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Copenhagen, Day Three, from Tuvalu to Todd Stern
Brad Johnson, the wonk room
The Tuvalu Protocol

At this morning’s plenary session of the Copenhagen climate negotiations, the tiny island nation of Tuvalu called for strengthening the Kyoto Protocol to limit warming to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels, rather than the current standard of 2 ° C. Their proposal to amend the Kyoto Protocol with a new, legally binding agreement to set a target of 350 ppm of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere fractured the session, as Tuvalu was supported by other small island states and poor nations in Africa, but was opposed by fifteen richer developing nations, including Saudi Arabia, China, and India. Stabilizing carbon dioxide concentrations at 350 ppm would be 25 percent above pre-industrial levels, but is 10 percent below the present concentration of 390 ppm, so the targets would require significant and immediate reductions in emissions from both developed and developing nations. Tuvalu negotiator Ian Fry told the conference that “our future rests on the outcome of this meeting.”..

...Developing Development

The negotiators then turned to the challenge of financing and governance of clean-energy investment for developing countries, including the state of the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism CDM)...

...United States

At a press conference, chief US negotiator Todd Stern said, “I completely reject the notion of a debt or reparations” in terms of moral responsibility on the part of the United States for its historical emissions, though he recognized the “historical role in putting emissions into the atmosphere.”..

...Pushing Around Targets

Yesterday, South Africa announced it would commit to significantly slowing the growth of their global warming pollution by 2020.

Canada and Croatia took the top “Fossil of the Day” award today...
(9 Dec 2009)

Copenhagen day 1: Scandal! Bullying!
Joshua Kahn Russell, grist
What better way to open the Copenhagen climate talks—the meeting of the UNFCCC that is supposedly going to decide the fate of the entire world—than with broad civil society outrage at the egregious lack of democracy in the process.

Here’s the inside scoop: the Danish presidency is desperate for a positive spin on any outcome of the climate negotiations here. That means forcing an outcome by bringing together the rich and powerful nations to broker a deal in private and then to announce it to the rest of the world. There is widespread concern of U.S.-friendly text being “parachuted” into the negotiating documents, at the expense of G77 countries (everyone else).

We all know that international agreements involve quite a lot of back-room deals and often intimidation. We just usually don’t expect it to come from the facilitators. Obviously this is both antithetical to the U.N. process but also to the duties of the Danish Government in playing a neutral convening role at the Conference of Parties. It’s not just an attack on democracy, but it amounts to an attack on the rest of the world on behalf of a few powerful interests. It’s the sort of “green room” behavior one would expect from the World Trade Organization, not the United Nations, which has a consensus process designed to make global decisions.

The logic is this—the U.S. needs to be on board to get any deal, so therefore let’s force a watering-down of the process to get the U.S. to sign. Déjà vu? It’s errily like we’re replaying the Kyoto meeting in 1997. Remember how the world watered down the treaty (giving birth to the concept of offsets and the Clean Development Mechanism) so that the U.S. would sign? …and the U.S. never even signed anyway...
(7 Dec 2009)

Met Office reveals last decade was the hottest ever recorded
Michael McCarthy, The Independent
The first decade of this century has been by far the warmest on record, the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) and the UK Met Office announced yesterday - and this year is likely to have been the fifth hottest.

At the UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen, officials from both organisations said the new figures showed that the world was not in a cooling phase, as some sceptics have asserted, but that the warming trend seen for the past 40 years was continuing.

The 10 years up to the end of 2009 have been the hottest in the 160-year instrumental record of global temperatures, and significantly warmer than the 1990s, the 1980s or any other decade since global surface temperature measurements began in 1860, the WMO and the Met Office said in separate announcements at the meeting, where the world community is trying to construct a new global warming treaty.

...Taken as a whole, the first decade of the 21st century has been 0.4 degrees hotter than the current baseline for measuring global temperatures – the average for the years 1961-1990, which was 14C. By comparison, the 1990s were 0.23 degrees hotter and the 1980s were 0.08 degrees hotter, while all the previous decades stretching back to 1850 showed averages that were lower.

"This is an indication that the world has not been cooling since 1998," said Dr Vicky Pope of the Met Office's Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research, referring to claims by climate change sceptics that since 1998, the hottest year of all, the trend has changed from warming to cooling...
(9 Dec 2009)