17%

The Durban conference on climate change began this past Monday with a whimper, not a bang. After the let-down of the Copenhagen conference in 2009, expectations are pretty low this time around. As near as I can figure it, the boffins of the international community spent years hammering out an approach that everyone - from coal-devouring China to nearly-seafloor Seychelles - thought was equitable. All that remained were some signatures. With a bit of brinksmanship at Copenhagen, a deal was in the offing. Then Obama flew in and started making side-deals that circumvented the tortuous UN process. Chaos ensued, a face-saving compromise statement was issued, and the subsequent IPCC conference in Cancun was devoted to patching up the feelings of the aforementioned boffins who had just wasted a decade of their lives.

At this point I have no idea what the background story for Durban is. There's someting about rich countries and poor countries and extending Kyoto. Complicating matters is that when all of this jibber-jabber started twenty years ago, it was very clear who was rich and who was poor. Now China has TGV trains and a manned space program, wheras a major chunk of Canada's greenhouse gas emmissions are generated not from first-world economic activity but from distilling petroleum from the wastelands of Alberta.

So Canada is not seen as a leader in this debate. Be that as it may, let us consider what the conservative goverment of Canada did promise to do some time ago, independently of any agreement. Regardless of the outcome of the current conference in Durban, Harper's Junta (trust me; it rhymes) has pledged to reduce the CO2 emissions of the Great White North by 17% BELOW those of 2005 by 2020. This is a good start. And because it is the official policy of the Government, we should all be preparing today for the not-too-distant future when the various policies kick in and we all have to reduce our fossil-fuel use by 17% below what we used 7 years ago.

I was going to calculate what that looks like, but a relevant article by the Pembina Institute beat me to it. Here is Canada's (purported) future:

And this is the future the Conservatives have reluctantly agreed to

Of course, no such thing will happen. Canada will be nowhere near the target of 607 megatonnes per annum in 2020 because we have not even begun to think about how to live on 25% less than we do now. As I have said before, the longer the world stalls for time, the harder it will be to bring this runaway train under control.

Which is why today's column by Margaret Wente in the Globe and Mail is so infuriating. Instead of moving the debate forward so that we actually do something to achieve our goal for 2020, we get a  dismissal of climate research that wears the guise of a defense of the scientific process. She actuallly sounds like she thinks she is so clever to be doubting climate change.

No one knows with any certainty the exact impact of carbon dioxide emissions, what long-term climate trends will be or the effect of other factors, such as the sun.

For more of this cleverness, I dare you to read the hundreds of comments that follow this article. As with any piece of journalism on climate change, most commentators have a bizarre world view in which climate scientists have conspired to engineer a ponzi scheme of fake data in order to award each other taxpayers' money. Their objections are a mixed salad of conservative invective against anything the government does and a litany of the same urban myths regarding climate change that have been debunked many times before ("It's the sun spots.", "They said it was cooling in the 1970s").

Her statement is correct in one sense: Nobody knows anything with certainty. The beauty of science is that it can be expressed mathematically, allowing us to know very precicely the probability of the impacts of carbon dioxide emissions. This comes after she (unbelievably) brings up the "re-hacked" emails from the original Climategate that were recently released in an effort to undermine the Durban talks. Nine separate investigations have exonerated the climate scientists who were targeted in the Climategate affair. Yet for Wente, that these re-heated emails have not suddenly undermined decades of peer-reviewed research is somehow proof that something is wrong with science. Smarmingly, she wraps up with:

The suppression of legitimate debate is a catastrophe for climate science. It’s also a catastrophe for science, period.

Would Wente write such an article about the debates within proteomics, or graphite photoreactor research? The catastrophe for science is that everybody thinks of themselves as an expert on the weather and politics.