Büyük büyük dedelerimiz ve ninelerimiz Anadolu’nun farklı bölgelerinde, tıp, tarım ve ekosistem alanlarında verdikleri inançlı ve uzun soluklu mücadelelerle biyolojik bilgeliği yarattılar. Pratik deneyimlemenin yerel savaşçıları elde ettikleri değerleri bir sonraki nesillere işlevsel uygulamalarıyla aktardılar.

Gelenekselliğin önemli ölçütlerinden biri olan yerel tohum dışında, verim uğruna vazgeçilmez bir koşul olarak önerilen monokültür, mekanik ekipman (traktör), suni gübre ve sentetik ilaç paket çözümleri, tarımsal üretimin hemen her alanında kullanılan hayvanın (gübre, iş gücü, besin, vb) gerekliğini ortadan kaldırmış görünüyor.

Özellikle 20. yüzyılın son çeyreğinde, temel seçim parametresinin finansal endeksli (kısa vadeli) karlılık hesabına dayandırıldığı yöntemler, yüksek verim uğruna çiftçiyi daha yüksek maliyetli girdi deseninde bir tarımsal üretim modeline mahkum ederken, tüketici açısından özellikle hormon ve ilaç kalıntısına bağlı gıda güvenliği daha çok sorgulanmak durumunda kaldı.

Daha yüksek verimlilik beklentilerinde geleneksel tarım dünyanın bilhassa 'gelişmiş' bölgelerinde ölmeye yüz tutarken, üretim metotlarına bağlı olarak gıdalar, sağlık sorunlarının önemli sebepleri arasında yer almaya başladı. Az gelişmiş bölgelerde ise (yerel) geleneksel tarımın yok oluşu küreselleşme ve diğer ülkelerdeki yüksek tarımsal sübvansiyonlara bağlı olarak, tercih edilebilecek konvansiyonel tarımın değil, ekonomik çaresizliğin bir sonucu olarak ortaya çıkmakta.

Enerji kaynakları ve petrole bağlı tarımsal üretimin geleceği sorgulanmalı, kendine yeterlilik ve sürdürülebilirlik esasında, geleneksel tarım metotları, donanım ve hizmet (traktör üreticileri, ilaç ve gübre sanayi, endüstriyel tohum firmaları, kredi kuruluşları, sertifikasyon sistemleri) sağlayıcılarının karlılığı için değil, toprak ana, üzerinde yaşam sürdüren üretici ve onun emeğini destekleyen tüketici leyhine iyileştirilmelidir; bugünün ve yarının muhtemel şartlarını anlayarak ve yaşamı daha iyi analiz ederek...


14 Mart 2009 Cumartesi

Kopenhag Zirvesi

New York Times - 12 Mart 2009

(...)
The Danish Government will host the UN Climate Change Conference in December 2009 and will hand over the conclusions to the decision makers ahead of the Conference.

The six preliminary key messages are:

Key Message 1: Climatic Trends

Recent observations confirm that, given high rates of observed emissions, the worst-case IPCC scenario trajectories (or even worse) are being realised. For many key parameters, the climate system is already moving beyond the patterns of natural variability within which our society and economy have developed and thrived. These parameters include global mean surface temperature, sea-level rise, ocean and ice sheet dynamics, ocean acidification, and extreme climatic events. There is a significant risk that many of the trends will accelerate, leading to an increasing risk of abrupt or irreversible climatic shifts.

Key Message 2: Social disruption
The research community is providing much more information to support discussions on “dangerous climate change”. Recent observations show that societies are highly vulnerable to even modest levels of climate change, with poor nations and communities particularly at risk. Temperature rises above 2 degrees C (*) will be very difficult for contemporary societies to cope with, and will increase the level of climate disruption through the rest of the century. [*This is 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, above the globe's average temperature around 1850, the organizers say. Translated, that would be about 61.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Today's global average temperature is estimated at around 59 degrees. (This was updated after a couple of comment posters noted my funky conversion effort. Europe set its 2-degree limit from pre-industrial temperatures, making this a complicated calculation, and a source of much ongoing confusion.]

Key Message 3: Long-Term Strategy
Rapid, sustained, and effective mitigation based on coordinated global and regional action is required to avoid “dangerous climate change” regardless of how it is defined. Weaker targets for 2020 increase the risk of crossing tipping points and make the task of meeting 2050 targets more difficult. Delay in initiating effective mitigation actions increases significantly the long-term social and economic costs of both adaptation and mitigation.

Key Message 4: Equity Dimensions
Climate change is having, and will have, strongly differential effects on people within and between countries and regions, on this generation and future generations, and on human societies and the natural world. An effective, well-funded adaptation safety net is required for those people least capable of coping with climate change impacts, and a common but differentiated mitigation strategy is needed to protect the poor and most vulnerable.

Key Message 5: Inaction is Inexcusable
There is no excuse for inaction. We already have many tools and approaches – economic, technological, behavioural, management – to deal effectively with the climate change challenge. But they must be vigorously and widely implemented to achieve the societal transformation required to decarbonise economies. A wide range of benefits will flow from a concerted effort to alter our energy economy now, including sustainable energy job growth, reductions in the health and economic costs of climate change, and the restoration of ecosystems and revitalisation of ecosystem services.

Key Message 6: Meeting the Challenge
To achieve the societal transformation required to meet the climate change challenge, we must overcome a number of significant constraints and seize critical opportunities. These include reducing inertia in social and economic systems; building on a growing public desire for governments to act on climate change; removing implicit and explicit subsidies; reducing the influence of vested interests that increase emissions and reduce resilience; enabling the shifts from ineffective governance and weak institutions to innovative leadership in government, the private sector and civil society; and engaging society in the transition to norms and practices that foster sustainability.

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What was the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference really about?
March 13th, 2009

Posted by: Roger Pielke, Jr.

A Guest Post by
Professor Mike Hulme
School of Environmental Sciences
University of East Anglia

This article is co-published with SEEDMAGAZINE.COM

The largest academic conference that has yet been devoted to the subject of climate change finished yesterday in Copenhagen. Between 2,000 and 2,500 researchers from around the world attended three days of meetings during which 600 oral presentations (together with several hundred posters on display) were delivered on topics ranging from the ethics of energy sufficiency to the role of icons in communicating climate change to the dynamics of continental ice sheets.

I attended the Conference, chaired a session, listened to several presentations, read a number of posters and talked with dozens of colleagues from around the world. The breadth of research on climate change being presented was impressive, as was the vigour and thoughtfulness of the informal discussions being conducted during coffee breaks, evening receptions and side-meetings.

What intrigued me most, however, was the final conference statement issued yesterday, a statement drafted by the conference’s Scientific Writing Team. It contained six key messages and was handed to the Danish Prime Minister Mr Anders Fogh Rasmusson. The messages focused, respectively, on Climatic Trends, Social Disruption, Long-term Strategy, Equity Dimensions, Inaction is Inexcusable, and Meeting the Challenge. A fuller version of this statement will be prepared and circulated to key negotiators and politicians ahead of the 15th Conference of the Parties (COP15) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change to be held in December this year – also in Copenhagen.

The conference, and the final conference statement, has been widely reported as one at which the world’s scientists delivered a final warning to climate change negotiators about the necessity for a powerful political deal on climate change to be reached at COP15. (Some commentators have branded it The Emergency Science Conference’). The key messages include statements that ‘the worst-case IPCC scenario trajectories (or even worse) are being realised’, that ‘there is no excuse for inaction’, that ‘the influence of vested interests that increase emissions’ must be reduced, and that ‘regardless of how dangerous climate change is defined’ rapid, sustained and effective mitigation is required to avoid reaching it.

There is a fair amount of ‘motherhood and apple pie’ involved in the 600 word statement – who could disagree, for example, that climate risks are felt unevenly across the world or that we need sustainable jobs. But there are two aspects of this statement which are noteworthy and on which I would like to reflect: ‘Whose views does the statement represent?’ and ‘What are the ‘actions’ being called for?’

The Copenhagen Climate Change Conference was no IPCC. This was not a process initiated and conducted by the world’s governments, there was no systematic synthesis, assessment and review of research findings as in the IPCC, and there was certainly no collective process for the 2,500 researchers gathered in Copenhagen to consider drafts of the six key messages or to offer their own suggestions for what politicians may need to hear. The conference was in fact convened by no established academic or professional body. Unlike the American Geophysical Union, the World Meteorological Organisation or the UK’s Royal Society – who also hold large conferences and who from time-to-time issue carefully worded statements representing the views of professional bodies - this conference was organized by the International Alliance of Research Universities (IARU), a little-heard-of coalition launched in January 2006 consisting of ten of the world’s self-proclaimed elite universities, including of course the University of Copenhagen.

IARU is not accountable to anyone and has no professional membership. It is not accountable to governments, to professional scientific associations, nor to international scientific bodies operating under the umbrella of the UN. The conference statement therefore simply carries the weight of the Secretariat of this ad hoc conference, directed and steered by ten self-elected universities. The six key messages are not the collective voice of 2,500 researchers, nor are they the voice of established bodies such as the World Meteorological Organisation. Neither are they the messages arising from a collective endeavour of experts, for example through a considered process of screening, synthesizing and reviewing of the knowledge presented in Copenhagen this week. They are instead a set of messages drafted largely before the conference started by the organizing committee, sifting through research that they see emerging around the world and interpreting it for a political audience.

Which leads me to the second curiousity about this conference statement. What exactly is the ‘action’ the conference statement is calling for? Are these messages expressing the findings of science or are they expressing political opinions? I have no problem with scientists offering clear political messages as long as they are clearly recognized as such. And the conference chair herself, Professor Katherine Richardson, has described the messages as politically-motivated. All well and good.

But then we need to be clear about what authority these political messages carry. They carry the authority of the people who drafted them – and no more. Not the authority of the 2,500 expert researchers gathered at the conference. And certainly not the authority of collective global science. Caught between summarizing scientific knowledge and offering political interpretations of such knowledge, the six key messages seem rather ambivalent in what they are saying. It is as if they are not sure how to combine the quite precise statements of science with a set of more contested political interpretations.

Which brings us back to the calls for action and the ‘inexcusability of inaction’. What action on climate change exactly is being called for? During the conference there were debates amongst the experts about whether a carbon tax or carbon trading is the way to go. There were debates amongst the experts about whether or not we should abandon the ‘two degrees’ target as unachievable. There were debates about whether or not a portfolio of geo-engineering strategies now really needs to start being researched and promoted. And there were debates about the epistemological limits to model-based predictions of the future. There were debates about the role of behavioural change versus technological change, about the role of religions in mitigation and adaptation, and about the forms of governance most likely to deliver carbon reductions.

These are all valid debates to have. And they were debates that did occur during the conference. Experts from the natural sciences and social sciences, from engineering and policy sciences, from economics and the humanities, all presented findings from their work and these were discussed and argued over. These debates mixed science, values, ethics and politics. This is the reality of how climate change now engages with the worlds of theoretical, empirical and philosophical investigation.

It therefore seems problematic to me when such lively, well-informed and yet largely unresolved debates among a substantial cohort of the world’s climate change researchers gets reduced to six key messages, messages that on the one hand carry the aura of urgency, precision and scientific authority – ‘there is no excuse for inaction’ – and yet at the same time remain so imprecise as to resolve nothing in political terms.

In fact, we are no further forward after the Copenhagen Conference this week than before it. All options for attending to climate change – all political options – are, rightly, still on the table. Is it to be a carbon tax or carbon trading? Do we stick with ‘two degrees’ or abandon it? Do we promote geo-engineering or do we not? Do we coerce lifestyle change or not? Do we invest in direct poverty alleviation or in the New Green Deal?

A gathering of scientists and researchers has resolved nothing of the politics of climate change. But then why should it? All that can be told – and certainly should be told - is that climate change brings new and changed risks, that these risks can have a range of significant implications under different conditions, that there is an array of political considerations to be taken into account when judging what needs to be done, and there are a portfolio of powerful, but somewhat untested, policy measures that could be tried.

The rest is all politics. And we should let politics decide without being ambushed by a chimera of political prescriptiveness dressed up as (false) scientific unanimity.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 13th, 2009 at 8:13 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
11 Responses to “What was the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference really about?”

1. 1 Mark Bahner Says:
March 13th, 2009 at 9:09 am

‘there is no excuse for inaction’

I’m reminded of a great Simpsons moment. (People outside of the U.S., I feel so sorry for you missing great Simpsons’ moments!) (But there are very few great Simpsons moments anymore, so you’re no longer missing much.)

The scene is Kent Brockman, ace reporter, interviewing the Professor, expert in all things worth knowing:

Kent Brockman: “Hordes of panicky people seem to be evacuating the town for some unknown reason. Professor, without knowing precisely what the danger is, would you say it’s time for our viewers to crack each other’s heads open and feast on the goo inside? ”

Professor: “Yes I would, Kent.”
2. 2 jae Says:
March 13th, 2009 at 9:30 am

One call for action might be to stop wasting so much carbon on such grandiose meetings. It looks to me like its purpose was really only to give papers and have fun!
3. 3 michel Says:
March 13th, 2009 at 10:09 am

Thank you for this. It is a great relief to see that someone professionally associated with the climate issue, at UEA no less, shares our puzzlement.

We seem to continually be confronted with large numbers of academics proclaiming that to delay action is inexcusable, but who cannot say exactly what action they have in mind. Nuts!
4. 4 Scientist: Warming Could Cut Population to 1 Billion - Dot Earth Blog - NYTimes.com Says:
March 13th, 2009 at 10:43 am

[...] 1:45 p.m.: A roundup of economists’ and scientists’ views at the Copenhagen climate meeting and a reaction from Mike Hulme, a participating [...]
5. 5 Copenhagen Summit Seeks Climate Action - Dot Earth Blog - NYTimes.com Says:
March 13th, 2009 at 10:44 am

[...] 1:45 p.m.: A roundup of economists’ and scientists’ views at the Copenhagen climate meeting and a reaction from Mike Hulme, a participating [...]
6. 6 Sylvain Says:
March 13th, 2009 at 11:04 am

So following this, is it fair to blame deniers for delaying action when the heart of the matter is that there is no agreement on what the action should be?

Isn’t that the fact that we don’t know what action should be taken, the real reason why climate action are delayed?

Well not taking into account that most action that have been taken, didn’t fill their promises.
7. 7 Maurice Garoutte Says:
March 13th, 2009 at 11:09 am

Leave policy to the politicians seems like a good idea. Except that the public no longer trusts politicians. Science is still trusted so skilled politicians are inclined to use science to put a veneer of respectability on social policies.

Many scientists think that the ability to affect policy is a promotion of their profession, and if all goes well they will be right. However if the public starts thinking that science based policies are making their life worse the blame will go to science in general.

Leaving policy to the politicians is still the best idea. When the society suffers it should the fault of politics. It may be too late for baseball but we can still keep science pure.
8. 8 Maurice Garoutte Says:
March 13th, 2009 at 11:27 am

Krauthammer says it better than me.

“Science has everything to say about what is possible. Science has nothing to say about what is permissible. Obama’s pretense that he will “restore science to its rightful place” and make science, not ideology, dispositive in moral debates is yet more rhetorical sleight of hand — this time to abdicate decision-making and color his own ideological preferences as authentically “scientific.” “

He’s talking about stem cells not AGW but the connection between science and politics is the same.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/12/AR2009031202764.html?nav=rss_opinion/columns
9. 9 wmanny Says:
March 13th, 2009 at 12:00 pm

And speaking of connections, Thomson’s clone might well have said, “if climate prediction consensus does not make you at least a little bit uncomfortable, you have not thought about it enough.”
10. 10 Climate porn… Marcoscan Says:
March 13th, 2009 at 12:13 pm

[...] conferenza ha suscitato diverse critiche [1, 2], e non solo da parte dei cosiddetti “scettici”; anche molti scienziati hanno [...]
11. 11 The Good And The Bad Reporting About Rising Sea Levels « The Unbearable Nakedness of CLIMATE CHANGE Says:
March 13th, 2009 at 3:12 pm

[...] makes one of them good, and two bad? Well, if you cannot spot the difference between presenting the scientific debate as it is, and selecting only the stuff that a journalist deems worth noticing, I am not sure I would be [...]

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