The Age of Global Warming: A History (52 page)

*
  Before becoming UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon had been South Korea’s foreign minister, a country which was a major beneficiary of Kyoto in being a highly industrialised non-Annex I nation.

*
  Excerpts from the recording can be streamed at http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,692861,00.html

33

Aftermath

Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.

Duke of Wellington, 1815 

The first requirement of statesmanship is a sense of reality – Disraeli rather than Gladstone; Bismarck rather than Napoleon III; Nixon rather than Carter. At Copenhagen, the Europeans did not comprehend the entrenched positions of China and India. Barack Obama did. Having concluded an agreement with the BASIC Four, Obama did what many advise American presidents finding themselves in intractable overseas entanglements. He declared victory and left.

At 10.30pm, Obama held a press conference to announce a ‘meaningful and unprecedented breakthrough’.
[1]
It was, the president claimed, the first time in history all major economies had come together to take action on climate change. ‘OK, thank you very much everybody, we’ll see some of you on the plane.’
[2]

It was over.  Obama couldn’t get out of Copenhagen fast enough. He had, as he’d told the Europeans, more important business to attend to.

On the flight back, the president secured the sixtieth Senate vote for his healthcare legislation. ‘After a nearly century-long struggle, we are on the cusp of making healthcare reform a reality in the United States of America,’ Obama exulted.
[3]

Climate change was a priority for Obama. It just wasn’t the most important. In his June 2008 speech on winning the Democratic nomination, the first thing people would be telling their children wasn’t about the slowing of the rise of the oceans and the healing of the planet. It would be about when America started providing care for the sick.
[4]
 

There was one breakthrough. Malta became the first non-Annex I party to attain Annex I status in the history of the convention.
*
If it was a miracle, it wasn’t a divine agent but Malta’s Zammit Cutajar to whom the credit belonged.

China spoke of a ‘positive’ result, though not of a breakthrough. ‘All should be happy.’
[5]
Happiness was in short supply in the Bella Center. Jon Snow saw eager young men and women in NGO T-shirts in tears. Copenhagen ended ‘more dramatically badly than any conference I’ve ever been to’, Snow – who had covered every major summit from the Reagan-Gorbachev meetings – recalled. It was meant to have been the great moment. ‘This was going to be it.’ Instead it turned out to be the moment when all the wind went out of the climate change negotiations.
[6]

Denmark’s Rasmussen had the thankless task of trying to get the Accord approved by the COP plenary. The session started at 3am on Saturday. It was a rocky ride, lasting nearly thirteen hours. Tuvalu, one of the most vocal small island states, could not accept the Accord, despite the offer of financing. To do so would ‘betray our people and sell our future, our future is not for sale’.
[7]
Saudi Arabia’s delegate declared Copenhagen ‘the worst COP plenary’ he had ever attended. It was evident there was no consensus and the parties were simply restating their positions.
[8]

Speaking for the G77, Lumumba Di-Aping compared the proposed deal to the Holocaust. ‘[This] is asking Africa to sign a suicide pact, an incineration pact in order to maintain the economic dependence of a few countries. It’s a solution based on values that funnelled six million people in Europe into furnaces.’
[9]

Di-Aping’s remarks were immediately condemned by the UK, Norway, the EU and others. They hadn’t objected when Gore made the comparison at Bali two years earlier or when the world’s most famous climate scientist, James Hansen, called coal trains ‘death trains’.
[10]

The NGOs went into over-drive, demonstrating how they had lost the plot. ‘By delaying action, rich countries have condemned millions of the world’s poorest people to hunger, suffering and loss of life,’ said Nnimmo Basey, chair of Friends of the Earth. ‘The blame for this disastrous outcome is squarely on the developed nations.’
[11]
Kumi Naidoo for Friends of the Earth denounced the Accord as a ‘betrayal of the poor’ and blamed the conference failure on racism. Why was there such a lack of urgency? ‘Is it because of the colour of their skin’ of those in the front line of climate change, Naidoo asked?
[12]
It was a question better addressed to Beijing and New Delhi rather than Berlin and Paris.

As the plenary session wore on, Ethiopia, on behalf of the African Union, supported the Accord. Tuvalu then backtracked and decided to betray its future, suggesting that it be adopted as a ‘miscellaneous document’ of the COP. The UK proposed adopting the document as a COP decision. Opposition from Bolivia, Cuba and Venezuela and two or three others prevented consensus. At 10.35 on Saturday morning, it was proposed that the COP ‘take note’ of the Copenhagen Accord. Parties could signify their (non-legally binding) support for the Accord by being listed in an appendix. 

Hours of procedural wrangling followed. Late on Saturday morning, the COP finally decided to ‘take note’ of the Accord. ‘You sealed a deal,’ Ban Ki-moon told exhausted delegates – only they hadn’t.
[13]
‘We will try to have a legally binding treaty as soon as possible in 2010,’ Ban promised reporters.
[14]

There wasn’t a treaty in 2010. Or in 2011.

The institutional gulf in the Accord separating Annex I nations from the rest was laid bare in the respective appendices for both groups. Appendix I listed each Annex I party’s quantified emissions target for 2020. In Appendix II, there was a list for
unquantified
mitigation actions by developing country parties. In Attachment B of the Danish Text, there had been an additional column for the quantified impact of each action in units of millions of tons of CO
2
equivalent. In Appendix II of the Accord, it had disappeared. Obama’s warning that it would be a hollow victory unless developing country commitments were ‘measurable, reportable and verifiable’ turned out to be exactly that. The actions might be reportable and even verifiable, but they were no longer measurable.

Out too went any specified year when global and national emissions should peak. The Accord’s aim was to achieve a peak as soon as possible

recognising that the time frame for peaking will be longer in developing countries and bearing in mind that social and economic development and poverty eradication are the first and overriding priorities of developing countries and that a low-emission development strategy is indispensable for sustainable development.
[15]

There was just enough in the Accord to keep the whole negotiating process going indefinitely and provide cover for European governments to continue with their global warming policies. Everything could go on much as before. And, if the scientists and the IPCC were right, it would mean unabated global warming.

Angela Merkel put on a brave face. ‘It is a first step toward a new world climate order, nothing more but also nothing less,’ she told the
Bild am Sonntag
.
[16]
What was needed, Merkel thought, was ‘a UN environment organisation that could control the implementation of the climate process.’
[17]
Quite how that could come about, she didn’t say. 

Nicolas Sarkozy was closer to the mark. The deal was the only one that could be reached after the summit had revealed deep rifts. The UN process of moving forward by consensus of one hundred countries was not workable. Although China was a permanent member of the UN Security Council, if India were too, ‘it would be far easier to get her to shoulder a greater proportion of her responsibilities’, Sarkozy said. ‘Seeing a system like this makes it blindingly obvious.’
[18]

More likely, Sarkozy’s explanation had it the wrong way round. Given the opprobrium heaped on those viewed as being on the wrong side of the argument about global warming, the UN negotiating forum was ideal for China and India. Fundamental disagreements could be masked as procedural objections and proxies could make arguments on their behalf. If the world’s major economies were genuinely agreed on a way forward, it is hard to believe that the rest of the world would not have followed, as happened with ozone-depleting substances and the Montreal Protocol. The fundamental reality at Copenhagen was the failure of the West to get its way.

Some found it hard to come to terms with. Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband decided to pick a quarrel with the world’s second largest economy. Writing in the
Guardian
on the Monday after the conference, Miliband accused China of vetoing quantified caps. ‘We will make clear to those countries holding out against a binding treaty that we will not allow them to block global progress,’ Miliband threatened. The process had been hijacked, presenting a ‘farcical picture’.
[19]
There needed to be major reform in the way climate change negotiations were conducted.

‘Such an attack was made in order to shirk the obligations of developed countries to their developing counterparts and foment discord among developing countries,’ a spokeswoman for China’s foreign ministry said.
[20]
The next day, Brown took up the cudgels. ‘Never again should we face the deadlock that threatened to pull down those talks,’ Brown thundered in sub-Palmerstonian vein. ‘Never again should we let a global deal to move towards a greener future be held to ransom by only a handful of countries.’
[21]
How was Britain going to take on China? Send a gunboat up the Yangtze? Brown didn’t say.

Meanwhile in Beijing, French premier François Fillon arrived with a delegation of ministers and business leaders. ‘Even though it is our first meeting in person, I feel like we are friends,’ Wen told Fillon. ‘Our two countries’ partnership is unmatched,’ Fillon replied. The two signed agreements on aviation and nuclear cooperation.
[22]
A source said the French would leave China with €6.3 billion of signed contracts.
[23]

Nonetheless, China remained sensitive about its role at Copenhagen. The same day, Wen declared that China had played an ‘important constructive’ part at the climate conference.
[24]
Maintaining China’s climate alliance with India was vital. At a meeting with Manmohan Singh, the Chinese premier gave an assurance that China ‘would like to pursue relations with India on the basis of equality’, according to India’s foreign minister Nirupama Rao.
[25]
Global warming had brought together these two longstanding Asian rivals into an alliance to protect their common interests against the West.

‘It is easy to discern China’s fingerprints all over the international climate change fiasco,’ wrote John Tkacik, a former chief China analyst at the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research.
[26]
If his intelligence briefers had been reading the Chinese press, Obama would have seen it coming. In a September article in Beijing’s
Science Times
, Ding Zhongli, China’s top paleo-climatologist and VP of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, had written that ‘the idea that there is significant correlation between temperature increases and concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide lacks reliable evidence in science’.
[27]
Given the deep scepticism of the Chinese Academy of Science’s senior climatologist, Tkacik wrote, ‘It is clear that no one in the Chinese politburo is truly anxious about the climatic consequences of global warming.’
[28]

In New Delhi, the opposition Communist Party of India (Marxist), known by its initials CPM, accused the Singh government of being too soft and making pre-summit concessions which enabled the US to undermine the Kyoto Protocol. ‘The CPM had warned the government that unilateral concessions before the negotiations, and without conditional linkages to deep cuts by developed countries, will not yield results. This is indeed what has happened.’
[29]

As for the Indian government, in a March 2010 interview in the
Wall Street Journal
, environment minister Jairam Ramesh described himself as a climate agnostic. Ramesh, who headed India’s delegation at Bali and addressed the Copenhagen conference, said the climate negotiations were in a ‘complete quagmire’ and heading nowhere.
[30]
‘In many parts of India people are dying because of excess pesticides in the water, or arsenic in the water,’ according to Ramesh. ‘That’s more important and more urgent than climate change.’ The other BASIC nations shared the same perspective. They had bonded ‘very well’ at Copenhagen. ‘We are united in our desire not to have a binding agreement thrust upon us which will constrict our developmental options,’ Ramesh said.
[31]

China could even claim the support of the weather. The first week of 2010 saw Beijing temperatures plunge to -18
o
C as a blizzard dumped the heaviest snow fall in a single January day since 1951. For two months beforehand, China had experienced widespread gas shortages as demand rose because of the unusually cold weather. In Seoul, more than ten inches of snow fell on the Korean capital – the greatest amount since records began in 1937.
[32]
In Mongolia, temperatures fell to -50
o
C. Ferocious winter conditions killed almost ten million sheep, cattle, goats, horses and camel – a fifth of the country’s total.
[33]

In Washington, Senator Inhofe’s grandchildren built an igloo with a sign saying ‘Al Gore’s New Home’. ‘This isn’t a good old-fashioned winter for the District of Columbia, not unless you’re remembering the last ice age. And it doesn’t disprove global warming,’ wrote Bill McKibben, the Copenhagen bell-ringer, in the
Washington Post
in February. ‘Instead, the weird and disruptive weather patterns around the world are pretty much exactly what you’d expect as the planet warms,’ McKibben rationalised.
[34]
  

Whether or not global warming caused the heavy snowfall, McKibben’s claim that more snow was exactly what was expected contradicted one of the most famous predictions in the history of global warming. Within a few years, winter snowfall will become ‘a very rare and exciting event’, David Viner, of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit told the
Independent
in March 2000. ‘Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,’ Viner forecast.
[35]

Mongolian nomadic herdsmen had a name for the harsh winter –
dzud
, meaning ‘white death’.
[36]
Writing three days after McKibben, the
New York Times
’ Thomas Friedman coined his own. Avoid the term ‘global warming’, Friedman advised. ‘I prefer the term global weirding.’ As global temperatures rise, the weather gets weird, Friedman asserted. 

Global weirding even found its way onto the website of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). ‘Global warming or global weirding?’ Don’t draw long-term, large-scale conclusions from short-term local weather patterns, was NOAA’s careful answer.
[37]