Energy Efficiency & Climate Change Law

More than 400 negotiators, business leaders, environmental activists and journalists will board the carbon-free "Climate Express" train on December 5th to join approximately 15,000 attendees from 192 countries at the U.N. conference in Copenhagen, beginning December 7th, where leaders will discuss proposals for a successor treaty to the Kyoto Protocol.  The Copenhagen meetings, which are expected to establish a framework that should lead to a global climate deal in 2010, is the culmination of months of negotiations between countries to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

As the Copenhagen meetings approached in recent weeks, and media attention began to focus on the Danish capital, it appeared that deniers of human-induced climate change were losing ground. However, on November 19th, a computer hacker allowed these nay-sayers to die another day.  The anonymous hacker breached a server used by the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia (UEA) in Norwich, England.  The CRU, one of the world’s leading research bodies on natural and human-induced climate change, played a key role in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report, which is considered to be the most authoritative report on the science of climate change.

The hacker disseminated a number of e-mails obtained in the breach, which include, among other things, discussion of how data was truncated to stop an apparent cooling trend that showed up in a report and encouragement to delete other information.  A poll released December 3rd, conducted less than two weeks after reports of the CRU e-mails first surfaced, shows that a majority of Americans now question climate science.  Two of these Americans, who are also conservative members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, asked the Academy to rescind Al Gore’s Oscar, which he won for “An Inconvenient Truth,” a movie about climate change.  

The scandal has also offered Comedian Jon Stewart a chance to quip on The Daily Show, "Poor Al Gore, global warming completely debunked via the very internet you invented."  While "Climategate" has offered such material to comedians, it is no laughing matter because this scandal of sorts has grabbed the spotlight away from the build-up to the Copenhagen meetings – a pivotal moment in the brief history of efforts to mitigate climate change.  

The e-mails that were unveiled during this scandal show that a select few scientists chose to deviate from what was right.  Perhaps it might even warrant new analysis regarding the reliability, and oversight, of climate science in general.  However eager one might be to deny that climate change is human-induced in order to maintain the status quo, the fact remains that the last time carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere were today’s levels of 387 parts per million (up from around 280 parts per million just 200 years ago), was 15 million years ago.