There is little doubt that, at Copenhagen, Rudd as a ‘friend of the chair’ gave it his best shot. But at the end of his term as PM will he be able to, in all conscience, say the same? Will he be able to:

sit down, look my children in the eyes and tell them in clear conscience that I did absolutely everything I could to achieve action to avoid dangerous climate change.

In full flight in the speech Rudd referred to a letter from 6 year-old Gracie who had written to him as he set out for Copenhagen:

“Hi” she wrote. “My name is Gracie. How old are you?”

Gracie continues “I am writing to you because I want you all to be strong in Copenhagen… Please listen to us as it is our future.”

I wonder what Gracie thinks of him now.

I have a theory that Rudd came back with a condition akin to post traumatic stress disorder.

I plan to return to the following in a subsequent post, but the shorter version of what Der Spiegel reckons happened at Copenhagen is as follows. A smaller meeting of about 25 critical players was convened in order to resolve intractable differences while the main body waited. In that meeting there was a direct confrontation between France and Germany on the one hand and China and India on the other. The Europeans ran into a brick wall. Obama seemed to equivocate. The Chinese asked for consultation time, because their premier had strategically withdrawn to his hotel room.

It was late afternoon and the meeting never in fact reconvened. Early that evening Obama went down to the floor below to a room booked by the Indians where India, China, Brazil and South Africa caucused. There he found the Chinese leader and in that room the Copenhagen Protocol was crafted, leaving out all that the Europeans regarded as essential.

Rudd assisting a chair who was clearly out of his depth must have felt useless and irrelevant in a conference that he had hoped would legitimise his domestic stance. Ever since he has avoided properly addressing climate change.

But Germany had no less at stake and has dusted itself off to host a series talks in an attempt to progress matters. In this news report Australia’s recalcitrance is noted.

They even put on an extra informal meeting of 45 selected states, the Petersberg Climate Dialogue, in an attempt to break the ice and find a basis for trust. Most countries sent their ministers. Australia sent a Deputy Secretary.

For Rudd the “great moral and economic issue challenge of our time” has been set aside while he concentrates on being re-elected.

Perhaps he is right. Apart from the official UNFCCC stream of talks there are other conferences. Bolivia, for example, on behalf of the ALBA countries organised the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth. They think that the end of capitalism is a prerequisite for curing Mother Earth. Those countries were strangely absent from Petersberg.

China too organised a conference to re-assert and consolidate its position.

Perhaps Rudd correctly thinks that Australia is wasting its time trying to influence what emerges from that lot where incompatible positions are strongly held.

Meanwhile in Oz, Rudd has no less than three cabinet ministers working on climate change, Penny Wong, Peter Garrett and Martin Ferguson. Indeed there are four cabinet ministers, Kim Carr as well, involved in the $4.5 billion clean energy initiative. Between them they should have been able to devise appropriate strategies and communicate them to the public. They have failed.

Of the three main players, Ferguson has largely sailed under the radar, yet much of the remaining action falls in his bailiwick. Darren Lewin-Hill in a thread comment links to his reports on a meeting with Ferguson. I urge you to read the extended version of Darren’s account. Ferguson’s championing of fossil fuels is grotesque.

Ferguson claims that his fundamental concern is JOBS. Declan Kuch did an excellent piece last year on the sources of Marn’s passion for jobs:

Martin’s anti-environmental alliance with global resource companies arises from this “slavery to the jobs ideology of the late 1940s”, as one Labor staffer I spoke to put it.

I think the question as to whether Ferguson is a closet denialist must be answered in the affirmative. Or else he has no respect for tourism jobs since his policies are incompatible with the retention of such jobs along the Great Barrier Reef, in Kakadu and on the snowfields of the Australian Alps.

May I remind you that this man is Minister for Tourism. It’s a disgrace, simply a disgrace.

It’s a shame that the two politicians with the greatest passion for and understanding of climate change, Malcolm Turnbull and Greg Hunt, are in a party that chews politicians up and spits them out if they get serious about the matter.

A few weeks ago John Davidson, who comments as John D, attended a small afternoon tea put on by Michael Johnston (Liberal – Ryan) for constituents that had contacted him about climate change. Greg Hunt was there to help. John tells me he was impressed with Hunt’s mastery of his brief and the amount of investigation and thinking he had done about climate change. But here’s the rub. Hunt said that 60% of Coalition pollies nationally (80% in Qld) were a against climate action while 75% of Australian citizens were in favour nationally.

Hunt’s concern was to convince Coalition members that there was a political need for the party to support climate action and that the costs would not be as great as they feared.

Recently something called the Climate Competitiveness Index was launched. While doing very well on climate accountability, on climate performance within the OECD Australia is towards the back of the pack. By my count there are 24 countries ahead of us and 4 behind.

The official key findings are here. Carbon Positive has a useful summary pointing out that:

Germany, France, the UK and Nordic countries, have the most consistent performance across the eight domains and between accountability and performance.

And then this:

In the US, Canada and Australia, there is a telling mis-match between citizen concerns and price signals, and divergent views within the business community and in politics.

Could it be that in those three countries climate sceptics/denialists/agnotologists have been most successful in causing mayhem, doubt and uncertainty? Could it be that we have elected the wrong politicians?

When the situation is desperate you take the first step. Reports like the Climate Competitiveness Index give the impression that there is widespread activity elsewhere. Countries are said to be “fiercely competitive as people strive to achieve first mover advantages.”

Finland, for example, is planning massive direct action to boost its renewable energy production to meet European Union requirements of 38% of energy consumption by 2020. The additional capacity needed is equivalent to three big nuclear power plants. Germany and Switzerland, I understand, are thinking of going for 30% reductions by 2020 instead of 20%.

As one of the highest per capita emitters and a major emitter overall, Australia matters. And the world has noticed.

I’m sure Gracie has too.

For three days this May some of the best minds on the planet attended a curious meeting at Cambridge University, the St James’s Palace Nobel Laureate Symposium, to contribute their ideas and authority to some of the world’s most pressing challenges, in this case the climate crisis and its implications.

The choice of topic is not surprising. This was the second such meeting. The first was two years earlier at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. So the list of participants included one Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Director of said Potsdam Institute, Malte Meinshausen from the same place, Rachendra Pachauri, the IPCC head honcho, Lords Gidden and Stern, and a fella called Steven Chu, Secretary of Energy for the USA.

The message from our intellectual elders is captured in the phrase:

The fierce urgency of now…

As it happens the folk at Potsdam have been putting a bit of flesh on that message.

One of the more interesting scenarios for stabilisation I’ve seen recently came from Bill Hare of Potsdam in Chapter 2 of the Worldwatch Institute State of the World 2009 report:

Figure 1: Bill Hare's stabilisation trajectory for a safe climate

This he reckons is the “emissions pathway required to limit warming to below 2 degrees Celsius with higher confidence”. Start early, go hard and reach zero emissions by 2050, then go negative. The trajectory is designed for a safe landing. After flirting with 2C the temperature is meant to come back to 1C above pre-industrial in the latter part of this century.

The same sort of thinking was contained in the Climate crunch issue on Nature where Malte Meinshausen did much of the heavy lifting. The basic concept here was that there is a limited remaining budget of gigatonnes of carbon that we can put into the atmosphere before we hit 2C. The cumulative quantity of emissions is what’s important. Since industrialisation we’ve already used up half our allowable budget. We can do the same again and that’s it.

It is commonly thought that if we start later we have to cut harder, but that’s OK provided we reach the same end point by 2050. What Meinshausen et al are saying is that if we start later we have to hit that end point sooner. It’s the area under the line on the graph, stupid!

Hare was looking at a safe climate scenario. Meinshausen based his calculations on the riskier kind of scenario being adopted politically around the world of a 50% reduction from 1990 levels by 2050 and zero by about 2080:

Figure 2: Meinshausen’s stabilisation path and related temperature values

This scenario has a 75% chance of not breaching the 2C limit. The graph comes from an article by Stefan Rahmstorf, where he puts the situation in, well, very plain and simple German. (For plain English, see RealClimate.) The budget for 2000-2050 is 1000gt of CO2 (or around 1500gt CO2e). But oops! we’ve blown a third of it already in the years 2000-2008! So our options are spelt out in Meinshausen’s second graph:

Figure 3: Meinshausen’s emissions reduction options

If we leave peaking global emissions from 2010 until 2015, the penalty is that the annual reduction rate goes up from 2% to 3.6%. I was actually shocked by the difference every five years makes. Remember the words of our elders!

50% reduction by 2050 depends on peaking in 2010. If you leave it until 2015 it has to be 90% by 2050 for the same climate outcome. Leave peaking to 2020 and we need zero by 2045.

Now the Germans have taken the remaining emissions budget and looked at the implications for individual countries if the budget is allocated equitably, based on population. Then they’ve specified how many years it would take major emitters to blow their budget at current emissions rates. Here are some of the results:

Figure 4: Future responsibility for emissions

A few things stand out. Firstly, the US is in a hopeless situation. If, say, they bought credits from India and other developing countries there would be a massive transfer of wealth.

Secondly, no-one should be buying credits from China, which might come as a surprise to them.

Third, the future of the planet does depend critically on what the US and China do.

Australia presumably is worse placed than the US.

What the world has been doing lately is illustrated in Will Steffen’s recent report which contained this graph:

Figure 5: CO2 emissions from 1990 to 2007

The Raupach et al 2007 paper which contained the original graph indicated that 70% of the increase in emissions was coming from developing and transitional economies. There is obviously an urgent need to equip these countries with renewable energy technology.

I think the Germans’ approach is rational and gives a new gloss to the phrase “common but differentiated responsibility”. Paying for the external cost of our lifestyles and exercising responsibility towards both the planet and posterity. We know that that the world does not operate according to reason but what the Germans have done provides a useful perspective with which to judge the outcomes of Copenhagen.

Speaking of which, it is not yet clear, to me at least, what we can expect from Copenhagen. This BBC story suggests three main options. Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the UN climate convention (UNFCCC) said:

Three options were on the table, said Mr de Boer: a completely new document, an extension of the Kyoto Protocol, or a “series of decisions” made at the Copenhagen talks.

The developing countries are insisting on specific pledges of cuts by the developing countries, which would come from an extension of the Kyoto protocol. A completely new treaty is not going to happen at Copenhagen; there is no time.

What they are shooting for now, it seems, is a political framework

an “overarching decision” that sets individual targets for industrialized countries, and determines what level of emissions reductions major developing countries are willing to make by 2020.

Then leaders need to

set a deadline for a treaty that works out those details.

They will also need to settle on an assistance package for developing countries. In this regard the EU is now proposing a 100bn euros a year to 2020 of which they will supply about a quarter. It’s not a lot. Whether this is a circuit breaker remains to be seen.

Stephen Chu’s attendance at the St James’s Palace Nobel Laureate Symposium notwithstanding, (it happened just after the publication of the Nature “Climate Crunch” issue, so he would have seen the graphs) he has to bring the American people, or at least Congress along with him. The US may not commit at all unless the Senate passes the climate bill.

Obama won’t go Copenhagen to make things happen. He’ll only go if things do happen without him. Besides he’ll be busy collecting his Nobel prize.

The target of a 17% reduction from 2005 levels I understand equates to 4% from 1990. So at best we’ll get a FAIL from the US in terms of what the world needs from them. Not even close.

The difficulty domestically in the US is well-illustrated by the report that 10 Democrat Senators want a protective tariffs provision to shield the steel industry against imports from China and other developing nations. That would make the Chinese “very frustrated and angry”. But the US senators may not play ball unless China itself comes up with some commitments. They would be looking for numbers.

Please note that the planet doesn’t benefit except perhaps marginally from the export of the American steel industry.

To complicate matters, senators Boxer and Kerry have now cooked up an energy bill (mentioned in the earlier link) proposing a reduction of 20% from 2005 levels. It seems that the Republicans will ensure that nothing goes anywhere, at least until after Copenhagen.

China’s Hu Jintau recently made a splash by pledging at a UN summit to cut “carbon intensity,” or the amount of carbon dioxide produced for each dollar of economic output, over the decade to 2020. There is a question as to what that actually means. In all probability it means, inter alia, (a) that Chinese emissions will continue to grow, but not as fast as they might have done, and (b) that Chinese reliance on coal, currently at about 70%, would remain for at least several decades.

We live in a world where both population and per capita GDP are expanding. Adam Barnes has calculated that we need to reduce emissions per unit of GDP by 66% by 2050 if we just want to keep emissions at their present dangerous levels. That’s based on a population increase of 50% and a mere doubling of per capita GDP.

If we are shooting for an 80% reduction by 2050 we’ll need a 96% reduction in emissions per unit of GDP, assuming 50% population growth and 3% pa growth in per capita GDP.

China plans to cut “energy consumption per unit of GDP by 20 percent between 2006 and 2010.” If you believe them, at their GDP growth rate that would still lead to rising emissions.

Raupach et al found that world energy intensity in relation to GDP had steadily decreased during the 20th century, but began to increase in the 21st. We need to do something about it but by itself it’s not enough.

China plans to get 15% of its power from renewables by 2020. That’s less than Australia’s RET of 20% but makes for a very large industry. I’m not sure whether it includes nuclear, very likely it does.

On a recent thread Roger Jones commented that the Chinese are working on a big integrated model with all their energy sectors to peak emissions and decline within three decades. The scientists think it can be done, the policy makers are not yet convinced. This finds support in a recent BBC story where the best prospect held out is peaking at 2030. More likely 2040.

Given where they would be then, this is also a “fail” in terms of what the world needs.

As everyone heads off to Barcelona for the penultimate gabfest, to me the prospects for Copenhagen, at best, don’t look all that good.

I’ll finish with some comments from me, totally unqualified lay person. First, two degrees isn’t safe. This from the RealClimate link:

We feel compelled to note that even a “moderate” warming of 2°C stands a strong chance of provoking drought and storm responses that could challenge civilized society, leading potentially to the conflict and suffering that go with failed states and mass migrations. Global warming of 2°C would leave the Earth warmer than it has been in millions of years, a disruption of climate conditions that have been stable for longer than the history of human agriculture. Given the drought that already afflicts Australia, the crumbling of the sea ice in the Arctic, and the increasing storm damage after only 0.8°C of warming so far, calling 2°C a danger limit seems to us pretty cavalier.

Second, I would understand that the Meinshausen scenarios are worked out with models that don’t include the longer term feedbacks James Hansen talks about. Even reaching Bill Hare’s 1C target would leave ice melting more than it is at present.

Third, as we saw in looking at Susan Solomon’s work, if we hit zero emissions tomorrow the climate would take a long time to recover. Delays measured in decades have consequences measured in centuries.

Fourth, no-one really knows when we might hit one of those dreaded tipping points that could by themselves ramp up the temperature a couple of degrees, or perhaps freeze Europe over.

That and more is why I’d prefer to take Bill Hare’s stabilisation path and shorten it to reach zero by 2030. But I guess it will take the world at least 10 years to wake up. By then it will be desperately close to game over as far as our emissions budget is concerned.

I think at least some of the European policy makers know. It’s the Americans, the Chinese and the rest of us that need to wake up.

The Holocene has been good for us as a species, but right now I fear we are heading somewhere else.

Update: I’ve added below an image from Hans Joachim (John) Schellnhuber, who is head of the Potsdam Institute and the boss of Rahmstorf and Meinshausen mentioned in the post.

Figure 6: Stabilisation scenarios using the 'carbon budget' approach

This is a different way of representing the carbon budget approach as it equitably applies to representative countries in Figure 4 above. Germany is a fairly typical advanced economy with per capita emissions similar to Great Britain and France. High polluting countries like Australia, if they are not to bludge on the efforts of others, should hit zero about 2020. If we don’t do that we should be prepared to pay others not to pollute in order to make up the difference.

Remember that all this is based on a 67% chance (scarily inadequate) of staying within the ‘guard rail’ of 2C. People like Scellnhuber, Rahmstorf and Meinshausen know that 2C is too high for a safe climate. They invented the concept in the mid-199s and it took over a decade to be accepted by policy makers. Menwhile the science meanwhile had moved on.

All this is profoundly depressing.

While it’s always risky to equate campaign positions with how a politician will actually govern, the noises from the Obama campaign have been reasonable. This is particularly so given the peculiar American fixation with “energy independence”. Their policy position is straightforward: domestically, an 80% cut by 2050 through cap-and-trade, with 100% auctioning of permits. Internationally, they want to re-engage with the “UNFCC – the main international forum dedicated to addressing the climate problem”. They will also create a Global Energy Forum of the world’s largest emitters “to focus exclusively on global energy and environmental issues”. It’s still inadequate, certainly, but it’s a heck of a lot closer to the ballpark than the current administration.

Meanwhile, the other big polluters have been starting to firm up their positions pre-Copenhagen (or, technically, pre the next round of talks in Poland in December), but the road to a deal is as clear as mud at this point. While a number of eastern European countries – and Italy – have tried to renege on Europe’s commitments to a 20% cut in emissions by 2020, the broader EU seems to be holding firm on its position. But the biggest unknown is China. China recently released its own white paper on climate change. It details in some detail, and without sugarcoating, the potential domestic effects on climate change. It also details a large number of domestic policies to reduce emissions growth. But as far as international targets go, it’s extremely vague, with lots of praise for the Clean Development Mechanism but very little about what it might take for the Chinese to sign up to anything stronger.

It seems like there’s lots of horsetrading to go before – if – we get a deal in Copenhagen.