By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 21st December 2009

The last time global negotiations collapsed like this was in Doha in 2001. After the trade talks fell apart, the World Trade Organisation (WTO) assured the delegates that there was nothing to fear: they would move to Mexico, where a deal would be done. The negotiations ran into the sand of the Mexican resort of Cancun, never to re-emerge. After eight years of dithering, nothing has been agreed.

When the climate talks in Copenhagen ended in failure last week, Yvo de Boer, the man in charge of the process, urged us not to worry: everything will be sorted out “in Mexico one year from now.”(1) Is Mexico the diplomatic equivalent of the Pacific garbage patch: the place where failed negotiations go to die?

De Boer might pretend that this is just a temporary hitch, but he knows what happens when talks lose momentum. A year ago I asked him what he feared most. This is what he said. “The worst-case scenario for me is that climate becomes a second WTO. … Copenhagen, for me, is a very clear deadline that I think we need to meet, and I am afraid that if we don’t, then the process will begin to slip, and like in the trade negotiations, one deadline after the other will not be met, and we sort of become the little orchestra on the Titanic.”(2)

We can live without a new trade agreement; we can’t live without a new climate agreement. One of the failings of the people who have tried to mobilise support for a climate treaty is that we have made the issue too complicated. So here is the simplest summary I can produce of why this matters.

Human beings can live in a wider range of conditions than almost any other species. But the climate of the past few thousand years has been amazingly kind to us. It has enabled us to spread into almost all regions of the world and to grow into the favourable ecological circumstances it has created. We currently enjoy the optimum conditions for supporting seven billion people.

A shift in global temperature reduces the range of places than can sustain human life. During the last ice age, humans were confined to low latitudes. The difference in the average global temperature between now and then was four degrees centigrade. Global warming will have the opposite effect, driving people into higher latitudes, principally as water supplies diminish.

Food production at high latitudes must rise as quickly as it falls elsewhere, but this is unlikely to happen. According to the body that summarises the findings of climate science, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the potential for global food production “is very likely to decrease above about 3C”(3). The panel uses the phrase “very likely” to mean a probability of above 90%(4). Unless a strong climate deal is struck very soon, the probable outcome is a rise of three or more degrees by the end of the century.

Even in higher latitudes the habitable land area will decrease as the sea level rises. The likely rise this century – probably less than a metre – is threatening only to some populations, but the process does not stop in 2100. During the previous interglacial period, about 125,000 years ago, the average global temperature was around 1.3 degrees higher than it is today, as a result of changes in the earth’s orbit around the sun. A new paper in the scientific journal Nature shows that sea levels during that period were between 6.6 and 9.4 metres higher than today’s(5). Once the temperature had risen, the expansion of sea water and the melting of ice caps in Greenland and Antarctica was unstoppable. I wonder whether the government of Denmark, whose atrocious management of the conference contributed to its failure, would have tried harder if its people knew that in a few hundred years they won’t have a country any more.

As people are displaced from their homes by drought and sea level rise, and as food production declines, the planet will be unable to support the current population. The collapse in human numbers is unlikely to be either smooth or painless: while the average global temperature will rise gradually, the events associated with it will come in fits and starts: sudden droughts and storm surges.

This is why the least developed countries, which will be hit hardest, made the strongest demands in Copenhagen. One hundred and two poor nations called for the maximum global temperature rise to be limited not to two degrees but to 1.5. The chief negotiator for the G77 bloc complained that Africa was being asked “to sign a suicide pact, an incineration pact, in order to maintain the economic dominance of a few countries”(6).

The immediate reason for the failure of the talks can be summarised in two words: Barack Obama. The man elected to put aside childish things proved to be as susceptible to immediate self-interest as any other politician. Just as George Bush did in the approach to the Iraq war, Obama went behind the backs of the UN and most of its member states and assembled a coalition of the willing to strike a deal which outraged the rest of the world. This was then presented to poorer nations without negotiation; either they signed it or they lost the adaptation funds required to help them survive the first few decades of climate breakdown.

The British and American governments have blamed the Chinese government for the failure of the talks. It’s true that the Chinese worked hard to mess them up, but Obama also put Beijing in an impossible position. He demanded concessions while offering nothing. He must have known the importance of not losing face in Chinese politics: his unilateral diplomacy amounted to a demand for self-abasement. My guess is that this was a calculated manoeuvre guaranteed to produce instransigence, whereupon China could be blamed for the outcome he wanted.

Why would Obama do this? You have only to see the relief in Democratic circles to get your answer. Pushing a strong climate programme through the Senate, many of whose members are wholly owned subsidiaries of the energy industry, would have been the political battle of his life. Yet again, the absence of effective campaign finance reform in the US makes global progress almost impossible.

So what happens now? That depends on the other non-player at Copenhagen: you. For the past few years good, liberal, compassionate people – the kind who read the Guardian every day – have shaken their heads and tutted and wondered why someone doesn’t do something. Yet the number taking action has been pathetic. Demonstrations which should have brought millions onto the streets have struggled to mobilise a few thousand. As a result the political cost of the failure at Copenhagen is zero.

Is this music not to your taste sir, or madam? Perhaps you would like our little orchestra to play something louder, to drown out that horrible grinding noise.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. Yvo de Boer, 19th December 2009. http://unfccc.int/2860.php

2. From transcript of video interview for the Guardian’s “Monbiot Meets” series. You can watch the edited discussion here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/video/2008/dec/08/monbiot-yvo-de-boer-climate

3. IPCC, 2007. Assessing key vulnerabilities and the risk from climate change. Table 19.1. http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg2/ar4-wg2-chapter19.pdf

4. http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/supporting-material/uncertainty-guidance-note.pdf

5. Robert E. Kopp et al, 17th December 2009. Probabilistic assessment of sea level during the last interglacial stage. Nature Vol 462, pp863-868. doi:10.1038/nature08686

6. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/dec/20/copenhagen-obama-brown-climate

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian, 2nd November 2009

There is no point in denying it: we’re losing. Climate change denial is spreading like a contagious disease. It exists in a sphere which cannot be reached by evidence or reasoned argument; any attempt to draw attention to scientific findings is greeted with furious invective. This sphere is expanding with astonishing speed.

US voters who believe that global warming is the result of natural causes (44%) now outnumber those who believe it is caused by human action (41%)

A survey last month by the Pew Research Centre suggests that the proportion of Americans who believe there’s solid evidence that the world has been warming over the past few decades has fallen from 71% to 57% in just 18 months(1). Another survey, conducted in January by Rasmussen Reports, suggests that, due to a sharp rise since 2006, US voters who believe that global warming is the result of natural causes (44%) now outnumber those who believe it is caused by human action (41%)(2).

A study by the website Desmogblog shows that the number of internet pages proposing that manmade global warming is a hoax or a lie more than doubled in 2008(3). The Science Museum’s Prove it! exhibition asks online readers to endorse or reject a statement that they’ve seen the evidence and want governments to take action. As of yesterday afternoon, 1006 people had endorsed it and 6110 had rejected it(4). On Amazon.co.uk, books championing climate change denial are currently ranked at 1,2,4,5,7 and 8 in the global warming category(5). Never mind that they’ve been torn to shreds by scientists and reviewers, they are beating the scientific books by miles. What is going on?

The debate about global warming that’s raging on the internet and in the rightwing press does not reflect any such debate in the scientific journals.

It certainly doesn’t reflect the state of the science, which has hardened dramatically over the past two years. If you don’t believe me, open any recent edition of Science or Nature or any peer-reviewed journal specialising in atmospheric or environmental science. Go on, try it. The debate about global warming that’s raging on the internet and in the rightwing press does not reflect any such debate in the scientific journals.

An American scientist I know suggests that these books and websites cater to a new literary market: people with room-temperature IQs. He didn’t say whether he meant Fahrenheit or Centigrade. But this can’t be the whole story. Plenty of intelligent people have also declared themselves sceptics.

One such is the critic Clive James. You could accuse him of purveying trite received wisdom, but not of being dumb. On Radio Four a few days ago he delivered an essay about the importance of scepticism, during which he maintained that “the number of scientists who voice scepticism [about climate change] has lately been increasing.”(6) He presented no evidence to support this statement and, as far as I can tell, none exists. But he used this contention to argue that “either side might well be right, but I think that if you have a division on that scale, you can’t call it a consensus. Nobody can meaningfully say that the science is in.”

The Pew report found that people over 65 are much more likely than the rest of the population to deny that there is solid evidence that the earth is warming, that it’s caused by humans or that it’s a serious problem

Had he bothered to take a look at the quality of the evidence on either side of this media debate, and the nature of the opposing armies – climate scientists on one side, rightwing bloggers on the other – he too might have realised that the science is in. In, at any rate, to the extent that science can ever be, which is to say that the evidence for manmade global warming is as strong as the evidence for Darwinian evolution, or for the link between smoking and lung cancer. I am constantly struck by the way in which people like James, who proclaim themselves sceptics, will believe any old claptrap that suits their views. Their position was perfectly summarised by a supporter of Ian Plimer (author of a marvellous concatenation of gibberish called Heaven and Earth(7)) commenting on a recent article in the Spectator. “Whether Plimer is a charlatan or not, he speaks for many of us”(8). These people aren’t sceptics; they’re suckers.

Such beliefs seem to be strongly influenced by age. The Pew report found that people over 65 are much more likely than the rest of the population to deny that there is solid evidence that the earth is warming, that it’s caused by humans or that it’s a serious problem(9). This chimes with my own experience. Almost all my fiercest arguments over climate change, both in print and in person, have been with people in their 60s or 70s. Why might this be?

And could it be that the rapid growth of climate change denial over the past two years is actually a response to the hardening of scientific evidence?

There are some obvious answers: they won’t be around to see the results; they were brought up in a period of technological optimism; they feel entitled, having worked all their lives, to fly or cruise to wherever they wish. But there might also be a less intuitive reason, which shines a light into a fascinating corner of human psychology.

In 1973 the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker proposed that the fear of death drives us to protect ourselves with “vital lies” or “the armour of character”(10). We defend ourselves from the ultimate terror by engaging in immortality projects, which boost our self-esteem and grant us meaning that extends beyond death. Over 300 studies conducted in 15 countries appear to confirm Becker’s thesis(11). When people are confronted with images or words or questions that remind them of death they respond by shoring up their worldview, rejecting people and ideas that threaten it and increasing their striving for self-esteem(12).

the journal Ecology and Society, proposes that constant news and discussion about global warming makes it difficult for people to repress thoughts of death, and that they might respond to the terrifying prospect of climate breakdown in ways that strengthen their character armour but diminish our chances of survival

One of the most arresting findings is that immortality projects can bring death closer. In seeking to defend the symbolic, heroic self that we create to suppress thoughts of death, we might expose the physical self to greater danger. For example, researchers at Bar-Ilan University in Israel found that people who reported that driving boosted their self-esteem drove faster and took greater risks after they had been exposed to reminders of death(13).

A recent paper by the biologist Janis L Dickinson, published in the journal Ecology and Society, proposes that constant news and discussion about global warming makes it difficult for people to repress thoughts of death, and that they might respond to the terrifying prospect of climate breakdown in ways that strengthen their character armour but diminish our chances of survival(14). There is already experimental evidence suggesting that some people respond to reminders of death by increasing consumption(15). Dickinson proposes that growing evidence of climate change might boost this tendency, as well as raising antagonism towards scientists and environmentalists. Our message, after all, presents a lethal threat to the central immortality project of Western society: perpetual economic growth, supported by an ideology of entitlement and exceptionalism.

If Dickinson is correct, is it fanciful to suppose that those who are closer to the end of their lives might react more strongly against reminders of death? I haven’t been able to find any experiments testing this proposition, but it is surely worth investigating. And could it be that the rapid growth of climate change denial over the past two years is actually a response to the hardening of scientific evidence? If so, how the hell do we confront it?

www.monbiot.com

With thanks to George Marshall

References:

1. http://people-press.org/reports/pdf/556.pdf

2. http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/current_events/environment_energy/44_say_global_warming_due_to_planetary_trends_not_people

3. http://www.desmogblog.com/2008-stats-global-warming-denial-blogosphere

4. http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/proveit.aspx

5. http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/search/ref=sr_nr_n_8?rh=n%3A266239%2Cn%3A!1025612%2Cn%3A57%2Cn%3A278080%2Cn%3A922416&bbn=278080&ie=UTF8&qid=1257145116&rnid=278080

6. Clive James, 23rd October 2009. A Point of View. BBC Radio 4. http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00n9lm3/A_Point_of_View_23_10_2009/

7. http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2009/09/14/answers-come-there-none/

8. http://www.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/5332261/an-empty-chair-for-monbiot.thtml

9. http://people-press.org/reports/pdf/556.pdf

10. Ernest Becker, 1973. The Denial of Death, pp47-66. Republished 1997. Free Press Paperbacks, New York.

11. Tom Pyszczynski et al, 2006. On the Unique Psychological Import of the Human Awareness of Mortality: Theme and Variations. Psychological Inquiry, Vol. 17, No. 4, 328–356.

12. Jeff Greenberg et al, 1992. Terror Management and Tolerance: does mortality salience always intensify negative reactions to others who threaten one’s worldview? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol 63, No 2 212-220.

13. OT Ben-Ari et al, 1999. The impact of mortality salience on reckless driving: a test of terror management mechanisms. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol 76, No 1 35-45.

14. Janis L. Dickinson, 2009. The People Paradox: Self-Esteem Striving, Immortality Ideologies, and Human Response to Climate Change. http://www.ecologyandsociety.org:80/vol14/iss1/art34/

15. T. Kasser and K. M. Sheldon, 2000. Of wealth and death: materialism, mortality salience, and consumption behavior. Psychological Science 11:348-351, Cited by Janis L Dickinson, above.

“Little things can have a surprising impact. Take global warming. Increasingly, we’re being asked to think about our “carbon footprint,” the amount of greenhouse gas produced to do the things we do: emissions from our cars, emissions from the power plants used to generate electricity for our homes, emissions from our air travel, and so on. These kinds of activities all have the benefit of looking dirty, so it’s very easy to imagine that there’s a bunch of carbon dioxide coming out along with the soot and smoke from engines and furnaces. But the big, obvious sources of greenhouse gases aren’t the only ones out there; in fact, nearly everything we do has a carbon footprint. Take, for example, the humble cheeseburger.

Methane (CH4) doesn’t last as long as CO2 in the atmosphere, but it makes up for it by having a much stronger greenhouse impact. One unit of methane is roughly equivalent to 23 units of carbon dioxide, when it comes to trapping heat.

If you’re like me, you occasionally wonder what the bigger story is behind everyday activities and products. A couple of years ago, I wondered aloud (in my blog, Open the Future) what the carbon footprint of the more prosaic parts of our lives might be — and I used, as an example, a cheeseburger. Now, I’m no enemy of the cheeseburger; I picked the cheeseburger as my example because I like them, and I wanted to know its impact. We’re not yet at the point where it’s easy to go Google up the carbon footprint of whatever you want, and nobody else had investigated the impact of something like a burger. I knew what my task would be.

After a bit of research, I found numbers laying out the energy demands of producing burgers — not just the energy for cooking, but everything, from raising the cattle to processing the meat to growing the wheat, lettuce and tomatoes. It’s not hard to find information showing how much carbon dioxide gets emitted by various energy sources, so converting that data on energy demands to data on carbon footprints just took a bit of simple math. Adding it all up, I got a number adding up to about 4-5 pounds of carbon dioxide emitted in the lifecycle of each cheeseburger — not a huge amount, but not insignificant.

But it occurred to me that carbon dioxide isn’t the only greenhouse gas out there. There are quite a few others, but they’re either too minimal or cycle out of the atmosphere too quickly to make a big difference. All but one, that is: methane. Methane (CH4) doesn’t last as long as CO2 in the atmosphere, but it makes up for it by having a much stronger greenhouse impact. One unit of methane is roughly equivalent to 23 units of carbon dioxide, when it comes to trapping heat. Fortunately, there’s not a huge amount of methane in the atmosphere; unfortunately, one of the bigger sources of methane is cattle.

Cattle gas, to be precise, or what the US Environmental Protection Agency politely calls “enteric fermentation.”

When you run the numbers, that little footprint of around ten pounds per burger becomes almost 200 MILLION metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent, every year, from the lowly cheeseburger.

The beef industry is big business, and there are millions of steers out there, waiting to be turned into cheeseburgers. It turns out that when you take into account the methane produced by gassy cows over the several years before they get turned into burgers (and divide that methane by the number of burgers you get per cow), the carbon impact of each burger more than doubles: more than ten pounds of carbon dioxide equivalent per burger. (Because CO2 is the most common and important greenhouse gas, environmental scientists like to convert the impact of other greenhouse gases to “CO2 equivalent” levels — in this case, multiplying the amount of methane emitted by the cattle by 23, to get the CO2 equivalence.)

Okay, ten pounds or more per burger, that’s something, right? Well, maybe. Ten pounds isn’t a whole lot in comparison to the average annual carbon footprint of an American, which is about 20 tons. If you only eat one or two burgers a month, you’re not adding much to your footprint.

It turns out, though, that if you’re only eating one or two burgers a month, you’re way below average. According to a diverse array of sources, including the sober UK news journal The Economist, Americans eat on average around 3 burgers per week. Now, that’s the average — meaning, all of the burgers consumed in the US divided by all of the people. Some of us eat less than that, but some of us eat even more. When you run the numbers, that little footprint of around ten pounds per burger becomes almost 200 MILLION metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent, every year, from the lowly cheeseburger. To put that in perspective, the total annual tailpipe emissions from all of the sport utility vehicles on the road is about 150 million metric tons.

Think about that for a minute: the lifecycle impact of burgers, all added together, is greater than the tailpipe impact of SUVs, all added together.

So, does this mean that we all need to stop eating cheeseburgers?
Well, cutting down wouldn’t hurt, for health reasons alone. But the point of this little exercise isn’t to make you feel guilty — it’s to trigger a bit of a realization. Everything we do has an impact — including the things we eat — and sometimes, that impact is far greater than we might think. But if we don’t have good information, we can’t make good choices.

It’s likely that, as we become a more carbon-conscious society, we’ll get a few more surprises like this. Not all of them will make us change our behavior. What they will do, though, is give us a better recognition of the implications of our actions. And that will let us take a little bit more responsibility for what we do.

And ultimately, it’s that link — from knowledge to recognition to responsibility — that’s how we’re going to save the world.”

Each $7 (£4) spent on basic family planning over the next four decades would reduce global CO2 emissions by more than a tonne. To achieve the same result with low-carbon technologies would cost a minimum of $32 (£19). The UN estimates that 40 per cent of all pregnancies worldwide are unintended.

“It’s always been obvious that total emissions depend on the number of emitters as well as their individual emissions”

The report, Fewer Emitters, Lower Emissions, Less Cost, commissioned by the Optimum Population Trust from the London School of Economics*, concludes that “considered purely as a method of reducing future CO2 emissions”, family planning is more cost-effective than leading low-carbon technologies. It says family planning should be seen as one of the primary methods of emissions reduction.

Meeting basic family planning needs along the lines suggested would save 34 gigatonnes (billion tonnes) of CO2 between now and 2050 – equivalent to nearly six times the annual emissions of the US and almost 60 times the UK’s annual total.

Roger Martin, chair of OPT, said the findings vindicated OPT’s stance that population growth must be included in the climate change debate. “It’s always been obvious that total emissions depend on the number of emitters as well as their individual emissions – the carbon tonnage can’t shoot down, as we want, while the population keeps shooting up. The taboo on mentioning this fact has made the whole climate change debate so far somewhat unreal. Stabilising population levels has always been essential ecologically, and this study shows it’s economically sensible too.

UN data suggest that meeting unmet need for family planning would reduce unintended births by 72 per cent, reducing projected world population in 2050 by half a billion to 8.64 billion

“The population issue must now be added into the negotiations for the Copenhagen climate change summit in December.** This part of the solution is so easy, and so cheap, and would bring so many other social and economic benefits, from health and education to the empowerment of women. It would also ease all the other environmental problems we face – the rapid shrinkage of soil, fresh water, forests, fisheries, wildlife and oil reserves and the looming food crisis.

“All of these would be easier to solve with fewer people, and ultimately impossible to solve with ever more. Meanwhile each additional person, especially each rich person in the OECD countries, reduces everyone’s share of the planet’s dwindling resources even faster. Non-coercive population policies are urgently needed in all countries. The taboo on discussing this is no longer defensible.”

The study, based on the principle that “fewer people will emit fewer tonnes of carbon dioxide”, models the consequences of meeting all “unmet need” for family planning, defined as the number of women who wish to delay or terminate childbearing but who are not using contraception.*** One recent estimate put this figure at 200 million. UN data suggest that meeting unmet need for family planning would reduce unintended births by 72 per cent, reducing projected world population in 2050 by half a billion to 8.64 billion. Between 2010 and 2050 12 billion fewer “people-years” would be lived – 326 billion against 338 billion under current projections.

The 34 gigatonnes of CO2 saved in this way would cost $220 billion – roughly $7 a tonne. However, the same CO2 saving would cost over $1trillion if low-carbon technologies were used.

The $7 cost of abating a tonne of CO2 using family planning compares with $24 (£15) for wind power, $51 (£31) for solar, $57-83 (£35-51) for coal plants with carbon capture and storage, $92 (£56) for plug-in hybrid vehicles and $131 (£80) for electric vehicles.

However, the study may understate the CO2 savings available because the estimates of unmet need are based on married women alone, yet some studies suggest up to 40 per cent of young unmarried women have had unwanted pregnancies.

Mr. Martin added: “The potential for tackling climate change by addressing population growth through better family planning, alongside the conventional approach, is clearly enormous and we shall be urging all those involved in the Copenhagen process to take it fully on board.”

NOTES:

*Available at www.optimumpopulation.org/reducingemissions.pdf

**In a statement issued last month, OPT called on climate change negotiators to ensure that population restraint policies are adopted by every state worldwide to combat climate change. Family planning programmes in poorer countries should be treated as legitimate candidates for climate change funding. The statement was endorsed by OPT patrons including Sir David Attenborough, Dr. James Lovelock and Jonathon Porritt. See: www.optimumpopulation.org/submissions/climatechange09.pdf .

***A recent study by Oregon State University concluded: “A person’s reproductive choices must be considered along with [their] day-to-day activities when assessing [their] ultimate impact on the global environment.” See Reproduction and the carbon legacies of individuals, by Paul Murtaugh and Michael Schlax, College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences/Department of Statistics, available on sciencedirect.com. The authors calculate that in the US each child adds 9,441 tonnes of carbon dioxide to the carbon legacy of an average female, equivalent to 5.7 times her lifetime emissions. See also: A Population-Based Climate Strategy (OPT Research Briefing) at www.optimumpopulation.org/submissions/opt.sub.briefing.climate.population.May07.pdf.