Another Kyoto with knobs on is likely to be a very expensive mistake

AS the Taoiseach prepares to leave for Copenhagen, we are told there are only a few hours left in which to save the planet. For all that is at stake though — entire nations vanishing and millions losing their homes to rising seas — I suspect the read-out from the conference-of-all-conferences will be rather less intently followed than, say, last week’s budget or even the X Factor result, come to think of it.

Yes, there is concern about man’s impact on the environment, but we are also wearying of being terrified by what are essentially speculations.

Two things seem certain. First, the conference will have failed. Second, it will be hailed as a resounding success. Simply, the developing world is not going to agree to give up cheap energy and the developed countries are going to find ways to look busy while not doing too much.

Some kind of agreement will have been signed but it will be an agreement to carry on talking as much as anything: conferencing is addictive. This will give our political leaders time to get themselves off the hook. But an effective, binding deal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions substantially over the next few decades seems a remote possibility.

That may be no bad thing. The idea of bringing down emissions without the technological means to do so is coming up against the very rational desire to improve living standards. To restrict definite present benefits in the name of indefinite distant ones would be a curious, if not foolish, path to take.

Consider the cases of the two emerging economic superpowers, India and China. They are currently performing economic miracles which, for the first time, have made hundreds of millions of their citizens comfortably off. But they can’t do this without increasing their carbon footprint. Should they be forbidden from doing so on the basis of uncertainty piled on uncertainty about what might happen a century down the line?

It often seems that it is not the concern with climate change per se that drives environmentalist rhetoric, but a widespread unease with modernity. The prospect of Indians and the Chinese aspiring to the standards of living reached in the west is particularly alarming.

Switching to much more expensive energy may be acceptable for us in the developed world. But in the developing world, there are still tens of millions of people suffering from acute poverty, preventable disease, malnutrition and premature death.

Who are we to deny others the chance to repeat the “mistakes” that have led westerners to enjoy longer, healthier lives, convenient systems of transport and communication and generally more leisure time and less drudgery? It is such “mistakes” that poor countries need to make, and want to make.

Our impulse to achieve economic growth and ever more comfortable lifestyles might have been replaced with the impulse to cut back and slow down but theirs has not. Here, almost every human activity — from driving and shopping to manufacturing products — is questioned according to the level of greenhouse gases it emits.

We are admonished for taking too many flights, using too much electricity, eating too much meat and so on. In the developing world, however, they call this progress. And with millions of Indians and Chinese still living in abject poverty, who can really blame them?

Well, future generations as it happens, the climate change lobby responds. But even if you accept the UN predictions, the world temperature will increase by 2100 by somewhere between two and four degrees celsius. A warming of half way between these two points works out at an average temperature increase of 0.03 degrees C per year. In the last 25 years of the past century, though, the temperature increased at the rate of about 0.025 degrees per year. Has this proved so appalling to manage?

Most troublingly for the computer modellers, in the last decade the global temperature hasn’t increased at all.

“The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t,” wrote one expert at the University of East Anglia’s climate research unit in one of the emails leaked recently. The pesky climate is refusing to play along.

Ever since an apparent hacker obtained access to their computers and published part of the unit’s internal email traffic, the scientific basis for global warming projections has been under scrutiny as never before, even if mentions of East Anglia and its dodgy academic behaviour are taboo in Copenhagen.

The revelation that leading climate scientists were manipulating the raw temperature figures, dumping inconvenient data and discussing means of suppressing the publication of articles by dissident scientists in respected journals has pulled back the curtain of authority and let the public in to have a look at the state of the science for themselves.

The picture we can see isn’t pretty for a warmer climate brings benefits as well as disadvantages. Even if there is a net disadvantage, it is far less than the cost of decarbonisation. Moreover, the greatest single attribute of mankind is our capacity to adapt to changing circumstances. By adapting to any warming that may occur over the next century, we can pocket the benefits and greatly reduce the disadvantages, at far less cost than some Kyoto-plus agreement to decarbonise.

It is because Kyoto was a relative failure that Copenhagen is happening at all, of course. In more than half of all industrialised countries, greenhouse emissions have increased since 1990. The “saving grace” was the utter collapse of the former Soviet economies after the end of communist rule there.

THE result has been huge reductions in emissions as great swathes of heavily polluting industry have been wiped out. Kyoto just about succeeded in its own narrow terms, but due to one-off, entirely coincidental changes rather than anything to do with the treaty itself.

Copenhagen was originally intended to secure a cut in global emissions, from the developed and developing world alike, of 50% below 1990 levels by 2050. But even if the much smaller Kyoto 5% cut is achieved — and in Ireland that might be the one “positive” consequence of the current economic slump — it will be only because the developed world collectively has effectively outsourced a large part of its emissions to countries such as China and India which do not labour under Kyoto constraints. A global target removes that escape route.

Even if Copenhagen is much more about process than results, though, commonsense still suggests that some serious work now on finding alternatives to current energy technologies makes sense. That way, if global temperatures do start to shoot up, we’ll be in a much better state to respond. The climate claims, one suspects, might prove to be overheated but broadening our energy options is a worthwhile investment.

In other words, there is no disaster facing us which we cannot mitigate by changing our behaviour over time. The real disaster will be if we cede to politicians the right to intrude in everything we do by pretending to “save” a planet which no one has proved will be lost.

Another Kyoto with knobs on is likely to be an expensive mistake.