Climate goal posts move while leaders argue details
July 28, 2009
By INGI SALGADO
The world's political leaders - those who attended the Major Economies Forum in Italy earlier this month - acknowledged the need to restrict the rise in average global temperatures to less than 2°C from pre-industrial levels.
Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the UN's International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), subsequently highlighted the contradiction between accepting this limit and the failure to commit to what he politely referred to as the "attendant requirement" that emissions peak by 2015.
Never mind 2015. With five months to go before a global pact is reached, there's little consensus on achieving deep cuts by 2020.
The significance of the 2°C target is that the knock-on effects of exceeding it are so severe as to crush many developmental ambitions. If the millennium development goals are elusive now, they may be downright fantastical in a world with a significantly warmer mean temperature.
The IPCC's 2007 fourth assessment report and more recent scientific research suggest that beyond 2°C, the adaptive capacity of both societies and ecosystems decline rapidly. There would be a high risk of large-scale irreversible effects, including the release of stored carbon, raising temperatures even higher. The risks of extreme health impacts, water distress and food shortages shoot up.
The world is already, on average, 0.8°C warmer than pre-industrial levels.
Three years ago, when former World Bank chief economist Nicholas Stern pushed global warming onto the UK economic agenda, he pointed out that the 2°C limit was nearly out of reach. He put the chances of exceeding this level at between 77 percent and 99 percent.
A year later, the IPCC report said a rise of 1.4°C was inevitable. But subsequent research puts the rate of rising temperatures and emission levels in line with the IPCC's worst-case scenarios.
According to a peer-reviewed synthesis report released this year by the scientific community, atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations are already at levels predicted to raise global temperatures by between 2°C and 2.4°C. An overshoot of 2°C, the report says, is inevitable.
The IPCC has outlined plans for a fifth assessment report, although it will be available only at the end of 2014. Some critics suggest the rigorous IPCC process produces delays that put policy makers out of the loop of the most up-to-date science.
Pachauri rejects this view and cautions that if assessments are based on "just a year or two of observations", then the IPCC could potentially play into the hands of climate change sceptics.
Nevertheless, one can't escape the fact that nations will negotiate a 2009 climate pact based on research published in 2007.
Higher temperatures mean higher adaptation costs, but if a deal is brokered on the premise of containing a 2°C rise in temperatures, and assuming this level will be surpassed, then we would have simply deferred a decision on how to fund the real costs of adaptation to a point in the future.
For now, we have a slightly confusing situation in which politicians have verbally committed to a goal that many of the world's climate scientists say can't be met even with the action that the politicians steadfastly resist making.
It requires a level of creativity to view the politicians' pledge with optimism: that a common goal has at least been agreed. But Oscar Wilde pointed out that a cynic is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing, and he might just have a point.
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