The international negotiating process is extremely important but that is not just about Copenhagen. I don’t for a minute expect that we will get a just, equitable international agreement at Copenhagen that brings down emissions as rapidly as we need to — but I wouldn’t rule that out later down the track — and that is what we should focus on. The other thing to focus on right now is the international negotiations in Bonn over the next couple of weeks.

Geoffrey Robertson talk about the trade-off/sell-out continuum at one of the big human rights conferences – I forget which one… – in Crimes Against Humanity : The Struggle for Global Justice.

You might get powerful examples for your argument there?

Socialista: “An agreement to fail would be worse than an a failure to agree.” Brilliant! I love it.!

two important things i noted in newspapers this past week – the age poll of nine anonymous australian IPCC panel member scientists last thursday shows how well rudd and co have wedged and divided climate scientists as well as wedging the coalition and green groups – rudd and co must be feeling pleased with themselves. six out of nine sciebtists said anything agreed at copenhagen is better than nothing, three disagreed. it’s worrying that so many scientists continue to place any faith at all in a corrupted political process. the only thing that might shake rudd is a resolute united front of scientists saying – PM, you are wrong on this!

also the opposition is said to be getting ready to support rudd’s targets for copenhagen without passing any CPRS legislation. and on perhaps proposing raising the low end aspirational [without legislation, this is all it would be] target from 5 % . is this a good thing, or just more political game playing? i would appreciate an early ”rooted” blog on this by someone with an informed line into coalition thinking. it seems potentially important – or is it just more spin? tony kevin .

Peter @ 11. This is rather a crucial point. There may, at some point in the future, be substantial pressure to change the targets from either changes in the international situation or dramatic deterioration in the climate (though I’m yet to see a climate impact that’s been noticed by a politician).

This is very much true. This is exactly what happened with the Montreal Protocol of ozone depleting substances — one of the few international environmental agreements that has achieved anything close to full cooperation. When the Protocol was first negotiated in 1987 the reductions were not very impressive at all. But in subsequent negotiations in London in 1990 and Copenhagen in 1992, and to a lesser extent in Vienna in 1995 and Montreal in 1997, the baundance of ozone depleting substances was brought down dramatically.

From what you’re saying, the sole determinant of the upper and lower cap 5 years out is how the minister du jour was feeling when they got out of bed that day? I’d assumed that the cap levels were just how fast or slow we make it to the 10 year target set out in the object.

Is it really possible for the minister to act more strongly or more weakly than the targets dictate?

That said, an additional question which I think the climate movement needs to urgently consider is how we relate to the Copenhagen process generally. A significant proportion of the movement have put huge faith in the hope that government negotiators committed to business-as-usual ways of thinking have the flexibility to come up with an emergency response.

This is worrying, because we are also setting ourselves up to think that a failure at Copenhagen is the ‘endgame’ for a safe climate goal – and, unfortunately, failure is looking (to use IPCC’s methodology) likely. As Copenhagen approaches it’s getting harder to say that the negotiators ’shouldn’t treat it like just another trade deal’ – because it’s increasingly shaping up to be exactly that, and no more.

The stance of our movement, unfortunately, seems to be something quite immature. It’s almost unthinkable now for an anti-poverty campaigner to believe that real solutions will emerge from the World Trade Organisation, World Bank or International Monetary Fund. But we’re still looking to the UNFCCC for answers, just as we still feel we must be part of the process of fixing the ETS and other major-party-initiated schemes. Sure, let’s engage, but let’s do it as a show for the audience, not the directors.

It will be a real show of maturity when the climate movement confidently walks it’s own independent path, when we no longer believe that the usual politicians and negotiators are even capable of coming up with anything worth considering – unless it’s borrowing a proposal from the movement. Let Rudd and Turnbull have to seriously engage with our ideas instead of us waiting for their own silly proposals. Let our ideas be more than just a ‘better ETS’ and then let our ideas do battle with their ideas.

We would have surely grown up when we start refusing to leave the fate of the planet up to a bunch of slick CV-building negotiators trying to please their politicians, who themselves are in the pocket of the polluters. A crisis of legitimacy would be very positive right about now.

Everything in time I guess.

However, even this is probably a gross underestimation because:

“the odds indicated by this modeling may actually understate the problem, because the model does not fully incorporate other positive feedbacks that can occur, for example, if increased temperatures caused a large-scale melting of permafrost in arctic regions and subsequent release of large quantities of methane, a very potent greenhouse gas. Including that feedback “is just going to make it worse,”

Can’t find the study on line, but a MIT press release is at:
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/roulette-0519.html