Mark Lynas writes for the Guardian that despite the general consensus that Obama screwed up Copenhagen, it was in fact China who killed the process

Here’s what actually went on late last Friday night, as heads of state from two dozen countries met behind closed doors. Obama was at the table for several hours, sitting between Gordon Brown and the Ethiopian prime minister, Meles Zenawi. The Danish prime minister chaired, and on his right sat Ban Ki-moon, secretary-general of the UN. Probably only about 50 or 60 people, including the heads of state, were in the room. I was attached to one of the delegations, whose head of state was also present for most of the time.

What I saw was profoundly shocking. The Chinese premier, Wen Jinbao, did not deign to attend the meetings personally, instead sending a second-tier official in the country’s foreign ministry to sit opposite Obama himself. The diplomatic snub was obvious and brutal, as was the practical implication: several times during the session, the world’s most powerful heads of state were forced to wait around as the Chinese delegate went off to make telephone calls to his “superiors”.

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To those who would blame Obama and rich countries in general, know this: it was China’s representative who insisted that industrialised country targets, previously agreed as an 80% cut by 2050, be taken out of the deal. “Why can’t we even mention our own targets?” demanded a furious Angela Merkel. Australia’s prime minister, Kevin Rudd, was annoyed enough to bang his microphone. Brazil’s representative too pointed out the illogicality of China’s position. Why should rich countries not announce even this unilateral cut? The Chinese delegate said no, and I watched, aghast, as Merkel threw up her hands in despair and conceded the point. Now we know why – because China bet, correctly, that Obama would get the blame for the Copenhagen accord’s lack of ambition.

China, backed at times by India, then proceeded to take out all the numbers that mattered. A 2020 peaking year in global emissions, essential to restrain temperatures to 2C, was removed and replaced by woolly language suggesting that emissions should peak “as soon as possible”. The long-term target, of global 50% cuts by 2050, was also excised. No one else, perhaps with the exceptions of India and Saudi Arabia, wanted this to happen. I am certain that had the Chinese not been in the room, we would have left Copenhagen with a deal that had environmentalists popping champagne corks popping in every corner of the world.

I’m sure this isn’t the last word on what happend, but it’s an interesting bit of data.  Mark’s conclusion is that China doesn’t want to bother with dealing with climate change because its economy is primarily coal-fired, and any cuts in emissions will necessarily lead to a diminishment in its ability to expand.

The Wall Street Journal just published a lengthy article discussing the unbearbly hot summer we’ve been having here in Austin and included some statistics to put it all in perspective:

The protracted heat wave — Austin on Monday recorded its 64th day of 100-plus degree weather since June 1 — has pushed electricity demand up to record levels, as air conditioners run overtime.

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The average, around-the-clock temperature in San Antonio this summer has been 87.9 degrees, beating the old record set in 1980 of 86.2 degrees. Houston, at 86.6 degrees, averaged over a 24-hour period, is slightly above the old record of 86.4 set in 1980. In Austin, the average temperature has been 88.6 degrees — the hottest since records began in 1898 — beating the prior record of 86.7 degrees in both 2008 and 1998.

The average household in Austin consumed 2,157 kilowatt hours of electricity last month, costing $235. Roughly 8% of households are delinquent with utility payments. Austin Energy is rolling out a plan to let residential customers pay 25% of their bill immediately and spread the remaining 75% owed over a six-month period.

And as if that wasn’t enough, it looks as though this whole ‘global warming’ theory might actually lead to the weather being warmer:

One source of those impacts, hellish heat waves, will become commonplace in the coming decades if we don’t reverse greenhouse gas emissions trends sharply and soon, as the figure above makes clear (see “Definitive NOAA-led report warns of scorching 9 to 11°F warming over most of inland U.S. by 2090 with Kansas above 90°F some 120 days a year — and that isn’t the worst case, it’s business as usual!“). By 2090, it’ll be above 90°F some 120 days a year in Kansas — more than the entire summer. Much of Florida and Texas will be above 90°F for half the year. These won’t be called heat waves anymore. It’ll just be the “normal” climate.

Based on two recent studies: By century’s end, extreme temperatures of up to 122°F would threaten most of the central, southern, and western U.S. Even worse, Houston and Washington, DC could experience temperatures exceeding 98°F for some 60 days a year. Much of Arizona would be subjected to temperatures of 105°F or more for 98 days out of the year–14 full weeks.

Slashdot just ran a post pointing out that The Independent just finished polling leading climate scientists and found growing support for geoengineering as a supplement to CO2 reduction to confront global warming.  So what is geoengineering exactly?

As human populations grow and technology spreads, measurable changes in the Earth are becoming more apparent. The current geological time period is known as the Anthropocene, as man’s activities are now a major driving force on the Earth’s biology and climate. Anthropogenic land use, accelerated since the industrial revolution, has led to the alteration of between one-third and one-half of the Earth’s land surface. Levels of atmospheric CO₂ have increased by approximately 30 percent over the last two centuries. More atmospheric nitrogen is fixed by humanity than by all natural terrestrial sources combined. And, more than half of all accessible surface fresh water is put to use by humans. The consequence of this is that humans have been radically altering the Earth for thousands of years, and geoengineering is usually proposed as an attempt to reverse the harmful side-effects of these changes, rather than to effect an ‘improvement’ upon nature. Typical projects are proposed to deal with recent climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions, rather than to attempt to alter the effects of pre-industrial human civilisations and activity.

Although many geo-engineering projects have been proposed (see below), large-scale CO₂-storage through biomass creation (e.g. tree-plantations) is the only universally-accepted means to decrease greenhouse gas concentrations. However, some geoengineering techniques seek to reduce carbon in the atmosphere directly (e.g. CO₂-scrubbing ‘Fake Plastic Trees’) or indirectly (e.g. ocean iron fertilization). Other techniques, such as Solar Radiation Management, attempt to mitigate the warming effects of global warming without influencing CO₂ and other greenhouse gases directly. Techniques that do not reduce greenhouse gas concentrations can only address the warming effects of these gases. They and cannot address other problems linked to increasing levels of CO₂ and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere (such as ocean acidification).

Many members of the scientific and technical communities fear that the full effects of various geoengineering schemes are not fully understood. The failure of the ambitious Biosphere 2 facility is one example of a complex project that was unsuccessful because scientists still have a limited understanding of how earth systems work together.

Performance of the systems may become ineffective, unpredictable or unstable as a result of external events, such as volcanic eruptions, phytoplankton blooms, El Nino, solar flares, etc., potentially leading to profound and unpredictable disruption to the climate system.

It may be difficult to predict the effectiveness of projects, with models of techniques giving widely varying results. In the instances of systems which involve tipping points, this may result in irreversible effects. Climate modelling is far from an exact science even when applied to comparatively well-understood natural climate systems, and it is made more complex by the need to understand novel and unnatural processes which by definition lack relevant observation data