countdown to copenhagen
20 Nov 2009
Why Can't We All Just Agree?
As far as climate change is concerned, it remains unclear whether international law will be part of the solution or part of the problem, writes Professor Gerry Simpson
The slow roasting of the planet, in effect, combines two problems: a scientific-environmental problem and a political-legal one. Interestingly, the environmental consequences of man-made greenhouse gas emissions are the subject of both widespread agreement and scientific uncertainty. There is now a consensus (give or take the occasional corporate-funded oddity) that the planet is warming, that burning fossil fuels are a large part of the problem, and that warming will cause us to enter a period in history marked by regular environmental catastrophe.
The Copenhagen negotiations will tell us a great deal about the possible role of international law, based on the will of self-interested sovereigns, in global survival.
In many key areas of international law, from the preservation of biodiversity to disarmament, the legal solutions are severely hampered by the problem of "collective action". In a world in which 185 states are sovereign and free, it is terribly difficult to reach any sort of agreement in the first place. This is particularly so when the costs and benefits of action are so unevenly distributed, where future risks are controversial and where there is little agreement on either the relevance or nature of historical responsibility for warming.
But there is a potentially even deeper problem. When people at dinner parties ask me: is international law really "law", what they are really asking is whether there can be such a thing as law without the possibility of regular enforcement. In fact, international legal norms are singularly effective given this apparent lack of conventional enforceability. As the eminent American human rights lawyer, Louis Henkin, has remarked: most states obey most of international law most of the time. Still, it would be foolish to pretend that, in the absence of a legislature and a police force, international law is a perfect system.
Problems with collective action abound when it comes to creating and enforcing global rules. Disarmament is one example. If all states were to relinquish nuclear weapons, the world would become a safer place. There is then a large incentive for, say, the UK to give up its nuclear capability. However, in a world of uncertainty, sovereignty and secrecy, the British may choose to keep their nuclear weapons because the very worst outcome would be one in which the UK disarmed (under the terms of some international law treaty) and other states did not. And in the absence of guaranteed verification and compliance, there are no guarantees that other states will comply.
Preventing ecological disaster is at least as large a challenge as achieving nuclear disarmament and the global environment can be saved only if we all act collectively.
But there are several obstacles to achieving any sort of solution.
First, in the absence of transparent and enforceable standards there is a serious risk that some states will free-ride. In other words, they will enjoy the long-term environmental benefit of reduced emissions and will continue to reap the economic benefits of pursuing environmentally unfriendly, and still cheaper, economic policies. Unilateral compliance in the absence of uniform compliance might have adverse economic consequences for Australia without changing planetary prospects at all. This has been the Federal Opposition's position for some time.
Second, it is very likely that global warming will have asymmetrical effects on states. Most states will suffer as a result of the planet heating up but some will suffer more than others (just as, say, Victoria may suffer more than Queensland from global warming). The projected average increase in temperatures (2.5 per cent by 2150) is just that: an average. Some regions will boil, others will experience a mild rise in temperatures; indeed, there may well be a small number of states and groups that benefit from the increasing temperatures (wine-growers in Sussex, summer tourism in Norway). Still others may experience a cooling effect (I have heard this said of my own home country Scotland which is cold enough as it is but which may lose the warming effects of the Gulf Stream as it begins to absorb melting ice-caps from the Arctic). The problem here is that some states may not think it in their interests to conclude any sort of agreement at all.
Third, there is the deeply troubling problem of historical responsibility. Should the challenge of global warming be met by those who caused it? Or by those who will experience it? This of course goes to the heart of one of the perceived flaws of the Kyoto Protocol; namely that it failed to impose any obligations on developing world states. That seemed fair at the time. After all, the developing world was not thought to be responsible for global warming, and, of course, it was still developing.
On the other hand, the strategic imperative to reach agreement may work against the moral imperative to allocate blame or responsibility. One way to reach agreement is to buy the cooperation of Russia (this happened at Kyoto) and the United States, say. But this sort of strategic behaviour may also seem remarkably unjust (why should the rich villains be compensated by the poor victims?). We see historical responsibility for past injustices debated elsewhere (in relation to slavery, colonialism and so on). And this problem reminds us too of the current controversies in relation to the Global Financial Crisis where there is a perception that the victims (tax-payers, bank customers) are paying for the egregious mistakes of the villains (the bankers).
Finally, there is the problem of sovereignty. The fact is that states don't have to sign up to anything. It is a basic principle of international law that states are bound to observe and respect only those norms or rules to which they have consented.
It is now no wonder, then, that Daniel Cole describes climate change as "the greatest collective action problem the international community has yet faced". Strategic behaviour, free-riding, differential incentives and the imperfections of international law form a particularly dangerous cocktail. Little wonder that Kyoto was regarded as fatally flawed in execution and design. Will Copenhagen lead to anything better? States are notoriously beholden to rent-seeking private interests or corrupt public ones.
The policy debates in the US at the moment are precisely about the relationship between public goods (universal healthcare, a clean environment) and private interests (private healthcare providers, the car manufacturers). This is unlikely to change.
And yet, perhaps there is some room for optimism. It is worth recalling that so much has been achieved in international law despite the problems of agreement and enforcement. The world has a functioning legal system in which compliance is the rule not the exception. States, on the whole, don't execute enemy POWs, they don't imprison each other's ambassadors and they don't invade each other's territories (at least not much).
Indeed, previous crises have been the catalyst for these sorts of changes. The horrors of World War II precipitated the creation of powerful legal instruments designed to protect civilian populations (The Geneva Conventions), prevent mass atrocity (The Genocide Convention) and criminalise torture (The Torture Convention). These negotiations were difficult and the resulting compacts were often initially disappointing.
But, to give just one example, though the Torture Convention of 1984 was the product of arduous negotiation and struck some observers as disappointing, it has had enormous influence on the way international law operates. Without the convention, it is unlikely that General Pinochet would have been stripped of his sovereign immunity in a London court room. Without the Convention, the present outcry over the maltreatment of detainees in the "war on terror" would have been much more muted.
International law is a law of unintended consequences. Even relatively mild treaty arrangements can be modified, moulded or appropriated in ways that offset some of the problems referred to above. It may be that agreements reached at Copenhagen will offer opportunities to activists to begin legal proceedings in national courts or to use international law in media campaigns to delegitimise certain forms of production or to change consumption habits.
Or it may be that Copenhagen will lead to some sort of framework agreement to be fleshed out in the future or, less likely, Copenhagen may fail and in failing inspire a popular backlash against the apparent recalcitrance of the political elites. Conversely, an international agreement might be one way in which enlightened political elites like the Obama Administration might sell onerous environmental policy to resistant local constituencies.
There are precedents even in the economic field where we might have expected states to most jealously guard their prerogatives. Many states are now part of a global economic legal order in which matters of economic sovereignty are decided by international panels and quasi-judicial bodies. They are prepared to do this because, at the negotiations, it became clear that there were benefits to be gained from a multilateral free trade agreement and that these benefits could only be realised if the problems of sovereignty and free-riding were overridden by robust enforcement methods like the possibility of judicially endorsed retaliatory measures.
The tendencies of states to behave selfishly, then, can be offset by their need to act collectively. And there is a precedent in the environmental area. After all, when was the last time you heard someone speak about the depleted ozone layer? When I was an undergraduate in the 1980s, the major global environmental threat seemed to arise from the destruction of the ozone layer through the emission of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). The Montreal Protocol in 1987, agreed to by hard-headed diplomats and international lawyers, phased out the manufacture and export of CFCs (despite some scientific uncertainty and the opposition of major European manufacturers). The result is an international legal initiative that is expected to yield net economic benefits of some 2 trillion dollars by 2060. Meanwhile, the hole in the ozone layer above Antarctica is projected to close at around the same time.
Perhaps Montreal can be the inspiration for something even bolder and more redemptive at Copenhagen.
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Part of the problem is that companies have the same rights as people but can bypass the responsibilities. A person can be held liable but a company only has limited liability and can set up in tax havens and operate with damaging practices and get away with it. Despite claims that parties like the Democrats and Labor are left wing, they are as beholden to vested interests as are Republicans and Liberals. Boiled down, why can’t we all just agree? $elfishness and greed.
Thank you Gerry for an intelligent, thoughtful and helpful piece refreshingly devoid of the usual ‘stuff’ which generally characterizes articles herein on Australia on mankind’s response to AGW. You hit a chord with me when you stated:
"The tendencies of states to behave selfishly, then, can be offset by their need to act collectively."
and
"Perhaps Montreal can be the inspiration for something even bolder and more redemptive at Copenhagen."
IF I was an AGW ‘catastrophist’ then it would be eminently obvious to me that the appropriately realistic response to (catastrophic) AGW, like the successful international response to CFCs pollution of 1987 would be:
(1) a legal framework in which ALL NATIONS can reasonably be equal partners in; and
(2) like Montreal covers only a very small, cross border (and hence legally amenable) suite of joint actions which all nations can support; BUT DOES NOT
(3) implement a complex hotpotch (wish list) of curbs and rollbacks of all manner and types of intra-national CO2 emissions which is then made all the more complex (and ineffective) by an uncontrollable, and expanding web of cross subsidies, tariffs, political manipulation, patronage, grifting etc.
Face it - we will never legally and effectively control global CO2 emissions on an individual nation/power station/cement kiln basis because each nation and each citizen of the world has such divergent levels of current energy usage and expectations of future energy usage.
Quite apart from the political shenanigans, the utter mess of Labor has made of it’s horrible ETS should provide a signal warning of the ‘climate change madness’ we could all easily descend into (and may well do).
As Robert Gottliebsen has noted, here in Australia what Federal Labor are planning to do is substantially reduce the cash flow of the exiting carbon-using generators so that they will have less money to invest in new low-carbon technology and hope that the money for low carbon generators will come from somewhere else (e.g. hospitals, schools, vital infrastructure). There is a shortage of global capital and, on the global stage, the competition for funding is fierce. That’s why it is really stupid to destroy the existing carbon capital because we need it to fund and hasten the technology change. The best example of this is the current plan of Federal Labor that is likely to send the Latrobe Valley brown coal generators into official management which would then stop a $2 billion gas-fired power plant being built with private capital to replace the worst brown coal generators.
Billions of people are rightly suspicious of the alarmist AGW movement because its message is de facto rolled up with a lot of really nasty implications (or misplaced utopian intentions?) such as the roll back of peoples’ welfare via inflated energy costs, large scale losses of livelihood and employment, blatant discrimination against the poor of the world and (worst of all) a denial of the latters’ birthright to a future free of poverty and disease.
We simply can’t lose sight of the basic reality that, for humans, Energy = Welfare.
Hence we simply need an international legal framework which ONLY:
* encourages large scale cross-national afforestation and re-forestation;
* places at most only a single world-wide tax on emitted fossil carbon positively discouraging each and every other permutation; and
* facilitates and removes unsound legal barriers to joint ‘geoengineering’ initiatives such as broad scale stimulation of oceanic cyanobacteria, artificial manufacture of clouds etc.
This Problem needs nothing less and We need ….nothing more!
The tired old free ride argument again! This is a total furphy ( Australian slang for eroneous for the non Australian readers).
Even if Australia was the only country in the world to take action to prevent climate catastrophe, we would not be putting ourselves at any long term disadvantage because put quite simply if the world takes no action re impending climate catastrophe and world overpopulation then civilisation as we know it will be drastically altered and much of the world including Australia can expect to descend into anarchy as we all fight it out for diminishing food and water. This will totally swamp any perceived short term economic disadvantage of acting alone.
There will be no economy if we do not act know on the twin issues of impending climate catastrophy and present world overpopulation. We are not facing the prospect of losing a few tens of thousands of jobs. There will be no jobs in an anarchic world.
That tired old Chicken Little argument again!
The sky ain’t falling in and the science doesn’t say so.
I agree with GraemeF. Corporations are an "unnatural" entity that have been given too much power in most Western countries. We’re so obsessed with the idea of (governmental) totalitarianism that we are blinded to corporatism.
Thanks for this article. It’s great to read something optimistic about how a worldwide agreement on action may be reached - even if Copenhagen has been billed as our "last chance", perhaps something else may come of it if no effective agreement will be reached next month. However, cutting back CFCs seem to have required 1% of the collective effort required for cutting back carbon emissions.
Why does Gerry spoil his article with a comment like, "(give or take the occasional corporate-funded oddity)"? If he means that there is an "occasional" corporate-funded contra view, then he is probably correct - but why is it an "oddity"? If he means that all contra views are oddities, then he is obvioulsy incorrect. Does he mean that the only "occasional" contra view comes from a "corporate-funded" source, then he also incorrect. Most of those who present public contra-views are not linked to corporates in any way. Why cannot he make his statement without alienating people like me because this will lead us to NEVER agree?
Shocked, Shocked to Find That Fraud is Going on in Here
The Really Big News™ is actually that there is no really big news. Much is being made of the recent hack of the HadleyUniversity of East Anglia’s Climatic Research CenterUnit (the "CRU") whereby over a thousand emails along with documents as well as data and code were lifted and published to an FTP site before being linked to by "The Air Vent" blog and then… the world.
The leak appears to show climate scientists shaping results, strategizing on how best to conceal data and analysis from the public, planning public relations to get their message out irrespective of the most recent data setbacks, debating the best way to influence the "man on the street," discussing means to deal with critics via the press and otherwise, and reacting with barely contained glee to the news of an opponent’s untimely death. While the general consensus is that the most damaging emails appear to reference the now semi-famous "hockey graph" illustration that has been a favorite of the United Nations (and everyone else pushing radical climate change policy) for a decade, I think something much more insidious (and actually quite ordinary) emerges from between the many subject lines. Rank corruption.
http://finemrespice.com/node/71
"Part of the problem is that companies have the same rights as people but can bypass the responsibilities. A person can be held liable but a company only has limited liability and can set up in tax havens and operate with damaging practices and get away with it."
"Corporations are an "unnatural" entity that have been given too much power in most Western countries. We’re so obsessed with the idea of (governmental) totalitarianism that we are blinded to corporatism."
"…(give or take the occasional corporate-funded oddity)."
Gimme a break!
Anti-corporatism is a strong visceral thread running throughout the AGW-alarmist global environmental movement (along with equally strong visceral opposition to GM crops, nuclear power, ‘big business’ etc., etc - the list is long)?
Yet, the reality is that in this day and age we essentially have almost wall-to-wall philosophical concordance with the global environmental movement within the bureaucracies of Western Federal Governments, State governments, local governments and a whole host of NGOs and international organisations such as Greenpeace, WWF etc., etc.
Surely people know that prominent movement apparatchiki such as Clive Hamilton enjoy the patronages of e.g. Pew Charitable Trusts - an extremely well funded green organisation which has tentacles all through the First World?
In fact, the global environmental movement is itself already heavily and widely corporatized, and this is very much the case within Australia.
So what we have above are relatively facile, juvenile and actually quite boring examples of the pot(s) calling the kettle(s) black.
This is the context in which the front line soldiers of the AGW-alarmist global environmental movement i.e. the numerous overlapping little cabals of scientists who will control the limits of journal editorial staffing, peer review etc have substantial license to exert the sort of power which the recent hacking of The Hadly Centre server has revealed.
Simply the quintessence of the exertion of corporate power.
Except that this particular corporation hasn’t yet learned how to get it’s IT and record keeping well under control……
http://www.neuralnetwriter.cylo42.com/node/2421
ecoeng:
EXACTLY. Corporatism (not to be confused with capitalism) is such an essential part of our eco-political systems that the ONLY way to make any change is to play that very game.
Correct! These wallies who rabbit on endlessly about the evils of corporations, big business, capitalism, etc., never ever bothered to read e.g. Orwell’s ‘Homage to Catalonia’. Even the Anarchists were smart enough to enunciate and develop Syndicalism.
Those that can’t whinge, those that can get organised. Anyone who has started, organised or been integrally involved in good businesses knows (or soon learns) the critical skills. Who really gives a damn about ‘eco-political systems’?
Corporatism (= cooperative tribalism) is simply the best fit to human nature, and inevitably the most productive. The early NASA is a good example. One day, with a bit of luck, such tribal groupings of skilled people will e.g. be terraforming Mars, mining Titan etc. Don’t you just know in yer bones they won’t be doing so off the back of a soft options, post-modernist style education!
Best fit for human nature? Says who?????
A confusion between should and "can"/"no other choice" leads utilitarians constantly harping on about efficiency, productiveness, and management. Meanwhile, "softies" (sorry, post-modernism is SO yesterday and mine are actually all vocational) actually have a view of human life that goes beyond the myopic ant-nest visions of the utilitarians who will forever equate achievement with production, progress with ever increasing consumption. yawn…
It’s not a question of being smart enough. It’s about creating an ethical society and understanding what democracy really means. i.e. It’s about SHOULD versus CAN.
Cutting through the garbage terms: The point is that corporatism is OUT OF CONTROL. OUT OF CONTROL in the sense that democracy and co-ordination in the original sense are no long possible. e.g. Who owns Obama and Congress? Goldman Sachs and the big boys, that’s who.
Correction then: not so much no other choice - the only other choice is really the citizen to do their job - rallying the government and holding it to account.
Oooooohhhhhh, didn’t that ever draw out the hangups!
So ‘yesterday, so post-modernist, so Gen-X?’
Scream it out. ‘SHOULD versus CAN’!
‘OUT OF CONTROL I tell you, OUT - OF - CONTROL!’
Its all the faulty of those Goldman Sachs, those (Jewish) ‘big boys’, that ‘s who.
Meantime, lets just quickly gloss over the fact the our very own, totally and utterly voted for, Yes we Can! St. Barack just , oh shit…..bailed them out.
Gotta, gotta, uhhhhhh ‘rally the government’, ‘gotta, uhhhh…. hold it to account’
Damn, just wet myself. Can’t stop laughing…..
could newmatilda ban ecoeng - he’s boring and offensive and in my view has nothing of value to offer on any topic that I’ve seen him address. It’s tedious to have to trawl past his rubbish, all of which has been covered and debunked elsewhere.
Very many people need a real lot of Moral Authority and Certainty in their lives. They need to actually know that e.g. God exists or that the Sky is Definitely Falling In. It is a substitute for the inadequacy of their own critical facilities. It is a comfort.
Therefore they need to believe implicitly in authority figures e.g. a church or an Al Gore, so that they can then assert that everything else is rubbish, it has all been covered and debunked elsewhere. Naturally, people who challenge that comforting sense of Certainty are resented bitterly.
But unfortunately for them, there is often far too little of the drug of Certainty they perpetually crave. Even those sometimes only vaguely sensed (;-) Authority Figures are far less certain themselves!
From: Kevin Trenberth
To: Michael Mann
Subject: Re: BBC U-turn on climate
Date: Wed, 14 Oct 2009 08:36:36 -0600
Cc: Tom Wigley , Stephen H Schneider , Myles Allen , peter stott , "Philip D. Jones" , Benjamin Santer , Thomas R Karl , Gavin Schmidt , James Hansen , Michael Oppenheimer
Mike
Here are some of the issues as I see them:
Saying it is natural variability is not an explanation. What are the physical processes? Where did the heat go? We know there is a build up of ocean heat prior to El Nino, and a discharge (and sfc T warming) during late stages of El Nino, but is the observing system sufficient to track it? Quite aside from the changes in the ocean, we know there are major changes in the storm tracks and teleconnections with ENSO, and there is a LOT more rain on land during La Nina (more drought in El Nino), so how does the albedo change overall (changes in cloud)? At the very least the extra rain on land means a lot more heat goes into evaporation rather than raising temperatures, and so that keeps land temps down: and should generate cloud. But the resulting evaporative cooling means the heat goes into atmosphere and should be radiated to space: so we should be able to track it with CERES
data. The CERES data are unfortunately wonting and so too are the cloud data. The ocean data are also lacking although some of that may be related to the ocean current changes and burying heat at depth where it is not picked up. If it is sequestered at depth then it comes back to haunt us later and so we should know about it.
Kevin
Michael Mann wrote:
Kevin, that’s an interesting point. As the plot from Gavin I sent shows, we can easily account for the observed surface cooling in terms of the natural variability seen in the CMIP3 ensemble (i.e. the observed cold dip falls well within it). So in that sense, we can "explain" it. But this raises the interesting question, is there something going on here w/ the energy & radiation budget which is inconsistent with the modes of internal variability that leads to similar temporary cooling periods within the models.
I’m not sure that this has been addressed—has it?
m
Its a tough old Universe…..for some.
I certainly don’t resent you ecoeng - if anything I find your posts a bit sad. Paragraph after paragraph trying to capture people’s attention with new revelations that the dupes of the world are too simple to see. Dazzling insights into climate science that thousands of climate scientists missed - brilliant though they are, but not brilliant enough to compete with you. Or worse, information the climate scientists concealed in a global conspiracy that is now revealed for all to see. If only the simple folk understood, but they’re not bright enough. They can’t understand. All they deserve is contempt.
So not that threatening, more a bit sad, and mostly just tedious.
Corporations have no morals, only the imperative to make money and be damned the consequences even if that means supporting rape and slavery.
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-har…
Re the violent gang rape of an employee of Halliburton/KBR.
"The Democratic Senator Al Franken, when he heard about this, was horrified, and tabled a simple amendment to the law. It demanded that no company that prevents rape victims from having their day in court should receive taxpayers’ money any more. Rape is rape. A majority of Republicans in the Senate – including John McCain – voted against the amendment. Why? The private contractors are major donors to the Republican Party, but the Senators claim this didn’t affect their judgement. No – they said that Franken’s proposal was a "vendetta" against Halliburton/KBR with "political motives".
‘Political motives’ sound much like an echo of the words of ecoeng. Or what about slavery?
"At the same time, a group of Democratic senators have tried to amend the latest customs bill to ensure that nothing produced by slaves should be sold in the United States. It sounds uncontroversial – as uncontroversial as punishing rapists, in fact. Yet corporate lobbyists are militating behind the scenes to oppose it. As the private subscription-only newsletter "Inside US Trade" reported: "Business groups are worried by the potential effects", and a source tells them there will be, "a push from lobbyists closer to the Finance Committee mark-up of the bill… US industry groups and foreign governments [ie those that use slave labour] could form ad hoc coalitions to help send a united message." They will fight for their right to use slave labour."
The wonders of corporations as described by other posts above could equally apply to criminal gangs cooperating to enrich themselves. The same corporate mentality is opposed to taking any action against AGW unless they can’t tap into more filthy lucre yet exactly that charge of greed and irresponsibility is directed at the majority of climate scientists instead.
Hi nanks. This is what George Monbiot said in today’s Guardian about the University of East Anglia hacked emails that econeng refers to, and, along with ecoeng’s other comments, you find "a bit sad, and mostly just tedious".
Here’s Monbiot:
"It’s no use pretending that this isn’t a major blow. The emails extracted by a hacker from the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia could scarcely be more damaging. I am now convinced that they are genuine, and I’m dismayed and deeply shaken by them.
Yes, the messages were obtained illegally. Yes, all of us say things in emails that would be excruciating if made public. Yes, some of the comments have been taken out of context. But there are some messages that require no spin to make them look bad. There appears to be evidence here of attempts to prevent scientific data from being released, and even to destroy material that was subject to a freedom of information request.
Worse still, some of the emails suggest efforts to prevent the publication of work by climate sceptics, or to keep it out of a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I believe that the head of the unit, Phil Jones, should now resign. Some of the data discussed in the emails should be re-analysed…" he goes on to say "I apologise. I was too trusting of some of those who provided the evidence I championed. I would have been a better journalist if I had investigated their claims more closely."
And doesn’t this highlight the ridiculous statement by Gerry Simpson, "There is now a consensus (give or take the occasional corporate-funded oddity) that the planet is warming."
If you read the emails it’s obvious most of the corporate and government funding is fraudulently being steered to the climate change rent seekers.
"but which may lose the warming effects of the Gulf Stream as it begins to absorb melting ice-caps from the Arctic). "
The Inconvenience Truth is that if the Gulf Stream is inundated with fresh water, it will cease to function bringing a New Ice Age to the Northern Hemisphere and many millions of refugees.
A problem that has escaped the attention of the mainstream media because it is too catastrophic to handle.
Nice work IBerlin. Typical denialist action to take something out of context. Why didn’t you finish Monbiots quote?
"But do these revelations justify the sceptics’ claims that this is "the final nail in the coffin" of global warming theory? Not at all. They damage the credibility of three or four scientists."
It didn’t suit your agenda to put in the whole story.
Hi GraemeF, sorry for not responding sooner. Just waiting for today’s Guardian piece from George Monbiot. Here we go:
" I have seldom felt so alone. Confronted with crisis, most of the environmentalists I know have gone into denial. The emails hacked from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, they say, are a storm in a tea cup, no big deal, exaggerated out of all recognition. It is true that climate change deniers have made wild claims which the material can’t possibly support (the end of global warming, the death of climate science). But it is also true that the emails are very damaging.
The response of the greens and most of the scientists I know is profoundly ironic, as we spend so much of our time confronting other people’s denial. Pretending that this isn’t a real crisis isn’t going to make it go away.
I feel desperately sorry for him ( the deceitful Professor Phil Jones): he must be walking through hell. But there is no helping it; he has to go, and the longer he leaves it, the worse it will get. He has a few days left in which to make an honourable exit."
Dear Gerry,
Thanks for your article! Very helpful!
And I have one question. In your view, do regional BINDING legal initiatives via governance bodies like the EU system, constitute the best model, if not ultimate solution to controlling greenhouse gas emissions on a global level? NB. I do understand from your article, this aspiration may prove practically impossible in the short-term (if not long-term as well). Further, do you think Elinor Ostrom’s key research conclusions about commons management are relevant in this context?
Cheers,
Mary O.