Climate Change, Environment, Global, Global Geopolitics, Headlines

ENVIRONMENT: The Decade After Next…

Stephen Leahy

BROOKLIN, Canada, Jan 27 2005 (IPS) - Climate change could raise global temperatures a whopping 11 degrees C. by mid-century, new research revealed Thursday, even as some international experts warn that just a two-degree increase would likely spell disaster for many people.

New reports reveal that the Earth’s climate is much more sensitive to human emissions of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide than scientists had previously believed.

These changes pose real risks to international peace and security and the global economy, said Nigel Purvis of the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based think tank.

“The United Nations and the secretary-general, in particular, need to be much more active and forceful on this issue, including pressuring the U.S. to do more to curb its emissions,” Purvis told IPS prior to the release of new British research that may be the most urgent call to action yet.

Using the most computer power ever attempted to predict the future climate, British climate scientists writing in the journal Nature today calculate that global temperatures could rise between two degrees and 11 degrees C. by mid-century.

The last estimate in 2001 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a groundbreaking scientific collaboration that laid the basis for the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on curbing greenhouse gases, was 1.5 to 4.5-degrees C.

While the IPCC estimate represents a consensus amongst the world’s leading scientists, new data in the last two years suggests that doubling the amount of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases (GHGs) beyond pre-industrial levels could lead to shockingly sharp increases in temperatures.

Doubling would mean the GHG concentration has reached 540 parts per million (ppm) in the atmosphere – a level not seen in millions of years. The current level is around 380 ppm, rising at more than two ppm per year and accelerating.

Last July, the IPCC convened a meeting in Paris to discuss the new data and concluded that extreme temperature increases could not be ruled out, said Myles Allen, a physicist at Oxford University and co-author of the Nature study.

“My gut feeling is that temperatures won’t rise as high as 11 degrees C, but you can’t rule it out and I find that very worrying,” Allen said in an interview.

The next IPCC report and official estimate is expected in 2007.

While mid-century may be some distance away, in just 10 years global temperatures could be two degrees higher than pre-industrial levels, according to a report by the International Climate Change Taskforce released this week. Global temperatures are currently 0.7 degrees higher.

“Meeting the Climate Challenge” says if temperatures rise more than two degrees, “the risks to human societies and ecosystems grow significantly…(and) the risks of abrupt, accelerated or runaway climate change also increase”.

These risks include substantial agricultural losses, widespread adverse health effects, greatly increased risks of water shortage and permanent damage to the world’s coral reefs and rainforests.

The taskforce was set up by the Institute for Public Policy Research, the Centre for American Progress and the Australia Institute. Although these organisations focus on policy, not scientific research, IPCC head Rajendra Pachauri served as scientific advisor.

The report says there is an enormous need for more efficient low-carbon and no-carbon energy alternatives and an “urgent need to increase access to modern energy services for the world’s poor”.

The taskforce also urges British Prime Minster Tony Blair to set up a climate panel at the Group of Eight most industrialised nations (the United States, Canada, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Russia), of which he is currently president, to “engage the United States and major developing countries in action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions”.

There is a clear and direct link between environmental problems and global peace, according to the Environmental Change and Security Project (ECSP), which runs out of the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars in Washington.

“Environmental security is the disarmament policy of the future,” Klaus Toepfer, the executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme, says in the ECSP’s 10th anniversary report released this week.

“People in countries with severe population, environment, and health problems get desperate. If they have no hope, they turn to drastic things like civil war and terrorism.” writes scientist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jared Diamond in the report.

“Today, no society can collapse without affecting other societies.”.

Solving population, environment, and health problems is a cheap way to prevent conflict concludes Diamond, who has written a new book on these issues titled “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed”.

“It would be relatively cheap to solve the world’s public health problems, which if left untreated, may ultimately lead to the explosions that cause us to send in our troops. The band-aids cost much more than the antibiotic.”

The least developed nations, weak and undemocratic states are the most vulnerable to climate change and are in desperate need of assistance to adapt the inevitable fallout, according to the Brookings Institution’s Purvis, who, with a colleague also contributed a paper to the ECSP report.

The United Nations needs to dramatically strengthen its programmes to handle disaster and humanitarian crises because there will be many more in the future, said Purvis. Early warning systems and vulnerability assessments will need to be done. And nations most at risk will need help in setting up risk reduction strategies.

All this will require that nations from the developed world come up with a lot more funding to help countries face these enormous challenges, he says. But Purvis believes the money will come.

“It’s becoming understood that it is in the U.S.’s and other developed nations’ moral and security interests to reduce global poverty,” he said. “Unfortunately it’s unlikely the U.S. will be involved in substantial (emissions) reductions for some time under the Bush administration.”

While the Kyoto Protocol will take effect Feb. 16 with 136 countries participating, Bush has refused to submit the treaty to Congress for ratification because he says industrialised nations are unfairly singled out.

There has been some action at the local and state level, but key steps like increasing fuel efficiency standards for vehicles and setting mandatory cuts in emissions for industry nationwide are not being done, he said.

“The U.S. public knows global warming is real but they don’t think it’s a high priority,” Purvis concluded.