Ian On sunday

In 2007 as many as 20,000 politicians, officials, international functionaries, journalists and activists attended the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, better known as the Bali Conference. That was a very great number of Neros assembled in one place complete with their fiddles.

Ian McDonald

The outcome of this conference, you will recall, was “hailed by governments as a success.” Which governments? And in what way can “a deal to start negotiations to adopt a new climate pact” be counted a success? Anyone can declare an intention to do something – but will it be done? Such deals are fundamentally meaningless. James Connaughton, Chairman of the White House Council on environmental quality at the time, speaking for the greatest Nero of them all, was quoted as saying triumphantly, “We now have one of the broadest negotiating agendas ever on climate change.” Well, hurrah, then, we agreed an agenda. And Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany, was quoted as saying that Bali represented “an important basis for a good result.” Well, hurrah again, Bali achieved the basis of a good result. Not therefore a good result. In other words (words!) Bali was a draftsman’s paradise, as such conferences usually are, where the purpose always in the end becomes to stitch up a luxuriant fig leaf to cover complete nakedness.

Shakespeare said it all about such windy, grandiloquent, useless conferences when he wrote the dialogue between two noblemen, Glendower and Hotspur, in the play Henry IV, Part One:
Glendower: I can call spirits from the vasty deep!
Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can any man. But will they come when you do call for them?
Indeed. What we saw at Bali is not a new thing. Throughout history rulers have believed (or pretended to believe) that the announcement of good intentions is the equivalent to the solution of problems. What is perhaps new in our age is that this tendency has hardened and crystallized into a way of life for multitudes of experts, advisers, consultants and other important people who live and work and find their motivation in a sphere remote from the real world.

There exists in the world today two entirely separate spheres of activity. One is the sphere of rhetoric, impressive prepared speeches, mutual backslapping, declarations of good intent, and agreed communiqués. The other sphere is the sphere of reality, cold hard facts, military and economic strength, tough commercial negotiations, payment by results, cash down and the bottom line. Each of these spheres function quite separately, has its own apparatus of power and influence, administers its own procedures and proceedings, sets its own objectives and achieves its own successes. They are quite self-contained. There seems to be little, if any, spillover from one sphere into the other.

Progress is only made when a way is found to connect the sphere of good intentions with the sphere of practical results. Failing that, the spirits of doable compromise and real progress will always remain imprisoned in the vasty deep of interminable talk-shops.

The Bali Conference could only have been judged a success if it had achieved two things leading directly to the reduction of greenhouse-gas emissions, the increase of which is already causing disasters brought about by global warming and climate change and the acceleration of which, unless halted, will in a couple of ticks of historical time lead to worldwide catastrophe, a great if not final extinction.

Above all, the conference should have agreed time-tabled targets for cutting the emissions. Europe to its credit was prepared to set such targets but America, the greatest culprit, would not do so while George Bush was President. So no targets were set.

There is another way of acting against disastrous climate change. Since tropical de-forestation causes 20% of greenhouse-gas emissions, steps to reduce, halt, reverse this process will obviously be very valuable to the world as a whole. So there should have been agreement to give incentives, a “preservation dividend,” to careful developing countries, like Guyana, for not deforesting our land. But of course no such thing was agreed.

Since Bali, precious time has elapsed and the climate change crisis has got much worse much more rapidly than expected. The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) now reports that the loss of Arctic ice is well ahead of previous forecasts. And Greenland’s glaciers are now estimated to be melting faster than forecast a short time ago. So while the IPCC projected previously that sea levels would rise 16 inches this century it now forecasts a rise of 39 inches.

To make matters worse, experts now despair that global warming can be held to an increase of 2 degrees Celsius which, if exceeded, will cause more widespread droughts and increasingly violent storms, devastate agriculture in many areas and make the planet warmer than it has been in millions of years. The world is flooding and burning up at an accelerating pace.

Copenhagen in December 2009 where a deal, and not just a deal to agree a deal, is to be hammered out is now just around the corner. Talking while the world burns will not be enough. By then Nature will have taken another few steps along its own determined way to solve the problem – by the eventual elimination of that rather stupid species, mankind.