In the months leading up to the recent climate change conference in Copenhagen, politicians and the media were pretty quiet about global warming. Not any more!
It is difficult to resist the idea that this conference was a high profile vehicle for launching a coordinated campaign to bring climate back into the news. Many observers seem to believe that the next conference in Copenhagen, in December this year, may be the last chance to get a worldwide deal on CO2 emissions, and for the first time things are not all going the alarmist’s way. Very real economic turmoil has trumped speculation about climate catastrophe.
So how does one set about assessing what happened at Copenhagen?
Well the first thing to remember is that it is unwise to try and reach any conclusions while the conference is taking place or in its immediate aftermath. A glance at the organiser’s web site reveals that among their ‘Media Partners’ were Time magazine, Scientific American and National Geographic, all of which have very definite positions on climate change. We can be sure that so far as media coverage is concerned, the main stories will have been carefully planned well in advance and that the conference will be promoted by a very high profile PR campaign. One might ask, however, why what purports to be a scientific conference needs ‘Media Partners’?
We can also be sure that these stories will carry precisely the spin that the organisers wish and that they will also be dramatic. The Media Partners would be very disappointed if they were not.
Predictably, a number of apocalyptic predictions were launched in the run-up to the conference and while it was taking place: melting Greenland ice, rising sea levels, oceans turning to acid. Nothing new there, but there was one novel element to the campaign, and that was the oft repeated slogan that the IPCC was too cautious in it’s last assessment report, which I suppose is another way of saying that it wasn’t nearly scary enough to have the political effect that advocates of human caused global warmng desire. We’ll come back to the political role of the conference later.
Of course, even with such big hitters in the media industry helping out, you can’t run an international conference with 2000 delegates on thin air. Money – lots of money – is needed, so who would be likely to provide that? A helpful display on the organiser’s website tells us, and there are some quite interesting names here, listed as ‘Star Sponsors of the Conference’.
DONG Energy, build and operate wind farms all over Northern Europe
Vestas, one of the biggest wind turbine manufacturers in the world
Velux, a very big name in home insulation
Rockwool: almost synonymous with home insulation
COWI: Environmental Consultants
http://www.di.dk/english, http://www.maerskoil.com, http://www.novozymes.com, http://www.time.com, http://www.sciam.com, http://www.nationalgeographic.com, http://en.cop15.dk/climate+consortium, http://www.mfonden.dk
No doubt all these companies are deeply concerned about climate change, but it is equally certain that they all stand to profit if politicians and the general public can be persuaded to share their concerns. But it is odd that, when warmists accuse ‘big oil’ of sponsoring sceptics – and it is very difficult to find much evidence of this actually happening – they seem to close their minds to equally questionable activities of interested parties whose support they welcome. For the companies mentioned here, the dividends in terms of political influence and media exposure are enormous.
For an appraisal of what the Copenhagen Conference was all about, let’s turn to an unimpeachable source; Professor Mike Hulme. As founding director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Research at the University of East Anglia, no one could possibly accuse him of being a climate sceptic, indeed his utterances on that subject have never been anything other than rigorously politically correct, although he has in the past had the courage to criticise climate scientists for exaggerating research findings in order to get publicity.
The Copenhagen conference was no Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) event.
It was not a process initiated and conducted by the world’s governments; there was no systematic synthesis, assessment and review of research findings as in the IPCC, and there was certainly no collective mechanism enabling the 2,000-plus researchers to consider drafts of the six key messages or to offer their own suggestions for what politicians may need to hear.
The conference was in fact convened by no established academic or professional body.
Unlike the American Geophysical Union (AGU), the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) or the UK’s Royal Society – which also hold large conferences and from time to time issue carefully worded statements representing the views of professional bodies – this conference was organised by the International Alliance of Research Universities (IARU).
This little-heard-of coalition, launched in January 2006, consists of 10 of the world’s self-proclaimed elite universities, including of course the University of Copenhagen.
IARU is not accountable to anyone and has no professional membership.
The statement therefore simply carries the weight of the secretariat of this ad-hoc conference, directed and steered by 10 self-elected universities.
The six key messages are not the collective voice of 2,000 researchers, nor are they the voice of established bodies such as the WMO. Neither do they arise from a collective endeavour of experts, for example through a considered process of screening, synthesising and reviewing.
Instead they were drafted largely before the conference started by the organising committee, sifting through research that they saw emerging around the world – some of it peer-reviewed, some of it not – and interpreting it for a political audience.
The press reports of the conference give no hint that the conclusions reached had been decided before the delegates even booked into their hotels in Copenhagen. Nor that the ‘new research’ that was so eagerly headlined by the media might not have been published or even reviewed
In spite of any doubts that Mike Hulme might have about the scientific authority of the conference, he seems to be quite content that politics played a major role in the proceedings. I wonder if there is any field of science other than climate science in which this would not be generally condemned?
Here is what The Times says about a keynote speech delivered during the opening session of the conference:
Politicians were willfully ignoring and misunderstanding the science of global warming, a government adviser said today.
John Ashton, who is the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s special representative on climate change, warned scientists that they could not trust in the honesty of politicians.
Speaking at the start of the climate change conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, Mr Ashton said that the truth could be lost to political expediency or mischief and urged scientists to couch their conclusions in terms that could not be misunderstood or go unheard.
Delegates at the conference will again meet in the city later this year in an attempt to reach an international deal on how to combat global warming.
Mr Ashton, who trained as a physicist before becoming a diplomat, said that researchers had been tremendously successful in analysing climate science but had yet to succeed in making political leaders understand the importance of their discoveries.
“In science the truth is out there. It’s there to be discovered. In politics often the truth is whatever is expedient to this or that project,” he said in the opening session of the conference.
Urging the scientists to speak the language of politicians, he said: “We need to do this better to stand any chance of keeping climate change on the right side of the last acceptable risk. There has to be much better communication between the world of science and the world of politics.”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article5880865.ece
Later, Mr Ashton was even more forthright about what he thought the assembled scientists should be doing:
Speaking outside the conference hall, he added: “There are plenty of people in the political world who are quite happy to abuse the [scientists’ conclusions] to serve political purposes. Politics is a shark-infested sea.
“The more effort scientists put into how their message might be heard, how it might be manipulated and made mischief of, the better.”
Mr Ashton also told scientists that if they wanted to be listened to in the current political climate, they needed to show that tackling climate change was an economic opportunity.
“Politicians around the world are going to be focussed on one big thing and that is going to be jobs, jobs, jobs,” he said.
“If we want to successfully respond to climate change we have to form it as part of the solution to the economic crisis.”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article5880865.ece
Mr Ashton’s diverse CV has evidently not alerted him to the dangers of unintended irony; so much of what he said could equally be a sceptic’s view of the way in which climate science and politics interact.
Expect lots of news stories in the coming weeks about massive investment in climate change mitigation projects that will create employment and thereby simultaneously save the planet and alleviate all our global economic woes; a 21st century version of snake oil.
Little of the information that I have posted here was included in the popular media’s coverage of the Copenhagen conference, and only those who take the trouble to search the internet will find it now. The messages that the organisers, their sponsors, climate scientists, and their political cheerleaders wished to disseminate have gone forth, and nothing that is said now will alter that. As Mark Twain once said, ‘A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can even get its boots on’. And that was before the days of high-speed communications.
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