2 degrees or 1.5?

10am
Finally caught up on my sleep from the week (translates as: "overslept and missed the session on Earth Observation I'd wanted to go to"). Caught a taxi to the COP in a rush and found a secret entrance that gets the cars near the door. This is incredibly useful as some of our delegation need car access otherwise they can't make the meeting timings.

1115am
Found the session with Adnan Pachauri head of the IPCC. Dr Pachauri gave a briefing on AR5, the fifth assessment, basically to the effect that the science review is well underway and there's a substantial focus in it on looking at transport mitigation. I can only assume that here he's referring to Work Groups 2 or 3.

1200
Spent the rest of the morning working on logistics for our mission. It seems that the UN FCCC has overbooked the conference by - i kid you not - 20,000 people. So instead of there being 15000 attending, of whom about 3000 would be national delegations, there have been 35,000 people registered. This explains the absolute mayhem going on.

The UN's response has been to decide to cut all the representations of non-government entities by 2/3rds from Tuesday. This means very considerable rejigging of our mission timetable, moving some key meetings out of the Bella Centre.

2pm
Okay - here's news. Attended a negotiating/discussion session between the business NGOs (BINGOs in UN parlance) and leading parties like the US and EU. This is one of the things we're here for, to help develop recommendations for how to manage sectoral agreements and ensure maximum economic efficiency of the voluntary and obligatory corporate measures.

There's real talk of there being flexibility in whatever arrangements are created, with substantial market mechanisms to encourage mitigation of emissions. Unfortunately as things stand about 100 nations don't really stand to use these kind of mechanisms, so it's not in their interests to support them going into the Draft Text.

However, these are the kind of things that will allow developed countries to smooth their transitions to low-carbon economies in an economically efficient way. So they are needed.

At the end of the meeting, they announce that a draft text has been released for the first time to non-governments!!!

3pm
The draft text is in my hands ... but I've now got to go collect some of our missions from the airport.

6.19pm
Okay, here we go. It talks about

- a target of EITHER 2 degrees or 1.5 degrees - both are good!
- all nations reduce their emissions by either 50% (bad), 85% (now you're talking) or 95% (she's sucking diesel!!);
- Developed countries reducing their emissions by between 75%, 80%, 95% or more than 95% by 2050 on 2020 levels;
- developing nations will cut by 15-30% by 2020 (no baseline given) with the financial and technological support of rich countries;

But most pointedly, the preamble specifically states: "the draft text assumes the adoption of a second commitment period under the [Kyoto] Protocol." Thats not what I heard last night ...

But overall, this looks really promising!

We could be going to save the planet yet.