Battle vs. Climate Change “Lost”. Adapt! say Scientists
What a difference a fortnight makes. Two weeks ago I wrote on global warming in terms of guarded optimism in the belief that the world had finally listened and having, more or less, summoned up the political will was now moving in a direction that would see us through. What this actually means is that by 2050 global warming will have been capped at 2?C., carbon dioxide emissions having been reduced by half current levels. Or, to put it another way, given the political will to do the necessary, plus a healthy dose of human ingenuity and a bit of luck, we’d all squeak by wikthout being massively inconvenienced.
Alas! that is not what many leading scientists on climate change are now telling us.
This Summer at a conference on global warming Professor Kevin Anderson, of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at Manchester University UK, told a stunned audience of fellow scientists that carbon emissions were soaring out of control, far above even the bleak scenario’s delivered by the IPCC and Stern benchmark reports on climate change presented to the UN in 2007. He wished he was wrong but, he said, the battle against climate change “had already been lost.” The world now needed to prepare for things to get “very, very bad”, he concluded hoping his audience would prove him wrong. None of them could.
Let’s Make a Depression
Prof. Anderson pointed out that CO2 emissions since 2000 have risen much faster than anyone thought possible, driven mainly by the coal-fuelled economic boom in the developing world. So much extra pollution is being pumped out that climate targets being debated by politicians are “fanciful at best or dangerously misguided at worst”. CO2 in the world’s delicate atmosphere is measured by parts per million (ppm). Anderson now says it is “improbable” levels could be restricted below 650 ppm. With CO2 levels currently at 380ppm, up from 280 at the time of the industrial revolution, and it rises at 2 ppm a year, responsible governments in developed nations say the world should cap this rise at 450ppm. Experts say this would give us an even chance of limiting eventual temperature rise to 2?C, which the European Union says is already dangerous. We’ve already used up 0.7?C. of that and a further 0.5?C. is guaranteed because of emissions to date. That leaves us an unlikely target limit of 0.8?C for the next 42 years. Unfortunately for us all Prof. Anderson’s charts show graphs of fumes that belch from chimneys, exhausts and jet engines instead of heading for the floor, soaring upward to the ceiling. Come 2050 the world would be lucky indeed to stand at 650ppm, which translates into a catastrophic 4?C temperature rise. Even that bleak future could only be realised if all countries, developing nations included, adopted draconian emission reductions within a decade. Only an unprecedented planned economic recession could do it. Our current financial woes wouldn’t even come close.
Prof. Anderson is not the only expert saying current targets are hopelessly optimistic. Many scientists, politicians and campaigners privately admit 2?C is a lost cause, that 650ppm is a much more likely outcome than the 450ppm called for. Bob Watson, Chief Scientist at the UK’s Environment Dept. and former head of the IPCC report, warned the world that it should prepare for a 4?C rise, which would wipe out hundreds of species, bring extreme food and water shortages and cause floods that would displace hundreds of millions of people. “We are”, he said “at the top end of the worst case emissions scenario. Hitting the 450ppm target will be unbelievably difficult. Realistically we should aim for 550ppm”.
Failure to Haunt Humanity for All Time
From Australia a government report this Autumn stated that a target of 450ppm was so ambitious it could wreck the new global deal on global warning that has to be reached at Copenhagen in December, 2009. The report’s author, economist Prof. Ross Garnaut of Melbourne University, says nations must accept that a greater amount of global warming is inevitable “or risk a failure to agree that would haunt humanity till the end of time”. The report says all developed nations will have to slash emissions by 5% p.a. over the next decade to hit the 450ppm target. The UK’s Climate Change Act, the most ambitious legislation of its kind in the world only calls for an annual 3?C reduction until 2050. The awful arithmetic means focussing on a 450ppm outcome could sabotage negotiations for 550ppm, a more modest but still difficult international outcome, which would still be vastly superior to business as usual.
A different and hardly encouraging slant comes from Henry Derwent, President of the International Emissions Trading Association. He said we must stop talking in terms of of either 450ppm or 550 ppm because it will halt the politics of negotiation dead in its tracks. The alarming fact is that many small island states are predicted to be swamped by rising sea levels triggered by CO2 levels as low as 400ppm. “It just won’t work”, he says “countries are not going to sign up for something that loses them half their territory. The new agreement in Copenhagen must concentrate on shorter term goals, such as firm emission reductions by 2020”, he said.
Wait! It gets Worse....
There is still worse news. Escalating human emissions could not have come at a worse time. Earth’s forests and oceans are losing their ability to soak up CO2 pollution. Most climate projections work on the assumption that about half of all carbon emissions are re-absorbed by these natural sinks. Computer models predict this effect will weaken as the world warms, and scientists say it‘s already happening. The Southern Ocean’s ability to absorb CO2 has dropped by 15% per decade since 1981 and scientists have noted dramatic declines in the North Atlantic CO2 sink over the past 20 years. Separate studies also show the ability of the world’s remaining forests to soak up CO2 is declining, not just through deforestation and degradation, but because changing length of seasons alters the time when trees switch from being a sink to a source of CO2 emission.
The Earth’s soils too are also starting to give up their carbon stores. In 2005 parts of the vast expanse of the Siberian tundra began to thaw. This region, the largest frozen peat bog in the world, had begun to melt for the first time since it was formed 11,000 years ago. Scientist believe the bog may start to release billions of tonnes of methane, a greenhouse gas that is 20 times more potent than CO2, just as the World Meteorological Organisation reported the largest annual rise in methane levels in a decade.
Many other scientists are now calling for urgent upward reassessment of the IPCC recommendations in the light of the unexpected surge in carbon emissions. “the suggested carbon cuts cannot be taken as a reliable means of stabilising levels in the atmosphere. Cuts will need to be more and bigger”, said Peter Sheehan, Prof of Economics at Victoria University, Australia.
Yet another another chilling idea of the scale of the problem facing us comes from Jim Hansen, Senior Climate Scientist at NASA, who earlier this year told us that a historical target of 350ppm, significantly below where we are today, is what‘s needed to “preserve a planet similar to that on which our civilisation developed and to which life on earth is adapted”. He called for an urgent top level joint review of the IPCC report by Britain’s Royal Society and the US National Academy of Sciences.
I’d Like to Believe you Prof., But.......
Against all this we have the reassurance of Prof. Rajendra Pachauri, Chairman of the IPCC, who totally rejects all suggestions from his former IPCC colleagues that the IPCC report is out of date. “The IPCC report is not based on two years of results but 30 or 40 years of research. We’re not dealing with short term weather changes, we’re talking major changes in our climate system. I refuse to accept a few papers should influence the long term projections the IPCC has come up with”.
To which the UK’s Prof. Bob Watson responds, “even without new data most us feel more urgent action is essential. The new information only confirms that. It was already very urgent to start with. It’s now become very, very urgent”.
Having spent two weeks covering the politiking at the Bali Global Warming Conference in December 2007 and reading up on how things are limping along right now at the Poznan UNCCC in the run-up to Copenhagen December 2009, when the agenda for the renewal of the Kyoto protocol is supposed to be agreed, it is hard to see how the relatively modest IPCC suggestions allowing for a 2?C rise in temperature and 50% cut in carbon emissions by 2050 will do the trick. The scientific Cassandran chorus we are now hearing has the ominous ring of truth.
We have been this way before.... and made it. DNA science now tells us the reason variations between our genetic make-up is so very small is because at some stage in the past 200,000 years a catastrophic climatic occurrence reduced our numbers from some millions to just 1,000 people. And we started over.
I guess that’s encouraging, but let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. We are probably already in a world where the powers-that-be are manipulating us to worry, but not panic. We would all do well to start ordering our lives accordingly for an uncertain future and meantime do all we can privately and in our businesses to reduce our carbon emissions. For one thing seems certain, and that is change, the like of which may not have been seen in millennia, is on its way.
