Christmas time again, and an opportunity to look back over the last year. Twelve months’ ago, I wrote “Perhaps 2014 will be seen as the year when the international will to seek to control the climate via energy policy begins to wane more noticeably. Already, even the chairman of the UK Committee on Climate Change has recently admitted that unilateral action is useless. Perhaps next year will be the one in which the UK government – still the only one with supposedly legally-binding emissions targets – begins to prioritise energy security and affordability over failing renewable energy and biofuel policies.”
That was wishful thinking, I’m afraid. Indeed, this month’s annual climate change jamboree – COP20 in Lima – was billed as a crucial one, to lay the groundwork for an expected binding international agreement in Paris next December. Predictably, like previous climate summits, it ended up as a messy compromise which achieved very little other than temporarily boosting the economy of Lima and filling seats on international flights.
The deal which emerged, such as it was, demonstrated the gulf between the industrialised and developing worlds. Rich countries, with the EU as the main cheerleader, want the whole world to follow their example and take steps to begin curbing emissions of carbon dioxide. Emerging and developing countries pay lip service to the need for action, while understandably wanting to do nothing to jeopardize their economic growth. They are happy to reduce emissions, but only if the rich world picks up the bill.
A Green Climate Fund was set up at the Cancun conference in 2010. The aim is to have $100 billion available by 2020, but this year only $10 billion was pledged, by 24 countries. Predictably, this was seen as unambitious, although it did achieve the minimum to get the fund off the ground. What developing country governments generally think about climate change is not known, but they would certainly like to get some of the money on offer.
The sense is that the climate change negotiation juggernaut is set on its path and that there is little that can be done to alter this. On the other hand, at a practical level, the lack of any binding agreement and the failure to match words with action suggest that little will change over coming years. The Copenhagen conference (COP15) in 2009 was billed as the turning point, the last chance for concerted action to be agreed which could avoid a dangerous degree of warming this century.
This indeed turned out to be a turning point, but in the wrong direction. The event was badly managed and quarrelsome and nothing of substance emerged. Since then, climate change negotiations have, by and large, been relegated to the inside pages of newspapers. Cancun, Durban, Doha, Warsaw and now Lima have come and gone with much attempted hype but with little to show for the effort.
The self-perpetuating system grinds on, and it is unlikely that next year’s COP21 in Paris will buck the trend of failure. Maybe a rabbit will be pulled out of the hat, but I wouldn’t put money on it. In simple terms, emerging and developing economies are going to take no serious action until rich countries pay them to do so, and it beggars belief to think that the EU, USA and other developed economies will cough up ten times the amount already pledged at a time of continuing economic uncertainty.
The best that is on offer at present is a mechanism for countries to put forward their own plans for emissions reduction, but these are effectively meaningless since China has blocked any independent scrutiny of them. The big news prior to the Lima meeting was a deal struck by the US and China, under which America will cut its emissions by 27% relative to 2005 by 2025, while China has merely promised that its emissions will peak by 2030.
At that stage, US emissions will be a little lower than in 1990, the baseline for EU reductions of 40% by 2030. China, though, having overtaken the US as the world’s biggest CO2 emitter less than ten years ago, will by 2030 be producing several times as much as America. If the IPCC is right about the sensitivity of global temperature to CO2 level, then reductions from that point on will have to be swingeing, and probably include some form of carbon capture.
Either way, it looks like any agreement which might be reached in Paris – and anything which is other than merely face-saving will surely mark the beginning of the end for the credibility of the process – will be simply window dressing and do nothing other than push global reductions in emissions into the 2030s at least.
In the meantime, this year has again seen attempts to create scare stories about climate around the time of the Lima summit. This time, we have heard little about sea ice, mainly because Arctic ice has held up pretty well and the Antarctic ice has been expanding rather than contracting. This year, the themes have been the greater number of extreme weather events and the possibility that 2014 will be the warmest ever (or, in the preferred terminology, the ‘hottest’ ever). Neither of them has much to support them. Perhaps next year it will be the turn of ocean acidification once again.
2015 is certain to see a repeat of the cycle of looking for evidence to support the case for radical action to reduce emissions, trumpeting weather records and then failing to take any action which will make any conceivable difference. Maybe it’s not too early to wish for next year’s Christmas presents: a decision to focus on protection of vulnerable communities – who will be vulnerable whether or not temperatures start to rise again – together with research into what drives weather patterns and development of new and improved energy generation and storage technologies. I won’t hold my breath.
I wish all readers a happy Christmas and a safe, healthy and prosperous 2015. The next edition of the newsletter will be on 9 January.
Martin Livermore
The Scientific Alliance
St John’s Innovation Centre
Cowley Road
Cambridge CB4 0WS
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