Why COP15 was an important milestone

 Dr Joe Smith  is feeling optimistic. Luckily for humanity the climate change last chance saloon seems to have no fixed closing time. But while most media and policy commentators have savaged the UN and international policymakers for failing to come to a convincing deal I’ve come away from two weeks in the Danish capital holding [...]

Nothing is agreed until everything else is agreed

By Dr Stephen Peake Over the past week or so, a great deal of routine housekeeping work has been achieved on various agenda items under the UNFCCC and its Kyoto Protocol. The texts of most of this work are now, as is customary, bracketed (this is how Governments signal discontent with the texts) and being [...]

Sustainable energy in Europe

COP15 presents a new focus for international debate and decisions about energy and its use. Godfrey Boyle discusses what the countries of Western Europe are doing to promote sustainable energy production. His album on iTunes U looks at the future energy map of Europe and questions whether energy policy is principally a scientific issue or a political one. [...]

Is $10 billion a big number?

By Dr Stephen Peake There are two crucial elements to the climate negotiations. The first is nations’ pledges to reduce greenhouse gases (e.g. 20, 30, 40, 50% by 2020,30,40,50 etc). The second is how much cash the developed countries are prepared to commit to help developing economies reduce their emissions and adapt to the impacts of [...]

COP 15: The hum of expectation

Dr Stephen Peake writes about the atmosphere of COP15 in its first few days, from a bride and groom honeymooning there, to the various demonstrators and media gathering at the conference…   The atmospheric pull of COP 15 begins the instant I leave home. The taxi driver thinks it’s all too late (only a population [...]

Faith in climate change

By Yoseph Araya, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Faculty of Science   Human-induced climate change poses a grave risk to all inhabitants of the Earth – flora, fauna and us. There is overwhelming evidence it’s happening and the future impacts will be even more severe. The recent demonstrations ahead of COP15 are just one indicator of peoples’ concern and their demand for international action. [...]

How do we know climate change is real?

Users of Platform, the OU’s community website, were asked to submit their own questions around climate change ahead of the UN Climate Change Conference being held in Copenhagen this month. Six questions were chosen and answers will be supplied by the OU’s academic experts. Here’s the response to the first question… How do we know [...]

Expert comment on warmest decade – recent data is not enough

The first decade of this century has been by far the warmest decade on the instrumental record according to the Met Office. New figures released in Copenhagen show that, despite 1998 being the warmest individual year, the last ten years have clearly been the warmest period in the 160-year record of global surface temperature maintained jointly [...]

Release more climate research data, urges academic

In the wake of hacked files from the Climate Research Unit, Darrel Ince, Professor of Computing at The Open University, says that scientists should release the program code used for computer simulations: “Software is notoriously difficult to make error-free— particularly scientific software.  Even software that has been produced by systems development companies with the highest [...]

Global agreements – a false sense of security?

by Dr Stephen Peake COP15 will be our third big global punch up on climate change. The first was the establishment of the UNFCCC at the Earth Summit in 1992. The second was in Kyoto in 1997. It’s ten years since I left the secretariat of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in [...]

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