Alan Pulis
The warmer it becomes...
The Durban climate summit held in South Africa did not stimulate the international media hype that the Copenhagen meeting had generated back in December 2009. Here, the Durban event went almost totally unnoticed.
Durban COP17 was the next follow-up to Cancun in 2010 as the global community seeks to develop a new climate legal regime once the remit of the 1998 Kyoto Protocol technically expires. Time and again, and with a clearly unfavourable global economic climate as backdrop, Durban has shown that climate politics is no piece of cake.
Climate lobbyists or the media had initially portrayed the 2009 Copenhagen summit as signalling the birth of a post-Kyoto treaty, or almost. The end results, however, proved so dismal compared to the original expectations that climate campaigners were faced with what they perceived as doom and gloom.
The lesson that international climate conventions very rarely yield too much must have long been learnt and, even now in the Durban aftermath, there is no sight as yet of the post-Kyoto holy grail. So much for all the greenhouse gas emissions to bring together thousands of delegates from all over the world to agree on what is considered by many as flimsy legalese!
Kyoto’s timeline is, to put it mildly, intriguing. Originally developed and eventually adopted in just five years after the 1992 UNFCCC – a remarkably short time period given the protocol’s global scale and economic implications – it was not before February 16, 2005, eight years later, that this unique international legal instrument could actually enter into force after it had gained enough signatories.
The quantum leap with Kyoto was the onerous commitment entered into by the industrialised nations to achieve greenhouse gas emissions cuts of the order of circa five per cent compared to baseline year 1990 over the period extending from January 1, 2008 to December 31, 2012.
What matters most with the Kyoto protocol in terms of its success is not really the cutting down of emissions per se but, rather, the treaty’s adoption of the diverse mechanisms through which it operates: the clean development mechanism, joint implementation and emissions trading, the latter having been implemented with considerable success in the EU since 2007.
As things stand now, carbon emissions from the developing world have escalated to such an extent that there can be no proper post-Kyoto legal framework unless China, India, Brazil and South Africa (the BASIC countries) and others commit to drastic emissions cuts almost in the same way or if not more than the industrialised world did in 1998.
How far can the climate politicking go when the science unequivocally shows that the risks from global temperature rise over the next 100 years – estimated so far to be in the range of at least 2-6° – are expected to become dramatically costlier to manage? In Durban, the alarm bells rang that the global average temperature rise deadline to within 2° compared to pre-industrial, as formally agreed in Copenhagen, may not be achievable after all, with a 3° or 3.5° rise suddenly becoming a more realistic scenario.
The worst off in the convolution of climate talks between the developed world and the various segments of the developing will always be the vulnerable small island states like ours. These have to counter, and with extremely limited resources, both the adverse impacts of rapidly changing climates and also severe consequences from rising sea levels. The last thing small islands can afford, for example, is greater dependency on expensive desalination processes to make up for a foreseeable increased scarcity of potable water.
The Durban conference outcome proposes a “platform” mandating an ad hoc working group to draft a new climate protocol by 2015 that should enter into force by 2020. The working group shall be supplemented by the crucial findings of the International Panel on Climate Change’s fifth assessment report scheduled for completion in 2013/2014.
As Kyoto moves into a second commitment period, COP17 also marks the activation of a crucial $100 billion green climate fund that had been agreed upon in Cancun.
A key element in the Durban talks has been the inclusion of carbon capture and storage technology (CCS) in Kyoto’s clean development mechanism. The prospects of the CCS industry now look better given the possibilities that should arise, on paper at least, for CCS investments in the greenhouse gas emissions-rich developing countries. The International Energy Agency estimates that no fewer than 3,400 CCS plants will be required worldwide by 2050 to ensure that global temperature rise does not go beyond the 2° mark.
Malta has transposed the EU directive on geological carbon capture and storage only last year through Legal Notice 346 of August 29. The implications could be more than meets the eye.
The author specialises in environmental management.
Popular Stories
In Discussion
3 Comments
Post comment
Please sign in or create your Account to post comments.
Alex Ellul
Jan 29th, 17:34
Regarding the Carbon Capture technology, which, in scientific terms means the pumping of CO2 gas UNDER PRESSURE into gelogical fissures, spent oil wells, coal mines and such like cavities in the earth's crust: This is an engineering impossibility. CO2 gas can never be locked under ground. There are great risks involved, and nobody, no insurer will ever underwrite the risks and therefore it will never be carried out. The UK has just cancelled 100 billion sterling investment in Carbon Capture. The scam is collapsing fast.
Alex Ellul
Jan 29th, 17:25
The writer of this piece has not woken up and saw the writing on the wall: Climate Change Politics are over. The last COP meetings, Copenhagen, Cancun and Durban were one debacle after another. This debacle is the result of politicians realising and tacitly accepting the fact that the science behind the theory of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) was proven wrong by observation. This is how science works:
Step 1.A Theory is proposed based on a scientific hypothesis.
Step 2. The theory is tested by observation
Step.3 If observation sustains the theory, then the theory is further studied
Step. 4 If the theory fails to be supported by observation, then it is discarded.
AGW theory was proposed when some scientists thought they had found a correlation between the increase of atmospheric CO2 gas and the global average temperature. This was so for a few years between early 1980's and 1996, but global temperature records show that since 1997, while CO2 levels have continued the linear increase, reaching 390 ppmv by 2011, the global average temperature stayed static since 1997. There has been no increased global warming since 1997. The ocean levels are falling, while the new science reports are showing a global cooling commencing due to reduced solar activity in the current anomalous solar cycle 24 and a possibly dim sun during the next cycle SC 25.
So, while the UN's corrupt IPCC tries to keep pushing the issue, thus not losing their millions in funds, the mainstream media keeps on selling the catastrophic, Hollywoodesque end-of-the-world stories so that their newspapers would sell more.
But politicians worldwide have seen through the scam and are tacitly getting out of AGW. Even president Obama, whose electoral campaign was based on clean renewable energy and reduction of hydrocarbon energy, has, during this week's State of the Union Address, hailed to high heaven the drilling of shale gas to energise the US and create jobs.
It is high time that journalists and commentators realise that the AGW theory is dead, and that the planet is not suffering CO2 emissions. It is suffering from other forms of environmental problems which are not being seen to. The money is being spent on a problem that does not exist. This money would have solved many environmental problems such as deforestation, water and ocean pollution, over fishing, plastic debris in oceans, hman-caused extinctions from illegal poachers world-wide.. and much more.
We have globally spent trillions of dollars and are planning to spend even more to try to reduce CO2 emissions which in any case would not reduce the temperature of the planet by 0.001C.
That is why nobody cares anymore about the IPCC and its expensive annual jamborees.
For the Durban meeting/jamboree/paid-holidays-for-the-bureaucrats, where 15,000 of them flew, stayed for 2 weeks in posh hotels, ate fantastic food three times a day, if each person had cost €10,000, then the total cost to the taxpayers of Durban COP17 is €150 million’ Therefore, by today's value of money, the 17 COP meetings held during the years is a staggering total of €2550 million. Now think about this: The politics and money spent on Climate Change has not saved anyone from death by heat because all the Climate Change mitigation is to save the future and not the present. But how many children, babies, woman and men would have been saved from famine, disease, lack of education and medical care, malnutrition, and other factors, if those €2550,000,000 were spent on saving these people?
Can one conclude that the UN’s IPCC is guilty of condemning millions to an early grave by ommission?
Rod Enderby
Jan 28th, 13:53
The EU is just full of "hot air" when it comes to climate change and Mr.Barosso's "procrastination is not an option" is laughable.
A first simple step for the EU to reduce carbon emissions, would be to introduce symmetry (and common sense) regarding "winter" and that would mean the clocks going forward in mid February-cerrtainly by the last Sunday.
America and Canada have done this on a slightly smaller scale (first Sunday in November to the first Sunday in March) and save almost two million carbon emissions as a result.