edit The Climate Change Portal
 | This article is part of the Climate change portal on SourceWatch. |
Welcome to the SourceWatch portal on climate change policy, the citizen's encyclopedia on global climate change policy that you can edit.
The portal aims to build the best information resource investigating key aspects of climate change policy and debate ahead of the December 2009 United Nations’ Climate Change Convention in Copenhagen. The conference, referred to as COP15, aims to establish "an ambitious global climate agreement for the period from 2012".
edit Becoming a Citizen Journalist on Climate Change
If you would like to help document climate change issues and debates, this is the place for you. This project relies on citizen journalists to expand, update and create articles on topics.
You can view the existing articles on climate change here. And it is also worth visiting the Coal Issues portal which documents areas such as coal mining, coal consumption and coal-fired power station proposals around the world.
If this is your first experience of a wiki, don't worry - help is at hand. To learn how you can edit any article right now, visit SourceWatch:About, SourceWatch:Welcome, newcomers, our Help page, Frequently Asked Questions, or experiment in the sandbox. If you need help, feel free to post a note to the User talk:Bob Burton or User talk:Diane Farsetta. Or, you could post a query to the 'talk page of any other user (by clicking the 'Talk" next to the name of other users at the Special:Recentchanges page.
The Waxman-Markey Climate Bill, which has been passed by the U.S. House of Representatives but has yet to be debated in the U.S. Senate, is likely to have a major impact on the COP15 negotiations. The head of the U.S. climate change negotiating team, Todd Stern, has flagged that the U.S. negotiating position will broadly reflect the content of legislation that gets through the Congress. Pundits predict that the Senate will water down the bill further, which could result in negotiations at COP15 being aimed at far weaker emissions reduction targets sought by the European Union and groups such as the Alliance of Small Island States.
edit Climate Change Who's Who
On September 24 and 25 representative of the G20 nations will meet in Pittsburgh for the 2009 G-20 Pittsburgh summit. Will they have substantial discussions on climate change? Or, as they did in London in April, only make a passing mention of the topic in the final communiqué? See G20 and climate change for more details.
edit The Path to COP 15: Climate Change Events
- COP15: The conference will take place from December 7 to December 18, 2009 in Copenhagen, Denmark.
- Pages to be started or expanded include:
- start the article on the International Renewable Energy Agency (see here and IRENA).
- The climate change bill introduced by Henry Waxman, The American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, will become a major debating point on the shape of the domestic policies adopted by the U.S. Congress and promoted by the administration of Barack Obama.
- International Scientific Congress on Climate Change: Global Risks, Challenges and Decisions March 10-12, 2009, in Copenhagen, Denmark;
- the page on the PR company, The Hawthorn Group which, in a recent newsletter outlined the "grassroots campaign Hawthorn created and managed for the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE)." ACCCE is a coal industry front group.
- the UK Committee on Climate Change and their December 2008 report proposing an 'intended target of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 42% by 2020.
- Clean Development Mechanism and Big Hydropower Schemes - last year the group, International Rivers, released a report on the main problems with major hydro schemes being included in the CDM. See here, here (pdf) and here (pdf) for background information. It would be good to include a summary of the key issues on the Clean Development Mechanism and Big Hydropower Schemes page;
- International Emissions Trading Association - who do they represent and what policies do they advocate?
- International Risk Governance Council (IRGC)- the council has published a 32-page paper Regulation of Carbon Capture and Storage which is available here (Pdf). The report was funded by companies including E.ON Energie, the Allianz Technology Center on behalf of the Dresdner Bank Foundation, Resources for the Future (RFF) and Swiss Re. It would be great to have at least a few paragraphs summarizing the key points of the briefing paper on the IRGC page and a more detailed summary on the Regulation of Carbon Capture and Storage (Report) page.
- COP14 Bloggers - there are more and they will probably be blogging on these issues up to and beyond COP15 -- lets add them in;
- Industry-funded groups and think tanks opposing the Kyoto treaty - add links and help keep this page updated;
- Greenhouse gases omitted from the Kyoto Protocol
- Ad Hoc Working Group on Long-term Cooperative Action - it would be good to add some details of the discussion areas that fall within its charter;
- Ad Hoc Working Group on Further Commitments for Annex 1 Parties under the Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change - it would be good to add some details of the discussion areas that fall within its charter;
- Clean Development Mechanism and Carbon Capture and Storage - this will be discussed at Poznan and the article page will need to be updated;
- Barack Obama statements on a post-Kyoto global warming agreement - the position of the US will be crucial in the future of the negotiations leading to COP15 so it would be good to keep the page updated; and
- Global Energy Forum - a commitment made by Obama; this page will need to be kept updated too.
For two weeks in December 2009, the Danish government will host the COP15 conference which will determine whether there will be a replacement agreement to the Kyoto Protocol. Commenting on the difficult preliminary negotiations in Bali in late 2007, the Danish Minister for Climate and Energy, Connie Hedegaard, noted that the "the political price for obstructing global agreement has increased significantly." While optimistic, she predicted that "the December days in Copenhagen in 2009 will be the decisive period. I can already predict that it will be a political thriller on an international scale, and that right until the very end it will not be known whether a future agreement can be reached. Perhaps the very last minutes will decide whether the world joins in a shared agreement or not."
edit Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Concentrations
edit Climate Change Skeptics Corner
Ian R. Plimer, a Professor of Mining Geology at the University of Adelaide, South Australia, is the author of Heaven and Earth, a book hailed by climate change skeptics. Plimer is also a director of three mining companies: Ivanhoe Australia, a subsidiary of Bob Friedland's Ivanhoe Mines, CBH Resources and Kefi Minerals.
Garth Paltridge is a former Australian government physicist and a veteran global warming sceptic. In mid-2009 he published The Climate Caper in which he claims that "it has not be solidly established, and it is certainly not accepted by a majority of scientists as proven fact, that global warming from atmospheric carbon dioxide will be large enough to be seriously noticeable - let alone large enough to be disastrous ... Even accepting for the sake of the argument that some significant degree of global warming may be observed in the future, it is certainly not he consensus of the majority of scientists that the actual impact on humans will be significant - or indeed that it will be detrimental."
Patrick J. Michaels is the Editor of the World Climate Report, a blog published by New Hope Environmental Services, "an advocacy science consulting firm" he founded and runs. Michaels, who is considered to be one of the leading global warming skeptics, has long been a speaker to various think tanks, trade associations and energy and other companies. On a 2007 academic CV, Michaels disclosed that prior to creating New Hope Environmental Services he had received funding from the Edison Electric Institute and the Western Fuels Association.
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