Inside COP21 – Another Missile from Paris

Guest Author Uncategorized

Here is Guest Author Thom Mitchell’s latest dispatch from Paris:

Bad coffee and the smell of rats, but looks like progress?

Dear NM Insider,

On Monday, 150 world leaders issued forth to the Paris climate talks with grandiose statements about saving the planet. Most have left, because, you know, saving the planet is a part-time job.

The negotiators tasked with giving affect to their words are now pouring over every word of every letter of what is currently a 50-page draft of the new international agreement on climate change. When the 11 December deadline for the end of negotiations comes, it will set out exactly how the world-saving will, or perhaps won’t, be done.

At the time of writing – the first Thursday night of the two week summit – it’s still half-filled with the infamous [square brackets] which indicate the wording still to be agreed on. They stand in for the sleepless nights that have already started in earnest. (I saw a guy literally sleeping standing up on the train back to Paris city centre at 6pm today).

It’s a pity French coffee is so bad.

Negotiators, non-governmental observers, and a serious media scrum are spinning off into all manner of informal meetings, often in the pricey cafeterias making a killing out of impending global disaster, to discuss the square brackets and what they mean for the world’s chances of avoiding dangerous climate change, and the interests and agendas of individual nations.

The 18-hectare conference centre where the negotiating’s being done is a total circus. So it’s fitting that a boulevard which separates two rows of massive warehouses at the site in Le Bourget, on Paris’ outer fringe, is lined with kitsch plastic animals, translucent and standing in for the one’s whose future is being determined.

Ditto for the skeletal trees just outside the airport-security entrance, which watch over hundreds of busloads of people ferrying in and out of the main site each day, and to and from the train station or various side events.

An overbearing sense of artifice permeates the whole show, as different countries, not-for-profits, academics and journalists scurry through the melee. There are people in elaborate turbans, saris, suits, and pāreus; speaking French, English, and dozens of other languages, and rushing off to meetings in side rooms, plenaries and cafe corners.

Some of them, like the Pacific Islander delegates, are trying to save their people. Others, rather selfishly, their economies. But the obvious disparity in negotiating power is largely hushed up, and for countries which are both poor and large emitters of carbon, the situation is a much more complex and delicate balancing act.

Because the process is run by consensus, every country, in a way, has the ability to bugger it up by refusing to sign on to the final text. But in these early stages people are treading carefully. The problem with, say, Pacific Islanders kicking up a stink about the fact that what’s being negotiated will sink many of their homes, is that for them any deal is better than none at all. And the problem with India demanding an ambitious deal which would save them huge money on their adaptation bill, is they have domestic demands to provide ‘electricity to all’ the 300 million without it by 2030.

At this stage, as the 196 countries involved work collaboratively on the climate pact, delegates are feeling out others’ negotiating positions, and getting ready for the political crunch that comes in the second week. But hopes are genuinely high that the talks will produce a document coherent, ambitious, and credible enough to kickstart the shift towards a lower carbon world.

The focus is largely on process – we know we’re not going to get even to a two degree goal, inadequate though the science tells us that is – so there’s a huge emphasis on setting up a system that will ratchet up over time, and leave the door open to greater ambition later.

But it could easily be another furphy.

Earlier today, renowned climate scientist and former head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, James Hansen (pictured below), told me he’d come to his first ever climate talks because he smelt a rat.

He said he thought governments would come to the conference, and leave claiming they’d made serious progress. They’ve done it plenty of times before, but some estimates say emissions are up by more than 60 per cent since the first major climate conference.

“Unlike the ozone problem where the governments actually took some actions to solve the problem, in the case of the climate problem, they’re not taking action,” he said. “Young people and future generations are screwed if we stay on that path, [but] trying to communicate against this headwind of fossil fuel propaganda is very difficult.”

There will be an update on key bones of contention in the morning, and it should become a fair bit clearer how things are progressing. But history tells us that in spite of all the careful planning and soaring rhetoric, the real decisions will be made in a schism towards the end of the second week.

I’ll keep you posted.

Cheers, Thom

503 thoughts on “Inside COP21 – Another Missile from Paris”

  4. “Islamic State has new recruiter-in-chief – Donald Trump.”
    .
    Following in the footsteps of Al Qaeda’s best ever recruitment officer the idiot George Dubya Shrub

  9. Just what St Malcayman didn’t want to hear.

    Tony Abbott ‘determined’ to stay until next election, maybe longer

    Former prime minister Tony Abbott says he will serve in Parliament until the next election and has left the door open to staying on beyond 2016.
    In an interview with Alan Jones on Sydney radio station 2GB, Mr Abbott said it is a “tremendous honour” and a “noble calling” to serve as a backbencher.
    “I am determined to do what I can to serve the people of Warringah and Australia for the rest of this Parliament,” Mr Abbott said.
    “To be a backbench member of Parliament…is a noble calling. It is a very noble calling. And to represent 100,000 people, as I do, is a tremendous honour. There’d be nothing wrong, I think, with continuing to do that in the Parliament.”

    http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/tony-abbott-determined-to-stay-until-next-election-maybe-longer-20151210-glkypq.html

  13. Already 31.8C here, forecast is 34C, I think it might go higher. It might not sound hot, compared to some of the temperatures that get reported here, but for this place, it’s well above the norm.

  14. Gravel,

    Apart from being cute, that is a very interesting video.

    When quite young infant humans are shown a possible event (e.g., a doll being placed on a stage, a screen coming down to hide that doll, another doll being placed behind the screen, and finally the screen being raised to reveal two dolls), infants typically show no reaction. However, if they are shown an impossible event – the first scenario but with the other doll being only apparently placed behind the screen, and the screen then rising to show only one doll – they typically react with surprise. These and related studies have been used for some time now to demonstrate that even very young infants are sensitive to quantity, to differences in quantity, and to violations of expectations relating to the outcomes of (very) simple addition and subtraction.

    The orang utan in the video was, to my mind, demonstrating the same sensitivity to quantity (there is lots of experimental evidence that even ‘lesser’ fauna are also sensitive to quantity).

  19. BK

    The Brits are having lots of Twitter fun at #TrumpFacts, a reaction to this ridiculous nonsense.
    http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/dec/10/donald-trump-responds-uk-petition-criticism-muslims

    Like these –

  20. Fiona

    It was a delightful video. Does your scenario work only by numbers? I’m curios as to a baby’s reaction to replacing a female/male, or cat with a dog, etc., or vice versa, or does it just work with similar objects?

  21. BK

    Fox reveals the real Murdoch , Rupes unleashed in the land of the free. He is a cancer on the political bony in the UK , Australia and the US. The Repug POTUS hopefuls should be called the candidates from Fox News.

    The “no go zone” was a blast from the past. His hate sheets on the UK used to love rolling that term out when it came to migrants.

  22. Gravel,

    It’s a quantity/magnitude sensitivity. Another interesting (to me) example is that you can habituate a baby to looking at 3 items (usually something pretty boring like dots or squares). Habituation means showing the same display over and over again until the baby gets bored and looks away. If the baby is then shown a display with 2 items or 1 item, they will ‘dishabituate’ i.e., suddenly show interest again. The dishabituation will also happen if the baby has been habituated to, say, looking at a 3 item display and then hears 2 drum beats. However, if 3 drum beats are played, the baby remains uninterested . . .

  31. Well, they are Australian leaders in environmental vandalism. Truffles just leads environmental vandals. Or on current signs they lead him around.

  36. Blasts from the past.

    Good to see First Dog has not abandoned his fixation on hair. Remember the starring role Brendan Nelson’s hair used to have in his work?

    And Senator Ludlam’s hair?

  41. jaycee – You could install one in your truck. A quick G&T just the thing when you run out of juice on an uphill.

    Ready for Christmas over there?

  42. Pell adopts the Kathy Jackson excuse. Next he will check into a mental health clinic.
    ___________________________________________________________________
    Would not the Vatican qualify as such an institution?

  43. BK
    Probably. But Pope Frank sent Pell home to appear at the RC, so it looks like sanctuary at the Vatican Clinic for the Perpetually Disturbed has been denied.

  44. Het Petal Pell. Dubai for a couple of days. On to Singapore for a couple of days and then “Come on down George !”. I’m sure the church can chip in for an upgrade to first class.

  47. kk
    I went to the physio two days ago and he said my recovery has been remarkable. I can do most things but I fear my medium pace bowling will not be a feature in the local Australia Day Pub vs Fodder Store cricket match!

  48. BK

    my medium pace bowling will not be a feature in the local Australia Day Pub vs Fodder Store cricket match!

    Being in the pub team may provide lubrication.

  50. Ctar1.. ” Ready for Christmas over there?”

    I’ve got the cork remover gassed up, the corkscrew sharpened, the wire-cutters ready for the Champers cap and the monkey wrench all “greased and ready’ for the screw-tops…I envisage and will tolerate no obstacles in the passage to worship of the magi !

    And yes, that little “fringe benefit” would go nicely in the Bedford…snug between the saddleblankets!

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