Before the “Conference of the Parties”, COP19, PIK director John Schellnhuber travelled to Warsaw to meet with the president of this year´s COP, the Polish Minister of the Environment Marcin Korolec. In a joint interview with the German weekly Die Zeit Schellnhuber said: “If we achieve a reasonably ambitious agreement, hopefully countries will join forces as alliances of rationality and pioneering partnerships until 2020. And something else will happen: Nature itself will speak to us, namely in earnest words. There will be heat waves, floods, crop failures – because we massively interrupt the complex climate system.” He also talked to the biggest Polish newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza, and other international media like the Brazilian Valor Economico or the Japanese agency Jiji Press.
Ottmar Edenhofer, vice director of the Potsdam Institute, will be in Warsaw for a side event next week. In advance, he told Süddeutsche Zeitung there could only be immediate achievements if CO2 emissions had a price. Taz and Märkische Allgemeine also picked up economic questions regarding the climate negotiations. Gunnar Luderer said to Deutsche Welle, doing nothing was more expensive than to act: “If we act quickly, the costs of climate protection will probably be in a similar range of less than two percent of the global economic performance.” Anders Levermann talked with the Austrian Standard and WDR about the chances of moving on at COP19, so did Wolfgang Lucht with HNA: “If climate change is not slowed down, we will live in a completely different world by the end of the century.”
But the dominant topic in the media is typhoon Haiyan and its devastating scale. Will tropical storms get worse? Stefan Rahmstorf explains the correlation of the appearance of strong tropical storms and global warming in his blog, but also in heute Journal, Brandenburg Aktuell and Inforadio. At ZDF Morgenmagazin he said that the warming of the sea brings forward such storms. In regard to the climate negotiations in Warsaw Rahmstorf said he missed the political determination and urgency in this race against time.
