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ENVIRONMENT: Climate Change Lays Waste to Global Treaty

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Mar 15 2004 (IPS) - Retreating glaciers and more forest fires, floods and other severe weather events are arriving as predicted, 10 years after the world community agreed to limit the greenhouse gas emissions believed to cause global warming, says a new report.

A decade after ratification of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), those emissions continue to rise, signalling a “collective failure” of the industrialised world, according to the Washington-based World Resources Institute (WRI), one of the world’s foremost environmental think tanks.

“We are quickly moving to the point where the damage will be irreversible,” warns Dr. Jonathan Pershing, director of WRI’s climate, energy and pollution programme.

“In fact, the latest scientific reports indicate that global warming is worsening. Unless we act now, the world will be locked into temperatures that would cause irreversible harm”, he adds in a statement.

WRI researchers estimate that greenhouse gas emissions, such as carbon dioxide, rose 11 percent over the last decade, and are expected to grow another 50 percent worldwide by 2020.

Under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, the international agreement that provided specific targets to follow up the UNFCCC, 38 industrialised countries were called upon to reduce emissions by an average seven percent below 1990 levels by 2012.

While the administration of former U.S. President Bill Clinton signed the Protocol, Clinton’s successor, President George W. Bush, withdrew the United States, which currently emits about 25 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases, from negotiations over Kyoto’s implementation.

Russia, which indicated initially it intended to ratify the Protocol, remains undecided. As a result, the agreement, which must be ratified by countries whose greenhouse emissions totalled more than 55 percent of global output in 1990 in order to take effect, is in limbo.

WRI decided to make a relatively rare public statement now both because the tenth anniversary of the UNFCCC’s ratification will take place next weekend and because of growing pessimism over the international community’s ability and will to deal with the problem.

The UNFCCC, which called for voluntary reductions in greenhouse emissions, was signed by, among others, then-President George H.W. Bush, at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, and took formal effect Mar. 21, 1994. Today, 188 countries are signatories.

The Kyoto Protocol grew out of the UNFCCC when it became clear that plans for voluntary reductions would not meet initial targets, and as scientists on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) became increasingly convinced that the rise in global temperatures of about one degree Fahrenheit over the last century was due primarily to artificial emissions, notably the combustion of fossil fuels, including coal, oil and gas.

Studies over the past decade have shown the warming trend continues. “The five warmest years in recorded weather history have taken place over the last six years,” said WRI President Jonathan Lash.

“The 10 warmest years in recorded weather history have taken place since 1987. Whether it’s the retreat of glaciers, the melting of the permafrost in Alaska or the increase in severe weather events, the world is experiencing what the global warming models predict,” he added in the report.

Europe, the main champion of the Kyoto Protocol, suffered its hottest year on record last year. Some 15,000 people in France alone died due to heat stress in combination with pollution, while European agriculture suffered an estimated 12.5 billion U.S. dollars in losses.

Britain’s most influential scientist, Sir David King, recently excoriated the Bush administration for withdrawing from the Protocol and ignoring the threat posed by climate change. “In my view, climate change is the most severe problem we are facing today,” he wrote in ‘Science’ magazine, “more serious even than the threat of terrorism”.

Even the Pentagon recently issued a warning that global warming, if it takes place abruptly, could result in a catastrophic breakdown in international security.

Wars over access to food, water and energy would be likely to break out between states, according to the report. “Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life,” it adds. “Once again, warfare would define human life”.

Even if climate change is more gradual, recent studies have argued that as many as one million plant and animal species could be rendered extinct due to the effects of global warming by 2050.

A report by the world’s largest reinsurance company, Swiss Re, predicted that in 10 years the economic cost of disasters like floods, frosts and famines caused by global warming could reach 150 billion dollars annually.

“Accelerated development of a portfolio of technologies could stabilise greenhouse gas concentrations, enhance global energy security, and eradicate energy poverty,” argues David Jhirad, WRI’s vice president for research. “We urgently need the political will and international cooperation to make this happen.”