COP29 Host Nation President: “Having oil and gas … It’s a gift from God.”

I wish I knew Geoff.

Obviously we can all speculate, and occasionally we all see hints and catch glimpses.

But I’ve been wrong before, so I’m not going to bet the farm on something I don’t know for sure.

Take Climategate for example. When I first read Climategate, I expected to find emails with people laughing about how badly they were deceiving the public, and how much money they were making out of the scam. Instead what I saw was a bunch of people who were so sure they were right, they occasionally appeared to bend the rules, to ensure “deniers” didn’t obtain any leverage to deflect them from their mission to save the world.

There is a climategate email (0700.txt) which goes to the heart of this. Did scientists provide “stronger signals” because they were afraid of losing funding, and had to give politicians a bit of what they want to protect their mission to save the world from global warming? Because I don’t believe I saw evidence that scientists were just out to make money from grubby grant scams.

I doubt we’ll ever know exactly what was going through their minds, even with megabytes of private emails to read.

…

The interface between science and politics

B Stauffer said that science could not prevent global climate change, therefore science should support sustainability, however if science can point to means of reducing the rate of global change, this would show that there was something that could be done and would evoke political decisions.

J Jouzel said that the truth will come from the use of models and their validation and that there was a move in WCRP – CLIVAR to take more interest in palaeo-data. Communications between scientists and politicians are becoming more and more important and the scientific population must be large enough to be visible. D Raynaud commented that the work by Stocker in 1997 on the gross rate of emissions and the change in thermo circulation is important to conferences such as Kyoto. K Hutter added that politicians accused scientists of a high signal to noise ratio; scientists must make sure that they come up with stronger signals. The time-frame for science and politics is very different; politicians need instant information, but scientific results take a long time

A Ghazi pointed out that the funding is set once the politicians want the research to be done. We need to make them understand that we do not understand the climate system. Kyoto was a compromise and the EC accepted pollution levels which were not accepted by all members. At the next meeting in Buenos Aires in November 1998 we must learn how to approach the USA. The USA wants to buy the 30% of emissions that is not achieved in Russia. This emission trading is not acceptable. However the US argues that if the EC is trading within itself then it can do so also, however the EC will be achieving an emissions reduction of 6-8

There needs to be more science representation to interact with the policy makers. Chris Rapley added that the message needs to be passed that science has the rational approach and that to look at the Earth from a policy-makers point of view raises different issues and interconnections.