Environment Forum
Global environmental challenges
What hope for U.N. climate talks in Poland?
This week the U.N. leads a new round of global climate talks, in its 14th meeting since the world signed up to the convention on climate change in 1992.
It’s all about replacing the Kyoto Protocol with a more ambitious climate deal from 2013. Kyoto is widely regarded as toothless, but so could be its successor. (For a story, click here)
After all, fighting climate change isn’t easy – it involves limiting emissions of greenhouse gases which are a by-product of everyday essentials from energy to food, from burning fossil fuels and making fertiliser, for example.
But where does that leave Kyoto – a multilateral process which requires unanimity for every decision?
Oxford University’s energy expert Dieter Helm last week compared the entire emissions-cutting effort of Kyoto from its base year 1990 to 2012 to the increase in emissions from aviation alone over the same period.
At the moment Kyoto excludes the United States, which didn’t ratify the pact, and all developing countries, including China and India. And it gave too much emissions headroom in its target for Russia.
Why is it that the loudest climate change characters are not scientists? Even most “climataologists” are not scientists. Their predictions seem to be at least as often wrong as right and may be less reliable than a soothsayer. Further none of this speculation is believable by me until some very basic questions are well answered. 1. How does anybody know that rising temperatures do not cause higher CO2 instead of the other way around. 2. What starting date is used to determine warming or cooling? 3. Why are the planets warming as much or more than we are? 4. The greatest biodiversity arose during the very warm Cambrian period and mankind arose in a warm Africa. Why are we fighting it? 5. Crop yield and usable farm land would become much greater in a warm earth (read Siberia and Canda. Why are we fighting it? We have pleaty of time to move away from the sea. This is displacement not earth catastophe. Why are we fighting it?
There may be warming and may not. I don’t know and neither does anybody else.
Savant