Hansen hopes Copenhagen talks fail

One of the world's leading climate change scientists has controversially suggested that it would be better for the Copenhagen talks to collapse than result in nations committing to emission cuts that will not go far enough to help avert dangerous levels of climate change.

Speaking to the Guardian, James Hansen, the Nasa scientist who has repeatedly provided evidence on climate change to the US Congress and is one of the world's pre-eminent experts on global warming, said the likelihood was that any deal emerging from Copenhagen would be so flawed that it would be better to have no agreement.

"I would rather it not happen if people accept that as being the right track because it's a disaster track," he said. "The whole approach is so fundamentally wrong that it is better to reassess the situation. If it is going to be the Kyoto-type thing then [people] will spend years trying to determine exactly what that means."

The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has recommended that industrialised nations need to cut carbon emissions by between 25 and 40 per cent by 2020 to stand a reasonable chance of avoiding dangerous temperature rises of more than two degrees. However, only Japan and Norway have pledged cuts in this range, with the EU currently proposing cuts of 20 per cent on 1990 levels and, crucially, the US proposing a cut of 17 per cent on 2005 levels, which equates to between four and six per cent on 1990 levels.

Hansen warned that the scale of the cuts being considered by key players in the Copenhagen talks are nowhere near sufficient. "This is analogous to the issue of slavery faced by Abraham Lincoln or the issue of Nazism faced by Winston Churchill," he said. "On those kind of issues you cannot compromise. You can't say let's reduce slavery, let's find a compromise and reduce it 50 per cent or reduce it 40 per cent… We don't have a leader who is able to grasp it and say what is really needed. Instead we are trying to continue business as usual."

Craig Bennett of the Corporate Leaders Group on climate change - which will today present a petition signed by 850 firms to Prime Minister Gordon Brown calling for an ambitious deal to be reached at Copenhagen - said that Hansen's frustrations were understandable, but warned that it would be counter productive to start the negotiating process from fresh.

"It has taken two years to get to this point and we do not have time to start again," he said. "In any political negotiations it's important not to make the best the enemy of the good. We need a deal in Copenhagen so we can really get started in the process of decarbonising our economies."

He added that any targets agreed at Copenhagen should serve as a starting point for future negotiations, arguing that those targets could be upgraded over time.

Hansen's comments came as the diplomatic ebb and flow that has defined the build-up to the Copenhagen talks continued, with the Indian government today announcing that it will aim to cut its carbon intensity 25 per cent by 2020, while leading emerging economies lined up to reject the Danish government's draft proposal for a deal.

India joined with China, Brazil and South Africa to reject the draft agreement, which would commit nations to halving global emissions by 2050 and ensuring global emissions peak by 2020, but controversially does not contain short-term emission targets for industrialised countries.

Diplomats from the key emerging economies told Reuters that they could not agree to a deal unless it required rich nations to do more to curb their emissions and revealed that they had drawn "red lines" that clearly limit what they are willing to accept.

"We cannot agree to the 50/50 [halving emissions by 2050] because it implies that... the remaining [cuts] must be done by developing countries," said South Africa's chief climate negotiator Alf Wills, adding that rich nations' emission reduction targets were still well short of what is recommended by climate scientists.

Meanwhile, Lord Stern, the author of the influential Stern Review on the economic case for tackling climate change, today said that global emissions need to fall from 47 billion tonnes a year currently to about 44 billion tonnes in 2020. "If you look at the kind of offers that are now on the table, we are just a few billion tonnes short per annum of the kind of emission cuts we need to get on target for 2020," he said.

Speaking to reporters following a meeting with European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso and IPCC chairman Dr Rajendra Pachauri, Stern said that while there was a "significant way to go" a satisfactory deal remained possible.