UK’s Miliband calls out China as the Copenhagen spoiler

I have not been fond of how the United Nations has been running all things climate.   Both CAP’s Andrew Light and I have argued before, “we don’t need 192 nations to come to an agreement on mitigating carbon emissions in order to get the job done. We only need those countries responsible for 85% of emissions to move forward on the pathways identified by the IPCC with a promise to the world to do so in a responsible manner.”

That’s why much of what 350.0rg founder (and occasional CP guest blogger) Bill McKibben doesn’t like about the Copenhagen Accord is exactly what I like about it.  McKibben complains of Obama’s successful effort to prevent a complete failure at Copenhagen:

• He blew up the United Nations….
• He formed a league of super-polluters, and would-be super-polluters….

Hurray!

Most of the coverage and analysis on the Copenhagen Accord has been dreadful and devoid of important context, as I’ve said, and that includes McKibben’s analysis, which is, I believe, 100% backwards.

Today Nobelist Paul Krugman wrote of the Congressional debate over health care, “the fact that it was such a close thing shows that the Senate “” and, therefore, the U.S. government as a whole “” has become ominously dysfunctional.” And yet this “dangerous dysfunction,” as he puts it, is solely due to the need for a modest 60% supermajority that could only be dreamed of by those hoping for progress in the Alice-in-Wonderland world of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, where any single nation can veto the outcome:

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And the falsehoods about the Russian Institute of Economic analysis are exposed

Everybody but the anti-science disinformers have known for a long time that the Hadley/CRU (Climatic Research Unit) temperature data UNDERestimates — not OVERestimates — the recent global temperature rise.  I’ve repeatedly written about how this data excludes “the place on Earth that has been warming fastest” (see “Why are Hadley and CRU withholding vital climate data from the public?” and “What exactly is polar amplification and why does it matter?“).   So has NASA’s James Hansen (for years) among others.

The disinfomers — people like the Competitive Enterprise Institute –  have been trumpeting yet more ass-backwards disinformation on this, spun from the Russian Institute of Economic Analysis (but debunked by Tim Lambert aka Deltoid and others).  Now the Met Office has buried them with a new analysis, published Friday on their website:

New evidence confirms land warming record

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Obama displayed the same leadership and bargaining skills that will be needed to obtain Senate passage of a bipartisan climate bill

President Obama may have improved his chances for passing global warming legislation in the Senate by forging an interim international agreement here that puts both rich and poor countries on a path to curtail greenhouse gas emissions.

E&E News (subs. req’d) agrees with CAP’s Dan Weiss (see “Why the newly inked Copenhagen Accord boosts the odds for Senate passage of bipartisan climate and clean energy jobs legislation“).  And I agree, too, particularly since what happened during Copenhagen underscores what I said before Copenhagen:  Everything Obama has done in the last few days, indeed every thing he has done in the past year, makes clear he is going to push very hard for climate legislation (see “Coming to Copenhagen commits Obama to getting the bipartisan climate and clean energy bill passed“).

Since it is Obama’s personal leadership that matters most to Senate passage at this point — his willingness to bargain as hard with the likes of Graham and McCain and Murkowski and Lugar and Collins and Snowe as he did with China and India and Brazil and South Africa and Indonesia — I am more confident than ever we will see a serious economy-wide climate and clean energy bill pass in 2010.

Indeed, E&E has some quotes from key swing-state Republicans to back up this view:

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A new scientific report, the Copenhagen Prognosis, outlines the terrible challenge the world faces from climate change — as well as several paths to safety. World leaders in Copenhagen struggled to come to a provisional accord that would provide a framework for sustainable civilization. But a team of the world’s top climate scientists have offered a stinging indictment of the political process, noting that the unofficial commitments made are “not consistent with the expressed political will to protect humanity“:

A broader analysis of tipping points and feedbacks reinforces the conclusion that greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reductions targets currently being tabled within the political realm are not consistent with the expressed political will to protect humanity against high risks of devastating climate impacts and significant risks of self-amplifying global warming.

The Prognosis indicates that for a “good chance” (75%) of avoiding “major societal and environmental disruptions through the rest of the century and beyond,” “global GHG emissions would almost certainly need to decline extremely rapidly after 2015, and reach essentially zero by midcentury.”

This is indeed an “almost overwhelming challenge,” but “there is no evidence suggesting it is impossible”:

To the contrary, the growing body of analytical work examining such scenarios at the global and regional level suggest it is not only technically feasible but also economically affordable, even profitable.

It should come as little surprise that a clean-energy economy is not just more sustainable but more profitable than one based on the reckless waste of unrecoverable resources — but economists are just now beginning to recognize that fact.

The Copenhagen Accord reaffirms the goal of limiting warming to less than two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, but negotiators jettisoned the target of cutting global warming emissions in half by 2050. Even that goal, the Copenhagen Prognosis finds, is utterly insufficient:

The Copenhagen Prognosis was prepared by top climate scientists, including the Stockholm Environment Institute‘s Sivan Kartha, the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research‘s Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, and was endorsed by IPCC director Rachendra Pachauri’s Energy Resources Institute.

We’ve passed the threshold of safety and security, and each additional ton of carbon, each year emissions rise, each year concentrations do not drop — we are killing people.

We need to separate the science — that we are at unsafe levels of greenhouse gases and our destabilized climate is killing people — from the policy of setting deadlines and targets.

We know that any deadline or target to eradicate hunger and poverty is insufficient, but we make them anyway. We need the same understanding with climate change.

Responds to laughable alum attack on his “crimes against the scientific community … and the citizens of the world” because “CO2 lags Earth’s temperature”!

I managed to catch the Bjerknes Lecture, which was given by Richard B. Alley: “The biggest Control Knob: Carbon Dioxide in Earth’s Climate History”. The room was absolutely packed – standing room only, I estimated at least 2,000 people in the audience. And it was easy to see why – Richard is a brilliant speaker, and he was addressing a crucial topic – an account of all the lines of evidence we have of the role of CO2 in climate changes throughout prehistory.

That’s CP guest blogger Steve Easterbrook writing about the talk Alley gave last week.  I’ve heard Alley present, so I can attest to his dynamic speaking skills.  And I know this talk is worth watching because the AGU has posted it in an especially viewable format (click here) — with his slides shown as Alley speaks in one corner of the video.

I’d strongly recommended it to anybody who wants to understand why scientists are so certain that CO2 is such a big driver of our climate.  It is for an audience of geophysicist types, but is probably the most understandable science lecture on the subject you are likely to watch.

Here’s how Easterbrook summarizes it:

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Hot Electrons Could Double Solar Power

For decades researchers have investigated a theoretical means to double the power output of solar cells–by making use of so-called “hot electrons.” Now researchers at Boston College have provided new experimental evidence that the theory will work. They built solar cells that get a power boost from high-energy photons. This boost, the researchers say, is the result of extracting hot electrons.

The results are a step toward solar cells that break conventional efficiency limits. Because of the way ordinary solar cells work, they can, in theory, convert at most about 35 percent of the energy in sunlight into electricity, wasting the rest as heat. Making use of hot electrons could result in efficiencies as high as 67 percent, says Matthew Beard, a senior scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, CO, who was not involved in the current work. Doubling the efficiency of solar cells could cut the cost of solar power in half.

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“And the United States is very much back in the game too. After eight years of playing the spoiler, it is now a leader with a president who seems to embrace the role.”

The global climate negotiations in Copenhagen produced neither a grand success nor the complete meltdown that seemed almost certain as late as Friday afternoon. Despite two years of advance work, the meeting failed to convert a rare gathering of world leaders into an ambitious, legally binding action plan for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. It produced instead a softer interim accord that, at least in principle, would curb greenhouses gases, provide ways to verify countries’ emissions, save rain forests, shield vulnerable nations from the impacts of climate change, and share the costs.

The hard work has only begun, in Washington and elsewhere. But Copenhagen’s achievements are not trivial, given the complexity of the issue and the differences among rich and poor countries. President Obama deserves much of the credit. He arrived as the talks were collapsing, spent 13 hours in nonstop negotiations and played hardball with the Chinese. With time running out “” and with the help of China, India, Brazil and South Africa “” he forged an agreement that all but a handful of the 193 nations on hand accepted.

I must say that I think most of the coverage on the Copenhagen Accord has been dreadful and devoid of context.  I’ll post my own analysis shortly, but I plan to run the (small number of) good pieces in their entirety, starting with this excellent NYT editorial:

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Sen. Inhofe (R-OIL) has mostly become a laughingstock on this continent.  He’s made absurd statements attacking military leaders trying to warn about the dangers of human-caused global warming (see Inhofe trashes generals who advocate for bipartisan clean energy legislation: They crave “the limelight”).  Heck even the Palin-embracing Washington Post mocks Inhofe as “the last flat-earther.” Not it turns out he’s a laughingstock on two continents now, as made clear in this Think Progress repost.

Back in September, godfather of global warming deniers Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) announced that he would be going to the U.N.’s climate change summit in Copenhagen this week to present “another view.” “I think somebody has to be there “” a one-man truth squad,” he said. His “truth squad” later expanded to three, with Sens. John Barrasso (R-WY) and Roger Wicker (R-MS) joining in.

But MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow noted last night that Inhofe’s mission of wreaking havoc on the summit fell flat:

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In 2007, Newt said “My message I think is that the evidence is sufficient that we should move towards the most effective possible steps to reduce carbon loading in the atmosphere…. And do it urgently, yes.”

In 2007 and 2008, when former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich was pretending to be an environmentalist, — and suckering some of the status quo media — I examined his long anti-environmental, anti-clean-energy history (see “Anti-environment, anti-technology Gingrich tries to rewrite history. Don’t buy it or his new book” and “Note to media: Newt Gingrich is an eco-fraud“).  Gingrich continues to move (back) toward his ant-science roots made clear in this Think Progress’s repost.  [Note:  I don’t believe that Weekly World News headline is accurate, but it is no less plausible than Gingrich’s current views on CO2.

Newt Gingrich wrote a column in the Washington Examiner yesterday addressing climate policy. In the op-ed, the former House Speaker attacks the Environmental Protection Agency’s move to classify CO2 emissions as a dangerous pollutant:

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Sorry. Looks like it was a power outage at the servers, possibly related to the weather. Hmm. Maybe we need some on-site generation.