It’s worth going back every so often to see how projections made back in the day are shaping up. As we get to the end of another year, we can update all of the graphs of annual means with another single datapoint. Statistically this isn’t hugely important, but people seem interested, so why not?

For example, here is an update of the graph showing the annual mean anomalies from the IPCC AR4 models plotted against the surface temperature records from the HadCRUT3v and GISTEMP products (it really doesn’t matter which). Everything has been baselined to 1980-1999 (as in the 2007 IPCC report) and the envelope in grey encloses 95% of the model runs. The 2009 number is the Jan-Nov average.

As you can see, now that we have come out of the recent La Niña-induced slump, temperatures are back in the middle of the model estimates. If the current El Niño event continues into the spring, we can expect 2010 to be warmer still. But note, as always, that short term (15 years or less) trends are not usefully predictable as a function of the forcings. It’s worth pointing out as well, that the AR4 model simulations are an ‘ensemble of opportunity’ and vary substantially among themselves with the forcings imposed, the magnitude of the internal variability and of course, the sensitivity. Thus while they do span a large range of possible situations, the average of these simulations is not ‘truth’.

There is a claim doing the rounds that ‘no model’ can explain the recent variations in global mean temperature (George Will made the claim last month for instance). Of course, taken absolutely literally this must be true. No climate model simulation can match the exact timing of the internal variability in the climate years later. But something more is being implied, specifically, that no model produced any realisation of the internal variability that gave short term trends similar to what we’ve seen. And that is simply not true.

We can break it down a little more clearly. The trend in the annual mean HadCRUT3v data from 1998-2009 (assuming the year-to-date is a good estimate of the eventual value) is 0.06+/-0.14 ºC/dec (note this is positive!). If you want a negative (albeit non-significant) trend, then you could pick 2002-2009 in the GISTEMP record which is -0.04+/-0.23 ºC/dec. The range of trends in the model simulations for these two time periods are [-0.08,0.51] and [-0.14, 0.55], and in each case there are multiple model runs that have a lower trend than observed (5 simulations in both cases). Thus ‘a model’ did show a trend consistent with the current ‘pause’. However, that these models showed it, is just coincidence and one shouldn’t assume that these models are better than the others. Had the real world ‘pause’ happened at another time, different models would have had the closest match.

Another figure worth updating is the comparison of the ocean heat content (OHC) changes in the models compared to the latest data from NODC. Unfortunately, I don’t have the post-2003 model output handy, but the comparison between the 3-monthly data (to the end of Sep) and annual data versus the model output is still useful.

(Note, that I’m not quite sure how this comparison should be baselined. The models are simply the difference from the control, while the observations are ‘as is’ from NOAA). I have linearly extended the ensemble mean model values for the post 2003 period (using a regression from 1993-2002) to get a rough sense of where those runs could have gone.

And finally, let’s revisit the oldest GCM projection of all, Hansen et al (1988). The Scenario B in that paper is running a little high compared with the actual forcings growth (by about 10%), and the old GISS model had a climate sensitivity that was a little higher (4.2ºC for a doubling of CO2) than the current best estimate (~3ºC).

The trends are probably most useful to think about, and for the period 1984 to 2009 (the 1984 date chosen because that is when these projections started), scenario B has a trend of 0.26+/-0.05 ºC/dec (95% uncertainties, no correction for auto-correlation). For the GISTEMP and HadCRUT3 data (assuming that the 2009 estimate is ok), the trends are 0.19+/-0.05 ºC/dec (note that the GISTEMP met-station index has 0.21+/-0.06 ºC/dec). Corrections for auto-correlation would make the uncertainties larger, but as it stands, the difference between the trends is just about significant.

Thus, it seems that the Hansen et al ‘B’ projection is likely running a little warm compared to the real world, but assuming (a little recklessly) that the 26 yr trend scales linearly with the sensitivity and the forcing, we could use this mismatch to estimate a sensitivity for the real world. That would give us 4.2/(0.26*0.9) * 0.19=~ 3.4 ºC. Of course, the error bars are quite large (I estimate about +/-1ºC due to uncertainty in the true underlying trends and the true forcings), but it’s interesting to note that the best estimate sensitivity deduced from this projection, is very close to what we think in any case. For reference, the trends in the AR4 models for the same period have a range 0.21+/-0.16 ºC/dec (95%). Note too, that the Hansen et al projection had very clear skill compared to a null hypothesis of no further warming.

The sharp-eyed among you might notice a couple of differences between the variance in the AR4 models in the first graph, and the Hansen et al model in the last. This is a real feature. The model used in the mid-1980s had a very simple representation of the ocean – it simply allowed the temperatures in the mixed layer to change based on the changing the fluxes at the surface. It did not contain any dynamic ocean variability – no El Niño events, no Atlantic multidecadal variability etc. and thus the variance from year to year was less than one would expect. Models today have dynamic ocean components and more ocean variability of various sorts, and I think that is clearly closer to reality than the 1980s vintage models, but the large variation in simulated variability still implies that there is some way to go.

So to conclude, despite the fact these are relatively crude metrics against which to judge the models, and there is a substantial degree of unforced variability, the matches to observations are still pretty good, and we are getting to the point where a better winnowing of models dependent on their skill may soon be possible. But more on that in the New Year.

CommonFuture: Join the discussion at http://common-future.org/wiki/Join_the_discussion for our action plan in 2010. #fb

Open thread for various climate science-related discussions. Suggestions for potential future posts are welcome.

Three more commentaries by experts not associated with RealClimate.

Ben Santer, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Ben Santer again

Myles Allen, University of Oxford

It’s worth noting that Allen has published commentary that is critical of RealClimate.

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Comments on this should be posted under the Hansen post.

Guest Commentary: An Open Essay on “ClimateGate”
Kim Cobb, Georgia Tech

Since the widespread distribution of stolen e-mails originating from the University of East Anglia, I have become increasingly distressed by the way that the internet and media machinery has digested their content. As a climate scientist, I have always been sensitive to the direction the wind is blowing on climate change, and it has become increasingly clear to me that more scientists need to add their voices to the debate. I learned early in my career that it is far better to address the issues raised by global warming skeptics head on rather than ignore their attacks and let public sentiment evolve in an information battleground that has been ceded to their arguments.

I am a collaborator, co-author, and friend of both Phil Jones and Michael Mann, the authors of the most frequently quoted e-mails from the “CRU hack”. My name even appears in one of these emails to Phil Jones, regarding my involvement as an unpaid collaborator on his proposal. I don’t believe my relationship to these scientists disqualifies my opinion on this matter – rather, I believe that as a paleoclimate scientist who knows the intricate details of the matters they discuss, my opinion may be of value to the general public.

There is no doubt that the CRU e-mails are an embarrassment to climate science in general, and to paleoclimate in particular. I have read the “greatest hits”, and cringe along with everyone else at their content. But in my professional opinion, these e-mails reveal nothing more than brief, emotion-fueled remarks made in the face of unrelenting and often disingenuous attacks. Far more importantly, the conduct (questionable or not) of a handful of climate scientists in no way undermines the scientific support for anthropogenic global warming. The conclusions reached in the IPCC report do not critically depend on the work of these few scientists.

One of the more unnerving impressions from the behind-the-scenes glance at climate research may be that subjectivity exists in climate science. My response is “Well, duh.” Scientists are not technicians, we are not following a cookbook or a yellow-brick-road. Rather, we make a myriad of decisions every day about our results, based on our interpretations, which in turn are based on (in this case) years of experience. Some aspects of climate science are more open to subjective interpretation than others (the standardization of some late 20th century tree ring paleoclimate records being near the top of this list). If a subjective choice changes the conclusion of a study, then the confidence in the conclusion is reduced and the associated uncertainties must be quantified. But the scientific process is self-correcting; if an inappropriate choice was made, then this will eventually be identified by other researchers, our scientific understanding will improve, and our confidence in the conclusions will increase.

The concern about peer review evident in these emails arises from the disproportionate impact of a few peer reviewed articles that called into question some of the scientific evidence for anthropogenic global warming. The public impact of these single articles quickly rose to rival those of the dozens of climate science articles published in Nature, Science, and other reputable journals. In my eyes, the problem is not with the journal, editor, or authors of the papers in question, because dissenting voices will always exist, but with the public relations machinery that gives them undo influence over public sentiment and the political process. At the time, there were several careful point-by-point refutations of the anti-global warming articles written, but such contributions failed to quell the fire that was sparked by politically motivated skeptics and fueled by media outlets eager for controversy. It was a misplaced and perhaps even misguided effort for the CRU scientists to suggest changes to the peer-review system in that case, but I can definitely understand their frustration.

The last point that merits mention is the issue of who should have access to raw and processed climate data and associated metadata. We all agree that all types of climate data should be made publicly available. Ideally, data consumers would further progress by seeking to understand the fundamental truths of climate change and probing the limitations of climate datasets, contributing to a global dialogue in the peer-reviewed literature. Nevertheless, the fact of the matter is that a small portion of the raw data that went into some of the CRU SST datasets is proprietary, and was shared by parties who stipulated that it not be publicly distributed. Even if this were not the case, archiving such a large dataset in such a way as to make it useful to those not well-versed in IDL or GRADS is not a trivial task. There is a financial cost associated with making data and metadata and code publicly accessible, and this cost needs to be borne by someone other than the scientists themselves or their institutions, which operate on tight budgets.

I feel that as climate scientists we must put ourselves at the very center of the discussions surrounding the causes and consequences of anthropogenic global warming. In doing so, some may come dangerously close to policy advocacy, but to recuse ourselves from the raging international debate would be a great loss for humanity.

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Comments on this should be posted under the Hansen post.

Several people have written saying that it would be useful to have an expert opinion on the state of the surface temperature data from someone other than RealClimate members.

Here you go:
TemperatureOfScience.pdf

You don’t get more expert than Jim Hansen.

The 1991 Science paper by Friis-Christensen & Lassen, work by Henrik Svensmark (Physical Review Letters), and calculations done by Scafetta & West (in the journals Geophysical Research Letters, Journal of Geophysical Research, and Physics Today) have inspired the idea that the recent warming is due to changes in the sun, rather than greenhouse gases.

We have discussed these papers before here on RealClimate (here, here, and here), and I think it’s fair to say that these studies have been fairly influential one way or the other. But has anybody ever seen the details of the methods used, or the data? I believe that a full disclosure of their codes and data would really boost the confidence in their work, if they were sound. So if they believe so strongly that their work is solid, why not more transparency?

There is a recent story in the British paper The Independent, where Friis-Christensen and Svensmark responded to the criticism forwarded by Peter Laut (here). All this would perhaps be unnecessary if they had disclosed their codes and data.

Gavin and I published a paper in Journal of Geophysical Research, where we tested the general approach used by Scafetta & West, and tried to repeat their analysis. We were up-front about our lack of success in a 100% replication of their work, but we argue that the any pronounced effect – as claimed by Scafetta & West – should be detectable even if the set-up is not 100% identical.

However, Scafetta does not accept our analysis and has criticized me for lacking knowledge about wavelet analysis – he tells me to read the text books. So I asked him to post his code openly on the Internet so that others could repeat our test with their code. That should settle our controversy.

After repeated requests, he told me that he doesn’t really understand why I’m not able to write my own program to reproduce the calculations (actually, I did in the paper together with Gavin, but Scafetta wouldn’t accept our analysis), and keeps insulting me by telling me to take a course on wavelet analysis. Furthermore, he stated that there “are several other and even more serious problems” in our work. I figure then that the easiest way to get to the bottom of this issue it to repeat our tests with his code.

A replication in general doesn’t require full disclosure of source code because the description in the paper should be sufficient, though in this case it clearly wasn’t. So to both save having us do it again and perhaps miss some other little detail – in addition to using an algorithm that Scafetta is happy with – it’s worth getting the code with which to validate our efforts.

It should be a common courtesy to provide methods requested by other scientists in order to speedily get to the essence of the issue, and not to waste time with the minutiae of which year is picked to end the analysis.

The reason why Gavin and I were not able to repeat Scafetta’s analysis in exact details is that his papers didn’t disclose all the necessary details. The first point he raised was that we used periodic instead of reflection boundaries. The fact that the paper referred to the expression ‘1/2 A sin (2 pi t)’ to describe the temperatures or solar forcing would normally suggest that they used periodic rather than reflection boundaries. There was no information in the paper about reflection boundary. But this is no big deal, as we have subsequently repeated the analysis with reflection boundary, and that doesn’t alter our conclusions.

After further communication, we found out that Scafetta re-sampled the data in such a way that the center of the wavelet band pass filter was located exactly on the 11 and 22 year solar cycles, which were the frequencies of interest. He also informed me that a reasonable choice of the year when the reflection boudary was made should be the year 2002-3 when the sun experienced a maximum for both the 11 and 22 year cycles. This information was not provided in the papers.

I’m no psychic, so I couldn’t have guessed that all this was needed to reproduce his result. But since Scafetta has lost faith in my ability to repeat his work, I think it’s even a greater reason to disclose his code so that others can have a go.

For the record, we did not just use wavelets to filter the data – we obtained the same conclusion with an ordinary band-pass filter.

Full Paper

"Rules must be binding; Violations must be punished; Words must mean something."

(US President Barack Obama)

The negotiations currently taking place at Copenhagen at the fifteenth Conference of the Parties (COP-15) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) aim at the fundamental objective of the UNFCCC, namely to stabilize atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations at non-dangerous levels. It is argued that the existing institutional tools at our disposal – international treaties and in particular the Kyoto protocol – are insufficient to achieve this goal. Furthermore, the framework put in place at Kyoto suffers multiple and fundamental flaws which fatally undermine its effectiveness; any new treaty must have a structure which mostly evades these flaws if it is to be effective. Treaties, legal structures, and other institutions more commensurate with the scale of the climate change challenge are suggested to inform discussions around the structure of any future climate agreement. An agenda for effective global action is outlined here:

1. Strong global institutions – e.g. a world environmental agency – including an agreed framework (such as coordinated carbon taxes) for collective policy, to replace national commitments.
2. A framework action plan to eliminate carbon emissions sector-by-sector, region-by-region, over the next two to three decades. In particular a plan to develop, transfer and deploy the safe, responsible, and very large-scale use of enhanced energy efficiency, renewable-electric, nuclear, and carbon capture and storage energy technologies; and to encourage responsible land use and agriculture, including the sustainable use of water¹.
3. A significant ($100-$200/tCO₂e), sectorally complete, substantially geographically complete, agreed, and guaranteed minimum carbon price, levied upstream at the national level (including embodied carbon from any regions not otherwise carbon-constrained), with revenues used at national discretion. It is possible that a carbon tax may have net economic benefits at the national level if used to replace taxes with higher 'deadweight' costs. The removal of fossil fuel subsidies has already been agreed as part of the Kyoto protocol, but has not been fully implemented.
4. A plan to protect forests and other natural carbon stores.
5. A plan to keep high carbon fuels in the ground (following Hansen et al. 2008).
6. An enabling framework for enforceable state-corporation climate contracts (e.g. guaranteeing the carbon price for investors) (Ismer & Neuhoff 2006).
7. An enabling framework for the use of trade sanctions to enforce state-state climate commitments, such as border tax adjustments (Ismer & Neuhoff 2007).
8. Unimpeachable monitoring and verification of all commitments.

Full Paper

The structures for climate change mitigation agreed at Kyoto were flawed in a number of different ways. The most obvious flaw was the lack of effectiveness – it is not clear that the Kyoto treaty has reduced emissions at all. There are three main reasons for this lack of effectiveness:

Firstly, the treaty does not give binding commitments for all major emitters – in particular, the developing countries has no binding commitments and the United States signed but did not ratify the treaty.

Secondly, among the countries that implemented the agreement, many did not achieve the Kyoto targets. Little real action was noticeable – those who have achieved the targets (such as the UK and the former Soviet states) seemed to do so largely by accident rather than design.

Thirdly, the targets, although binding in international law, included no enforcement mechanism, beyond a threat that future targets would be more stringent for those countries that failed to achieve the target. There are also the following problems with international treaties in general:

• Countries can in principle withdraw from treaties once signed, although this is rare.
• Treaties face significant barriers in the US congress, with two thirds of United States senators required for ratification.

The Kyoto approach requires national emissions targets, negotiated country-by-country. It is possible that emissions reductions, whilst key to the end goal, are a politically and psychologically negative way of 'framing' commitments. (In other words, if commitments are expressed in different, but likely equivalent, terms, the balance of perceived national benefits may be different, for a given level of expected stringency). Countries may not know if they are able to reduce emissions by a large amount. Fast developing countries such as China or India may wish to play safe, avoiding emissions targets, whereas a more practical action plan (see below) may be perceived more positively by nations.

The Kyoto treaty and the actions since the treaty encourage downstream emissions trading. There are a few fundamental flaws to this approach:

• Low coverage of sectors (the European Emissions Trading Scheme (EU-ETS) covers only 40% of the EU domestic emissions, and none of the net emissions embodied in its net imports);
• An emissions trading scheme gives a volatile price for structural reasons related to the short-run price insensitivity (inelasticity) of fuel demand and the fact that carbon based fuels are ubiquitous in a modern economy (and so fuel demand is sensitive to the economic cycle and the weather). This volatility can lead to delayed investment and higher economic costs;
• Emissions trading schemes encourage 'quota seeking' behaviour by nations in any original agreement and by companies in the political process of allocation rights to emit;
• Perverse incentive to avoid stringent commitments – the structure of the agreement with national emissions caps fails to transform incentives of nation states;
• The use of 'offsets', such as the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) has multiple problems in addition to the lack of a developing country cap. Most fundamentally, it encourages 'double counting'. Offsets provide perverse incentives to developing countries to inflate expected emissions in order to demand payment to reduce them back to more reasonable levels.
• No incentives to preserve existing forests and other natural carbon stores.

More fundamentally, none of the major powers (with the possible exception of the EU) have agreed to cede any sovereignty to a global institution. There also seems to be a fundamental difference in opinion between developed countries – which expect developing countries to accept binding commitments – and developing countries, who seek financial assistance from the developed world.

Finally, there is a lack of any necessary or direct connection between a treaty being agreed, and any real action to reduce emissions. We need a new treaty that has an 'action plan' to reduce emissions.

Make a deal or go home?
Given the multiple flaws in a possible Copenhagen agreement, there are two possible approaches. Firstly, the countries could avoid making a deal; Secondly, the countries could make a flawed deal that is ineffective. Both outcomes have major drawbacks. We might not get a better opportunity to reduce emissions, yet a flawed treaty would be little better than none at all. I think the best that could be expected would be a global agreed target and then leave implementation of those targets to a further treaty

Kevin Wood, Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean, University of Washington
Eric Steig, Department of Earth and Space Sciences, University of Washington

In the wake of the CRU e-mail hack, the suggestion that scientists have been hiding the raw meteorological data that underpin global temperature records has appeared in the media. For example, New York Times science writer John Tierney wrote, “It is not unreasonable to give outsiders a look at the historical readings and the adjustments made by experts… Trying to prevent skeptics from seeing the raw data was always a questionable strategy, scientifically.”

The implication is that something secretive and possibly nefarious has been afoot in the way data have been handled, and that the validity of key data products (especially those produced by CRU) is suspect on these grounds. This is simply not the case.

It may come as a surprise to some that the first compilation of world-wide meteorological data was published by the Smithsonian Institution in 1927, long before anthropogenic climate change emerged as an important issue (Clayton et al., 1927). This volume is still widely available on the library shelf as are updates that were issued periodically. This same data collection provided the foundation for the World Monthly Surface Station Climatology, 1738-cont. As has been the case for many years, any interested party can access this from UCAR (http://dss.ucar.edu/datasets/ds570) and other electronic data archives.

Now, it is well known that these data are not perfect. Most records are not as complete as could be wished. Errors periodically creep in and have to be identified and weeded out. But beyond the simple errors of the key-entry type there are inevitably discontinuities or inhomogeneities introduced into the records due to changes in observing practices, station environment, or other non-meteorological factors. It is very unlikely there is any historical record in existence unaffected by this issue.

Filtering inhomogeneities out of meteorological data is a complicated procedure. Coherent surface air temperature (SAT) datasets like those produced by CRU also require a procedure for combining different (but relatively nearby) record fragments. However, the methods used to undertake these unavoidable tasks are not secret: they have been described in an extensive literature over many decades (e.g. Conrad, 1944; Jones and Moberg, 2003; Peterson et al., 1998, and references therein). Discontinuities may nevertheless persist in data products, but when they are found they are published (e.g. Thompson et al., 2008).

Furthermore, it is a fairly simple exercise to extract the grid-box temperatures from a CRU dataset—CRUTEM3v for example—and compare it to raw data from World Monthly Surface Station Climatology. CRU data are available from http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature. One should not expect a perfect match due to the issues described above, but an exercise like this does provide a simple way to evaluate the extent to which the CRU data represent the underlying raw data. In particular, it would presumably be of interest to know whether the trends in the CRU data are very different than the trends in the raw data, since this could be taken as indication that the methods used by CRU result in an overstatement of the evidence for global warming.

As an example, we extracted a sample of raw land-surface station data and corresponding CRU data. These were arbitrarily selected based on the following criteria: the length of record should be ~100 years or longer, and the standard reference period 1961–1990 (used to calculate SAT anomalies) must contain no more than 4 missing values. We also selected stations spread as widely as possible over the globe. We randomly chose 94 out of a possible 318 long records. Of these, 65 were sufficiently complete during the reference period to include in the analysis. These were split into two groups of 33 and 32 stations (Set A and Set B), which were then analyzed separately.

Results are shown in the following figures. The key points: both Set A and Set B indicate warming with trends that are statistically identical between the CRU data and the raw data (>99% confidence); the histograms show that CRU quality control has, as expected, narrowed the variance (both extreme positive and negative values removed).

Comparison of CRUTEM3v data with raw station data taken from World Monthly Surface Station Climatology. On the left are the mean temperature anomalies from each pair of randomly chosen times series. On the right are the distribution of trends in those time series and their means and standard errors. (The standard error provides an estimate of how well the sampling of ~30 stations represents the full global data set assuming a Gaussian distribution.) Note that not all the trends are for identical time periods, since not all data sets are the same length.

Conclusion: There is no indication whatsoever of any problem with the CRU data. An independent study (by a molecular biologist it Italy, as it happens) came to the same conclusion using a somewhat different analysis. None of this should come as any surprise of course, since any serious errors would have been found and published already.

It’s worth noting that the global average trend obtained by CRU for 1850-2005, as reported by the IPCC (http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg1/ar4-wg1-chapter3.pdf), 0.47 0.54 degrees/century,* is actually a bit lower (though not by a statistically significant amount) than we obtained on average with our random sampling of stations.

*See table 3.2 in IPCC WG1 report.

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References
Clayton, H. H., F. M. Exner, G. T. Walker, and C. G. Simpson (1927), World weather records, collected from official sources, in Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections, edited, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

Conrad, V. (1944), Methods in Climatology, 2nd ed., 228 pp., Harvard University Press, Cambridge.

Jones, P. D., and A. Moberg (2003), Hemispheric and large-scale surface air temperature variations: An extensive revision and an update to 2001, Journal of Climate, 16, 206-223.

Peterson, T. C., et al. (1998), Homogeneity adjustments of in-situ atmospheric climate data: a review, International Journal of Climatology, 18, 1493-1517.

Thompson, D. W. J., J. J. Kennedy, J. M. Wallace, and P. D. Jones (2008), A large discontinuity in the mid-twentieth century in observed global-mean surface temperature, Nature, 453(7195), 646-649.

CommonFuture: JOIN the launch online at 2pm GMT at: https://webmeeting.dimdim.com/portal/JoinForm.action?confKey=common_future_video_talk #fb

CommonFuture: TODAY: LIVEstream from Bella Center, Copenhagen, at the Launch of the South-North Journal - 2pm GMT #fb

CommonFuture: Global Climate Policy: An Agenda For Effective Action http://bit.ly/8KiKCm #fb

CommonFuture: Global Climate Policy: An Agenda For Effective Action http://bit.ly/56Ud2K #fb

16,000 attendees, thousands of cups of coffee and thousands of interesting conversations (and debates) about science.

That would be San Francisco, not Copenhagen of course.

There are a few of the RC crew there, so hopefully we’ll get some updates, but keep track of some other attending bloggers as well:

• Michael Tobis
• Steve Easterbrook
• Update: Harvey Liefert on the AIRS CO2 data
• Update2: Summary of Richard Alley’s talk
• Update3: The official AGU blog

and the whole AGU blogroll. There are some live webcasts through the week that might be interesting too.

If there are any other attendees reading, feel free to post about any interesting sessions/talks you see. I’ll update the main post with anything particularly noteworthy.

CommonFuture: Journal will be launched on Tue 3pm (Copenhagen time) at our booth in the tcktcktck Arcade area within Bella Center. #fb

CommonFuture: Journal will be launched on Tue 3pm (Copenhagen time) at our booth in the tcktcktck Arcade area within Bella Center. #fb

CommonFuture: Journal will be launched on Tue 3pm (Copenhagen time) at our booth in the tcktcktck Arcade area within Bella Center.

CommonFuture: South-North Journal arrived safely in Copenhagen. First issues delivered to our senior advisors. #fb

Climate Policy A New Agenda (pdf), by Stephen Stretton

Summary

 “Rules must be binding; Violations must be punished; Words must mean something.”

(US President Barack Obama)

The negotiations currently taking place at Copenhagen at the fifteenth Conference of the Parties (COP-15) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) aim at the fundamental objective of the UNFCCC, namely to stabilize atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations at non-dangerous levels. It is argued that the existing institutional tools at our disposal – international treaties and in particular the Kyoto protocol – are insufficient to achieve this goal. Furthermore, the framework put in place at Kyoto suffers multiple and fundamental flaws which fatally undermine its effectiveness; any new treaty must have a structure which mostly evades these flaws if it is to be effective. Treaties, legal structures, and other institutions more commensurate with the scale of the climate change challenge are suggested to inform discussions around the structure of any future climate agreement. An agenda for effective global action is outlined here:

1. Strong global institutions – e.g. a world environmental agency – including an agreed framework (such as coordinated carbon taxes) for collective policy, to replace national commitments.

2. A framework action plan to eliminate carbon emissions sector-by-sector, region-by-region, over the next two to three decades. In particular a plan to develop, transfer and deploy the safe, responsible, and very large-scale use of enhanced energy efficiency, renewable-electric, nuclear, and carbon capture and storage energy technologies; and to encourage responsible land use and agriculture, including the sustainable use of water¹.

3. A significant ($100-$200/tCO₂e), sectorally complete, substantially geographically complete, agreed, and guaranteed minimum carbon price, levied upstream at the national level (including embodied carbon from any regions not otherwise carbon-constrained), with revenues used at national discretion. It is possible that a carbon tax may have net economic benefits at the national level if used to replace taxes with higher ‘deadweight’ costs. The removal of fossil fuel subsidies has already been agreed as part of the Kyoto protocol, but has not been fully implemented.

4. A plan to protect forests and other natural carbon stores.

5. A plan to keep high carbon fuels in the ground (following Hansen et al. 2008).

6. An enabling framework for enforceable state-corporation climate contracts (e.g. guaranteeing the carbon price for investors) (Ismer & Neuhoff 2006).

7. An enabling framework for the use of trade sanctions to enforce state-state climate commitments, such as border tax adjustments (Ismer & Neuhoff 2007).

8. Unimpeachable monitoring and verification of all commitments.