The UN’s climate surgery opening hours this week in Bonn, Germany, are 10am-1pm and 3pm-6pm.

    Several times they’ve finished early — lack of demand?

    “That’s good. Often they just go on and on. Next week it may be a bit later,” a UN spokesperson told me.

    Welcome to a new round of talks to find a successor to the UN-administered Kyoto Protocol on global warming. Bonn is the second of eight meetings of 190 countries and 2,000 people or so to agree a new climate pact by December 2009.

    All right, on the two-week agenda there’s also a lot of side events, lobby group huddles and so on, while delegates wake up very early to attend busy, ad hoc sessions, one told me.

    But from the outside at least there’s no sense of rush - the plenary sessions are often dry presentations from government bureaucrats, re-hashing well known positions with erudite allusions to climate convention text written 16 years ago.

    UN chairmen tried on Friday to steer talks towards “concrete proposals” for a new pact, to discuss in more meetings.

    Some NGOs said ideas were emerging to fund efforts to prepare for global warming and cut greenhouse gas emissions which are rising several percent annually. Scientists want emissions to peak within 10 years to avoid dangerous warming.

    Those ideas included a Swiss-proposed carbon tax, the UN’s shipping organisation’s suggestion for a carbon auction and Norway’s proposal to sell emissions rights to rich countries.

    Nevertheless talks are slow. Last December was a more dramatic meeting — ministers struggled in Bali, Indonesia, but finally succeeded to agree to launch these post-Kyoto talks.

    Why isn’t there more urgency here in Bonn, I asked a UN official. 1.) it’s not our fault, the United Nations is a facilitator, he said, 2.) some meetings are more technical than others, and 3.) you need leadership, and one country can provide that.

    That was a swipe at the United States, the only industrialised country not to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, and the world’s top or second biggest emitter of the planet-warming gas
carbon dioxide (after China). The United States hugely lags many countries’ ambition, for example President George W. Bush plans to halt emissions growth by 2025, while the EU says it will cut its greenhouse gases by 20 percent by 2020.

    But I still have sympathy with the U.S. delegation.

    Some ideas may be naive, like one from a major developing country that we compel Western entrepreneurs to sell their intellectual property rights, to speed up emissions cuts.

    “The private sector is private property. I think this process could use some common sense and honesty because it’s still out of touch with the world as it is,” the U.S. delegate
told me. I could agree.

    But where does that leave urgency?

So what happened to global warming?

It’s not just that it’s disappeared from media headlines this year - shoved off by the credit crunch and natural disasters, for example. It can’t be ignored that 2007 came and went as another very warm year - the 7th hottest on record since 1850 according to the World Meteorological Organization.

But it wasn’t a record. In fact that was 1998, a full 10 years ago — the year of an exceptional El Nino, a Pacific weather pattern which heats the whole globe. So is global warming not living up to the hype?

Two weeks ago Leibniz Institute’s Noel Keenlyside stirred an academic hornet’s
nest by saying that we may have to wait longer - a decade or more - for another
peak year, because a natural weakening in ocean currents may be cooling sea
temperatures.

Many scientists flatly rejected the idea, saying Keenlyside had over-estimated the effect. But some pointed out that a recent switch in a weather pattern called the North Atlantic Oscillation could indeed cool temperatures globally.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said last year recent warming was
“unequivocal” and most of it ”very likely” manmade. And almost all scientists in the latest debate, including Keenlyside, agree that any temporary cooling doesn’t alter that - blips due to natural effects are to be expected.

But how long is a blip? No-one knows.

It could be many years before there’s an El Nino as bad as 1998, scientists say. And in the meantime the doubts will grow, just as policymakers try to negotiate one of the most complex global treaties ever. A new Kyoto Protocol will affect issues of equity and poverty: in the case of poor countries the right to grow, for island states perhaps the right to exist, and for rich countries the right to compete on a level economic playing field.

Meanwhile one or two doubters are already saying the present lull in warming
casts doubt on just how far manmade greenhouse gases are influencing the climate. MIT’s Richard Lindzen reckoned that if it was as bad as all that temperatures would be rising faster.

What do you think?

His work at the Bali climate change conference isn’t sponsored by world oil giant Exxon Mobil, although he has held past conferences which were, says Alan Oxley.

Oxley, former Australian ambassador at world trade talks and now chairman of his NGO World Growth,  believes the sense of urgency that pervades the Bali talks – meant to launch negotiations to agree a successor to the Kyoto Protocol — is misplaced.

“There’s a surfeit of enthusiasm,” he says.

“I think there’s been a bit of a campaign to engender this sense of urgency,” he says, pointing to Britain and Germany as chief culprits.

Oxley isn’t convinced that global greenhouse gas emissions need to peak in the next few years, one scenario proposed by a U.N. panel of scientists. Twenty to 30 years is fine, he says. He isn’t too worried, either, about a 2 degrees centigrade hotter world. “We need a very long-term perspective, so what’s the rush?”

Oxley is in Bali to try and calm everyone down and promote his publication — on the threat emissions cuts pose to the world’s poor. But his main agenda appears to be to argue for free trade.

He’s worried that climate change policies such as Europe’s emissions trading scheme could unleash a new wave of protectionism, whereby countries slap tariffs on imports of goods like steel and cement, to try and compensate for carbon taxes on their industry at home.

And he’s opposed to any position that smacks of unfairness — including paying developing countries like China to cut their greenhouse gas emissions, a key issue at the Bali talks.

“Over time, as prosperity rises, they’ll take more action.”

What about a global carbon market, to help cut the costs of fighting change?

“It would be easier to negotiate a global currency. It’s beyond the technical capacity of governments to negotiate.”

By the way, I’m updating this blog after Alan Oxley objected to the implication, in the original, that he was sceptical about whether climate change was happening. He called me to say that World Growth accepts that human activity is a cause of global warming but is sceptical about the Kyoto Protocol. 

Take more responsibility for your personal carbon footprint.
Fly less.
Use video link-ups, instead of flying to conferences in exotic places.
Sound familiar?
All advice you can expect from many governments on how we should all roll up our sleeves in the fight against climate change.
But over the next two weeks some 10,000 delegates including representatives from 186 governments, up to 2,000 journalists (including me) and members of 130 non-governmental organisations descend on Bali, Indonesia.
They’re attending a two-week conference to kick-start two years of talks to agree a new, tougher, sharper climate change regime to replace the Kyoto Protocol.
But why Bali?
Indonesia’s environment ministry estimates that the event will produce 47,000 tonnes of the main greenhouse gas blamed for global warming, carbon dioxide.
If it had to be Indonesia, why not Jakarta, instead of forcing 10,000 people to take connecting flights?
Have the sponsor, the United Nations, made a PR gaffe by hosting a climate change event on a beautiful tropical paradise island at the Westin Resort, pictured above and below, which also happens to be miles from anywhere?
Tell us what you think. (BTW these are my photos, taken today)

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has just presented its summary report on how bad climate change is.
There’s one inconsistency in there which doesn’t undermine for me the key IPCC message — that climate change is a serious threat towards which mankind is hurtling.
But it has left me with a feeling that in one case at least figures have been selected to stress the threat.
The IPCC published on Saturday its handbook version of thousands of pages of climate change research.

On page 4 of this 23-page pocket guide it says that manmade greenhouse gas emissions rose 70% from 1970 to 2004.
But earlier this year, after an enquiry to the IPCC’s lead authors, I found that emissions of all greenhouse gases actually rose 49%. It’s a still a big increase, but not as big.
In its report published on Saturday the IPCC did mention in a footnote that the 70% figure only included greenhouse gases regulated by the Kyoto Protocol.
What it didn’t mention anywhere was that there’s a whole bunch of other greenhouse gases not included in the number, and whose emissions are rapidly falling.
These ozone-depleting gases (ODP gases) are very strong planet-warming gases, as measured in tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e).

Mankind emitted some 5.9 billion tonnes CO2e of such ODP gases into the atmosphere in 1970, but that fell to just 1.5 bln tonnes in 2004, after global efforts to stop a hole in the Earth’s ozone layer from getting any bigger.
So — total global greenhouse gas emissions including ODPs were 51.3 bln tonnes in 2004, up 48.6% on 1970 levels.
But excluding ODPs greenhouse gases increased by 74.0% to 49.8 bln tonnes — the IPCC’s headline number.
The IPCC summary is based on a more detailed report published earlier this year, which mentions that ODP gases have “declined significantly”, but only in passing. A 70% increase is the headline figure there, too.
Like I say, to me this doesn’t colour the IPCC message, but it does comes across as message management.

Ever fancied escaping the rat-race, and waking up instead to the sound of bird song over a steaming mug of home-made coffee?
According to author Nick Rosen, that’s now becoming possible.
It’s down to a combination of weakening restrictions on house-building and the falling cost of installing off-grid electricity like wind and solar power, says Rosen, author of “How to live off-grid”.
In addition, flexi-working is now possible even without a phoneline, using wireless 3G technology.
Is it really that easy to sell up and build on a plot out West?
Britain has tight rules on building new homes — which help account for Britian’s high house prices and pretty patchworks of green fields on the outskirts of big British cities.
But the UK’s population is swelling, putting pressure on housing space. Prime Minister Gordon Brown says he wants 3 million more homes by 2020, and all new build to be zero carbon from 2016 on.
Surely that plays into the hands of off-gridders seeking a life closer to Nature, where lunchbreaks entail a stroll in the woods rather than a frantic dash for an over-priced sandwich.
Britain claims it won’t bend the rules and make it easier to build houses on green fields or in woodlands. But that may not square with its planned, massive house-building programme.
Meanwhile, the price of wind and solar power is dropping, although it still involves an outlay of tens of thousands of pounds.
What may clinch an off-grid life is getting lucky, then.
If you can buy a cheap piece of farmland and then get permission to build a house on it, you may save enough money from selling a house in the city to pay for all the green electricity you want.
For that, you only have to hurdle Britain’s convoluted planning system.

At a time of record $88 oil prices you’d imagine that a business sector founded on supplying an alternative to diesel and gasoline is well-placed. Not so.
The criticism has been building for some time, but I think it’s safe to say the global biofuel industry is now in deep trouble.

The problem for the industry is that bad press and poor performance are now such that the government support it depends on is starting to look precarious. Pull out the credits, grants, tariffs and soft loans and the whole sector would come tumbling down — at least in the United States and Europe.

Just look at the damage the introduction of biofuel taxes has done to the German industry this year. It’s crippled, running at less than half-capacity.

Biofuels are derived from plants, especially food crops like rapeseed, palm oil, sugar cane, corn (maize) and wheat. As a result, they can be sourced locally, cutting dependence on foreign oil imports. They are also meant to help fight climate change. Burning biofuels only releases the heat-trapping carbon dioxide that the plants they’re derived from took from the atmosphere in the first place when they were growing.

So far, so good, right? That’s just the problem. Biofuels problems stem directly from why they are so attractive, those convenient motives that have prompted aggressive U.S. and European subsidies to support them. Now they’ve become a victim of their own success: a boom in U.S./EU production has hoovered up crop supplies and created a glut on the market, squeezing profits between higher prices for corn, wheat and so on, and lower prices for the end product.

The result? Take a look at the share price of almost any European or U.S. biofuels company — many are at or near 52-week lows.

Wise investors saw that coming and have been pulling out of the sector for the past 12 months. But now other issues are hitting, too. Green groups have long blamed biofuel production in Indonesia for rainforest slash and burn, which threatens the orangutan, while human rights groups have said the biofuel boom is also responsible for raising food prices, threatening the poor.

Those voices have been joined by some of the world’s most reputable analysts and thinktanks. The U.N.’s FAO and the OECD said this summer that biofuels will push food prices above long-term levels over the next decade. Earlier this year the International Energy Agency (IEA) called for an end to aggressive biofuel targets. It was joined last month by a report commissioned for the OECD and yesterday by analysts “Oil World”.
Meanwhile in August Nobel laureate chemist Paul Crutzen said almost all biofuels actually contributed more to climate change than oil.

The industry has tried to fight back, but the meekness of its counter-offensive, to me, only highlights the trouble they’re in. They counter the Crutzen report findings with other reports, and pick over individual numbers rather than dispute the thrust of his findings. Meanwhile they blame a hike in food prices on bad harvests and rising demand, saying the contribution of biofuels is exaggerated, that it’s all about “choices”, and that biofuels have been made a scapegoat. That could all well be true, but it doesn’t deny the underlying problem.

Most worrying perhaps for the sector is its fixation on new technologies to save the day — and especially extracting ethanol from wood chips and straw. Such technologies would by-pass the food versus fuel problem and could be very efficient, thus cutting carbon emissions, too. Almost every day a company says they’re targeting production to start in the next four to five years.

But the IEA says 10 years is more realistic, and a recent report by the OECD pointed out the logistical problems of hauling timber around the world — as an alternative to pumping oil through pipelines. The end result is that this emerging sector, so recently feted by President George W. Bush, is staring at the possibility that it may in the end be only a niche solution in the fight against climate change and fuel dependency.

The carbon market has been attracting headlines recently on Reuters for the massive profits some speculators and polluters are making from these emerging schemes.

These markets are meant to help fight climate change by putting a price on greenhouse gas emissions. But are these profits helping drive cuts in those gases? I would argue that often the answer is “no”.

They can even make the problem worse.
Take for example carbon trading under the Kyoto Protocol. A U.N. report this month says that under this scheme factories in China, India, South Korea, Mexico and Argentina are getting up to ten times more money than they actually need to eliminate emissions of very powerful greenhouse gases called HFCs.

These carbon offset incentives mean factories will now actually lose money if they invest in widely available technologies to cut these emissions. Not exactly the outcome you’d want from an environmental policy.
In addition, speculators who put these Kyoto deals together earn an additional mark-up, potentially worth billions of dollars by 2013. Won’t much of these profits go to the speculators and their investors, not to developing countries, or to help the planet?

Windfall profits are also being earned under a separate scheme, the European Union’s carbon market. Power companies, Europe’s biggest polluters, will earn profits of nearly $30 billion a year directly as a result of the scheme, a Reuters report showed on Friday.

The flaw won’t be corrected until 2013 at the earliest — nine years into the scheme.
Utilities are earning these profits by perfectly legally passing on to electricity consumers the price of emissions permits which they get for free. They are treating those permits as an asset, and costing them like that when they redeem them for producing emissions.

Analysts differ over whether the windfall will be invested at all in finding new sources of low carbon energy, and so tackling climate change, or simply go to the companies’ shareholders.
So - is it too late to try an alternative policy? A carbon tax, for example? That’s the big question. A tax may be simpler, more transparent. Perhaps too often it’s dismissed as unworkable, because the public are assumed to be against.

Who wants to offset their flight? Or, for that matter, say they plan to go carbon neutral, joining the likes of Costa Rica, Norway, Google and Yahoo?

Voluntary carbon offsetting involves paying someone to cut their emissions of greenhouse gases, so that you can go ahead and take that flight, car journey or whatever, but not add to mankinds contribution to global warming. Going carbon neutral involves offsetting all your emissions.

Offsetting is a small but growing slice of the global carbon market. Carbon trading is viewed by the European Union and United Nations as a key policy plank in the worlds fight against climate change.

Voluntary offsetting is becoming big news. British media have this month continued their blitz of critical coverage, exposing dodgy practices, and especially examples of project developers earning carbon credits for emissions cuts that were planned anyway.

A group of British parliamentarians weighed into the debate on Monday, relaying some uncomfortable facts. They said that HSBCs emissions rose the year it said it went carbon neutral suggesting that offsetting may not change behaviour. Illustrating the need for standards, it said mangos planted to offset Coldplay rock concerts died from lack of water. And it poured scorn on British Airways service to help customers offset their flights, saying the profile of the service had been non existent and achievements risible. The implication was that BA had no desire to flag up the problem of climate change to its customers.

Does any of this matter?

Yes, according to some of the worlds biggest banks, who are investing billions of dollars in the much bigger, regulated carbon market under the Kyoto Protocol. Banks are buying carbon credits from developing countries to sell to rich countries struggling to meet their Kyoto targets. This is a kind of posh offsetting very transparent, highly regulated and based on mandatory emissions limits.

The banks are worried if voluntary offsetting implodes itll take down the entire $30 billion global carbon market with it.

The British government also thinks the reputation of the voluntary market matters. London accounted for half of global carbon trades under Kyoto last year, worth $5 billion. The UK wants the voluntary market to adopt Kyoto-style standards.

But Mondays report pointed out that offsetting under Kyoto had its own reputation issues. Indeed it does. Some have alleged fraud in India. And the majority of Kyoto offset deals have centred on a handful of projects to destroy greenhouse gas emissions from chemical plants in China, making a tiny elite of brokers rich.

Reputation problems for carbon trading dont stop there. Europes carbon market is perversely handing windfall profits which could top 10 billion euros to electricity generators, the continents biggest polluters.

So voluntary offsetting matters quite a lot if its troubles mirror problems across all carbon trading, and our response to climate change.

Carbon trading is new and we should give it time. Much attention is now focused on 2013, when both Kyoto and the European carbon market are set for a re-vamp. What role carbon trading plays then will depend on whether it can be shown to work.