The biggest news out of Copenhagen over the past 24 hours did not originate in the Danish capital, but rather from Washington DC, where the US Environmental Protection Agency declared that Carbon Dioxide and the five other major greenhouse gas emissions are harmful to human and environmental health. The annoncement makes the creation of a binding global agreement more likely, even if it doesn’t occur at this summit.
It’s a quarter past one in the afternoon in Montmartre. I’m sitting in a café right outside Métro Pigalle after having spent the morning looking for a wifi connection.
Annette and I arrived at 6:30 Central European time with 14 hours to kill before our 20h30 flight to Copenhagen. By pure chance we’ve already shared a restaurant with the head of a major environmental group and a flight with the Canadian Defence Minister, so I’m already feeling the global importance of the Copenhagen conference.
Since we’re in Paris for the day, we decided to check our bags now rather than haul around weeks of clothing while we roam around Paris.
“Vous allez à Copenhague?” the woman at the Scandinavian Airlines desk asks us. “Are you going to Copenhagen? For the climate change conference?”
Starting next week, over 20,000 people will be meeting in Copenhagen to discuss how the world should tackle climate change.
Officially called the 15th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the two week-long meeting will (hopefully) culminate with a global road map on how humanity will tackle global warming.
Here are five reasons why you should follow the talks in Copenhagen.
David Frum, formerly a key advisor to George W. Bush, writes in the National Post about the scandal plaguing climate scientists from the University of East Anglia, where emails obtained by outsiders seem to suggest that scientists fudged their climate numbers.
Frum’s point: just because some scientists did bad does not make the entire science of climate change bogus.
He uses the example of James Watson and Francis Crick, who gained in enormous insight from the work of Rosalind Franklin in their discovery of the structure of DNA and subsequently denigrated her with a attitudes of misogyny and sexism. Nobody would use Watson and Crick’s bad behaviour to discredit the structure of DNA.
Yet, here we are, our media using the behaviour of a small number of scientists to discredit the work on climate change done by thousands upon thousands of scientific minds.
See his article here.
The Chinese government will announce its intention to cut it’s emissions intensity by 40-45% of 2005 in Copenhagen in December.
Assuming that China’s economy continues grow at 9-10% of GDP each year, that will mean that China’s emissions will more than double their 2005 emissions.