Volker Radke

>>Zweitens aber macht sich die Geschichte so, dass das Endresultat stets aus den Konflikten vieler Einzelwissen hervorgeht, wovon jeder wieder durch eine Menge besonderer Lebensbedingungen zu dem gemacht wird, was er ist; es sind also unzählige einander durchkreuzende Kräfte, eine unendliche Gruppe von Kräfteparallelogrammen, daraus eine Resultante – das geschichtliche Ergebnis – hervorgeht, die selbst wieder als das Produkt einer, als Ganzes bewusstlos und willenlos wirkenden Macht angesehen werden kann. Denn was jeder Einzelne will, wird von jedem anderen verhindert, und was herauskommt, ist etwas, das keiner gewollt hat. So verläuft die bisherige Geschichte nach Art eines Naturprozesses …<< (F. Engels, Brief an Bloch (1890), MEW 37, 463f.)

Elizabeth Grossman, Earth Island Institute:

>>…“We were too optimistic,” Field said. “There was no decrease in emissions from developed countries and the sharpest increases and overall intensity came from China and India that rely heavily on coal.”

“It was assumed that coal would become less important,” says Ken Caldeira, also of the Carnegie Institution. What happened, however, is that China and India developed rapidly while rising oil prices pushed wealthy nations to use more coal, which is more CO₂ intensive in its emissions. Scientists at NASA’s Goddard Space Science Institute concur that the past five years’ sharp increase in atmospheric CO₂ is attributable to the steep rise in global coal use, pushed upward by accelerated Asian economic and industrial development.

“IPCC scenarios assume an increase in energy efficiency during this period,” Caldeira says. But that didn’t happen. “Efficiency flattened out,” he says.

[...]

Given the fact that the breakneck economic growth in India and China were well known phenomena, how could the Nobel prize-winning IPCC have omitted an increase in Asian carbon emissions from its scenarios? The short answer appears to be politics.

“Social and political dynamics are at work,” in producing final IPCC reports, Fields said at the AAAS meeting.

Stanford University biology professor and climate scientist Stephen Schneider agrees. “The lead authors are constrained by government reviewers,” Schneider says. “The political process cuts the edges and doesn’t do a good job at the tails of the bell curve, which is where we are now.

“These reports are consensus documents and when it comes to politics, the interests of small island nations are different than those of the U.S., China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait.”

There is a political and diplomatic incentive to low-ball emissions predictions because lower numbers make the task ahead appear less onerous…<<