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The atmosphere at Copenhagen
Chinese delegation members prepare for a meeting in the Bella Center of Copenhagen.
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TEXT OF INTERVIEW
Kai Ryssdal: There are some truisms about the goings on in Copenhagen, Denmark, this week and next that might be helpful if you're interested in a fuller understanding of the UN climate conference. One is that it's dark and it's cold. About 7 hours of daylight today. Temperatures in the low 40's with rain as well. Another is that there's way more going on than just a bunch of official delegates sitting around talking climate policy. Marketplace's Stephen Beard is at the conference for us. Hello, Stephen.
STEPHEN BEARD: Hello Kai.
Ryssdal: So what is it like there?
BEARD: It is the most bizarre, and bewildering event that I've ever had to cover, Kai. I mean first of all one of the negotiating teams was quoted as saying at the outset, we've got two weeks to save the planet. Well, I have to tell you saving the planet is not as exciting as it seems. This is what it sounds like...
COPENHAGEN CONFERENCE: The UNFCCC parties had already decided to invite...
Ryssdal: Wake me when that one is over, huh, Stephen?
BEARD: It's not quite the way Hollywood would cover the saving of the planet. But it's not as boring as it sounds because you've got, we're in this huge conference center, and at the heart of it is a big conference hall, absolutely gigantic, like an aircraft hanger. And in this vast communal space you've got all the negotiators and the journalists, and the delegates, and the environmental activists all mingling. And this area is actually constantly erupting in spontaneous demonstrations, with protesters chanting some of the oddest slogans I've ever heard.
PROTESTERS: We want one degree! We want one degree!
Ryssdal: We want one degree, right? Is that what that was?
BEARD: We want one degree, that's it. What they're saying is we want a ceiling of one degree. We don't want to see global average temperatures rise more than one degree by the end of the century. Something even odder, actually, when we arrived at the summit center this morning, another bunch of people shivering in their underpants outside the summit shouting, "We're in the cold, to stop the heat."
PROTESTERS: We're in the cold to stop the heat! We're in the cold to stop the heat!
Ryssdal: So far Stephen, I will tell you, it sounds not unlike a carnival.
BEARD: Or even a madhouse. But in fact what one should say is there is an enormous amount of idealism here. A lot of young people. Five hundred American kids, in fact, who are here to press the case for a new climate treaty. One of them, Ethan, is a 19-year-old student from Minnesota.
ETHAN: I feel charged and motivated and powered and impassioned to try to really push for the U.S. negotiators to understand our ecological debt, to understand how much we owe to the world.
Ryssdal: Well, if that's the idealism, Stephen, surely there are skeptics there as well. It's an equal-opportunity conference, I imagine.
BEARD: Oh, it certainly is, although I should say the overwhelming majority here are routing for a new climate treaty. But I did find one climate-change skeptic. A British peer, who as a skeptic, felt he was rather in enemy territory.
CLIMATE-CHANGE SKEPTIC: I have been surrounded by chanting children with zombie-like faces, who have been trained by their teachers to yell fatuous slogans, such as, "Oooh, oooh, it's hot in here, there's too much carbon in the atmosphere."
Ryssdal: All right, well, Stephen, so where do we go from here. Once you get passed it all, there is serious work being done, yes?
BEARD: Yes, behind closed doors they're negotiating hard, and the signs are that something serious is emerging. What is certainly really focusing minds here now is that next week the leaders arrive, more than hundred heads of states will be here, including President Obama. And that has convinced many that in spite of all the circus and the carnival, something meaningful and something serious will emerge from Copenhagen.
Ryssdal: Stephen Beard in the Danish capital with a slice of life, if you will. Thank you, Stephen.
BEARD: OK, Kai.
I fell off my seat laughing and had to check my radio dial during Stephen Beard's piece from Copenhagen when I heard Lord Monckton declaiming against the "chanting children". I thought my radio had wandered to an impossible 21st Century variation of a Gilbert & Sullivan comic opera. All that was missing was the chorus chanting:
"Stick close by your dogma, and never go to sea,
If you live in the British Isles it'll rise over thee!"
The condescension coming from everyone in this report other than the protester is stunning. I listen to NPR for unbiased coverage, but this segment clearly does not qualify. Using terms like "bizarre," "carnival," "madhouse," when referring to the "kids" protesting is completely demeaning. And despite the fact that Beard even admits the crowd is overwhelmingly in favor of a climate treaty, you choose to interview a skeptic who demonstrates nothing but patronizing disdain for the protesters.
And the transcript leaves out the snorts of laughter coming from both Marketplace reporters.
We get the message loud and clear Marketplace: supporters of action on climate change are silly buffoons whose arguments and ideas can be dismissed.
Too bad to see you jumping on the corporate media bandwagon.
I was astonished by the sarcastic tone, and lack of information provided in this report. The use of terms like "madhouse" and "carnival" to describe the atmosphere in Copenhagen, and the activists (whatever their position) who are speaking out there, indicates obvious impatience with grassroots activism and the sometimes messy machinery of public policy-making. And for all the snark, we learned little or nothing about who the activists are, what countries and points of view they represent, and who they're trying to influence.
Your report on the Copenhagen Climate Conference included what I’m sure was meant to be a stirring and hopeful mini-profile of a 19 year old from Minnesota gushing about how fired up he is to save the world. That’s nice.
Your mention of Christopher Monckton presented him as a curmudgeon who dismisses the engaged youth out to save the world as a brainwashed zombie. Well, what would you expect from someone who used to be an advisor to Margaret Thatcher. We all know what those folks are like. That must also be why Monckton got a standing ovation from the American Physical Society last year when he presented his paper pointing out the serious flaws in the UN IPCC’s 2007 climate summary.
I’ve always found it ironic that the hypothesis of global warming was based on the same computer models that brought us chaos theory - the mathematics that demonstrates that in a nonlinear dynamic system (such as the atmosphere, ocean, universe, life, etc.) it’s damn near impossible to predict anything. Indeed, attempts to use computers to predict the weather demonstrated that it can’t be done with certainty over any extended time line.
Why didn’t you devote at least as much air time to Lord Monckton’s research - he’s no slouch in that department - as you did to some 19 year old who’s obviously drunk the Koolaid and doesn’t even know it’s laced with a massive dose of group think.
The science that supports the hypothesis of global warming is pure junk. It is horrifying that we have reached a point in the public dialogue where to even suggest such a thing is met with automatic dismissal as a crank, kook, tool of the far right or stooge of big business. You are part of the problem, and shame on you.
Lord Monckton’s paper reveals that –
* The IPCC’s 2007 climate summary overstated CO2’s impact on temperature by 500-2000%;
* CO2 enrichment will add little more than 1 °F (0.6 °C) to global mean surface temperature by 2100;
* Not one of the three key variables whose product is climate sensitivity can be measured directly;
* The IPCC’s values for these key variables are taken from only four published papers, not 2,500;
* The IPCC’s values for each of the three variables, and hence for climate sensitivity, are overstated;
* “Global warming†halted ten years ago, and surface temperature has been falling for seven years;
* Not one of the computer models relied upon by the IPCC predicted so long and rapid a cooling;
* The IPCC inserted a table into the scientists’ draft, overstating the effect of ice-melt by 1000%;
