Dom Post on Climate Change

The Dom Post editorial:

Last night, NZ time, representatives of 192 countries gathered in the Danish capital of Copenhagen for the start of a two-week conference devoted to global warming.

Depending on your point of view, the conference represents either a last chance for humanity to save the planet from a man-made apocalypse, or the culmination of a giant fraud.

If the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is to be believed, the planet is warming, sea levels are rising and humans are to blame. The panel, a United Nations body, is forecasting temperature rises of between 1.1 degrees celsius and 6.4C this century and sea-level rises of between 18 centimetres and 59cm – sufficient to cause drought and coastal flooding and render some island countries uninhabitable.

If the sceptics are to be believed, fluctuations in the planet’s temperature are normal and there is no conclusive proof that human activity is to blame for the changes in the past 50 years.

What I find interesting is that the editorial even mentions the views of sceptics. A few months ago, and I suspect it may not have.

Notwithstanding the recent publication of emails suggesting that some climate-change scientists have sought to suppress data that does not conform to their theories, the weight of scientific evidence is on the side of the climate-change believers.

However, even if the sceptics are eventually proved correct, it makes sense to take a precautionary approach. If the sceptics are right, the cost of reducing carbon emissions will be measured in lower standards of living. Consumers will have to pay more for electricity and fuel, goods will be more expensive and inhabitants of developed countries such as New Zealand will have to compensate inhabitants of poorer countries for reducing their use of the polluting technologies with which developed countries built their wealth. If the sceptics are wrong, the cost will be drought, famine, the destruction of productive land and, as an editorial published by 56 newspapers today says, the drowning of whole countries.

A fair point. However the projected increase in sea levels by 2100 is from 19 cm to 69 cm – not metres and metres.

The challenge facing negotiators is to find a formula that rich and poor countries can agree to. An agreement to which the world’s biggest emitters, China and the United States, are not party to is an agreement not worth the paper it is written on. So too is an agreement from which other developing countries exclude themselves.

Absolutely. At present NZ has a more ambitious target than both China and the US. No way should NZ agree to a higher target unless the big emitters do.