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Missing: the most vital ingredient

Copenhagen summit on climate change – 1

Ahead of Monday’s opening of the Copenhagen conference on climate change, the majority of governments and scientists are working hard to avert drought, famine – and war. Yet the public is still unconvinced of the need for urgent action.

It would have been easier to take on board the danger had it been an asteroid. Say Nasa had announced that one of its much-tracked Near Earth Objects– XYZ999, if you like – a giant hurtling lump of space rock 10km across, had been discovered with an orbit that would intersect precisely with that of the Earth on 5 December 2010, thus threatening the same cataclysm visited upon the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, we could perceive the nature of the threat with absolute clarity. And as one, we would shout to our leaders: Do something!

But this global warming business, it seems so … so hazy, so indistinct, somehow. People have been going on about it for years, haven’t they, that it’s going to get a lot warmer, some time in the future, and if it did, would that be so bad? A bit more warmth? And some people think it’s not our fault, and it isn’t happening anyway.

And so the argument runs now: there is no discernible clamour from the public at large (a quite different body of people from environmental activists) for resolute and radical action to combat the threat of climate change, which many senior scientists and politicians perceive as by far the most critical danger human society has ever faced – a phenomenon that will wipe out food and fresh water supplies across the globe, triggering giant migrations and consequent, worldwide, desperate conflicts.

This lack of a worldwide citizen commotion demanding action is perhaps the most remarkable circumstance surrounding the two-week United Nations conference that begins in Copenhagen on Monday, at which the countries of the world will try to construct a new international treaty to bring climate change under control. Most world leaders will attend, from President Barack Obama down, supported by perhaps 15,000 officials. They will address the scientific evidence that the course we are currently set on threatens a rise in global average temperatures of up to 6°C by 2100, which would destroy human society. But the public’s lack of demand for action remains the crucial weakness in the world’s response to global warming.

Scientists and politicians will speak of the overheating of the atmosphere being caused by the remorselessly growing emissions of carbon dioxide – CO2 – which we produce whenever we burn fossil fuels in power stations and motor vehicles, and cut down forests. Their agenda will be nothing less than the human future on the planet; the habitability of the Earth. But ordinary people’s feelings, the essential basis of political will, could well be Copenhagen’s fatal weakness. For even if world leaders agree on a new plan of action, shaking hands, posing for the photo-op – Gordon Brown will be prominent – and speak of their triumph, that plan will be nowhere near strong enough to get a hold on the invisible gas which is profoundly altering the nature of our world.

How have we got here? Let us look at the science first. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere acts as a “greenhouse gas”: that is, it behaves like the panes of a greenhouse, and its molecules absorb the heat emitted by the Earth when the planet is warmed by the Sun, preventing that heat from escaping to space. The more carbon in the atmosphere, the more heat will be retained: Venus, which has an atmosphere almost totally made up of CO2, has a surface temperature of 450°C.
For more than 200 years, since the beginnings of the industrial revolution when we began to burn fossil fuels on a large scale, we have been increasing the atmospheric CO2 concentration, the natural level of which was about 280 parts per million by volume (ppm) before industrialisation; when a young American scientist, Charles David Keeling, began to measure it annually on the top of an extinct Hawaiian volcano, Mauna Loa, in 1958, it stood at 315ppm. It now stands at 385ppm, and rising.

It had long been recognised that substantial, human-produced increases in atmospheric CO2 would be likely to result in increases in global temperatures (the credit is generally given to a Swedish physicist, Svante Arrhenius, who died in 1927), and in the 1980s it began to be appreciated that this phenomenon was upon us. The average temperature of the Earth’s atmosphere was observed to be steadily climbing, in parallel with the rapidly swelling carbon emissions pouring out of factories, power stations and transport as post-war global economic growth careered on unchecked.

If there was a specific moment when the two were linked in the public mind, and the world was alerted to the threat, it was 23 June, 1988, when America’s leading climate scientist, Jim Hansen of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, testified before the US Senate, in a record 98°F (36.7°C) heatwave, that global warming had arrived. His words attracted huge attention, which was then switched to the Toronto Conference on the Changing Atmosphere the following month. As global warming was suddenly high on the international agenda, the United Nations shortly afterwards established a body of scientists to investigate it, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

That was the beginning of the global warming age, which has been marked by four, successively more ominous, reports from the IPCC. The first of them, in 1990, was drastic enough: it announced that if “Business As Usual” continued, the world would warm by 3°C by 2100 and be hotter than at any time for 10,000 years, with a consequent rise in global sea levels of up to a metre: clearly a recipe for disaster. This galvanised the international community, and in 1992 – on an astonishingly short timescale for an UN treaty, let it be said – the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was produced and signed by virtually all nations at the Earth Summit at Rio de Janeiro.

The UNFCCC remains as the world’s principal tool for attempting to control a warming world; its avowed objective is to stabilise greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent climate change that is dangerous (in recent years a threshold regarded as 2°C above the pre-industrial level). It proposes to effect this by having nations cut their emissions of the CO2 that is causing the problem, and the first agreement to do so came with the protocol to the treaty signed in the Japanese city of Kyoto, in December 1997.

The Kyoto protocol has been the great hope of the world, in dealing with climate change, and also its great disappointment. Under its terms, 37 industrialised countries, including Britain and the US, agreed to make legally binding cuts in their emissions of greenhouse gases (mainly carbon dioxide, but also others such as methane and nitrous oxide) by a total of 5.2 per cent by 2010.

This was a tremendous step forward. But the developing countries, from China and India down, were not required to make cuts of their own as it was recognised by all sides that nations had “common but differentiated responsibilities” with regard to the climate, and that as the rich Western nations had caused most of the problem by putting most of the CO2 up there in the first place, they should act first.

This did not go down well in the United States, when Al Gore, then Bill Clinton’s vice president, arrived back from Kyoto after signing the treaty. The Senate did not like the idea of the US struggling to cut carbon, through higher taxes or whatever, while China, a major economic rival, was obliged to do nothing; senators made it clear that the protocol would not be ratified; it never was. Worse was to come. When George W. Bush took office as Clinton’s successor in 2001 he had Kyoto in his sights and in March 2001 he withdrew the US from it completely.

Without the participation of the world’s leading nation, indeed the world’s biggest carbon emitter – the US was responsible for 36 per cent of global emissions in 1990, for less than 5 per cent of the world’s population – the treaty was crippled in its effectiveness, and over the next eight years the Bush administration, ruled by a caucus of oilmen who were deeply hostile to the idea that burning fossil fuels might be causing anyone any problems, obstructed progress in dealing with climate change at every possible turn. During these years, however, the realisation began to dawn that climate change was proceeding more rapidly than anyone had hitherto thought it would.

Although before the millennium most of the change referred to was in computer predictions of the future, it became clear after 2000 that major shifts were happening already in the real world, visible not least in the melting of the land ice of Greenland, of the Antarctic peninsula and the great majority of mountain glaciers, from the Alps to the Himalayas.
Intense scientific research on climate issues began to throw up new threats. For one, a large amount of the CO2 pumped out by human society was dissolving in the oceans, and acidifying them as it did so, in a major threat to marine life. For another, it was realised that the climate system itself held “positive feedbacks”, mechanisms which could amplify the warming, such as the melting of the sea ice of the Arctic Ocean, which left a dark sea surface, which absorbed more heat, which melted more ice, which left a bigger dark surface, and so on.

These new worries were reflected in the IPCC’s fourth report, published in February 2007, which contained the strongest language the scientists had yet used: they said that warming of the climate was “unequivocal” and that there was a better than nine out of 10 chance that most of the warming seen since the mid-twentieth century had been caused by increased amounts of greenhouse gases human society had generated. The report predicted a temperature increase of between 1.8°C and 4°C by 2100, depending on the amount of CO2 emitted, with an outside chance of a completely catastrophic, society-finishing 6.2°C rise, if emissions growth continued unchecked.

At the UN climate conference in Bali in Indonesia, in December 2007, a newly galvanised international community agreed to create a wholly new climate treaty, from scratch, to be signed at Copenhagen this month. There had to be three essentials if warming is to be properly tackled. First, Copenhagen would bring America back into the fold. With the election of Barack Obama, convinced of the importance of the climate issue, this became a reality.

Secondly, it would bring in China, India and the other developing countries whose carbon emissions were beginning to soar past those of the industrialised West; they would not yet be required to make absolute emissions cuts, so they could continue the economic growth that was pulling their people out of poverty, but they would be required to move decisively away from “Business As Usual”. And thirdly, a new and comprehensive package of financial help from the rich countries would help developing countries make the changes.

For the past two years 192 nations have been negotiating these proposals, and after many ups and downs and a recent period of pessimism, the signs are that over the next fortnight in Copenhagen, they will be agreed. A formal, legally binding treaty will not be signed in the Danish capital, but there will be a firm political commitment to draw such an agreement up over the next 12 months, and the world will once more be united in the face of the unparalleled climate threat.

A new deal will be a massive step forward. But what will it actually promise? The IPCC told the Bali conference in 2007 that to get on track to hold temperature rises to 2°C, emissions should be cut in the medium term – by 2020 – to a figure 25-40 per cent below 1990 levels. If a deal goes ahead, the European Union will commit to a 30 per cent cut below 1990, Japan to a 25 per cent cut, and Australia to something less. But the US, the world’s second biggest carbon emitter, will be pledging merely a 3 per cent cut below 1990, and China, now the biggest emitter, no cut at all, simply a slowdown in its runaway rate of emissions growth. It will not be enough.

It fact, it will be far from enough. The UK Met Office’s Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research said last year that to have a chance of keeping temperature rises below 2°C, global emissions would have to peak in 2016 and decline thereafter at an annual rate of 4 per cent until 2050 – and even then the chance of keeping to two degrees was only 50-50. But led by the explosive expansion of Chinese industry, global emissions are soaring, increasing at 3 per cent a year rather than declining at 4 per cent ; nothing like the really necessary, extreme decline is remotely on the Copenhagen negotiating table.

The political will to implement it is simply missing. And according to the most recent research, the emissions path we are now on leads to a 6°C rise by 2100, and perhaps a 4°C rise as early as 2060, well in the lifetime of people born today; and even the lower of those would be enough to put the skids under human society. If it were an asteroid, we would be shouting, every last one of us: do what has to be done! Get the whole world together, use all its ingenuity and resources to stop what is coming towards us, as the greatest of all priorities!

Instead, we are getting and spending, worrying about the recession, absorbed in computer games, lost in reality TV, Facebook and Twitter. And so the people’s representatives come together in Denmark on Monday to square up to the greatest threat that human society has ever faced, and the crowd behind them is silent.

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