Communicating Hope: Hope in an age of environmental crisis

"What relevance does the Christian message of hope have in our world that seems increasingly hopeless? It is noticeable that the Christian scene has changed, from the Christian tours of 2008/9 entitled, ‘Hope for Planet Earth’, to a recent (2011) Faraday Institute conference entitled, ‘Sustainability in Crisis’. A key turning point for the environmental movement in general was the Copenhagen Summit, which delivered so little, despite all the focus leading up to it. A grim and sober realism now seems appropriate, rather than a sense of, ‘if we all pull together we can do it’. What role, therefore, does a Christian theology of hope play in this? Is there any hope, humanly speaking, or are we beyond that? What role should a message of Christian hope play in our ecological message to churches and individual Christians? Are we just encouraging a 'pie in the sky' theology by peddling hope where there is none? Can a message of hope actually become de-motivating when the reality seems so different? It is this cluster of questions that we see as representing what we are calling, ‘the hope gap’. This is the focus of the present meeting."

Sometimes, things come along that are right up my street. This is part of the advertising blurb for a 24 hour conference in May organised by A Rocha UK and the John Ray Initiative (two Christian ecological organisations). Doing a PhD can be a lonely and isolating process and discovering that others are asking similar questions is like stumbling upon an oasis.

For others in the UK who might be interested, full details are here. Keynote speakers include Richard Bauckham (NT scholar and theologian), Andy Atkins (director of Friends of the Earth UK), Martin Hodson (environmental biologist), Margot Hodson (director of John Ray Initiative) and Ruth Valerio (A Rocha UK).

These questions I think are critical for Christians today who wish to think about what it will mean to communicate the good news of Jesus in a world increasingly suffering from ecological bad news. If we are to speak of hope, and those who follow a crucified and risen king cannot do otherwise, then how do we do so in ways that open up possibilities for human action and perseverance? How do we avoid giving false hopes? How do we avoid encouraging a quietism that abandons the neighbour in their distress and yet simultaneously avoids implying that we save ourselves? And in the face of increasingly dire scientific projections, what kind of penultimate hopes may a Christian hold today?

UPDATE: Richard Bauckham's talk is now available online.

On track for 4ºC

At Copenhagen in 2009 and then once more in Cancún in 2010, the nations of the world agreed on the goal of limiting global warming (the most talked about part of climate change and a rough indication of the overall severity of change) to a rise in average surface temperature of no more than 2ºC above pre-industrial levels. We are already almost 0.8ºC up, with something like another 0.5ºC already committed due to the time lag between emissions and their effects. To have a 75% chance of keeping overall warming under 2ºC by 2100 would require us to emit no more than a trillion tonnes of carbon dioxide between 2000 and 2050. How much is a trillion tonnues? Well, simplifying matters somewhat, and given that we've already used a fair chunk of that, the bottom line is that it woud require us to leave more than half of the economically recoverable fossil fuels (oil, coal, gas) in the ground. That is: no more searching for new fields; no further exploitation of the non-conventional sources (shale gas, tar sands, methane hydrates); no inclusion of fields currently too expensive to exploit. And we leave more than half of what is already known and can already be removed profitably in the ground.
Those interested in the fine print of the numbers used in these calculations can consult this quite technical study.

Two degrees would still bring all kinds of very undesirable consequences. It would be likely to mean virtually no summer sea ice in the Arctic, the loss of most coral reefs around the world, potentially dramatic declines in total ocean productivity (at least as far as fish are concerned; jellyfish may do quite well), the eventual extinction of hundreds of thousands or even millions of species, significant suppression of total global crop yields (when total food demands are likely to double by 2050), sea level rises of 50-100 cm by 2100 and of many metres over the coming centuries, changes in precipitation patterns leading to both worse droughts and floods, a more fragile Amazon and already the possibility of passing thresholds that could precipitate sudden and irreversible changes. Two degrees is no walk in the park.

While the world agreed that 2ºC ought to be treated as an upper limit (except low-lying island nations, for whom 2ºC would already likely be a death-sentence), the pledges made as a result of these negotiations put us on track for a world that is more likely to be around 4ºC warmer by 2100, and more than 6ºC warmer during the following century. Note that these pledges are in some cases aspirational and lack any legislative framework to accompany them. In Australia's case, our pledge (lying quite firmly at the less ambitious end of the scale) is dependent upon the implementation and success of the Gillard government's proposed scheme to put a price on carbon. So even were we (and all other nations) to implement successfully our plans, we are still far more likely to be at 4ºC by 2100 than anywhere near 2ºC.

If a 2ºC world sees us suffering from a wide range of very difficult and worsening challenges that will stretch our ability to cope, a 4ºC world would be unrecognisable. A conference this week looking at the likely impacts on Australia of a four degrees rise suggested that Australia, the world's sixth largest food exporter, may no longer be able to feed itself. The difficulty of understanding just how different such a world would be is illustrated by the following quote from Professor Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Chair of the German Scientific Advisory Council, advisor to the German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). In March 2009, Schellnhuber said that on a four degree world the planet’s “carrying capacity estimates [are] below one billion people.”*

Just let that sink in.

Or find ways to avoid thinking about it.
*Carrying capacity is a complex and contested notion and obviously depends on a range of assumptions about average standard of living. The point is not to suggest that one billion is a fixed limit, but simply to highlight how severely compromised the systems on which we rely for a world of seven billion people may be in a four degrees warmer world.

UPDATE: Kevin Anderson, until recently the director of the U.K.’s leading climate research institution, the Tyndall Energy Program, had this to say about four degrees: “a 4 degrees C future is incompatible with an organized global community, is likely to be beyond ‘adaptation’, is devastating to the majority of ecosystems, and has a high probability of not being stable.”

Incompatible with an organised global community. Parse that how you will, it ain't pretty.

Growth and justice

"Economic growth is the magic formula which allows our conflicts to remain unresolved. While economies grow, social justice is unnecessary, as lives can be improved without redistribution. While economies grow, people need not confront their elites. While economies grow, we can keep buying our way out of trouble. But, like the bankers, we stave off trouble today only by multiplying it tomorrow. Through economic growth we are borrowing time at punitive rates of interest. It ensures that any cuts agreed at Copenhagen will eventually be outstripped. Even if we manage to prevent climate breakdown, growth means that it’s only a matter of time before we hit a new constraint, which demands a new global response: oil, water, phosphate, soil. We will lurch from crisis to existential crisis unless we address the underlying cause: perpetual growth cannot be accomodated on a finite planet."

- George Monbiot, "This is about us".

This piece, worth reading in full, was written during the height of the Copenhagen conference last December. Yet it has not been rendered irrelevant by the (unsurprising) failures there. This is another way of saying that ecological responsibility cannot be divorced from justice. Though Monbiot doesn't see it, I believe that justice can only be sustainably pursued by love.

Another exoneration: IPCC head cleared of financial wrongdoing by KPMG

To go along with the recent string of exonerations that have been given by public enquiries concerning the hacked CRU emails and the vindication of Michael Mann's conduct by PSU, now accusations of financial impropriety made against Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the IPCC, have also been refuted in an investigation by KPMG. The Sunday Telegraph, which first broke the story, has removed it and offered an apology.

Dr Pachauri has received a sum total of £0 for his work as IPCC chair (yes, far from a socialist plot to install world government, the IPCC is a tiny group co-ordinating the work of thousands of scientists that can't even afford to pay its own chair). And his entire income is under £50,000. More details are found here, with intelligent discussion here.

But like all such retractions, it is too little, too late. The smear did its job, spreading popular doubt about the work of the IPCC around the time of increased global attention on the issue due to the Copenhagen conference.

Yet of all the accusations against climate science flying around at the end of last year, the worst that have been substantiated were a reference to an incorrect date on one page of the IPCC's 2007 report (which ran to thousands of pages), some personal nastiness in private emails and possible evasion of FOI requests by a scientist under siege from dozens of such requests. No consensus has collapsed, no climatologists have been shown to have been fraudulent, no studies have been fatally undermined, no new theory to explain the data has gained wide acceptance. It is still the case that over 97% of the most active climatologists agree that human emissions are the primary culprit for a significant and ongoing rise in global temperatures and shift in climate patterns.

Moral: don't believe every breathless scandal dished out by the popular media, especially when the source is a blogger with an unimpressive track record and the target is a highly politicised figure. But then, most of you knew that already.

USA fail

Why the failure of the US Senate to pass a climate bill is worse than the failure at Copenhagen
The Copenhagen Conference on Climate Change was largely a failure, but this was not particularly surprising given the huge range of factors working against an fair, ambitious and binding deal.

However, the recent death of any chance of the US Senate passing (or even voting on) a much watered down climate bill anytime soon was a genuine and more significant failure. This is not only because the passage of a US bill would be the single greatest factor increasing the likelihood of a global deal, but mainly because the opportunity was so much more achievable. Think about the constellation of factors making it possible: a president who had included it as a major part of his campaign, Democrat majorities in both houses, an ever more convincing scientific body of evidence, a catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico highlighting the dangers of addiction to ever more difficult to obtain fossil fuels, a bill that had largely been crafted by a bipartisan team, a core strategy invented by conservatives (i.e. using trading schemes for managing environmental issues), in the middle of what has been so far the hottest year on record at the end of the hottest decade on record, after having repeatedly set the highest twelve month running average on record, with the greatest sea ice volume anomaly on record (plus a range of other climate related records) and a US population who want a price on carbon. Somehow, with all that going for them, they still managed to drop the ball.

If we want to stay below 450 ppm of CO2 (giving only a little better than a 50/50 chance of staying below 2ºC, and so only heavy damage), then each year of delay increases the price of achieving such a risky target by a staggering US$500,000,000,000. Yes, five hundred billion US dollars for each year of delay, because each year we wait, more infrastructure is built that will last for about forty or fifty years. Once another coal-fired power plant is built, it becomes a sunk cost, meaning that those costs are unrecoverable and will most likely continue to be used to the end of its life unless the price of carbon becomes astronomical.

So why did the bill fail? Brian Merchant argues there were seven things that killed the climate bill (in ascending order of importance):

7. Woeful media coverage.
6. Shortsighted action by the US Chamber of Commerce.
5. Archaic fillibuster rules in the Senate (a supermajority is not a constitutional requirement).
4. Barack Obama didn't get it and didn't get into it.
3. Fossil Fuel interests spreading misinformation.
2. Centrist and Coal State Democrats.
1. The Party of No: Republicans deciding that they would rather be opposed to anything from the other side than be willing to seek good solutions together.

The bill in question was far from perfect, and I've voiced my concerns with aspects of cap and trade before, but in this case, something probably would have been better than nothing, especially since it would have introduced a mechanism that could have been ramped up as more people get it. As it is, it looks like China might have to take the lead.

Obama was never going to be the messiah, but when the history of his presidency is written in decades to come, I wonder whether his other achievements will be overshadowed by this episode.

So what should the church be doing? Same thing as always, but more so.

Love casts out fear

Love casts out fear. The truth is that what is most likely to get us to take the right decisions for our global future is love. The temptation is to underline fear so as to persuade one another of the urgency of the situation: things are so bad, so threatening, that we have to do something. And indeed there are moments when we might think, rather bitterly, that the human race is still not frightened enough by the prospect of what it has stored up for itself. But this is to drive out one sickness by another. That kind of fear can simply paralyse us, as we all know; it can make us feel that the problem is too great and we may as well pull up the bedclothes and wait for disaster. What's more, it can tempt us into just blaming one another or waiting for someone else to make the first move because we don't trust them. We need more than that for lifegiving change to happen.

- Rowan Williams, "Act for the sake of love",
a sermon in Copenhagen Cathedral, 13th December 2009

This short piece is a good read to start the new year.* Archbishop Williams gave this sermon on 13th December at an ecumenical service in Copenhagen Cathedral in the middle of the climate negotiations. It is a reflection on 1 John 4.18a: "There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear". Williams' argument is that despite many reasons to be fearful, only love can sustain a life-affirming response to the threat of climate change. While I'm not sure I'd follow his reading of Romans 8 in the penultimate paragraph, I think his central claim is an important one: fear is ultimately an insufficient and destructive motive for action. There is much fear-mongering used by both activists and deniers. While fears have a place in shaping a prudent response, only love is truly renewable.
* Though if you're looking for something with a bit more zing this Christmastide, you could do worse than have a look at Kim Fabricius's provocative Christmas sermon. And for some fun, try this caption competition.

Copenhagen: so what?

My second piece reflecting on Copenhagen has just gone up at the Centre for Public Christianity (a.k.a. CPX). You can read the first one back here. My new piece was written towards the end of last week and attempts to reflect on some of the positive outcomes to this much anticipated gathering, even though at the time it was looking like little of worth was going to come out of it. And it is important to remember, that sadly (but not unexpectedly) that turned out to be largely true.

Baby permitting (we're still waiting, which is quite apt, given that it is Advent), I'll write a third piece in the days ahead that presents a more critical and reflective view on "where to from here?".

Too late? A genuine possibility

We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity. The tide in the affairs of men does not remain at flood -- it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is adamant to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, "Too late." There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. Omar Khayyam is right: "The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on."

A quote from the debate at the Copenhagen conference yesterday? A speech from a prominent NGO outside? No, it is an extract from this 1967 speech by Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. and concerned the Vietnam War. The man had a gift with words.

But the sentiment he expressed then about the challenges of his day still apply today to ours. Procrastination still kills. There is no guarantee that our civilisation will escape the fate of those dug up by archeologists. And there is no guarantee that our actions and inactions might not be material contributing causes to that result. As my fifth-grade teacher used to say "It is possible to avoid the consequences of our actions, but not to avoid the consequences of avoiding the consequences". In other words, we shall reap what we are currently sowing.

What of grace? Of forgiveness and the love of God? They are indeed a comfort, removing anxiety over past mistakes and giving us hope to act without full knowledge (to "sin boldly", in the famous exhortation of the older Martin Luther). But they are never an excuse. They give us freedom from guilt and fear, freedom to act, but never freedom from responsibility or the "freedom" to do as we please without consideration of others. This latter "freedom" is merely another kind of slavery, according to Jesus. It is slavery to our selfish desires. The great epistle of freedom is Paul's letter to the Galatians:

For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become slaves to one another. For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’ If, however, you bite and devour one another, take care that you are not consumed by one another.

- Galatians 5.13-15

Are we indeed loving our neighbour? Or are we simply consuming and thereby consuming one another? To follow Christ does not give simple answers. While we may find a new centre and coherence to our lives in seeking to love our neighbour, it does not remove the necessity of working out just what it means for us to love one another today.

So let us examine ourselves without any of the false safety nets of misplaced security or simplistic notions of freedom and ask: what are we to do today? Not "what do we want to do today?", nor "what will enable our lives to continue as they have been?" nor even "what must be do to survive?" But simply, what are we to do today? This question is not easy. The pressing needs of the hour do not remove its complexity. The answers are not found in the back of a book. The apparently obvious solutions put forward by so many interests do not remove our responsibilities to pay attention, to deliberate and to act.

May God have mercy on us all.

Copenhagen petition

Already 13 million people have signed a petition to the 110 presidents and prime ministers currently arriving in Copenhagen saying:

We call on each one of you to make the concessions necessary to meet your historic responsibility in this crisis. Rich countries must offer fair funding, and all countries must set ambitious targets on emissions. Do not leave Copenhagen without a fair, ambitious and binding deal that keeps the world safe from catastrophic global warming of 2 degrees.

You can add your voice here.

What does Christianity have to do with climate change?

And specifically, what does the Christian message have to offer to the enormous UN conference currently underway in Copenhagen?

In a number of previous posts, I've mentioned the work of the Centre of Public Christianity (a.k.a. CPX) in Sydney. The high standards of their online work might now be under threat since they just published a short piece I wrote attempting to answer that question, titled "Facing the truth in Copenhagen". I outline two common mistaken answers and their alternatives. Go and check it out. Or at least go and check out the rest of the CPX site.

CRU Hacking: the end of the world as we know it?

Or, on not being able to see the wood for the trees
Although it may still be too early for a final call, the illegally hacked emails from the Climatic Research Unit in the University of East Anglia are yet to turn up anything that comes close to justifying the "conspiracy", "smoking gun" and "final nail" headlines doing the rounds. There are plenty of cherry-picked quotes that initially sound bad, but isn't it important to presume innocence until proven guilty? So where is the proof?

Well, having had a week to find incriminating evidence, there is very little substantially proven beyond some rudeness from a few scientists when discussing those who have dismissed, misrepresented and distorted their work. Most of the "smoking gun" emails currently generating traffic are "shop-talk" taken out of context. Thus far, it would appear that the claims being made of a grand collusion are themselves merely one more conspiracy theory.

I could well be wrong. There may be more information to come to light in the coming days and weeks. There may be some elements of genuine concern. The discussion of freedom of information requests may indicate that certain individuals didn't want to spend yet more of their time answering the same old questions from dishonest opponents and (maybe) considered unethical actions to avoid doing so. There may be a couple of embarrassing revelations of too much spin (though I am yet to see one published paper decisively compromised by the scandal, and all the relevant journals are looking into the situation). Calling denialists "idiots" and so forth may not increase these scientists' chances of receiving a Christmas card from them this year. But the bottom line at this point is that there is no smoking gun, because there is, as yet, no bullet-ridden body. That is, there is no evidence that I have seen or heard about so far to indicate that any published papers were compromised, that any illegal activity took place, that any conspiracy exists. Amidst all the fuss, it is important to not lose the wood for the trees here.

What the emails do illustrate is something of the internal workings of all sciences, filled as they are with political feuds, concern for reputation, ongoing criticism of methods and interpretations of data, petty squabbles and everything you'd expect to find amongst any group of sinful humans trying hard to sort out various questions about how our world works with limited time, budgets and patience.

There is an interesting and often insightful discussion of some aspects of the ethics of the situation here, including the emails that discuss spurning partisan journals. And there is further detailed discussion of many of the more quoted emails that allegedly show "data manipulation" here. Perhaps the most quoted phrase about "hiding the decline" has been repeatedly shown to be a storm in a tea-cup (e.g. here and here).

Now those who were already convinced that one of the most researched and heavily scrutinised fields in contemporary science is all an elaborate conspiracy may see otherwise, but the onus remains on those who think this is much more than a publicity stunt leading up to Copenhagen to give answers to the following questions: What specific studies have these emails discredited? How does even a least charitable reading of these emails, mainly involving around six scientists at one centre, discredit the work of hundreds of contemporary climatologists and other earth scientists related to climate change in dozens of countries? Where are the faults in the more than thirty thousand published papers that comprise the body of work in this science? Answers must be specific and preferably in peer-reviewed journals.*

So what about all those headlines about the end of the world as we know it (for climate research)? Looks like we're back to the end of the world as we know it (for us and our children).
*NB Those who claim that there are four hundred and fifty peer reviewed papers against the generally accepted understanding are once again on very thin ice indeed. The vast majority of these papers are not actually peer reviewed, and/or known to be false, and/or irrelevant, and/or out of date, and/or not supportive of climate change denial. There are of course many legitimate continuing debates about a number of key factors involved in climate change (e.g. cloud formation, glacial movement, feedback mechanisms and more), but these are almost all happening within a widely accepted general framework that accepts alarming anthropogenic climate change.

PS Apologies for the multiple posts on climate change debates recently. It is just that these issues are quite timely with Copenhagen less than two weeks away.

PPS More interesting commentary.

PPPS And a new joint statement from the MET office, the Natural Environment Research Council and the Royal Society on the state of climate science.

Why I am pessimistic about Copenhagen

There is a great deal in the media about the United Nations Climate Change Conference 2009 which will meet in Copenhagen in just over two weeks. A number of people have asked me recently about my take on the matter. While I think that an international agreement of some kind is necessary to reduce global greenhouse gas levels (it won't happen simply by countries acting unilaterally on national interest), my expectations for Copenhagen are pretty low at the moment. Let me briefly outline some of my current perceptions.

• First, it is worth noting that an international treaty of this scale and complexity is a historical novelty. That doesn't mean it can't be done, but it does mean that we're in uncharted waters. I am certainly no expert on international law, but I am aware that the last decades have seen numerous innovations in this field. Yet any treaty that is developed will be something of an experiment, and one unable to be repeated.

• Second, there are deep divisions between the developed and developing world. This was quite predictable. The former have produced by far the lion's share of historical emissions and continue to be much higher per capita emitters than even the industrializing economies of China and India. And while responsibility is not equally shared, neither are consequences. The current effects of climate change are being felt most keenly in developing nations (perhaps Australia will be (or is) the first developed nation to be seriously affected through water shortages during more frequent and severe droughts). These divisions were visible at Kyoto and were part of the reason for the failure of that effort (when the US and other developed nations (e.g. Australia) refused to ratify the agreement that their own negotiators had reached. Despite ten more years of negotiation and massive progress in climate science, these deep divisions remain and were evident in the African bloc of 50 nations boycotting part of the most recent pre-Copenhagen negotiations in Barcelona. They did this due to a perception that the developed world was not really serious about making significant changes.

•Third, there are particular political difficulties associated with the United States. The US has been historically the largest greenhouse gas emitter and continues to be so if consumption of products made elsewhere is included (about a quarter of China's carbon footprint derives from the creation of products for Western markets). And yet for eight years during the Bush administration, it did all it could to stand in the way of any international progress on the issue, refusing to ratify Kyoto and suppressing the warnings of its own agencies. The Obama change-we-could-believe-in has revealed that the US Congress has little faith. There is basically zero chance of any US climate legislation being passed prior to Copenhagen and even when Congress does get around to addressing it, the issue has become increasingly partisan.* The significant Democrat majority in Congress provides no guarantees for Obama's agenda, as demonstrated in the heath care debate. The US is not the only nation to have internal political divisions over the issue, but some of the quirks of the US system ensure that legislation will have particular difficulty in being passed.
*It is quite refreshing to see that it is much less so here in the UK, where the Conservatives are in full support of Gordon Brown's aggressive stance and promising to not make this an election issue (which may be a political move to neutralise a perceived Labour advantage; the actual determination of a (likely) Cameron government to make this a high-priority issue remains to be seen). It is also quite partisan in Australia.

• Fourth, public opinion about climate change remains in some degree of flux (with the numbers who view it as a serious threat declining in at least the US, Australia and the UK). While elected representatives ought to make their own judgements based on wisdom and available evidence, rather than simply seeing which way the wind is blowing), it only seems to be increasingly true that too many politicians follow rather than lead public opinion. And public opinion in some countries seems to have shifted away from seeing climate change as a real and present danger for various reasons. First, the economic downturn is an immediate distraction from a long-term problem like climate change, and provides a convenient excuse for inaction until economic conditions are better. Second, there is a growing and highly successful misinformation campaign of climate change denial that is muddying the waters with outdated, pseudo-scientific and de-bunked claims (and not just about climatology). This is not to say that there are not plenty of bogus claims made by those who see climate change as a serious issue, but the noise-to-signal ratio on each side is not even close to being equivalent. Of course there is a difference between genuine scepticism and denialism. And of course we ought to weigh important claims that made upon our lives and are right to take most things reported by the media with a grain (or five) of salt. However, Andrew Cameron puts it well when he says, “Too little scepticism is gullible, but there comes a time when too much scepticism is a crippling disconnection from reality.” I intend to write more on this at some stage soon.

As crippling as these four point are, none is entirely insurmountable. Together, they combine to mean that negotiations at Copenhagen are unlikely to reach a binding treaty. Indeed, as a result of these and other obstacles, President Obama has recently stated the increasingly obvious: that Copenhagen will not deliver a legally binding deal. Despite all the momentum and build-up, the talks will now become just another stepping stone rather than a finish-line for climate negotiations. Will this matter? Is a bad deal worse than no deal? Will this cripple the possibility of a treaty or just delay it? All that remains to be seen.

However, I have three more reasons for remaining pessimistic that would still be true even if a miraculous 11th hour deal is reached in Copenhagen.

• Fifth, even the most ambitious targets on the table may well be too modest. There is currently around 387 parts per million of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere. The pre-industrial level was about 275 ppm. Twenty years ago, when the issue started to gain more widespread attention, 550 ppm was seen as an upper limit, but this was basically just a doubling of 275 and was not based on much evidence. The general consensus is currently to try to limit average warming to 2ºC (though even this would have significant negative effects) and most of the recent efforts have focused on stabilizing CO2 levels at 450 ppm as a means towards this (though it is difficult to be precise, it seems 450 ppm only gives about a 50% chance of staying below 2ºC warming). This is what is on the table at Copenhagen. Stabilizing levels at 450 ppm will be extremely difficult and will require massive shifts in economic patterns and expectations. The model proposed by Nicholas Stern in his Stern Report included "overshooting" 450 ppm to peak at 550 and come back down from there. However, more recent studies suggest that even 450 ppm may well lead to runaway warming as feedback effects gain pace and a number of scientists are now calling for a goal of 350 ppm.

• Sixth, I am not currently persuaded that the cap-and-trade market based system proposed as the mechanism driving emission reductions will actually work to reduce CO2 levels. From my limited understanding, a revenue-neutral carbon tax would be better and could also be the subject of international agreements. Solving ecological issues through extending the reach of market logic into more spheres of life seems a little like trying to put out a fire by pouring oil on it.

• Seventh, even if politicians fashion a binding agreement (whether in Copenhagen or some time next year) for 450 ppm, we are very unlikely to get there. The required changes are enormous, the momentum behind business as usual is too large. The economic assumptions of centuries (though note that they only arose during the period of modern industrialization) are too deeply entrenched. No leader is talking about anything other than economic growth as their primary goal. No leader is being honest about the fact that stabilizing levels at even 450 ppm would require massive changes on a scale similar to those experienced in Russia during the collapse of the Soviet Union (the only example in recent history of a nation dropping its emissions at anything like the rate required). Of course, that was (a) unplanned, (b) lasted only a few years rather than decades, and (c) was still not fast enough.

In summary, the Copenhagen conference is an attempt to reach a novel international agreement in a short time frame despite deep political divisions between and within nations and lagging public support, an agreement which may well be too little, too late, using the wrong mechanism and obscuring the true size of the challenge. So call me an optimist.

Nonetheless, politics is the art of the possible and I do not see the conference as either hopeless or useless. Nor, despite my pessimism, do I believe that such pessimism is self-fulfilling. But these points will have to wait for another day since this post is already way too long.

Copenhagen and Climate Change: hope and hopelessness

Tomorrow, in at least 177 countries, over 4,600 political actions (many of them involving hundreds or thousands of people) will be taken under a single banner. The banner? A number, three hundred and fifty, referring to 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide (and equivalents) in the atmosphere. This is the level many leading climate scientists (including the head of the IPCC) now say is required to minimise the likelihood of passing various climate tipping points that trigger positive feedback mechanisms virtually ensuring further destructive changes. The challenge? We're currently at about 390 ppm. Even the most rigorous goal for the Copenhagen negotiations stands at 450 ppm, on the assumption that this gives us a better than even chance of limiting average warming to 2ºC, widely quoted as a threshold beyond which the dangers multiply. But even an average warming of 2ºC will have enormous effects on many aspects of climate, not least precipitation patterns (and so agricultural yields) in some of the world's most food-stressed areas. To avoid this, the 350 campaign brings together a huge number of organisations, individuals, congregations and parties from nearly every country, calling for global leaders who will soon meet in Copenhagen (see clock in sidebar) to reach an agreement that is strong, equitable and grounded in the latest science. Today's Sydney Morning Herald includes this opinion piece by Archbishop Desmond Tutu explaining his support for the campaign.
H/T Matt Moffitt and Geoff Broughton for this link.

Personally (provided we are both over a cold that has been dogging us recently), Jessica and I will be going to one of the Edinburgh events tomorrow in order to add our voices and bodies in support of keeping this issue high on the agenda. You can find an event near you here.

However, political support for a strong deal seems to be waning. New polling shows that only 57% of Americans believe the climate is warming (compared to 77% in 2007) and only 36% accept that the human actions are primarily to blame. In Australia, 68% saw climate change as a threat to Australia's vital interests back in 2006, by last year that was still 66%, but is now only 52%.

With national leaders concerned about national interests, every country is out to minimise its costs, particularly since the primary dangers are decades away, well beyond the term of any of those responsible for current negotiations. Different approaches to sharing the burden are also evident between countries that have historically contributed most to emissions and those whose emissions are currently rising fastest.

And there is worse news. Even if leaders manage to agree in Copenhagen to limiting emissions to 450ppm, reaching some kind of compromise between developing and developed nations, then even the most optimistic assumptions about a best case scenario put the chances of actually sticking to anything like that as almost impossible. Clive Hamilton, one of Australia's best known public intellectuals and Professor of Public Ethics at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, a joint centre of the Australian National University, Charles Sturt University and the University of Melbourne, in a lecture delivered earlier this week, summarises the situation like this:

It is clear that limiting warming to 2ºC is beyond us; the question now is whether we can limit warming to 4ºC [to see what a 4ºC change might look like, see here, or here]. The conclusion that, even if we act promptly and resolutely, the world is on a path to reach 650 ppm and associated warming of 4°C is almost too frightening to accept. Yet that is the reluctant conclusion of the world’s leading climate scientists. Even with the most optimistic set of assumptions—the ending of deforestation, a halving of emissions associated with food production, global emissions peaking in 2020 and then falling by 3 per cent a year for a few decades—we have no chance of preventing emissions rising well above a number of critical tipping points that will spark uncontrollable climate change.

- Clive Hamilton, "Is it too late to prevent catastrophic climate change?"

The whole article is worth reading. In it, Hamilton argues that things are worse than we thought. Whereas until recently most policy makers assumed that we could limit change to less than 2ºC and that the effects of that change were "worrying but manageable", new research into the likely negative effects of even 2ºC warming and into the extreme (political, economic and social) difficulty of staying below the 450ppm barrier makes even the most aggressive suggestions currently on the table seem at once both beyond our reach and too little in any case.

So why bother at all? Why campaign for a basically impossible target? Why make the (sometimes painful) lifestyle, legislative and policy changes required to reduce our carbon footprint? If all our efforts will be too little, too late, why not "eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die"? A longer answer will probably take much of my thesis to articulate. An excellent 11-page answer by Andrew Cameron in his 2007 report to Sydney Anglican Synod on behalf of the Social Issues Executive can be found here.

But the short answer for an already over-lengthy blog post is found in the context of that famous quote ("eat, drink and be merry") in 1 Corinthians 15, namely the Christian hope of the resurrection of the body. The resurrection of Jesus is a promise and foretaste of the general resurrection of the dead: for as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive. The distinctively Christian hope of resurrection includes the belief that God has not given up on creation, nor on humanity, and that even our stupid self-destruction cannot ultimately thwart divine love. If God has not given up, neither can we. Our actions may or may not make a difference. Our society may or may not survive in anything like its present form, but living well, with humility and repentance as responsible members of the community of life, is enough.