Copenhagen's Dismal Deal.

President Obama needed to get back to Washington, DC, before he was cut off by a snow storm. Perhaps Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao was in a similar hurry. Both men were in a great hurry to reach a shoddy compromise at the Copenhagen Climate Conference - one that 'respected' China's national sovereignty (i.e., meant that China did not have to sign up to any international monitoring of its commitments on CO2 emissions) and, likewise, did not entail the US having to make any commitments to limit (still less reduce) its greenhouse gas output.

The resulting Accord is a non-binding 'political' deal which talks of limiting the increase in mean annual global temperature to below 2 Celsius above the reference datum (the pre-Industrial Revolution level), but does not will the means to achieve that objective, even if that objective were adequate - which it is not.

The politicians have failed - which is no surprise. The present generation of world political leaders do not have the intellectual or administrative ability to sort out this week's laundry, let alone anything of greater import. Barack Obama and Gordon Brown would probably find it difficult to run a bath, let alone their respective countries. The time has come for drastic action, and intervention from below - from, let us say, a socially unexpected quarter: the people, maybe.

Reflections from Madeira (2).

If it is the case that 1.5 billion people could live on this planet with an ecological footprint of 5 GHa/capita, then it is is certainly the case that a larger population could be accommodated with a smaller per capita allocation of bio-capacity.

For example, 3 billion people could live on Earth if they each had an ecological footprint of 2.5 GHa/capita. It would then only be necessary to reduce the Earth's human population from its present 6.79 billion to 3 billion, a reduction of 3.79 billion. (Let us remind ourselves that the ecological footprint is measured in terms of the area of biologically productive land or water that must be used to provide for the needs of one human being, and to eliminate his or her wastes.)

This implies, however, a substantial reduction in the material standard of living for those of us who live in Europe, for 5 GHa/capita is our current allocation, as indicated in my previous 'blog entry. It is a sacrifice that, IMHO, we can and should be prepared to make, in order to allow more of our fellow human beings the chance to live on this beautiful planet.

Reflections from Madeira.

I greet you, one and all, from the (currently) sunny Island of Madeira, where I am sitting in an Internet Café on the Municipal Square of Funchal, near the Museum of Religious Art, having eaten a good lunch, and feeling reasonably content with life (well, to the extent that that is possible) and ready once again to update this 'blog.

We have had rain. There was torrential - virtually tropical - rain yesterday, and drizzly rain this morning. Otherwise, however, Madeira has (apart from a brief shower on Saturday, just as the Easyjet flight bringing me here from Gatwick was landing) been bathed in warm sunshine, with temperatures in the upper teens Celsius.

The landscape is extremely hilly, not to say mountainous, and much of the vegetation is tropical or Mediterrranean. There are banana, palm and pineapple trees. I have sampled the Madeira (a secco), and found it very palatable. There are all sorts of oddities - teapots that don't pour unless you lift the lid, for example - but then I don't expect the Portuguese to know how to make tea (or 'cha') anyway - and they don't. They don't even know how to make a decent latte (in fact they don't even know what a latte is!).

The news from Copenhagen is bad - but I didn't expect it to be good. The idea that Ban Ki-Moon is apparently trying to float that the developing countries will have to agree to a deal with no definite financial provisions for them is a complete non-starter. Furthermore, I suspect that the White House 'optimism' about a deal is based around limiting atmospheric CO2 to 450 ppmv and the increase in annual mean global temperature to 2 Celsius. The problem is that the current level of CO2 (387.75 ppmv, according to the NOAA) is the highest level the Earth has seen since the Pliocene, 15 million years ago, when there were no Polar ice caps, and sea levels were 75 feet higher than they are today. James Hansen is right: we need to reduce CO2 from current levels, not allow it to increase.

Having watched Sir David Attenborough's very thoughtful Horizon TV documentary about human population on BBC2 the other day, and having read the WWF literature on sustainability, I am increasingly persuaded that, if we are to tackle the twin problems of global warming and resource-deficiency (which includes energy-, water- and food-scarcity), then we need, not merely to reduce human population growth, but the present size of the population. There are simply too many of us for this planet to sustain, and our numbers are such that, if they keep on growing at the predicted rate, so that they reach 9.1 billion by 2050, then Homo sapiens sapiens will join all the other members of genus Homo, and become extinct, along with the many other species that we will take with us into the Sixth Extinction. We have already killed off far too many other species, and are doing so right now.

The environmental feedback systems have a nasty habit of eliminating any population that threatens its local ecology - and there is no reason to suppose that the same logic would not apply on the vastly larger scale of the Earth. There are still those who think that the human population can go on increasing almost without limit on this planet - notably in the Roman Catholic Church, which remains steadfastly opposed to all forms of artificial birth control. The influence of the Vatican is important, given the fact that there are well over 1 billion Catholics in the world - but few, if any, of the Catholic laity in the developed world pay much heed to the teaching of Humanae Vitae; rather, it is the ill-educated poor of the developing world who are more likely to be turned away from practising safe methods of birth control (and prophylaxis against the transmission of STIs) by the intervention of the Church.

Even the most widespread availability and use of birth control will not be sufficient, however. The fact is - to put it as brutally and bluntly as possible - the population needs to be reduced and reduced drastically, if the human race is to have any chance of surviving past the mid-21st Century. That means that the present 6.79 billion figure needs to go down to 1.5 billion, a reduction of of 5.29 billion, or 77.9%. Clearly, the death rate per thousand of population will have to exceed the birth rate by quite a substantial margin to achieve that goal - how long for being determined by how much by.

The 1.5 billion number is the number of people the planet can sustain if everyone on Earth has an equal allocation of ~5 GHa (global hectares - i.e., land of average agricultural productivity) to provide for their personal needs and deal with their personal wastes. This is the average allocation for the typical Western European - somewhat smaller than the allocation for a typical American (>9 GHa), but much larger than that of a typical African or Indian (<1>link.

As to the means of achieving this desirable end, I am reminded of the famous debate between Ivan Karamazov and his brother Alyosha, in Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, where Ivan asks his (deeply religious) brother if, supposing he could create a perfect world - one where there was no war, no crime, no disease or poverty, no suffering of any kind, only peace, harmony and universal brotherhood - but that, in order to do that he had to murder one tiny baby, would he do it? To which Alyosha replies very firmly in the negative - on the grounds that 'one may not do evil that good may come of it', and that ends can never justify means.

Suppose, however, that one is faced with two courses of action, neither one of which is morally good. Should not one's course then be to choose that action whose outcome is least desirable, not for oneself, but for others (applying the Kantian principle that one should always adopt as a maxim of one's conduct that policy of action which one would wish to be applied as a universal law)?

So, for example, if a policeman is forced to choose between shooting dead a criminal he would prefer to arrest and allowing that criminal to kill innocent bystanders, he will choose the former course.

In this case, we are confronted with the terrifying alternative of reducing the population by 5.29 billion (77.9%!) or having the human race become totally extinct.

Clearly, the former is preferable to species extinction, but does it necessarily entail killing people as opposed to them merely dying, or just failing to be born? Enforced sterilisation was tried in India, under the late Mrs Gandhi, and her son, Sanjay, back in the 1970s. The policy was a disaster for her and her Congress Party politically, and probably led to her eventual assassination - and certainly that of Sanjay. People are living much longer thanks to modern medicine, better food and improved sanitation, and there is even talk of treatments for senescence itself.

The conclusion that I am coming to - ghastly as it undoubtedly is - is that mass murder on a hitherto unprecedented scale may indeed be necessary in order to ensure the long-term survival of our species. That logic does not exactly fill me with great joy, to put it mildly. I hope that I am wrong (oh, completely, absolutely and hopelessly wrong, please!), and I will spend a great deal more time on this, before committing myself to anything (well, such as? My own little murder campaign, perhaps? And what would be the point of that, apart from to cause a great deal of unnecessary misery and suffering and get me - quite rightly - locked up?).

There has to be some alternative - like all of us reducing our ecological and carbon footprints, for example - but unless we do, and do so drastically, in combination with a reduction in population growth, we will most assuredly be doomed - of that I am certain.

A very 'Merry Christmas', indeed!