COP17: Durban delusions

They want the KP (Kyoto Protocol) rules but they don't want the KP. In Africa, if you want the mango you also must like the mango tree. If you want (the carbon dioxide) markets to continue, if you want strong and robust rules, then keep the mango tree. Dr Tosi Mpanu-Mpanu, Chair of Africa Group

Changes in the weather and climate used to be blamed on gods or demons, but no longer. If something nasty happens - meteorologically and climatically - in the developing world today, a cacophony of voices invariably insists it is the developed world's fault. Most delegates at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change's (UNFCCC) seventeenth annual meeting of its Conference of the Parties (COP-17) in Durban, South Africa, agreed with this alleged causal connection.

Dr.Tosi Mpanu-Mpanu, the Democratic Republic of Congo's environment minister, was one of them. Referring to the desire of some delegates to dump the Kyoto Protocol but keep its Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) – the part with carbon trading rules – retaining the KP "mango tree" was best if you wanted the "fruit" - more international carbon credit "money".

"We are on African soil," he said at a media briefing last week. "I hope that people will go above and beyond what their official positions are to keep one billion Africans safe." So if traders want to go on trading carbon (dioxide), governments have to give Africa – and the developing world - a big "mango" $$$ tree.

Keeping one billion Africans "safe" from climate change? Assuming this utopian fantasy was achievable – it would come with a high price tag. No surprise, then, Dr Mpanu-Mpanu's group wanted "fast-start finance", money from the annual $100 billion plus Green Climate Fund proposed at Copenhagen (COP-15) in 2009; a "multilateral rules-based process" under United Nations control; a second KP commitment period beyond 2012; and billions of dollars of "adaptation funding".

Climate reparations

"Many people here in the developing world are angry. They see the changing climate, the rains coming at different times, the crops failing, and they are absolutely furious," BBC World Service One Planet producer, Michael Williams, said this week.

"So what they are very keen to talk about is the Green Climate Fund. Some, however, have stressed: 'We don't call it a fund. It is reparations, reparations for a wrong that's been done to us by you, the developed world. You made a mess here. You're going to have to clean it up!'"

Someone somewhere in the UN is apparently an expert on "stable" climates and knows how to conjure them into existence. Where are you? Is it a state that - like Goldilocks's porridge – is just right for the planet's 7,000 million inhabitants? If so, perhaps you can divulge how you will guarantee rain always will come exactly on time; crops will never fail, and climate change will be forever optimal and beneficial for everyone.

As for climate reparations, the concept is a tricky one. According to Melbourne lawyer Maxine Burkett and many others, it is based on the harm assumed to be caused by past anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions, improving the lives of the "climate vulnerable" through direct programs, policies and mechanisms involving "significant resource transfers", and ensuring the vulnerable are able to cope adequately with "future climate challenges."

"They are pushing very hard on that one," said Williams. "Some are saying: 'We want the money for adaptation, for living with the climate change. We have to live with it because you failed to stop it.'"

No wonder he felt "the mood here is very strange, I have to say. It's a festival, a conference and a workshop all rolled into one. There are diplomats and activists, secretary-generals and European royalty, musicians and dancers, and people dressed as trees. There's a lot of finger pointing, a lot of finger waving."

Another journalist described the event as resembling a "big alternative lifestyle expo" with "earth mother" vibes. But can green theology and eco-evangelism save humankind and restore a played-out planet? The COP-17 Working Group 3 believes so. The villain in its draft Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth was "the capitalist system". It – and not rapid population growth, unpredictable natural cycles, etc - was causing "great destruction, degradation and disruption of Mother Earth, putting life as we know it today at risk through phenomena such as climate change".

Climate politics

Deeper scrutiny of the weird world of international climate politics is long overdue. When, for example, did "climate change" first appear as the justification for wealth transfer on an unprecedented scale from the developed world to the developing world?

Ever since the 1992 UNFCCC codified dubious notions of "dangerous" climate change, "climate debt" and "precautionary" action, UN bureaucracies have been moving slowly (at least 17 years) – but inevitably - towards this highly politicised end-game.

For many UN members, climate debt has two components: Adaptation debt - compensation owed to the poor for the damages of climate change they have not caused; and emissions debt - compensation owed for their fair share of the atmospheric space they cannot use if climate change is to be stopped.

The UNFCCC's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), established in 1988 by the UN Environment Programme and UN World Meteorological Organization, provided the agency's climate juggernaut with a deepening alarmist narrative over two decades, successfully getting the issue on national political agendas.

When an accurate history of the UN's long involvement with the issue is written, it will be clear how eagerly – and in my view prematurely - the developing world (and other players) embraced it, years before the IPCC and its researchers ruled (incorrectly) the science was "settled". It will be a case study in politicisation of science and entrenchment of confirmation bias on a grand scale.

Did the UNFCCC's desired policy options – anthropogenic carbon dioxide and climate "stabilisation" - create a feedback loop between politics, science, and science funding? Did it lead to an overconfident assessment of the importance of greenhouse gases in driving future climate change? Did it compromise agency impartiality and the level of confidence claimed for its model projections (not predictions)?

The UNFCCC's primary objective was to prevent 'dangerous' human interference with the Earth's climate. Under Article 3.1 of its Principles, the Parties "should protect the climate system for the benefit of present and future generations of humankind, on the basis of equity and in accordance with their common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities."

It assumes collective global action actually can stabilise greenhouse gas concentration levels at about either 550 parts per million or 450ppm by about 2100 and meet the Copenhagen (COP-15) objective of limiting global warming to below 2C above preindustrial levels. Yet this controversial objective is not based on an established law of Nature that quantifies the precise relationship between human-generated GHC levels and global surface temperature. (There is no such law.)

Uncertainty, however, has never bothered either the UNFCCC or IPCC. When in doubt, use the (pseudo-scientific) precautionary principle to justify your preferred course of action. Article 3.3: "The Parties should take precautionary measures to anticipate, prevent or minimize the causes of climate change and mitigate its adverse effects. Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage lack of full scientific certainty should not be used as a reason for postponing such measures."

As for "climate vulnerability", IPCC has defined it as 'the degree to which a system is susceptible to, and unable to cope with, adverse effects of climate change, including climate variability and extremes'.

Vague and unquantifiable, open to PP exploitation, the concept is a carbon conman's dream come true. What if one person's vulnerability is another's natural (not anthropogenic) variability? What if the system is "unable to cope" due to adverse impacts of rapid population growth on resource availability and so on? And who will determine system "susceptibility"?

Climategate 2

At about 11am on 6^th December, a small single-engine plane appeared above Durban's beaches. A team of CFACTSargument-demolition experts (including Lord Christopher Monckton) parachuted down to Mother Earth - armed only with panache, the Socratic method and more Climategate emails.

The emails, a pre-2009 batch of 5,300 between key scientists promoting the "dangerous" anthropogenic global warming hypothesis were released anonymously by "FOIA" (UK Freedom of Information Act) on 23^rd November 2011, re-igniting a controversy that began two years ago with the appearance of the first cache (click here to access.) FOIA also released a 133MB archive containing another 220,000 encrypted emails, protected by an aes-256 passphrase.

COP-17 delegates, however, were too preoccupied with conjuring up cornucopian climate money trees and Orwellian regulations to show any interest in Climategate, despite (or because) the emails suggest "settled" climate science is unsettled and raise doubts about the veracity of apocalyptic model "predictions". Perhaps there was no time (or inclination) to contemplate them at such a critical stage in this high-stakes game of international carbon (dioxide) roulette?

Maite Nkoana-Mashabane, COP-17's President, announced what she described as a "breakthrough" yesterday, a "long-term solution to climate change" that "will play a central role in saving tomorrow, today." Durban had "lit up a broader highway to a low-emission, climate resilient future".

In a three-page 1,026 word media release, the 194-party conference agreed to develop and to "adopt a universal legal agreement on climate change as soon as possible, but not later than 2015." It would come into affect by no later than 2020. A new Ad Hoc Working Group on the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action would begin talks immediately.

According to some, however, what was agreed was little more than a voluntary deal put off for a decade.

As for the Kyoto Protocol, Dr Mpanu-Mpanu got his mango money tree. The expression 'global response' did not replace 'common but differentiated responsibilities' in the final preamble, so KP lives! The parties, including 35 industrialised countries, agreed a second commitment period from January 1, 2013. Management of the Green Climate Fund aiding to poor countries was agreed too. But raising annual contributions of $100billion from the developed world remains the biggest challenge.

With regard to adaptation, "the most vulnerable are to receive better protection against loss and damage caused by extreme weather events related to climate change." In other words, the developed world apparently will be liable to compensate any developing country that claims to have been affected adversely by any EWE deemed to be "related to climate change" and not the product of natural variability in a complex system. But deemed by whom and using what criteria?

COP-17 did agree on something else - another UN Climate Change Conference, COP 18/CMP 8: the 18th Conference of Parties to the UNFCCC, plus 8th session of Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties to the KP). It is scheduled to be held in Qatar from 26 November to 7 December 2012.

So the UN climate carnival will roll on for at least another year. It will be full of sound and fury again, with more developing world finger-pointing and hand-waving, and talk of developed world money trees. But will delegates leave with anything more than another bout of chronic conference fatigue syndrome, post-alarmist stress disorder or that virulent ennui that infects a bureaucracy on collapse of its grandest schemes - such as monetising carbon dioxide, or "stabilising greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that will prevent dangerous human interference with the climate system"?