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As fears grow amongst climate scientists that the world may be close to
reaching a tipping point leading to runaway global warming, there’s a
growing recognition that the forthcoming UN climate conference in
Copenhagen must deliver dramatic and binding targets to cut carbon.
According to Richard Douthwaite, the talks are unlikely to deliver
sufficiently meaningful action.
The choice is stark: either the governments of the world agree to engineer a planned energy descent or we will get a chaotic one by default which will cost hundreds of millions of lives. The decision between the two will be made at the UN climate conference in Copenhagen in December this year.
I'm fearful about the result because the politicians who will take the decision are not even aware that this is the choice they are making. Moreover, even if they were, it would be impossible for them to choose a planned approach immediately because no planning has been done and they are not facing up to the problem in an honest way.
The leaders of the twenty big countries collectively responsible for 80 per cent of the world's greenhouse emissions have made a bad decision already. In July, at the Major Economies Forum in Italy, they agreed that the global average temperature should not rise by more than 2 degrees C above its level in pre-industrial times.
Actually agreeing a temperature target (what took them so long?) was a step forward but one that didn't go nearly far enough because every one of those leaders knew that a 2 degree rise would have extremely undesirable effects. It could even be enough to trigger positive feedbacks which set off a rapid, uncontrollable warming with catastrophic consequences.
We've only had a 0.7 degree rise so far and some of the feedbacks have already kicked in. For example, the unexpectedly rapid rate at which the Arctic ice has been melting has increased the rate at which the planet is warming, because the white ice which reflected solar energy back into space has been replaced by a dark, heat-absorbing sea. Similarly, the melting of the permafrost in Russia has released vast amounts of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere.
EU officials charged with climate policy development have become gravely alarmed by the reports of feedbacks they have been receiving. “Panic doesn't BEGIN to describe it” one of them told me in an e-mail. The capital letters are his. James Hansen, the director of NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies is also alarmed. The “elements of a perfect storm, a global cataclysm, are assembled” he told the US Congress last year.
So why didn't the 20 leaders opt for a lower, safer temperature target such as the 1.5 degrees limit demanded by 80 small, poor countries, including the small island states which will disappear under the waves because of rising sea levels? The answer is that the economic consequences of cutting fossil fuel use in the next few years by enough to limit the rise to 1.5 would inevitably bring their economies crashing down. The advantage of the 2 degree target is that it means that serious adjustments can be delayed at least until those involved are out of office.
The big-country leaders hope that the 2 degree target can be achieved by allowing the atmospheric concentration of CO2 to rise to 450 parts per million (ppmv) before it stabilises. This requires that global fossil emissions are cut by 80 per cent of their 2005 level by 2050, with the cut-backs beginning in 2012.
At the Italian meeting, the rich big countries undertook to make the 80 per cent cuts by 2050 but the poorer big countries like India, China and Brazil did not. They refused to commit to any cuts just yet on the basis that their people need to use more energy to lift themselves out of poverty. They urged the rich countries to cut by more than 80 per cent instead.
Most of the rich big countries are being guarded about when they will start making the cuts and how large their initial ones will be. The EU presents itself as an honourable exception. It has said that it will cut its emissions by 20 per cent of their 1990 level (that's 14 per cent of their 2005 level) by 2020 whatever happens, and will cut by 30 per cent of the 1990 rate (in other words, 21 per cent of 2005 emissions) if other rich countries agree to substantial cuts too.
But its offers are not what they seem. FERN, the Forests and the European Union Resource Network, an international NGO with offices in England, Holland and Belgium, calculated earlier this year that the European Commission was planning to make only a quarter of its 20 per cent pre-2020 emissions cut within the EU. The rest would be made by paying companies in developing countries to reduce their emissions instead. This is a practice called offsetting which is permitted under the Kyoto Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). Unfortunately, carbon offsets do not help prevent climate change because they do not reduce overall emissions.
“Even in a best case scenario,” FERN points out, “all they can do is stabilise levels, because a reduction in one place justifies an extra emission in another place. Unfortunately, even this best-case scenario appears to be rare as it is not possible to verify whether any claimed reduction would otherwise have occurred. By allowing the release of extra emissions without the certainty of equivalent extra reductions elsewhere, any trading scheme involving carbon offsets may increase rather than reduce GHG emissions. On top of this, many of these projects also affect the rights of some of the world’s poorest communities, resulting in increased hardship and suffering.”
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