climate change
7 Dec 2009
The Global Copenhagen Editorial
On Monday more than 50 newspapers across the world published a common editorial calling for global action on climate change — but you won't read it in Australia
The following editorial was published on Monday by 56 newspapers around the world
in 20 languages including Chinese, Arabic and Russian. Most of the newspapers featured it on their front page. But you won’t read it in Australia. According to a report in the Guardian, "The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald,
pulled out [of the joint initiative] at a late stage after the election of climate change sceptic
Tony Abbott as leader of the opposition Liberal party recast the
country’s debate on green issues."
Today 56 newspapers in 45 countries take the unprecedented step of speaking with one voice through a common editorial. We do so because humanity faces a profound emergency.
Unless we combine to take decisive action, climate change will ravage our planet, and with it our prosperity and security. The dangers have been becoming apparent for a generation. Now the facts have started to speak: 11 of the past 14 years have been the warmest on record, the Arctic ice-cap is melting and last year’s inflamed oil and food prices provide a foretaste of future havoc. In scientific journals the question is no longer whether humans are to blame, but how little time we have got left to limit the damage. Yet so far the world’s response has been feeble and half-hearted.
Climate change has been caused over centuries, has consequences that will endure for all time and our prospects of taming it will be determined in the next 14 days. We call on the representatives of the 192 countries gathered in Copenhagen not to hesitate, not to fall into dispute, not to blame each other but to seize opportunity from the greatest modern failure of politics. This should not be a fight between the rich world and the poor world, or between east and west. Climate change affects everyone, and must be solved by everyone.
The science is complex but the facts are clear. The world needs to take steps to limit temperature rises to 2 degrees Celsius, an aim that will require global emissions to peak and begin falling within the next five to 10 years. A bigger rise of 3–4 degrees — the smallest increase we can prudently expect to follow inaction — would parch continents, turning farmland into desert. Half of all species could become extinct, untold millions of people would be displaced, whole nations drowned by the sea. The controversy over emails by British researchers that suggest they tried to suppress inconvenient data has muddied the waters but failed to dent the mass of evidence on which these predictions are based.
Few believe that Copenhagen can any longer produce a fully polished treaty; real progress towards one could only begin with the arrival of President Obama in the White House and the reversal of years of US obstructionism. Even now the world finds itself at the mercy of American domestic politics, for the president cannot fully commit to the action required until the US Congress has done so.
But the politicians in Copenhagen can and must agree the essential elements of a fair and effective deal and, crucially, a firm timetable for turning it into a treaty. Next June’s UN climate meeting in Bonn should be their deadline. As one negotiator put it: "We can go into extra time but we can’t afford a replay."
At the deal’s heart must be a settlement between the rich world and the developing world covering how the burden of fighting climate change will be divided — and how we will share a newly precious resource: the trillion or so tonnes of carbon that we can emit before the mercury rises to dangerous levels.
Rich nations like to point to the arithmetic truth that there can be no solution until developing giants such as China take more radical steps than they have so far. But the rich world is responsible for most of the accumulated carbon in the atmosphere — three-quarters of all carbon dioxide emitted since 1850. It must now take a lead, and every developed country must commit to deep cuts which will reduce their emissions within a decade to very substantially less than their 1990 level.
Developing countries can point out they did not cause the bulk of the problem, and also that the poorest regions of the world will be hardest hit. But they will increasingly contribute to warming, and must thus pledge meaningful and quantifiable action of their own. Though both fell short of what some had hoped for, the recent commitments to emissions targets by the world’s biggest polluters, the United States and China, were important steps in the right direction.
Social justice demands that the industrialised world digs deep into its pockets and pledges cash to help poorer countries adapt to climate change, and clean technologies to enable them to grow economically without growing their emissions. The architecture of a future treaty must also be pinned down — with rigorous multilateral monitoring, fair rewards for protecting forests, and the credible assessment of "exported emissions" so that the burden can eventually be more equitably shared between those who produce polluting products and those who consume them. And fairness requires that the burden placed on individual developed countries should take into account their ability to bear it; for instance newer EU members, often much poorer than "old Europe", must not suffer more than their richer partners.
The transformation will be costly, but many times less than the bill for bailing out global finance — and far less costly than the consequences of doing nothing.
Many of us, particularly in the developed world, will have to change our lifestyles. The era of flights that cost less than the taxi ride to the airport is drawing to a close. We will have to shop, eat and travel more intelligently. We will have to pay more for our energy, and use less of it.
But the shift to a low-carbon society holds out the prospect of more opportunity than sacrifice. Already some countries have recognised that embracing the transformation can bring growth, jobs and better quality lives. The flow of capital tells its own story: last year for the first time more was invested in renewable forms of energy than producing electricity from fossil fuels.
Kicking our carbon habit within a few short decades will require a feat of engineering and innovation to match anything in our history. But whereas putting a man on the moon or splitting the atom were born of conflict and competition, the coming carbon race must be driven by a collaborative effort to achieve collective salvation.
Overcoming climate change will take a triumph of optimism over pessimism, of vision over short-sightedness, of what Abraham Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature".
It is in that spirit that 56 newspapers from around the world have united behind this editorial. If we, with such different national and political perspectives, can agree on what must be done then surely our leaders can too.
The politicians in Copenhagen have the power to shape history’s judgment on this generation: one that saw a challenge and rose to it, or one so stupid that we saw calamity coming but did nothing to avert it. We implore them to make the right choice.
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Don’t worry. Tony Abbott has a cunning climate plan.
Kevin Rennie
http://laborview.blogspot.com/
I’ve noticed SMH pandering more to the denialists. I don’t know who is pulling their strings on this. Maybe a big advertiser has asked for more ‘balance’. If a fraction of the time was spent on analysing the denialist ‘science’ as is spent giving them public media time to contradict themselves, then their ‘science’ would be shown to be fatally flawed. Ian Plimers book has been shown to be riddled with dodgy statistics and draws conclusions from other scientific papers that have nothing to do with details in those papers, yet he is treated as a viable part of the ‘balance’ in the debate. There is a fair smattering of denialists who subscribe to Intelligent Design. There are denialists who continue to fight for big tobacco companies. Too much weight is given to their criticism of current scientific consensus and too little given to their own crazy theories. The same delusions and misrepresentations of data resurface unchanged in the media despite being proven wrong time and time again. This is not balance, this is pandering to vested interests and is anti-science.
Response from the Age explaining why they didn’t publish:
http://www.theage.com.au/environment/history-is-made-papers-single-call-…
According to “The Age”: “The Age was invited to take part in the global editorial but declined. Editor-in-chief Paul Ramadge said yesterday: ”We applaud The Guardian’s global initiative. At The Age we decided it was important to put our own views - to be consistent and partly because of the nuances of the debate in Australia.””
What a cop-out. What a national disgrace that Australian Fairfax media rejected this international cooperative endeavour at a time when decent people around the world are indeed looking for precisely that - international cooperative endeavour to tackle climate change.
And of course there was no way the disgusting, irresponsible, unethical, climate sceptic Murdoch Empire that controls 70% of Murdochracy Australia capital city dailies would come to the party.
What are the “nuances of the debate in Australia”?
Here, for starters, are just SOME of the KEY facts behind these “nuances” that you will NOT get to read in the Yellow Press of racist White Australia.
1. “Annual per capita greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution” in units of “tonnes CO2-equivalent per person per year” (2005-2008 data) is 0.9 (Bangladesh), 0.9 (Pakistan), 2.2 (India), 3.2 (the Developing World), 5.5 (China), 6.7 (the World), 11 (Europe), 16 (the Developed World), 27 (the US) and 30 (Australia; or 54 if Australia’s huge Exported CO2 pollution is included i.e. climate criminal Apartheid Australia’s is 60 times worse than that of global warming-threatened Bangladesh.
2. The Rudd Labor-Turnbull Liberal Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) known as the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS) will actually INCREASE Australia’s domestic and exported GHG pollution to 173% of 2000 levels by 2050 (as estimated from linear extrapolation of US Energy Information Administration data: see: http://www.eia.doe.gov/ ) - however, by permanently excluding agriculture from a GHG cap, it also commits Australia to over 50% of its current huge domestic GHG pollution FOREVER (World Bank analysts having recently determined that livestock contribute over 51% of annual man-made GHG pollution; see “Livestock and climate change”: http://www.worldwatch.org/node/6294 ).
3. Informed by “all men are created equal and have an unalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”, Climate Justice demands that “annual per capita GHG emissions” should be the same for “all men”. Australia’s White Paper demand it is taking to Copenhagen that it will only agree to “annual per capita GHG emissions” of 17.2 (Domestic ) and 44.8 (Domestic plus Exported) tonnes CO2-e per person per year in 2020 provided the Developed World achieves 8.9 and the Developing World 3.0 is clearly Climate Injustice (for details and documentation see “Climate Justice & Climate Injustice: Australia wants a 2020 per capita GHG pollution 15 times greater than Developing World’s”: http://sites.google.com/site/yarravalleyclimateactiongroup/climate-justi… ).
4. It is estimated from extrapolation from expert Canadian studies that coal burning pollutants kill 5,000 Australians each year, this yielding a minimum carbon price of about $300 per tonne just for this alone - as compared to the $10 per tonne by the counterproductive, fraudulent, worse-than-ineffective, pro-coal Rudd-Turnbull ETS.
5. Dr James Lovelock FRS (the Gaia hypothesis) and now also Professor Kevin Anderson (head, prestigious Tyndall Centre, University of Manchester) predict that only about 0.5-1.0 billion humans will survive the worsening climate genocide this century due to unaddressed,man-made climate change - this climate genocide involving the avoidable deaths of 6 billion under-5 year old infants, 3 billion Muslims, 2 billion Indians, 0.5 billion Bengalis, 0.5 billion Pakistanis and 0.5 billion Bangladeshis.
But in look-the-other-way, politically correct racist (PC racist) Apartheid Australia nobody wants to know except for the Greens. Having ridden on the sheep’s back for several centuries in more ways than one, Aussies get to prove the adage “you are what you eat”.
“Peace is the only way but Silence kills and Silence is complicity.
The SMH decided to run its own editorial:
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/editorial/the-challenge-of-copenhagen-2009…
Perhaps the newspapers who chose not to follow the Green Diktat couldn’t muster the required sheep-like devotion to the party line. Perhaps they felt their independence would be compromised. Maybe they were concerned about the general decline in objective reporting. Or perhaps they were asserting their independence and refusing to give in to the emotional blackmail of being considered “denialists”. Who knows?
Cubby, are they looking for more readers like IBerlin?
One is never surprised by the craven cowardice of Fairfax, where The Age’s business section has been a sewer of denialism for some time, and the SMH publishes hysterical bilge from the likes of Devine and Sheehan constantly. The one discernible positive from runaway climate change and the disappearance of Homo destructans is the knowledge that their species of malignancy will disappear from the Universe.
News Ltd is, in my opinion, even more wicked, its papers entirely turned over to the denialists in the habitual manner of FoxNews (Fair and Balanced) ie 100% bigotry towards Murdoch’s current position. This absolute bias to one side, the feature of News on most topics (what the Rightwing bufocrats call ‘a free media’)is hailed by the denialist detritus as ‘balanced coverage’. The Australian, which insults decency, but is probably correct, in calling itself ‘The Heart of the Nation’, (I can think of another organ, one of excretion, the fundamental(ist) orifice that is more apt)adds monumental hypocrisy to injury by spruiking its greenhouse reduction credentials ceaselessly.
The media in this country are a universally Rightwing propaganda apparatus. The owners of this country have plainly decided that current fossil fuel profits are more important than the future of humanity and the welfare of others. This is standard Rightwing psychopathy. Absolute indifference to the fate of others, total absence of human empathy, gigantic egotism and hence greed, and lack of any scruples in getting their way. Abbott will soon be our PM, after Rudd panics and back-tracks. Climate change will grind on, remorselessly, and the denialist rabble, too stupid and ignorant to understand how stupid and ignorant they are, will grow more hysterical and dangerously belligerent as the facts become undeniable. Personally I am convinced that it is almost certainly too late, and that some such calamity was certain ever since the worst of our species, with their ethos of greed and aggression, came to dominate our existence.
Would this be the same global press that has consistently ignored the solid scientific and ample circumstantial evidence that the events on 9/11 were other than the official story?
It would be the same press that knew for certain that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
This initiative presumably is designed to offset the global News Corp “diktat”.
By the way I’ve noticed the so called forensic powers of deconstruction by the denialist camp always beg a pass when it comes to high risk carbon capture sequestration. Funny how they manage to suspend the ancient and reliable principle - follow the money - when it comes to the efficacy of CCS.
James Hansen was just on ABC Lateline and he notes Canada has just agreed to build a pipeline (or maybe has) to the USA for oil from tar sands. Meanwhile the choir is meeting in Copenhagen. Still we humans had a good run of the place this last 10,000 years, we really can’t complain when it goes to crap.
We are after all no better than voles and their boom and bust population cycle.
Tom McLoughlin I doubt that any voles ever displayed the drive to destruction, the personal viciousness and the acute and chronic psychological and spiritual malignancy that cnaracterises what we euphemistically call ‘the Right’, but, in my opinion, ought better to be known as the psychotics. The real story behind the theft of the CRU e-mails is not the contrived, hysterical and viciously mendacious campaign of hatred and lies that the Rightwing psychotics have mounted, but the long campaign of harassment and intimidation against climate scientists of which this sordid episode is but the iceberg’s tip. Climate scientists have been vilified, lied about, threatened, harassed by nasty e-mails and other communications, had their work disrupted by incessant demands for information that is freely available, and, in the moronic inferno of the Rightwing blogosphere, we are beginning to see calls for their lynching. The anthropogenic climate change denial industry knew that stoking the innate paranoia and viciousness of the average Rightwinger would bring rich rewards in hysterical solidarity with the denialist jihad, but surely even they, creatures without any discernible scruple or value other than greed and egotism, must see that they have unleashed truly daemonic forces.
My guess is this the last common editorial the world is likely to get out of Copenhagen. We’re all sitting in the same room and reporting on the same events, but the hacks of Copenhagen will be reporting to their editors with very different perspectives. The big divisions between various countries and regions emerged quickly on Day 1, after a relentlessly positive opening ceremony.
Stupidity got us into this mess … why can’t it get us out?
Hear hear, Mulga! Love your word-craft! Succinct and to the point!
And very pointed it is! Have to agree with you 100%, again!
I listened to ABC Radio this morning with an increasing sense of disorientation and unreality.
Abbott (the Mad Monk, a seeming very apt description) looks like putting back into his Shadow Ministry one Dead Man Walking in one of our previous and possibly most malignant Ministers for Immigration. Soon, calls will be made for P. Ruddock, another Death’s Head and ex Immigration Minister to join him. How about one JW Howard for a call-up to return to the Mad Monk’s side?
Bronwyn? Are we looking at a new Howard Ministry in the offing?
Seems all one has to do to get on this team is to ridicule Global Warming and it’s (very much perceived to me) effects and to be a Far-Right-Wing Warrior, of very questionable intelligence and integrity.
Even if the Copenhagen meet comes out with aims which may stop, reduce, control Global Warming, I see no way that Krudd and his mob could ever get anything past this mob of yokels. Not that Krudd/W(r)ong looks like even trying for REAL carbon reductions, they are totally controlled by the Coal/Mining/Vested Interest groups, and their Dog’s ‘Vomited-up’ Breakfast of a CPRS is, and never was, intended to actually do anything for our Planet, just transfer lots and lots of OUR Public Moneys to the Polluters and the Mad Markets.
I read that Barack Obama and his mob have come up with the brilliant idea of by-passing Congress to some extent (he has about as much chance of getting anything past his Congress as Krudd has of doing so in Australia -zero!) and making some carbon pollution reductions through their already enacted Clean Air Act. Just hope that it works! The ‘deniers’ will be working flat out to destroy this avenue, of course, if they can.
Krudd here in Aussie has not even contemplated doing anything about Sustainable Energy, Clean Air etc. His mates in the Coal Mining/Coal Burning Industries and their captive State Governments would stop it immediately, as threatening their Profits.
Then again, is he ever in Australia long enough to do anything at all? Our Man Krudd, a denier of Global Warming at heart, is more interested in making a name for himself in International Forums more associated with Trade and Making Money for his rich mates, and possibly cementing a place for himself in a very lucrative job in the future (What future???).
His Failure Rate, and that of his Ministers, in all aspects, is daunting and increasing. What with NSW Labor doing the Liberal Party act, maybe the next election, whenever it is, and whatever it’s aspect, could be very interesting. In a Chinese Curse sort of way.
But saving the Planet! I doubt that this really occupies the Krudd mind to any real extent. He and Therese will undoubtedly enjoy Copenhagen, but I doubt very much that we will enjoy his chimera results.
Depressingly unsurprised, I am.
However, due to the joys of Internet and NM, I have indeed read this in Australia.
And I didn’t inflate the advertising revenue of obsolete media moguls to do it.
One perfect day, people will wake up and realise that greed is not a suitable motivator for those charged with disseminating the truth.
And neither is pandering to what people want to hear a substitute for truth - except that (as any politician will tell you) it seems to work just fine.
How disapointing that our major “news” sources did not publish this. Probably too enthralled with some celebrities bust.
Humans devised the means to let the Fossil Fuel Genie out of its crustal store. The Genie provided most of the massive power to build, operate and maintain the systems of civilization during their limited life. The output from the Genie has been like the eruption of a Krakatoa every day. It has had the unintended consequences of the emission of vast amounts of polluting waste materials. These wastes have had a number of deleterious effects, including initiating irreversible climate change. Society cannot call upon any measure to put the Genie back in its bottle. The best they can possibly do is to slow down the rate of emissions, so reducing the severity of climate change. Let us hope that wisdom struggles free from the hype surrounding the word feast in Copenhagen.
Delegates at Coppenhagen had a choice as to travel in chaufer driven luxury cars or via free buses and trains excelusivly for delagates.
Guess what they chose!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mp18LlWWSBw
With this gross hypocrisy, along with the lies and deceit as exposed in the climate gate scandal, it has turned into nothing more than a clumsy debacle.
“The politicians in Copenhagen have the power to shape history’s judgment on this generation: one that saw a challenge and rose to it, or one so stupid that we saw calamity coming but did nothing to avert it. We implore them to make the right choice”
It is not a matter of CHOICE but setting the “correct targets”
Unfortunately we do not have consensus on these!
As you point out greenhouse gase consentratations have been building for centuries.
To reduce these cocentrations our “scientists” will have to work overtime rather than lazily “scaremongering”.
As to the proper action, only a world-wide demand by the citizenry by taking to the streets will stir the politicians.
Alex Njoo
The AGE seems to think that local (domestic) news are more relevant than participating in the global editorial campaign. The AGE does not explain that Australia is not part of this planet. Too bad.
Pun and games Fairfax when the deluge hits:
We couldn’t see the seas for the Woods.
Did you see that they found a whole lot of secret parchment documents in a cave near Florence that revealed that scientists around the time of Galileo conspired to hide the counter arguments and denials from a small group of well educated priests and alchemists that the earth was round? It throws the whole issue into question!
SMH and Age have of course presented their views in a strongly worded - er - vacuum? Have they decided which side of the fence they are on? Doesn’t sound like it. They wouldn’t dare to state they support the deniers - which shows how weak the argument is that climate change is not caused by humans.
Unfortunately, Australia is caught ‘between a rock and a hard place’, because not only do we have the highest per capita CO2 emissions rate, but our economy relies heavily on coal exports.
So the strategy of vested interests (in coal) must be to keep denying climate change for as long as possible, while feverishly working out how to cash in on the renewable energy sector; as well as desperately trying to solve the carbon sequestration problem, in order to prolong the life of the coal-fired power industry.
Climate change denialists are just playing for time, ‘turning a blind eye’ to the mounting evidence for life-threatening climate change shown daily on our screens, because of financial concerns.
They risk being as Tony Abbott himself said ” either geniuses, or political roadkill”.
I predict the latter!
And if anthroprogenic activities (with an anthroprocentric attitude) have got us into this mess then, then anthropogenic activities can get us out of it; or lack of them, in aiming for a zero population growth, to limit the combined global carbon footprint.
Copenhagen, where we will all be butchered by a new tax for globalists
to further world government.
Billions will flood into the IMF coffers so that it can be ‘loaned’ to 3rd world
nations already drowning in debt. Once we sign this treaty it will give unelected officials the power to centrally plan the economy like the USSR.
When are the alarmists going to admit the Medieval warm period?
When are cluless protesters going to check the facts instead of falling
hook line and sinker for propoganda?
When will the media talk about climate gate emails and how ALL alarmist
science is contaminated by fraud?
When will people wake up that Al Gore has made hundreds of millions from
the build up to the new carbon tax?
When are the denialists going to admit that warming is far exceeding the rate that the dinosaurs saw?
When are denialists going to check the facts instead of falling
hook line and sinker for propoganda?
When will the media talk about the fossil fuel lobbies and how ALL fossil fuel industry fundedscience is contaminated by fraud?
When will people wake up that Al Gore was us vice president and did sweet fa on climate change?