Climate change

The President of the Maldives can sell his snorkel: he’ll be waving not drowning. The New Scientist carries a fascinating article, examining the research of Paul Kench of the University of Auckland and Arthur Webb of the South Pacific Applied Geoscience Commission. Using aerial photographs and high-resolution satellite images, Kench and Webb have found that 23 out of 27 low-lying Pacific islands, deemed to be vulnerable to rising sea levels, have grown by up to 10 percent in 40 years. Local sea levels have risen by 120 millimetres over the period. Coral is defying the apocalyptic flooding scenarios. Reef coral surrounding the islands is eroded and deposited to form atolls or coastal spurs.

Several months ago, European leaders went to Copenhagen to save the planet. China, India and Brazil on the other hand went to the climate negotiations in Denmark to showcase the changed distribution of power in the world. Unsurprisingly, the Europeans came home empty-handed, shut out of the key negotiations and powerless despite what was meant to be a standard-setting promise of 20 percent cut in the EU's greenhouse gas emissions. The US and the rising powers struck a non-binding deal, the value of which is still being determined.

I have been gripped by The Guardian’s climate change investigation and reporting these last few days. We do like to tease George Monbiot but he was one of the first to denounce spinning of the data and science by the University of East Anglia’s climate unit. It’s a mark of his professionalism and seriousness: global warming is a cause important to him, and he resents attempts to misrepresent things by his own side, or by his enemies. The Guardian seems to take the same view, and has sent David Leigh and others out on the investigation trail, and the final in the four-part series is printed today. It shows how the debate is changing – a topic brilliantly explored by Matt Ridley in his cover piece this week.

So who or what is to blame for the failure of the Copenhagen gathering to achieve what most people hoped for? Polly Toynbee says that the nature of politics is to blame. Personally I blame U2’s Bono. I don’t blame him for the failure of world leaders to agree a legally-binding agreement, of course. But I do blame him for the unrealistic expectations that were raised in the run-up to the meeting. Issue-based campaigning, of which the climate change movement is the latest example, came into its own with the debt-relief campaign of Jubilee 2000, which the Irish singer spearheaded.

This morning's papers share a unifying theme: the failure of political leadership to secure a deal at Copenhagen. Now, I applaud politicians for not succombing to enormous pressure and making a series of pledges that would risk grinding the world's poor ever deeper into the dirt. For those who take a different view, it is not that politicians have failed, but that high politics is an irrelevance, a vanity. I know Coffee Housers loathe her opinions, but Polly Toynbee is at her polemical best today. She writes: 'Politics is being weighed in the balance and found wanting. The writing is on the wall. The leadership required within and between each nation is heavier lifting that the weak machinery of governmental power can manage.

Today the TaxPayers' Alliance is releasing a new report which sets out the huge and excessive burden that green taxes impose on families and business across the UK. At the moment, 14 percent of domestic bill costs are the result of climate change policies.  Increasing the price of energy hits the poor and elderly hardest - which, in turn, increases poverty and benefit dependency.  At the same time, 21 percent of industrial electricity bills are the result of climate change policies.  If we want to make our economy less dependent on financial services, driving up a major part of many manufacturing firms' costs isn't the way to do it. Despite these costs, the current approach doesn't appear to be achieving the desired cuts in emissions.

The Spectator’s Global Warming special is only in the shops for a couple more days.  If you’ve missed it – or if you still need convincing to buy it – here’s an extended version of the article by Amanda Baillieu from within its pages: When a work colleague sent a tweet to his 2000 followers comparing me to Nick Griffin I realised I was heading for my Jan Moir moment. A few days before, I had written an opinion piece with the rather attention seeking headline Is global warming hot air?  I’d wanted to see if my readers, who are mainly architects, agreed with the line now adopted by the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) that ‘man made’ climate change is the greatest challenge facing the profession.