The Age of Global Warming: A History

by Rupert Darwall

  More likely, Sarkozy’s explanation had it the wrong way round. Given the opprobrium heaped on those viewed as being on the wrong side of the argument about global warming, the UN negotiating forum was ideal for China and India. Fundamental disagreements could be masked as procedural objections and proxies could make arguments on their behalf. If the world’s major economies were genuinely agreed on a way forward, it is hard to believe that the rest of the world would not have followed, as happened with ozone-depleting substances and the Montreal Protocol. The fundamental reality at Copenhagen was the failure of the West to get its way.

  Some found it hard to come to terms with. Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband decided to pick a quarrel with the world’s second largest economy. Writing in the Guardian on the Monday after the conference, Miliband accused China of vetoing quantified caps. ‘We will make clear to those countries holding out against a binding treaty that we will not allow them to block global progress,’ Miliband threatened. The process had been hijacked, presenting a ‘farcical picture’.[19] There needed to be major reform in the way climate change negotiations were conducted.

  ‘Such an attack was made in order to shirk the obligations of developed countries to their developing counterparts and foment discord among developing countries,’ a spokeswoman for China’s foreign ministry said.[20] The next day, Brown took up the cudgels. ‘Never again should we face the deadlock that threatened to pull down those talks,’ Brown thundered in sub-Palmerstonian vein. ‘Never again should we let a global deal to move towards a greener future be held to ransom by only a handful of countries.’[21] How was Britain going to take on China? Send a gunboat up the Yangtze? Brown didn’t say.

  Meanwhile in Beijing, French premier François Fillon arrived with a delegation of ministers and business leaders. ‘Even though it is our first meeting in person, I feel like we are friends,’ Wen told Fillon. ‘Our two countries’ partnership is unmatched,’ Fillon replied. The two signed agreements on aviation and nuclear cooperation.[22] A source said the French would leave China with €6.3 billion of signed contracts.[23]

  Nonetheless, China remained sensitive about its role at Copenhagen. The same day, Wen declared that China had played an ‘important constructive’ part at the climate conference.[24] Maintaining China’s climate alliance with India was vital. At a meeting with Manmohan Singh, the Chinese premier gave an assurance that China ‘would like to pursue relations with India on the basis of equality’, according to India’s foreign minister Nirupama Rao.[25] Global warming had brought together these two longstanding Asian rivals into an alliance to protect their common interests against the West.

  ‘It is easy to discern China’s fingerprints all over the international climate change fiasco,’ wrote John Tkacik, a former chief China analyst at the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research.[26] If his intelligence briefers had been reading the Chinese press, Obama would have seen it coming. In a September article in Beijing’s Science Times, Ding Zhongli, China’s top paleo-climatologist and VP of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, had written that ‘the idea that there is significant correlation between temperature increases and concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide lacks reliable evidence in science’.[27] Given the deep scepticism of the Chinese Academy of Science’s senior climatologist, Tkacik wrote, ‘It is clear that no one in the Chinese politburo is truly anxious about the climatic consequences of global warming.’[28]

  In New Delhi, the opposition Communist Party of India (Marxist), known by its initials CPM, accused the Singh government of being too soft and making pre-summit concessions which enabled the US to undermine the Kyoto Protocol. ‘The CPM had warned the government that unilateral concessions before the negotiations, and without conditional linkages to deep cuts by developed countries, will not yield results. This is indeed what has happened.’[29]

  As for the Indian government, in a March 2010 interview in the Wall Street Journal, environment minister Jairam Ramesh described himself as a climate agnostic. Ramesh, who headed India’s delegation at Bali and addressed the Copenhagen conference, said the climate negotiations were in a ‘complete quagmire’ and heading nowhere.[30] ‘In many parts of India people are dying because of excess pesticides in the water, or arsenic in the water,’ according to Ramesh. ‘That’s more important and more urgent than climate change.’ The other BASIC nations shared the same perspective. They had bonded ‘very well’ at Copenhagen. ‘We are united in our desire not to have a binding agreement thrust upon us which will constrict our developmental options,’ Ramesh said.[31]

  China could even claim the support of the weather. The first week of 2010 saw Beijing temperatures plunge to -18oC as a blizzard dumped the heaviest snow fall in a single January day since 1951. For two months beforehand, China had experienced widespread gas shortages as demand rose because of the unusually cold weather. In Seoul, more than ten inches of snow fell on the Korean capital – the greatest amount since records began in 1937.[32] In Mongolia, temperatures fell to -50oC. Ferocious winter conditions killed almost ten million sheep, cattle, goats, horses and camel – a fifth of the country’s total.[33]

  In Washington, Senator Inhofe’s grandchildren built an igloo with a sign saying ‘Al Gore’s New Home’. ‘This isn’t a good old-fashioned winter for the District of Columbia, not unless you’re remembering the last ice age. And it doesn’t disprove global warming,’ wrote Bill McKibben, the Copenhagen bell-ringer, in the Washington Post in February. ‘Instead, the weird and disruptive weather patterns around the world are pretty much exactly what you’d expect as the planet warms,’ McKibben rationalised.[34]

  Whether or not global warming caused the heavy snowfall, McKibben’s claim that more snow was exactly what was expected contradicted one of the most famous predictions in the history of global warming. Within a few years, winter snowfall will become ‘a very rare and exciting event’, David Viner, of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit told the Independent in March 2000. ‘Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,’ Viner forecast.[35]

  Mongolian nomadic herdsmen had a name for the harsh winter – dzud, meaning ‘white death’.[36] Writing three days after McKibben, the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman coined his own. Avoid the term ‘global warming’, Friedman advised. ‘I prefer the term global weirding.’ As global temperatures rise, the weather gets weird, Friedman asserted.

  Global weirding even found its way onto the website of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). ‘Global warming or global weirding?’ Don’t draw long-term, large-scale conclusions from short-term local weather patterns, was NOAA’s careful answer.[37]

  The scientists at NOAA had good reason to be cautious. As a scientific concept, global weirding is, well, weird. Following Popper’s criterion of falsifiability, the more a theory states that certain things cannot happen, the stronger the theory is. The problem with global weirding is that it doesn’t preclude anything – rather it suggests the opposite. Anything could happen.

  And how is weirdness measured? In Britain in 1975, near the start of a three-decade rise in global average temperatures in a record-breaking hot summer, the weather suddenly turned cold in the first week of June. Derbyshire was playing Lancashire in a county cricket championship match at Buxton. It started to rain, then snow. ‘When I went out to inspect the wicket, the snow was level with the top of my boots. I’d never seen anything like it,’ recalled umpire Dickie Bird.[38] Is summer snow in Buxton more or less ‘weird’ than winter snow in Washington?

  Despite this, global weirding captures a reality that changes in global average temperature do not. We only experience local temperature and local weather. No one experiences a global average temperature – a statistical artefact created by climate scientists. As measured by global average temperature, 2010 was one of the warmest years on record. Yet what was experienced by Mongolian nomads, the inhabitants of Beijing
or Senator Inhofe’s grandchildren in their igloo was quite different. If climate scientists had not been pre-disposed to worry about global warming, would anyone have noticed that 2010 was statistically one of the warmest years on record?

  The lack of observed warming during the first decade of the new century began to create a stir among climate scientists. In May 2009, Phil Jones, Britain’s best known climate scientist, reassured a colleague in a government funding agency. ‘Bottom line – the no upward trend has to continue for a total of fifteen years before we get worried,’ Jones wrote – giving himself more time by dating the fifteen years from 2004/05, and not 1998, as that was an El Niño year.[39] It was as if a doctor was dismayed rather than pleased to find a patient’s disease hadn’t progressed as fast as he had anticipated. In such a situation, most people would find themselves another doctor.

  While climate scientists might be over-committed to the idea of climate warming, political leaders most over-invested in global warming turned out to be Copenhagen’s biggest political casualties. No politician had toiled as hard as Gordon Brown. Trailing in the polls, a breakthrough at Copenhagen was Brown’s last chance of pulling around his electoral fortunes, even though, when talking climate change, it often sounded like a foreign language Brown hadn’t mastered. In the May 2010 election, Brown led Labour to its worst defeat since 1983.

  For Australia’s Kevin Rudd, Copenhagen was, in the words of opposition leader Tony Abbott, ‘an unmitigated disaster’.[40] Before the 2007 election, Rudd had described climate change as ‘the greatest moral, economic and environmental challenge of our generation’.[41] He then upped the stakes. Rudd dismissed opposition arguments to delay introducing cap-and-trade legislation until the outcome of Copenhagen was clear. ‘The argument that we must not act until others do is an argument that has been used by political cowards since time immemorial,’ Rudd said in November 2009. ‘There are two stark choices – action or inaction. The resolve of the Australian Government is clear – we choose action, and we do so because Australia’s fundamental economic and environmental interests lie in action,’ Rudd declared.[42]

  An RAAF plane was put on standby to fly Rudd to Copenhagen at short notice. A provisional delegate list numbered one hundred and fourteen Australians, including Rudd’s official photographer, compared to a seventy-one-strong UK delegation.[43]

  In April 2010, Rudd did an about-turn. Blaming the opposition and the pace of international negotiations, he announced a delay of his Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme until the end of 2012. Two months later, the Labor caucus heaved Rudd out of office and replaced him with his deputy Julia Gillard, whom Rudd also blamed for his decision to postpone the plan.

  Global warming played a part in Rudd’s downfall, according to his predecessor John Howard. It hurt him personally: one moment he had been saying it was the greatest moral challenge, then he was putting it off for two years, precipitating the sharp fall in his poll ratings.[44]

  The biggest casualty of Copenhagen was the West’s standing in the world. It had declared global warming the most serious issue of the age. The US and the EU had come together and pushed hard for a comprehensive agreement covering all the major economies. The build-up of pressure going into the conference was immense.

  However, the West misunderstood the contingent nature of the Third World’s participation in international environmental negotiations. Western politicians talked a story that the world’s poor would be hardest hit by global warming. But the nations with the largest numbers of poor people had priorities that conflicted with what the West wanted. Its leaders understood better than their colleagues in the West what Bastiat had found in the nineteenth century – the best defence against capricious nature is wealth.

  In this regard, it is striking how little had changed since 1972 and the Stockholm conference. There was some movement. The language of environmentalism made inroads. China committed to huge investments in renewable energy. Brazil moved from the outright hostility of its military rulers. Even so, Brazil stuck by China and India. When he got home from Copenhagen, Lula pointed the finger: ‘The United States is proposing a reduction of four percent from the date fixed by the Kyoto Protocol. That is too little,’ Lula said on his weekly radio show Coffee with the President.[45]

  At the same time, the power of the idea of global warming meant China and India couldn’t simply say ‘no’. So they fought the West by other means and played for time: fielding high calibre negotiators with a mastery of the conference texts and procedures; holding on to ground taken in previous rounds for as long as possible, especially the Berlin Mandate; using proxies to articulate their arguments and, most of all, maintaining the cohesiveness of the G77, despite the disparate interests of the small islands states and Africa from those of China and India. Throughout, they were aided by NGOs for whom blaming the West was encoded in their DNA.

  In the end China and India succeeded. If there was going to be an agreement, it would have happened at Copenhagen. The Durban COP in December 2011 demonstrated the enormity of their victory at Copenhagen. Canada, Russia and Japan had already announced they would not enter into a second commitment period under the Kyoto Protocol. In setting the goal of reaching agreement to cover the period from 2020, the Durban Platform confirmed the failure of the Bali Road Map to reach its intended destination. There would be a gap between 2012 – the end of the first commitment period under the Kyoto Protocol – and the start of a first commitment period of a yet to be negotiated treaty.

  The Durban Platform had a glaringly obvious credibility problem. If negotiating a legally binding agreement to cover the period after 2012 was too difficult, why would it be any easier to negotiate one for the period after 2020?

  The scale of the challenge was made apparent immediately after the COP when Canada announced its withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol. Environment minister Peter Kent said quitting the Protocol would save Canadians $13.6 billion it would otherwise have to spend on buying emissions credits from other countries.[46]

  Canada’s repudiation of Kyoto – inconceivable two years before at Copenhagen – made the prospect of a new treaty even less plausible. It strengthened China and India’s ability to resist pressure to cap their emissions. In public, they could hardly welcome Canada’s move, so they did the next best thing. ‘Any attempt by developed countries to casually set aside their existing legal commitments while calling for a new legally-binding agreement seriously questions their credibility and sincerity in responding to the climate crisis,’ a February 2012 statement on behalf of the BASIC Four said.[47]

  The long-standing position of China, India and the rest of the G77 was that developed nations must first demonstrate their commitment by actually cutting their emissions, the only interpretation of Kyoto that makes any sense. The US had not ratified Kyoto and now Canada had repudiated it, ostensibly because it did not cover developing nations. The result was to leave the climate negotiations in an unconsummated equilibrium with the potential to last indefinitely.

  It left the EU to negotiate with itself and with Norway and Switzerland over the emissions cuts for a second Kyoto commitment period. Outside this hard-core, there remained a handful of unilateralists. At enormous political cost, the Australians under Julia Gillard passed a carbon tax. In the US, California is a staunch climate change unilateralist. The three branches of the federal government are split between multilateralists and unilateralists. Cap-and-trade legislation was unable to make it through the Senate and had no chance after the 2010 mid-term elections, when Republicans took control of the House of Representatives. In its five to four decision on Massachusetts v. EPA, the Supreme Court endorsed unilateralism. Within the executive branch, the EPA under its administrator Lisa Jackson has adopted a hard-line unilateralist position. Obama’s position depended on the audience. In public, he was a unilateralist. Negotiating with India and China, he morphed into a multilateralist.

  A
t the conclusion of the Copenhagen conference, Ban Ki-moon hailed the Copenhagen Accord as an ‘essential beginning’.[48] At Bali two years earlier, Copenhagen was to be the final destination on the Bali Road Map.

  ‘Pathwalker, there is no path,’ Gore told the delegates at Bali in words that were more prophetic about the climate change negotiations than he’d hoped. Like the Voyager spacecraft after a multi-decade planetary tour, perhaps the fate of the COPs and the MOPs and their subsidiary bodies is to leave the solar system and journey into outer space.

  * To date, Malta is the only developing country to have graduated to Annex I. Croatia, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Slovenia were the products of parties to the convention that had split. The other addition to the original list was the Principality of Liechtenstein.

  [1] Barack Obama, ‘Remarks by the President during press availability in Copenhagen’ 18th December 2009.

  [2] David Espo, ‘Obama hails 60th Senate vote for health care’ AP, 19th December 2009.

  [3] ibid.

  [4] Barack Obama, ‘Remarks in St Paul’ in the New York Times, 3rd June 2008.

  [5] Stephen Collinson, ‘Chaos greets new climate pact’ AFP, 19th December 2009.

  [6] Jon Snow interview with author, 27th March 2012.