation.
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In April 2010, Rudd did an about-turn. Blaming the opposition and the pace of international negotiations, he announced a delay of his Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme until the end of 2012. Two months later, the Labor caucus heaved Rudd out of office and replaced him with his deputy Julia Gillard, whom Rudd also blamed for his decision to postpone the plan. 

Global warming played a part in Rudd’s downfall, according to his predecessor John Howard. It hurt him personally: one moment he had been saying it was the greatest moral challenge, then he was putting it off for two years, precipitating the sharp fall in his poll ratings.
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The biggest casualty of Copenhagen was the West’s standing in the world. It had declared global warming the most serious issue of the age. The US and the EU had come together and pushed hard for a comprehensive agreement covering all the major economies. The build-up of pressure going into the conference was immense.

However, the West misunderstood the contingent nature of the Third World’s participation in international environmental negotiations. Western politicians talked a story that the world’s poor would be hardest hit by global warming. But the nations with the largest numbers of poor people had priorities that conflicted with what the West wanted. Its leaders understood better than their colleagues in the West what Bastiat had found in the nineteenth century – the best defence against capricious nature is wealth.

In this regard, it is striking how little had changed since 1972 and the Stockholm conference. There was some movement. The language of environmentalism made inroads. China committed to huge investments in renewable energy. Brazil moved from the outright hostility of its military rulers. Even so, Brazil stuck by China and India. When he got home from Copenhagen, Lula pointed the finger: ‘The United States is proposing a reduction of four percent from the date fixed by the Kyoto Protocol. That is too little,’ Lula said on his weekly radio show
Coffee with the President
.
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At the same time, the power of the idea of global warming meant China and India couldn’t simply say ‘no’. So they fought the West by other means and played for time: fielding high calibre negotiators with a mastery of the conference texts and procedures; holding on to ground taken in previous rounds for as long as possible, especially the Berlin Mandate; using proxies to articulate their arguments and, most of all, maintaining the cohesiveness of the G77, despite the disparate interests of the small islands states and Africa from those of China and India. Throughout, they were aided by NGOs for whom blaming the West was encoded in their DNA.

In the end China and India succeeded. If there was going to be an agreement, it would have happened at Copenhagen. The Durban COP in December 2011 demonstrated the enormity of their victory at Copenhagen. Canada, Russia and Japan had already announced they would not enter into a second commitment period under the Kyoto Protocol. In setting the goal of reaching agreement to cover the period from 2020, the Durban Platform confirmed the failure of the Bali Road Map to reach its intended destination. There would be a gap between 2012 – the end of the first commitment period under the Kyoto Protocol – and the start of a first commitment period of a yet to be negotiated treaty. 

The Durban Platform had a glaringly obvious credibility problem. If negotiating a legally binding agreement to cover the period after 2012 was too difficult, why would it be any easier to negotiate one for the period after 2020?

The scale of the challenge was made apparent immediately after the COP when Canada announced its withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol. Environment minister Peter Kent said quitting the Protocol would save Canadians $13.6 billion it would otherwise have to spend on buying emissions credits from other countries.
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Canada’s repudiation of Kyoto – inconceivable two years before at Copenhagen – made the prospect of a new treaty even less plausible. It strengthened China and India’s ability to resist pressure to cap their emissions.  In public, they could hardly welcome Canada’s move, so they did the next best thing. ‘Any attempt by developed countries to casually set aside their existing legal commitments while calling for a new legally-binding agreement seriously questions their credibility and sincerity in responding to the climate crisis,’ a February 2012 statement on behalf of the BASIC Four said.
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The long-standing position of China, India and the rest of the G77 was that developed nations must first demonstrate their commitment by actually cutting their emissions, the only interpretation of Kyoto that makes any sense. The US had not ratified Kyoto and now Canada had repudiated it, ostensibly because it did not cover developing nations. The result was to leave the climate negotiations in an unconsummated equilibrium with the potential to last indefinitely.

It left the EU to negotiate with itself and with Norway and Switzerland over the emissions cuts for a second Kyoto commitment period. Outside this hard-core, there remained a handful of unilateralists. At enormous political cost, the Australians under Julia Gillard passed a carbon tax. In the US, California is a staunch climate change unilateralist. The three branches of the federal government are split between multilateralists and unilateralists. Cap-and-trade legislation was unable to make it through the Senate and had no chance after the 2010 mid-term elections, when Republicans took control of the House of Representatives. In its five to four decision on
Massachusetts v. EPA
, the Supreme Court endorsed unilateralism. Within the executive branch, the EPA under its administrator Lisa Jackson has adopted a hard-line unilateralist position. Obama’s position depended on the audience. In public, he was a unilateralist. Negotiating with India and China, he morphed into a multilateralist.

At the conclusion of the Copenhagen conference, Ban Ki-moon hailed the Copenhagen Accord as an ‘essential beginning’.
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At Bali two years earlier, Copenhagen was to be the final destination on the Bali Road Map.

‘Pathwalker, there is no path,’ Gore told the delegates at Bali in words that were more prophetic about the climate change negotiations than he’d hoped. Like the Voyager spacecraft after a multi-decade planetary tour, perhaps the fate of the COPs and the MOPs and their subsidiary bodies is to leave the solar system and journey into outer space.

*
  To date, Malta is the only developing country to have graduated to Annex I. Croatia, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Slovenia were the products of parties to the convention that had split. The other addition to the original list was the Principality of Liechtenstein.