OIL-PRODUCING COUNTRIES yesterday blocked a proposal by vulnerable small island states that the most recent scientific work on climate change should be summarised to aid negotiators at this year’s round of UN talks.
The proposal, made at a plenary session of the UN’s scientific committee, was supported by African, Latin American and Caribbean delegates as well as the EU, Australia and New Zealand. But it was blocked by Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and Venezuela.
Noting that several small island states “could become stateless from sea-level rise”, Wendel Trio, Greenpeace International’s climate policy director, said they “were simply asking for information . . . they desperately need to make decisions about their very future. That Saudi Arabia . . . exploited the UN consensus rule to stop the world’s most vulnerable countries from getting a much-needed summary of the latest climate science is breathtaking for its criminal disregard for the human impacts of climate change,” he added.
Seychelles ambassador Ronald Jumeau said some of the small island states “can’t afford to wait” for the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to complete its fifth assessment of global warming in 2014 because they faced an existential threat.
“Some of our countries will have ceased to exist [by the time a climate deal is reached] and others will be reduced to their mountain tops rising from the sea. We simply don’t have the luxury of time,” he said. “Some of us are even now silently planning relocation.”
Mr Jumeau told a press briefing that the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), which wants global warming limited to 1.5 degrees, wanted a report on all the peer-reviewed scientific papers on climate change since the IPCC produced its fourth assessment in 2007.
“If there is new scientific knowledge, let us find that out as quickly as possible. We’re talking about peer-reviewed literature that’s already out there, looking at different scenarios, so we can better inform our decisions and have an idea where we are headed in this.”
The Seychelles ambassador said it wasn’t enough to “Google this information”, as some had suggested, because it would need to be produced officially within the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) if it was to have any effect on the negotiations.
He suggested that the real agenda of those who blocked the proposal was to ensure that the AOSIS 1.5-degree goal remained off the table; the Copenhagen Accord sets two degrees as a target limit. But he added: “One way of attracting attention to an issue is to squash it.”
The outcome of Copenhagen was “a huge blow to us, and a majority of the most vulnerable countries have not associated with the accord. But 1.5 degrees is back on the table. AOSIS is not going to roll over and play dead. We are the only group who have everything to lose.”
Carlos Fuller, technical adviser to AOSIS, said temperatures in the Caribbean had risen by at least one degree since 1900. “We’ve seen more coral bleaching than ever before, with 60 per cent of the reef in Belize now degraded. We’ve also seen more flooding than ever.”
Meanwhile, vocal climate change critic Lord Christopher Monckton – a one-time adviser to Margaret Thatcher – gave a lecture to the press on how we shouldn’t “fall into worshipping” wind turbines and solar panels “merely because [they] are fashionable”.
He claimed that switching to renewable energy would make only a marginal difference to the climate, that fossil fuels would remain “the cheapest way of generating electricity in poorer countries” and that adapting to climate change would be less costly that cutting emissions.
When his thesis was challenged by John Vidal, environment editor of the Guardian, Lord Monckton responded: “Ah the Guardian, bless their little cotton socks. Wake up, sir, and smell the coffee.”