The Climate Conference in Copenhagen is history, and after expressing huge frustration most German newspapers have quit reporting about the “results”. Time for a summary therefore on  how the German media handled it.

First of all: Every newspaper, every news magazine, every online outlet covered the conference with special sections, special reports, and special attention generally (and not only in the science sections). The national media’s hope, that humankind might be able to come up with a global contract for a greater good, was the message that one could read between all these lines. Commentators couldn’t hide their disappointment that politicians couldn’t achieve more than to take notice of the “Two-Degrees”-goal (the temperature shouldn’t rise more than two degrees Celsius by 2050). But here and there some (incorrigibly optimistic?) journalists emphasize that Copenhagen could be the first step and that some agreements might be possible in Bonn, Germany, where the next climate conference will take place in July 2010 (the Hamburger Abendblatt, e.g., quotes a professor from the Max-Planck-Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, who still has hopes for an international agreement.)

The Süddeutsche Zeitung (Patrick Illinger, Christopher Schrader) provided two scenarios of the future in 50 years, based on current studies: Illinger drew a picture of the future world without any global agreement on carbon emissions, Schrader tried to describe a more responsible world. Illinger (head of the science section at the Süddeutsche) later added a comment on Copenhagen’s results. The headline sounds like: “We always knew that this conference would fail.” But Illinger describes an experiment with a group of students at the Max-Planck-Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, which explain why humans just don’t act for the greater good, but always put their individual goals first – the phenomenon famously called  the tragedy of the commons.

For the introduction of his comment, Ulrich Schnabel (Die Zeit) took a comparable approach, quoting research of the anthropologist Michael Tomasello (same Max-Planck-Institute), that humans behavioral abilities to save the world are limited.

The comment of the Austrian Standard sees political reasons for the failure of Copenhagen. Christoph Prantner writes, that Copenhagen was a “laboratory for the global politics of the 21st century“, the “pacific century”, where nothing works in global politics without an agreement of the two super powers China and USA. And China used Copenhagen to demonstrate this new role.

Joachim Müller-Jung wrote  for the science blog Planckton in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, from Copenhagen. With a very clear voice, using words like “climate hallucinations” and “self-denial” (of politicians), Müller-Jung described the frustrating last days of the conference. It’s interesting (and sometimes funny) to read. The pictures help to get an insight into life at and around the conference in the Danish capital. His article for the newspaper heads with the German short-cut for FYI – for your information – or z.K. (“zur Kenntnis”), in describing the minimal agreement that emerged at Copenhagen, and says that it is just a formula. Some nations like Bolivia frankly said, that they do not accept the agreement.

The FAZ correspondent from Brussels, Michael Stabenow, writes, that the European Union will try to build a “coalition of the likeminded“, despite the failure of Copenhagen.

Axel Bojanowski, a freelancer specialized on climate issues, visited Copenhagen and gave a detailed description of the formation of the “disaster” for the online issue of the weekly magazine Stern, stern.de. But at the end, he says, that climate protection did not die in Kopenhagen. Local solution should be found after the global attempt collapsed. Research and development of new and better green technologies should be boosted – the money should be there, because emission trading is omitted now.

This post may be updated as more gets digested.

- Sascha Karberg

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 29th, 2009 at 3:20 pm and is filed under Environment & Energy Stories, German Language Media. 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.