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UNFCCCC talks go nowhere - Colour Me Amazed

Well, gosh, I am such a Nostradamus. Just last week I said to someone "these climate talks in China are going to achieve nothing." It was a brave prediction, that few could have dared to make. And so it is with grim satisfaction that I read on the BBC website that

UN climate talks in China have ended without a major breakthrough and with angry words about the US from Beijing.

At the talks in Tianjin, China blamed the US for failing to meet its responsibilities to cut emissions and for trying to overturn UN principles.

The US accused China of refusing to have its voluntary energy savings verified internationally.

Make this shit up. I defy you to.

Reasons we are in Denial

From a 2006 spoof newspaper I did.

12 reasons why we are still in denial
MANCHESTER- A special investigation by this newspaper has revealed that Climate Change has been systematically under-estimated and under-reported. While no single villain is to blame, our reporters have identified several important factors.

Science is 'small c' conservative. Scientists are trained not to speculate beyond what the current empirical evidence will support. To do so, to go 'out on a limb', is to risk a career shelf-stacking at Asda.

Our ignorance is outstanding. The planet is fantastically complex, with all sorts of unknown influences, feedback loops etc. Assumptions that filled yesterday's text books are regularly over-turned. The new scientific and conceptual tools (Complex Systems etc.) at our disposal are absurdly new (40 years and less).

Prediction is difficult, especially about the future.

Some scientists still talking about how things will pan out in other fields 40 to 50 years hence, making it seem as if Climate Change is just one problem among many.

Our brains are limited. In most of our lives we encounter gradual change. We age one year at a time. Our wages (if we're lucky) creep up slowly. We are not regularly exposed to exponential changes, ‘phase shifts’ and the like. Without getting all evolutionary psychologist on your ass, we never needed to develop the mental tools for our current dilemma of positive feedback loops.

Our cultural selection pressures have always favoured optimists. Most folk flee from bad news. Never underestimate our amazing capacity to distract ourselves the latest baubles and trinkets, an upcoming holiday, coming and going in the Big Brother house.

We have a creeping expectation that God will rescue us, since we are obviously the most important thing in the Universe.

Profit-driven media systems exist to make money, not to inform. They need to establish a happy mood for people to read the adverts. The Pending Ecological Debacle doesn't really put the reader/viewer in the chucklezone.

Decisions on what and how to present science stories are largely made by arts graduates. They have been taught to get 'balance', meaning that until about two years ago, any old oil-company stooge could get equal airtime with a proper climatologist. Funnily, when doing stories on the Holocaust or the link between smoking and cancer, they don't ask David Irving or the Tobacco Growers' Association for a comment...

TV news stories have to be short, simple and have some good pictures. (Basically, what Herman and Chomsky refer to as “concision”)

We are coping with the legacy of ferocious and largely-successful ‘denial’ campaigns by capitalist interests in the 1990s (Global Climate Coalition is the prime example). This has left otherwise educated and bright people thinking that there is still doubt about climate change.

The general public is largely innumerate and woefully scientifically illiterate.

However, not all the scare stories are true: newspapers need to sell copies, so are attracted to the alarmist “we are all going to die next year” story, instead of the less controversial “we and most of the species on this rather pretty rock, are all going to die within the next 50 years”

People need to educate themselves about the basic science. Two really good places to start are Kate Evans “Funny Weather” and then www.realclimate.org. on which real climatologists speak to each other in something approaching English.

Scientists Wrong About Climate Change- It's Actually Far Far Worse

Back in the day (i.e. 2006), when it looked like we folks around Climate Camp would be smart enough to actually make the network of NVDA really happen, there was a post-Drax meeting in Manchester. Where it all went wrong. But enough of that...

I produced a spoof newspaper, called "Socialist Lurker" and the lead story was, with a picture of a polar bear and a thought bubble that said "great, I can forget about the swimming lessons", "SCIENTISTS ADMIT CLIMATE CHANGE REPORTS WRONG:
It's actually far far worse."

For reasons to do with me posting a youtube video about Apocalyptic Language, I am now posting it...

This newspaper, after an investigation spanning two years, can today announce a startling pattern hidden in reports and research about climate change and carbon dioxide emissions. This pattern, invisible to the naked eye, has far-reaching implications, shaking the belief system of our civilisation to its core. Those who know the pattern can be identified by their tight-lipped semi-smile that might also be a stoical grimace. For this reason, the pattern is known as 'Da Carbon Code'.

The pattern has the following elements:

Journalists report that a group of scientists have reported their surprising/unusual/worrying/bowel-loosening information. This roughly corresponds to coverage of the same report in the Telegraph, the Times, the Guardian and the Independent respectively.

This information is in the form of direct evidence/findings/report/a computer model.

The journalist has found the report in a reputable journal, such as Science, Nature or, occasionally, something more specialist. Alternatively, the story comes from a press release from a body such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change(1), the Royal Society, Hadley Centre or the like.

The report states that glacier melt(2)/ocean acidity(3)/ocean warming(4)/rainforest die-off(5)/methane hydrate release(6) etc(7). is happening quicker than expected.

At very least,it is happening twice as fast as had expected, but may even be happening faster than had previously been thought possible.(8)

The problem is caused by carbon dioxide emissions, and is likely to accelerate and also contribute to other environmental and social problems.

The pattern then continues with the journalist contacting a 'relevant authority' (either governmental or corporate) for a statement. The minister/PR flunky(9) looks shiftily at his- or more rarely her- feet and then out the window, before giving a ritual incantation of awareness and concern. He/she finally whines something like “Yes we are building more airports, but we're going to put low-energy light bulbs in all the departure lounges. And kittens are nice.”

By way of summing up the journalist will make the observation that 'tough choices' lie ahead, and that the 'political will' may not be present to meet them. In the deluxe version, they may mention that Kyoto, due to expire in 2012, was never much cop(10) anyhow.

Though this 'Da Carbon Code' has had little noticeable impact on the desires, assumptions and actions of the general public in the West, some among our Lords and Masters, the scientific community and the more alert environmentalists are starting to shit bricks. One campaigner was quoted as saying “It is probably too late to do anything actually worth the effort, but we should at least have a pop at the problem, for our own self-respect, if not for our kids. If we don't get Contraction and Convergence(12) adopted and implemented very soon indeed, it's definitely all over bar the shouting, wailing and gnashing of teeth.”

Footnotes to “Climate Reports Wrong”
1. The IPCC’s next report is due out in February 2007. It is likely to make for light, enjoyable bed-time reading. Not.
2. Check out the British Antarctic Survey www.antarctica.ac.uk See also footnote 8
3. The Natural Environment Research Council has a brilliant quarterly magazine called Planet Earth. The summer 2006 issue has a terrifying story on “Ocean Acidification: The Other Carbon Dioxide Problem” It’s available on-line, via http://www.nerc.ac.uk/publications/planetearth/
4. Jim Hansen, from NASA, is not a muppet. That was Jim Henson. Hanson's the guy with a cameo in Al Bore's Inconvenient Truth, fighting the good fight on Capitol Hill. 18 months ago NASA confirmed the oceans are heating up. http://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/environment/earth_energy.html
5. The Indie jealously guards its archive, but those criminals at climate ark have posted a story from 23 July http://www.climateark.org/shared/reader/welcome.aspx?linkid=58635. Realclimate.org has a pretty good rebuttal, that you should read before you start disasturbating too much…
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/08/amazonian-drought/
6. The amusing thing about Siberia and Alaska melting will be that the quantities of methane will make any carbon dioxide reduction schemes that the simian bipeds come up with utterly utterly irrelevant. At that point, will they all just shrug their shoulders and say ‘burn baby burn’?
There was an article and letters in Nature in September 2006 about this, but the following article is also good. It’s from ‘Seed’, an American magazine aimed at arty scientists and arty types who seek scientifically literacy. A bit technophiliac, but you can’t have everything... http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2006/09/post_3.php
7. Et cetera indeed! Royal Society report “Impact of climate change on crops worse than previously thought (Liebig’s law stands, it seems)
http://www.royalsoc.ac.uk/news.asp?id=3084
The Gulf Stream switching off, from those cheerful chaps at NERC again
http://www.nerc.ac.uk/research/issues/climatechange/rapid.asp
(One is reminded of William Broecker- "We're poking the climate system by adding greenhouse gases" like carbon dioxide, the Columbia University scientist said in a July 22 Summer Sessions lecture. "Will poking this angry beast cause it to lash out?" )
Soil becoming a carbon source rather than a carbon sink.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,12374,1324379,00.html
I could go on all night…
8. Elizabeth Kolbert wrote a three part piece on Climate Change for The New Yorker, now a book “Field Notes from a Catastrophe”
Almost wherever you looked, temperatures in the Arctic were rising, and at a rate that surprised even those who had expected to find clear signs of climate change. Robert Corell, an American oceanographer and a former assistant director at the National Science Foundation, co-ordinated the study. In his opening remarks, he ran through its findings — shrinking sea ice, receding glaciers, thawing permafrost — and summed them up as follows: “The Arctic climate is warming rapidly now, with an emphasis on now.” Particularly alarming, Corell said, were the most recent data from Greenland, which showed the ice sheet melting much faster “than we thought possible even a decade ago."
9. For public relations and greenwash, check out www.prwatch.org and the book Global Spin by Sharon Beder.
And read this quote from the wonderful Donald Westlake’s wonderful ‘Humans’;
The fact was, Anglo Dutch had learned from Exxon's experience with the Valdez. Never keep your information officer around long enough to establish any kind of personal rapport with the media; that way indiscretions and uncomfortable leakage lie. Every two weeks, whip into the slot another trim slim thirty-four-year-old, bland and smooth and bright, male or female (makes no difference), who will give the company line a nearly human face; but before that face becomes completely human get it out of there, and start with a new one....
10. Jokes that have to be explained are bad enough, but footnoted ones?! COP= Conference of the Parties is the name of the 6 monthly meetings of the UNFCCC. At COP-3, in 1997, the Kyoto Protocol was signed.
11. The idea that the mass media in the west is systematically skewed to support capitalist interests is unthinkable to those who benefit from it with fat jobs and fat heads.
www.medialens.org does an excellent job in tracking and challenging this invisible power. Specifically on climate change, see http://www.medialens.org/alerts/06/060131_welcome_to_mars.php
12.We must contract our carbon dioxide emissions and also gap in per capita emissions between rich and poor. C and C offers science-based targets, which we have ignored and will ignore until it is Too Late. If it isn’t already. www.gci.org.uk or else news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4994296.stm

Some cartoons to leaven the mood

Haven't done this for a while...

We will jam our fingers in our ears till they touch...

"The more serious the problem of climate change becomes, the more revolutionary the change needed to address it—the more we can expect powerful economic and social interests to deny the seriousness of the problem: playing up scientific uncertainties that always exist, and casting doubt on climate science itself. The object of such a response is to manipulate public opinion so as to sow confusion and arrest any attempt to alter business as usual."

Monthly Review May 2010

Overwhelmed by overwhelming overwhelmingness

Another banality that occurred to me this morning: Few of us like to feel overwhelmed and at the mercy of forces we don't understand/can't control. And as children, that's mostly what we endure- we are told when to go to bed, what to where, what to eat. [See Stephen Jay Gould on why kids are fascinated by big lumbering brainless dinosaurs] Becoming an adult, you get to “choose” these things yourself (though often the choices you make are within the narrow bounds set by advertisers, but the crucial thing- for my rhetorical purpose- is that you feel free.)

And you get to stay an adult, with luck, until advanced old age crumbles that independence away from you and you get patronised by some NHS stooge a third of your age.

But look, here comes climate change. A huge force, arbitrary and beyond control and bargaining with that will take away so many of the 'free choices' - air travel, bling - that we deploy to tell ourselves and each other that we are now adults. [It's bad enough if for those willing to concede that some social problems need collective solutions. For staunch 'individualists' who hates the messiness of mass society, then it must be doubly hell.]
And so, like a teenager with a parent lecturing us, we turn up the volume on our iPod and say (to ourselves) “yeah, whatever.”