Wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen
Friendly old girl of a town
‘Neath her tavern light
On this merry night
Let us clink and drink one down
To wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen
Salty old queen of the sea
Once I sailed away
But I’m home today
Singing Copenhagen, wonderful, wonderful
Copenhagen for me!
Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull are big fans of Copenhagen.
For Turnbull, Copenhagen is exactly the reason why the CPRS Bill should be delayed until early next year. It would give him a few precious extra months to convince his reluctant colleagues of the need for doing some sort of deal with the government to get the infernal issue of climate change off the agenda. It’s been one of several reasons why the Coalition delayed putting forward a position on emissions trading, including its own internal study, Senate inquiries and that jointly commissioned work from Frontier Economics that has now been forgotten.
For a while, Turnbull also insisted that we needed to wait until Waxman-Markey had made its way through the giant sausage machine of the US Congress, but the glacial progress of that Bill, and the Senate version, Kerry-Boxer, means that line has disappeared from his argumentation.
Instead, there’s now another excuse: the fact that the Bill is so complex that it will take much longer than the time allotted to it for debate between now and the end of the year. Julie Bishop today called for “one of the greatest debates of our generation”.
Ah, for the glory days of the Howard government’s last term when the Coalition thought a fast Bill was a good Bill and thought nothing of ramming through major reforms overnight.
Sigh.
One hopes Ian Macfarlane keeps the family pet away from his amendments lest the dog eat the Coalition’s homework.
Turnbull’s not the only one using Copenhagen as an excuse, though. For the Prime Minister, Copenhagen is the reason he needs to reintroduce his CPRS Bill in November, conveniently creating the opportunity for a double-dissolution trigger. The entire reason we’re having this circus at the moment is because of the Prime Minister’s purported need for certainty at Copenhagen.
As Richard Denniss pointed out so well yesterday, Copenhagen has nothing to do with the CPRS, emissions trading or any other mechanism for achieving emission reductions. It is entirely about an agreement on reduction targets.
For that matter, Copenhagen isn’t even likely to yield a deal, which doubtless suits Coalition opponents of action just fine.
But the real meaning of Copenhagen is this:
Everyone knows we only produce 1.5% of global emissions. The solution to climate change is almost entirely out of our hands on that front. It is up to the major economies to broker a deal. Australia is a marginal player. But we’re also the developed country most at risk from climate change, with potentially catastrophic economic and social impacts. Copenhagen is an opportunity for the world to act to prevent those impacts. There will be others, but every delay means greater climate change impacts and increases the costs of action. We’ve comfortably displaced our concerns about climate change onto foreigners — Pacific Islanders, Bangladeshis, “climate refugees”.
But the concern should be a lot closer to home. Copenhagen is the chance to do something for workers in the tourism sector who’ll lose their jobs as the Barrier Reef dies. The farmers who surrender to prolonged drought. The people contracting dengue fever in Queensland and the Top End. The regional centres that start shrinking under economic pressure. The bushfire victims in the south-east of the continent. Copenhagen’s their chance.
Australia goes to Copenhagen as a pleader for help, for urgent action to forestall a climate crisis that is coming faster than expected and that will hit us earlier and harder than it hits the Chinese, the Americans or the Europeans. Hell, the Russians would be happy to see temperatures go up a few degrees, given how damn cold most of their country is.
Instead, we’re fronting up to Copenhagen insouciantly talking about schedules and the importance of climate aid, without offering a single dollar, and boasting of our willingness to have a unilateral 5% — 5%! — cut in emissions by 2020, meaning, of course, under the CPRS that we’ll actually increase our total emissions but buy enough permits from PNG and Indonesia to enable us to meet the target.
Copenhagen isn’t just an excuse for our politicians, it’s a delusion, one based on the idea that we attend as a powerbroker, not as one who desperately needs the world to act.
Wonderful, wonderful. The light is beginning to dawn – not just for one side in the debate but for all!. Why must we have all this breast-beating and useless spin when there is so much at stake.
Thanks BK. To say nothing of Denniss yesterday and McGoldrick today. All three should be compulsory reading for all the hot air spruikers, including Penny and Kev07, Malcolm and the rest.
Good to see you have caught up with those of us who foretold well over two years ago where Rudd would be in his government’s cynical and useless exercise. Now catch up with the serious science at last beginning to make it look as though there are much better explanations for all major climate change that we know about, including especially, everything since the end of the last major Ice Age, than anything to do with CO2.
Consider the implications of A. the mass of the ocean being about 300 times that of the atmosphere and most of it little above freezing point; B. the huge gravitational forces of the sun and moon which we know about from ordinary tides and, spectacularly from spring tides, and the cycles that have been found for their separate and combined influence on the earth over periods of decades, centuries and even millenia; C. the allleged fact that the IPCC models hugely underestimate the transport of heat from the tropics to the higher latitudes – which ought to mean that melting Arctic Ice ought to be much worse than predicted by the IPCC but certainly means that the IPCC can’t explain a number of well-established periodic phenomena which, in reality, are probably based on movements of energy within the oceans in each of the major oceans. and include not only our current south-eastern Australian drought which has b-all to do with CO2 but the 60 year cycles of Indian monsoon failures.
Next stop, Bernard, is a realisation that there will soon be models which do a much better job of explaining climate changes, even if not doing much for weather forecasts – any more than the IPCC does or can.
Give it a rest Julius, you think the world’s best scientists are stupid? You think there is not ambitious geniuses out there who would grab your theory and run with it to win a Nobel if it had legs? More so you think they haven’t already road tested anything you might possibly serve up here on a crikey.com.au thread? Of course there are. Get real boyo.
It’s not so much a cosy tribe as a Fight Club in big science and they all want the prize, the fame, the glory. It’s as Darwinian as anything you can serve up, and guess what – they decided the earth is round, it goes round the sun, and anthropogenic climate change is 95% certain.
Get over yourself, champ.
Excellent Bernard, excellent: I don’t suppose you had a chance to watch Channel Two last night? It was a program on Athens and democracy during the time of Socrates. And the point was that man, carries within him the seeds of his own destruction.
If the current Climate Change arguments don’t illustrate that point to perfection I don’t know what does.
I suggest that Tom McLoughlin acquaint himself with the grounds for what he, in innocent ignorance no doubt, calls “your [i.e. my] theory”.
Dr Ian Wilson and his Russian colleagues for example on the cycles which relate oceanic events to solar and lunar cycles (and indeed the influences of the Jovian planets gravitation on the meridional flows of the sun and therefore, probably, the sun spot cycles and even long absences of sun spots during the Maunder minimum and similar periods (though it may turn out that the relationship of sun spot activity to earth’s climate is more to do with common causation than causation by sun spot activity).
The work of William Kininmonth is also in point when he points, authoritatively (by which I mean he has scientific credentials which cannot be dismissed by a sneer), to the failure of the IPCC models to use the correct parameters for poleward transport of heat from the tropics, and the peer reviewed work of particle physicist Tom Quirk suggesting that the origins of the increased volume of CO2 in the atmosphere may have much more to do with the oceans – probably ENSO and other hitherto underexplored oceanic oscillations – than has been assumed in the concern about anthropogenic emissions.
As one suffering from the SE Australian drought I am open to suggestions as to what may have caused it, but any influence from what has occurred in the way of anthropogenic CO2 emissions in the last 50 years (which is all that can be seriously regarded as possibly significant) seems quite inadequate when we know that there must be natural explanations for droughts which destroyed civilisations over periods of many decades since the last major Ice Age. Just think a little about the implications of the oceans being 300 times as massive as the atmosphere and being stirred up by forces of gravity big enough to cause spring tides of sometimes immense power.
So, don’t be surprised if some ambitious geniuses manage to get funding for research which offers much more plausible explanations of major climate change (including the Medieval Warm Period etc.) than the small effects which can be predicted from increases in greenhouse gases.