The feeling at the IPCC's release in Paris on Friday
was that the US had turned a corner - and that the Chinese are moving to take their place as the climate nigglers.
I absolutely concede that 1) the Chinese should not be held accountable for much of present-day warming 2) that it is hypocritical to expect them to stave off their development in the name of the environment when what they seek is to achieve the living standards that the west has been enjoying for the last 50 years, and 3) that the West must clean up its own act as it helps developing nations progress down a development path that takes into account the environmental value of natural resources.
But it's one thing to say, as the Chinese have in the past, that they must prioritise their development. It's quite another to stall a meeting which has come together because the overwhelming body of scientific evidence shows that there is a 90% chance human activities are responsible for warming global temperatures.
Yet that seems to have been the approach of the Chinese delegation at last week's 5-day deliberations on the summary of the IPCC report.
Talking to the scientists who contributed to the report, I found that not just one, but several used words like "cooperative" and even "constructive" when referring to the US delegation's work during the week prior to the release. They were only a little more hesitant to say that as much as the US had been helpful, the Chinese had not.
One delegate told me they spent 10 hours discussing one sentence, which was eventually dropped from the report on request of the Chinese delegation. The dropped sentence noted that the warming effect of man-made greenhouse gasses was five times that of solar irradiance ? a fact that climate sceptics have used in the past to argue that changes in the climate are due to natural factors. A bar graph, still in the report (see left), suggests human factors may in fact be 10 times more important than solar activity.
Another bone of contention was the sentence saying that human activities were "very likely" responsible for warming global temperatures. China and Saudi Arabia asked that "very likely" (90% probability) be replaced by "likely" (66%) - effectively keeping the same conclusion as the last IPCC report, in 2001.
The suggestion was resisted by New Zealand, UK, Norway, Switzerland, Argentina, US, France, Canada, Australia, Germany, Austria, Japan, Kenya, Sweden, and
the scientists. Not much of a chance of winning there, then. As a consolation prize, a footnote was added: "consideration of remaining uncertainty is based on current methodologies." (I leave it to you to decide what that means.)
Clearly, the Chinese are very aware of their precarious situation: a booming economy + plentiful supplies of coal + no Kyoto Protocol requirements to limit their emissions = one big environmental mess. But the policy arena - not the scientific one - should be where these concerns are expressed.Catherine Brahic, online environment reporter