Here is a double-report. Not a word in the NYT today, of course. They have spiked it. We will wait for the spin.
The Kyoto Protocol is Dead
By Ronald Bailey Tech Central Station
BUENOS AIRES -- The Kyoto Protocol is dead -- there will be no further global treaties that set binding limits on the emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG) after Kyoto runs out in 2012.
Under the Kyoto Protocol industrialized countries are supposed to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases 5.2% below their 1990 emissions levels during the first commitment period which runs from 2008-2012. The European Union agreed to reduce its overall GHG emissions by 8% during that period. To cut its carbon emissions, the European Union has established a carbon trading scheme in which companies must purchase permits to emit carbon. The number of carbon permits is capped at 8% below 1990 emission levels. The European Union and environmentalist activists have been pushing for negotiations to establish more stringent emissions limits for a second commitment period after 2012. It's not going to happen.
The conventional wisdom that it's the United States against the rest of the world in climate change diplomacy has been turned on its head. Instead it turns out that it is the Europeans who are isolated. China, India, and most of the rest of the developing countries have joined forces with the United States to completely reject the idea of future binding GHG emission limits. At the conference here in Buenos Aires, Italy shocked its fellow European Union members when it called for an end to the Kyoto Protocol in 2012. These countries recognize that stringent emission limits would be huge barriers to their economic growth and future development.
"I've been wondering if a cap and trade system for reducing carbon emissions would be successful," said Taishi Sugiyama, a senior researcher at Japan's Central Research Institute of Electric Power Industry. "I think the answer is no. The market for carbon credits will likely shrink to be only within Europe after 2012." Sugiyama was participating in a panel discussion looking at "Options for post-2012 global climate regime". The consensus of the panel members including Henrik Hasselknippe of the Point Carbon trading consultancy, Jonathan Sinton from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Axel Michaelowa the head of the International Climate Policy Program at the Hamburg Institute of International Economics, was that the Kyoto process is over. Sugiyama flatly predicted that Kyoto signatories Canada, Japan, and Russia will withdraw from the treaty after 2012.
So what now? Two different but complementary paths for addressing any future climate change have emerged from the Buenos Aires Climate Change Conference. The Europeans and activists have been pushing the first, which envisions steep near term reductions (next 20 years) in the emissions of GHG as a way to mitigate projected global warming. On the other hand, the United States has been advocating a technology-push approach in which emissions continue to rise and then GHG concentrations and emissions are cut steeply beginning in about 20 years. Over that time, the US sees the development of new energy efficient technologies, the creation of low cost methods for capturing and storing carbon dioxide both as emissions and atmospheric concentrations, and the invention of low carbon energy supplies. Such an approach has the advantage of fostering economic growth in the developing countries, lifting hundreds of millions from abject poverty over the next 20 years.
Sugiyama recommended that the technology-push approach be formalized outside of the Kyoto Protocol process with a Zero Emissions Technology Treaty. Such a treaty would have broad appeal because it avoids the inevitable conflicts over allocating emissions targets and because most countries recognize the importance of long-term technological progress. Sugiyama argued that a global cap and trade system is way too premature for developing countries to join because effective low cost ways to cut carbon emissions that they could use to binding emissions targets simply don't exist. "I cannot imagine a cap and trade system over the whole globe without low cost energy and emissions control technologies," said Sugiyama. However, as advanced energy technologies emerge over the next couple of decades, implementing a global cap and trade system becomes a more realistic prospect because developing countries will have access to effective technologies. In the meantime, the world could learn from the regional European carbon market what works and what doesn't work.
History will record that the COP-10 Buenos Aires Climate Change Convention is where it was first widely recognized that the Kyoto Protocol is a dead end. And where humanity chose to embark on a high tech path toward confronting whatever challenges any future global warming may present.
Ronald Bailey is Reason magazine's science correspondent. His email is rbailey@reason.com. His book, Liberation Biology: The Moral and Scientific Defense of the Biotech Revolution, will be published by Prometheus Books in early 2005.
Copyright © 2004 Tech Central Station - www.techcentralstation.com
TCS COP 10 Coverage: Buenos Aires: Kyoto's Waterloo
By Hans Labohm
"...throughout the drafting sessions, [UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] 'coordinators' would go around insisting that criticism of models be toned down, and that 'motherhood' statements be inserted to the effect that models might still be correct despite the cited faults. Refusals were occasionally met with ad hominem attacks. I personally witnessed coauthors forced to assert their 'green' credentials in defense of their statements..."
-- Richard Lindzen, American atmospheric physicist.
Kyoto seems to have found its Waterloo in Buenos Aires, the site of this year's 10th annual UN conference on climate change. Its proponents have always argued that first stage of the treaty, Kyoto Mark I, was only the first step towards a far more comprehensive scheme which would ultimately comprise all countries in the world and would aim at greenhouse gas emission cuts of around 60% by 2050. Since the refusal by the G-77, China and India to accept any commitment to reduce emissions as from 2012, when Kyoto Mark I expires, and -- more surprisingly -- the announcement by Italy that it will withdraw from the Kyoto process in the same year, we have entered a totally different ball game.
Italy's exit might incite other European countries to follow suit, for example Spain, which harbours similar objections against Kyoto as Italy. Now that Italy has made clear that it will leave the European fold in 2012, Russia has an irrefutable alibi to do likewise. In the intermediate period it may handsomely cash in a few bucks by selling emission rights to Western Europe.
Did Russian President Putin have a premonition of this scenario? And is that the reason that, after many years of wavering, he ultimately decided that Russia would join Kyoto Mark I? We don't know. But Russians are reputed to be skilful chess players. And chess players are used to anticipate many moves in advance.
Will the rest of Europe put its money where its mouth is? Let's hope not. Because it will cost a fortune and impose severe burdens on its citizens and taxpayers, while it will have no detectable effect whatsoever on climate, even if one would accept the validity of the climate models of the proponents of Kyoto.
In the meantime climate scepticism is gaining ground in Western Europe. It is even becoming respectable. Many organisations, often cum websites, provide ample information about the views of the climate sceptics, thus breaking the de facto information monopoly of the pro-Kyoto scientists belonging to the 'established climate science community'.
In Germany Christian Krahmer has been running his website 'Klima Aktuell' for many years. Even France and Belgium are timidly following now with critical analyses published by the Molinari Institute. In Spain it is the Rafael del Pino Foundation which is planning to organize a full day seminar conference about global warming. It has invited the top notch of worldwide climate sceptics, including Fred Singer, Andrei Illarionov (the economic adviser to President Putin), Sallie Baliunas and Patrick Michaels. In Italy it is the Institute Bruno Leoni, with authors like Antonio Gaspari and Carlo Stagnaro, which carries the torch. In Denmark it was Bjorn Lomborg who injected a fair dose of common sense into the debate with his blockbuster: 'The Skeptical Environmentalist'. In Norway and Sweden sceptics like Hans Jelbring and Erik Tunsted are taking issue with the conventional wisdom of pro-Kyoto scientists, such as Pål Prestrud, the director of the Norwegian CICERO (Center for International Climate and Environmental Research -- Oslo). In Finland Timo Hämeranta stands out as the most prominent climate sceptic. He is the moderator of 'Climatesceptics', a global scientific discussion group for climate scientists and other participants interested in discussing pros and cons of sceptical views in climate science, media and politics. And in the UK, climate skepticism centres around the journal Energy & Environment (E&E). Well-known British climate sceptics include Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen (the editor of E&E), Richard Courtney, Benny Peiser and Philip Stott (with his perceptive and highly amusing 'EnviroSpin Watch').
The proponents of the man-made global warming hypothesis often argue that 'the science is settled' and 'all scientists agree'. This is simply not true. In personal debates between them and climate sceptics, they often challenge the latter to publish their views in peer-reviewed journals. Many sceptics, however, share the experience that they have been denied access to these journals, or that they had to meet scientific standards which by far exceeded those which were applied to papers of their less iconoclastic colleagues. Nevertheless, the body of climate sceptical literature has been growing dramatically over the years. But one can hardly escape the feeling that the pro-Kyoto scientists are ignoring contrary views, perhaps because they labour under a serious form of cognitive dissonance. Timo Hämeranta deserves credit for drawing up a list of hundreds of scientific peer-reviewed papers, other scientific papers, overviews, presentations and books. He also draws some very pertinent conclusions from the overview of the sceptical literature: 'The scientific basis to tackle the climate change allegedly caused by human-induced CO2 emissions has collapsed. The newest scientific findings prove that current or near-future (i.e. in the next 100 yrs) CO2 emissions cause no dangerous anthropogenic interference with or dangerous perturbation in the climate system.'
Newcomers to the global warming debate are often surprised to notice that passions are running high, which has an adverse impact on both form and substance of scientific intercourse. In this respect the accusations and the subsequent process against Bjorn Lomborg represented an absolute low. Fortunately, he was completely vindicated afterwards on appeal. The arguments which were advanced in the second ruling were the spitting image of those which had already been developed by an international group of scientists, who were all experts in the field of scientific integrity, with the Netherlands' Arthur Rörsch, as lead author. Recently Rörsch has embarked on a new project, exposing infractions of good scientific practice which he encountered when joining the global warming debate. They include a wide variety of scientific misconduct, including: intimidation and expulsion of sceptical scientists; deriding and ostracizing opponents; other sorts of ad hominem attacks; the invocation of consensus, while ignoring opposing views, even those which have been published in the peer-reviewed literature; dismissing the right and/or competence of scientists of neighbouring scientific disciplines to participate in the climate debate, especially if they hold opposing views and refusal to enter into scientific debate to sort out differences; accusing opposing scientists of representing commercial interests, such as those of the oil and coal industry; manipulation of data and spin-doctoring of 'scientific' reports; attribution of extreme weather events to man-made global warming; the use of models as evidence, etc. All these infractions will be well documented in the report.
Undoubtedly this new report will trigger a new wave of man-made global warming ... this time warming of the global debate. |
