Extracts from the Sept-October 2001 edition of Renew
These extracts only represent about 25% of it

14. COP 6.5 wins the day

The reconvened sixth conference of parties to the Kyoto accord (COP-6) met in Bonn in July to see what could be rescued following the USA’s announcement in March that it no longer supported the UN Climate Change agreement.

The mood was sombre. In April, the Director of the US Environmental Protection Agency had claimed that the Kyoto climate treaty was dead, although she did say that ‘what we need to do is frame the discussion in a way that will get us to something that can be ratified, and really supported by everybody’.

She added that ‘the President has indicated his commitment to being engaged with the international community on global climate change. He feels it is a serious issue’ and indicated the US could still be involved in discussions if they were widened and involved a more practical approach to curbing greenhouse gasses.

However most people simple saw this as a way for the USA to avoid its reponsibilities. As a Greenpeace activist demonstrating against the decision outside the US Embassy in Tel Aviv, Israel put it ‘The United States of America can not threaten the environment of the entire world just to pay back Bush’s obligation to industry’.

Adopting a softer approach, a new U.N. environmental report suggested that forestry and some other "sinks", which absorb the CO2 emissions produced by human activity, could perhaps be accepted after all. That idea, pushed by the US, was of course what broke up the initial COP-6 meeting- the EU felt that it simply provided a way for the US to avoid making cuts in emissions. Nevertheless, the head of the U.N.’s panel for climate change, Dutch Environment Minister Jan Pronk, told Reuters that he hoped the paper, a policy compromise, could save the Kyoto treaty.

Another, rather more confrontational, option that had been discussed in EU policy circles was to try to make links with US companies direct, the ones that would benefit form the trading arrangements that would be created by the Kyoto agreement, thus side-stepping the US Government.

That’s a very different approach to the one being touted by some environmental pressure groups - a trade or consumer boycott of all US products. Finally there’s the really long shot option of hoping that Australia may change sides. Currently it backs the US line, but elections are coming, and it seems it could be that the greens might then hold the balance of power.

The temperature was raised when Bush came to Europe. in June. The Oxford Union voted overwhelmingly (274 to 65) to condemn ‘America's Neglect of Climate Change’, and there were anti- Bush demonstrations at every turn. Although, in his ‘Rose Garden’ speech in the USA, just before he left for Europe, he seemed a little more conciliatory on the need to deal with climate change, he continued to insist that this should not be at the expense of the US economy, and the result of the US-EU summit in Sweden in June was an ‘agreement to disagree’ over Kyoto, meaning that the EU would go it alone. Some saw the USA’s posture as actually beneficial - strengthening the resolve to get agreement.

COP 6.5 overlapped the G8 summit in Genoa- which of course was the target for violent demonstrations. Less aggressively, in Bonn, WWF created an ice sculptured globe- Australia evidently melted first- and Friends of the Earth Europe organised the construction of a giant Noahs arc- a Lifeboat for humanity- and the rising tide network put on a lot of events including some in the UK.

See http://www.foeeur ope.org/lifeboat/index.htm

and http://www.risingtide.org.uk

So what emerged from COP 6.5? The USA had hinted that it would turn up to COP 6.5 with a new set of proposals based on the new US climate policy. But in the event this was not to be, and the US sat on the side lines, being subjected to critical comments from China amongst others for its inaction. Japan initially dithered on whether to support the US position on sinks and nuclear power in the CDM - both of which Japan wanted. But in the end, despite strong support for nuclear from Canada, Australia and India, a compromise emerged, after a 48 hour/all night session - allowing some sinks (with Canada and Japan benefiting particularly), but leaving out nuclear.

The sinks concession effectively reduces the commitment to cut emissions by 5.2% on 1990 average figures, as agreed at Kyoto, to about 1.8 %, according to the World Wildlife Fund for Nature. There was also some softening of the compliance & penalty mechanisms. Even so, getting an agreement was still seen as a triumph, and a defeat for the USA, whose delegate was booed when she insisted that the USA was committed to taking remedial measures on climate change.

The USA’s official position remains that ‘the Kyoto protocol is not sound policy’, but everyone else seemed to get what they wanted. Russia got the opportunity to trade in ‘hot air’ carbon credits, which it has in plenty - equivalent in effect to maybe $10bn pa in aid. In addition to being able to set sinks against some of its emissions, Japan could be seen as having rescued a treaty set up initially on its own soil. And the EU happily continues to occupy the high moral ground, as saviours of the planet - a position further strengthened by an EU-led commitment to a $410m technology transfer fund to help developing nations to reduce emissions so they can one day join the treaty.

That contrasted strongly to the USA’s resistance at the G8 Summit to proposals from the G8 Renewable Energy Task Force for providing aid to help up to 1bn people get access to renewables (details in Renew 135). So the USA slinks off stage, while the EU, Russia and Japan, and presumably all the rest, will now move to ratify the treaty in time for the Rio+10 Earth Summit next year, with details to be sorted at COP 7 in Morocco this Nov.

Climate Change

Increase in Greenhouse Gases Seen From Space

New sets of data taken 27 years apart from two satellites orbiting the Earth have now provided the first observational evidence from space of a rise in greenhouse gases. ‘We’ve seen greenhouse gas increases that we can link to a change in outgoing long-wave radiation, which is believed to force the climate response,’ said Dr. Helen Brindley, an atmospheric physicist at Imperial College in London. By comparing the two sets of data, Brindley and her colleagues have shown a change in greenhouse gas emissions from Earth over 27 years which is consistent with ground-based measurements. She told Reuters ‘There has been quite a significant change over the past 30 years, particularly in methane’.

This aerial confirmation is fortunate since it seems some of the geological evidence for climate change is being lost, since glaciers strata are melting- due to climate change.

Meanwhile, the contrarians are still at it. Lindzen and co-workers hypothesized a possible ‘infrared iris’ negative feedback mechanism which might compensate for some greenhouse gas emissions.

See http://ams.allenpress.com/amsonline/?request=get-pdf&file=i1520-0477-082-03-0417.pdf

For another contrarian view, arguing that the surface measurements of global temperature may be flawed, see the article by John L Day on the Green Earth Society’s site: www.greeningearthsociety.org/Articles /2000/surface!.html

But the air as cleared a little by the US National Academy of Sciences, which, when asked by President Bush to elucidate on what he called the‘incomplete state of scientific knowledge of the causes of, and solutions to, global climate change’, agreed that there were still some uncertainties, but backed the conclusions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that greenhouse gas concentrations are increasing and global temperature is rising, adding crucially, that this was mostly ‘a result of human activities’.