http://theenergycollective.com/TheEnergyCollective/51430

Pondering Copenfloppen
by Lou Grinzo on 11/11/2009 23:09   3 comments , 116 views
Categories: Politics & Legislation, Climate
Tags: copenhagen, scientific american

The energy/enviro geek news is awash with gloom and doom over the
dimming prospects for anything of substance coming out of next month’s
Copenhagen meeting. If you read this site, then you’ve likely seen far
more reports along those lines than either of us cares to think about.
I know I have.

I’ve tried to stay away from commenting on Copenhagen largely because
I think we didn’t need yet another outsider (me) telling other
outsiders (you) What Will Happen, and I have no more of a clue about
it than any other outsider. But Scientific American has run a piece
talking about What Failure Will Mean, i.e. what happens if Copenhagen
turns out not to be Hopenhagen, as some have started to call it, but
Copenfloppen. And it serves as an excellent example of something I
really think we need to avoid, namely false brinkmanship.

What Would Failure at Copenhagen Mean for Climate Change?:

    This is the consequence of failure at Copenhagen: A marked shift
in scientific effort from solving global warming to adapting to its
consequences, a hodge-podge of uncoordinated local efforts to trim
emissions - none of which deliver the necessary cuts - and an altered
climate.

    Climate experts, scientists and negotiators say that, absent
international agreement, the children and grandchildren of those
living today will negotiate a world where planetary geo-engineering is
a part of daily life, sea-walls defend coastal cities, the world’s
poor are hammered by drought, floods and famine and our planet is
heading toward conditions unseen for the last 100 million years.

    The December talks are, in other words, the last, best chance to
change course before chaos descends.

    “The choice facing the present generation is an awesome one,” said
former Vice President Al Gore during a speech before the Society of
Environmental Journalists last month. “Never before has a single
generation been asked to make such difficult and consequential
decisions that will have implications for all succeeding generations.”

    Failure, Gore added, would be “catastrophic” - not only given the
urgency of changes already underway, but because it challenges the
efficacy of the rule of law as “an instrument of redemption.”

    …

    “Copenhagen is mitigation,” said Guy Brasseur, director of the
Climate Service Center in Hamburg, Germany. “If that fails, we move to
adaptation and geo-engineering.”

First and foremost, can we please stop this insane casting of our
current situation as being balanced on a knife’s edge and requiring us
to take action right this very moment? No one, and I mean not one
bloody person, has to convince me of the seriousness of climate chaos
and peak oil. But there is no way in the world I believe that a
failure to reach a good agreement in Copenhagen necessarily means
we’re suddenly flipping the switch from “mitigation” to “adaptation
and geoengineering”.

Notice that there’s a sloppy bit of writing and reasoning (or
intentional misdirection) going on here. Experts, including Al Gore,
are saying that without an international agreement we’re in Big
Trouble. I agree 100%. But are they saying that such an agreement must
happen next month in Copenhagen? (Clearly Mr. Brasseur thinks so, but
who else is in that camp?) What if it the negotiating breakthrough
happens a few months later in a follow-up meeting? Would that still
doom us to the kind of problems and responses the author describes?
And if the timing is that incredibly precise, then isn’t it also true
that the details of any agreement arising from Copenhagen in 20-
something days are absolutely critical–just a smidge less in CO2
reductions and we’re back in Big Trouble territory?

The bigger issue–and there’s always a bigger issue when talking about
energy and the environment, it seems–is that this kind of
envirobrinkmanship actually hurts “our” side. If we jump up and down
and scream about how we absolutely must, without the possibility of
exception, get this political agreement or that law signed, or find a
way to fund this project or whatever, then I can guarantee that we’ll
quickly get a reputation for being a bunch of Chicken Little who can
be ignored. The real problem is that the perception that we’re “always
screaming about something and always getting it wrong” is itself
wrong; the fact that we can’t explain in minute detail exactly when or
how the sky is falling doesn’t mean that we’re wrong about the basic
assertion that it’s falling.

(For the record, there’s much more to the article than just this one
piece I’m pounding the keyboard and table over, and I recommend you go
read the whole thing.)