THE cuts in greenhouse gas emissions being proposed at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, which opens today, are completely climate scientists warns. Current proposals, including recent ones from major emitting nations such as the US, China and India, are “little more than token gestures”, compared with what the science deems necessary to give even a 50-50 chance of staying below the danger threshold, says Professor Kevin Anderson, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of Manchester.
Writing in The Independent today, Professor Anderson cautions that with the commitments currently on the table in Copenhagen, global emissions of carbon dioxide will peak far too late for temperature rises to stay no more than C above the pre-industrial level, which is regarded as the limit that the Earth and human society can safely stand. Instead, the proposals are likely to put the world on a disastrous trajectory for 4C or even higher.
Nations must now make much more radical commitments, he says, even if it means sacrificing economic growth.
Professor Anderson is one of the world’s leading experts on CO2 emissions rates, and his comments represent a sobering reality check about just how great is the task the world faces in bringing global warming under control.
The conference will be attended in its final stages by most of the world’s leaders, including President Barack Obama and Gordon Brown, and will attempt to construct a new climate treaty under which all countries will eventually cut back their CO2. Most of the world’s biggest carbon emitters, led by China and the US, and including the European Union and Britain, have already “put numbers on the table” indicating the reductions they are prepared to make. The targets announced in the last fortnight for the first time by America, China and India, in particular, have been regarded as a considerable step forward. But the sum of all the commitments is simply inadequate, Professor Anderson says.
The date of the emissions peak is increasingly seen as a vital point in checking the progress of the warming. Last year, the Met Office’s Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research said that if global emissions peaked in 2015 or 2016 and then declined annually at a rate of 4 per cent, there would be a 50-50 chance n but no more than that n of keeping the rise in temperatures to C, the goal upon which much of the world’s climate policy is premised. For every 10 years that the peak was delayed, the Hadley Centre said, the world would be committed to another 0.5 of a degree of warming.
Professor Anderson points out that there is a widespread assumption that an emissions peak might come relatively early, but asserts that the political and economic will to bring this about is actually absent. “The statements by the US, China and India, allied with commitments from other nations, suggest peaking global emissions between 2020 and 2030 is about as hard as the economic and political orthodoxy is prepared to push in terms of emission reductions,” he writes. “If peaking global emissions between 2020 and 2030 is left unquestioned, the cumulative quantity of greenhouse gases emitted will be sufficient to put temperatures on a 4C or higher trajectory.” In recent years, emissions have shot up in a way no one expected even a decade ago, largely owing to the breakneck industrialisation of China, which doubled its CO2 output over the decade to 6 billion tonnes to become the world’s biggest polluter. Currently global carbon emissions are rising by nearly 3 per cent annually, making a 4 per cent annual decline a tall order indeed, and one that the present Copenhagen commitments would not remotely be able to facilitate. There has to be a move to a radical new level of emissions cuts, Professor Anderson says, if dangerous climate change is to be avoided.
“In brief, wealthy nations need to peak emissions by around 2012, achieve at least a 60 per cent reduction in emissions from energy by 2020, and fully decarbonise their energy systems by 2030 at the latest,” he says.
“Alongside this, the ‘industrialising’ nations need to peak their collective emissions by around 2025 and fully decarbonise their energy systems by 2050.” On the eve of the conference yesterday, the UN’s top climate change official expressed confidence. “Negotiators have the clearest signal ever from world leaders to craft solid proposals to implement rapid action,” said Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). “Never in 17 years of climate negotiations have so many different nations made so many firm pledges together.” However, climate-change sceptics will be boosted by the fact that the controversy over the stolen emails from the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia will receive an airing at the conference today.
Mr de Boer said that Dr Raj Pachauri, the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, would refer to it in his speech during the opening ceremonies.
— by arrangement with
The Independent
