We're not quite that stupid

It's a week now since I left Copenhagen. I've had four good nights of sleep in a row, a luxury I've not enjoyed for quite some time. And I've had many, many conversations about The COP. So here are my final impressions.

The Americans have landed
There were a vast number of American delegates. At a rough guess, perhaps a third of the people I met were from US NGOs, there to put across the ideas of the American environmental movement. They left me impressed with their enthusiasm and suggested a massive pent up desire for change in America.

Everyone talks
Inside the talks - if you could get inside that is - the approachability of delegates was remarkable. Its as if everyone was there on the same terms. You could walk up to anyone, introduce yourself and ask pertinent questions. In this way I came across national delegates, a vice chair of the IPCC, the heads of a few NGOs and power companies, and all willing to talk and say what they thought openly. The transparency of the process was impressive.

I won't be asking UNFCCC to organise my wedding
If there's one organisation that came out of this incredibly badly it was UN FCCC. By the end of the conference, they had succeeded in alienating most of the NGO representatives who would have arrived as supporters of FCCC and what it aimed to do. And they just did it through logistical stupidity.

You can't tell people that they've a ticket to an event half way around the World, let them book and pay for their flights and hotels in one of the World's most expensive cities, then tell them when they turn up that they can't come in. Really, it's a very, very bad plan and it played right into the hands of the countries that wanted to see UN FCCC and Kyoto dead. Who got what they wanted.

We're not dead yet
People keep asking me whether I think Copenhagen was a disaster. If you think in the sort of terms that Greenpeace think, where every unnecessary death or extinction is an unforgivable tragedy, then yes, Copenhagen was an utter disaster. But then so is eating meat, so is taking a flight, so is being born a human being. That mindset imagines a utopia where the red in tooth and claw nature of existence has been surpassed by some pseudo-divine balance between man and nature.

Nature is not like that. Humanity is just the latest natural disaster to hit the Earth, just as the meteorite (or whatever it was) wiped out the dinosaurs, or the ice ages destroyed the landscapes of the past.

That we have the capacity at all to mitigate this disaster is unprecedented in nature, and that we are making serious efforts to do so is a wonder given the savagery that lies within us. Only a few years ago our fellow citizens of Earth were hacking each others limbs off by the millions in Rwanda and Bosnia, and these were in many cases sensible, educated middle class people, just like us. For many in the World, life is still Hobbesian.

When I first began to pay attention to climate change back in 1990, I certainly didn't realise how serious the problem would turn out to be, nor did I think that within 20 years we'd have come as far as we have. Many major nations have reduced their emissions. Most now are serious about doing so at some level, as shown by the Copenhagen Accord. And the rich, those of us who built our wealth by emitting most of the GHGs currently in the atmosphere, have begun to accept our responsibility for reducing the effects this is having on the poor.

20 years is a short time in global geopolitics. Fixing the ozone layer was a trivial problem but took half that time. Reducing global nuclear proliferation has been ongoing now for 50 years and is still not finished. As the impacts of climate change begin to bite over the coming couple of decades and as technology improves, we will develop tighter targets and better approaches, perhaps based on sectoral restraints rather than national ceilings. It will take more floods in Saudi Arabia, more sand-storms in China, more famines for the poor, more devastated harvests in the American mid-West, more rivers running through Knightsbridge. But it will come.

Yes, for those who sought an instant pot-noodle agreement that would fix everything, Copenhagen was a great disappointment. Yes, there will be unnecessary famines, wars, deaths and extinctions. But no, we should not give up hope. We'll get there in the end, and yes the solution will be more expensive and difficult because it's late, but if we don't we'll be dead. And we're not quite that stupid.

Check back with me in another 20 years. Merry Christmas.