COP17: Durban delusions

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"?