I wonder how many people know that 2,500 climate scientists from 80 countries have been meeting this week at Copenhagen?   A few stories have made it into the media covering individual speeches but it seems a good time to draw breath and see where we are heading – 2009 should be a key year in climate change negotiations.   

The culmination of a year’s negotiations will be the 15^th Conference of the Parties to be held at Copenhagen in December, continuing a series of COP meetings that form the Framework Convention on Climate Change;  for many years, the world’s official climate change negotiating centre. 

This week’s meeting brings together climate scientists and has produced both list of six climate change ‘clinchers’, arguments in favour of taking action to reduce global warming. 

Sir Nicholas Stern has made another interesting contribution to the debate, arguing that the global depression provides a case FOR action rather than a case for inaction.  He said in a speech that spare economic capacity should be applied to speeding energy conservation measures and the development of green energy sources. Such measures, he said, could be paid for by the sale of emissions permits to create a Carbon Fund. Whether the economic state we are in makes it possible to start this process is another matter.

Rachel Warren from the University of East Anglia highlighted the dangers posed by drought in Europe, always one of the side-effects of warming that has caused me most concern. All these stories, and many more, can be followed from The Guardian newspaper’s web coverage of the congress (http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/copenhagen).

A formal negotiating session will be held in Bonn later this month with another to follow in June. A third session in Bangkok will take in autumn before the main Copenhagen summit in December. Details can be found at the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change website (http://unfccc.int/2860.php), though for general interest, I recommend The Guardian’s site.

I’ll return to the ‘road to Copenhagen’ in an attempt to map our progress to update the Kyoto Protocol – it will be interesting to watch the tensions between the global economic slowdown on the one hand and the new US government with the input of the Obama administration.

Julian Mayes,   12th March 2009.