Ban calls climate change 'defining challenge of our age'
By Elisabeth Rosenthal Published: November 17, 2007
VALENCIA, Spain: Secretary General Ban Ki Moon of the United Nations called climate change "the defining challenge of our age" Saturday and called on the United States and China, the greatest emitters of greenhouse gases, to be "playing a more constructive role" in coming negotiations for a new global climate treaty.
The world's energy ministers meet in Indonesia in just two weeks to begin what are expected to be protracted talks over a treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012 and seeks to limit the growth of greenhouse gas emissions. The United States has not ratified Kyoto, and China, along with all other developing countries large and small, is not bound by its mandatory emissions caps, which apply only to three dozen industrialized countries.
"Today the world's scientists have spoken, clearly and in one voice," Ban said as he released the final report of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. "In Bali I expect the world's policymakers to do the same.
"The breakthrough needed in Bali is for a comprehensive climate change deal that all nations can embrace."
Far more powerfully then ever before, members of the UN panel said Saturday that their review of the data had led them to conclude that reductions in greenhouse gases had to start immediately to avert a global climate disaster that could leave island states submerged and abandoned, decrease African crop yields by 50 percent and lower global economic output by 5 percent or more.
The panel, co-winner of this year's Nobel Peace Prize, said the world would have to reverse the growth of greenhouse gas emissions by 2015 to avert major problems. "If there's no action before 2012, that's too late, there is not time," said Rajendra Pachauri, a scientist and economist who heads the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. "What we do in the next 2-3 years will determine our future. This is the defining moment."
He said that since the panel began its work 5 years ago, scientists had recorded "much stronger trends in climate change" like an unpredicted melt of polar ice in recent years. "That means you better start with intervention much earlier," he said.
The report released Saturday summarizes and integrates the most significant findings of three sections of the panel's exhaustive climate-science review that were released from January to April. This fourth and final report this year culls its conclusions from thousands of pages of scientific data that accompanied the previous three reports, which had not previously been reviewed as a whole by the panel, and the synthesis created new emphasis and alarm, scientists said.
The first report covered climate trends; the second, the world's ability to adapt to a warming planet; the third, strategies for reducing carbon emissions. With their mission now concluded, the hundreds of scientists working for the panel were more free in speaking out than previously.
Like the other three reports, the new one was subject to change and approval from the delegates of 130 nations who gathered here this week. But this time both the scientists and environmental groups said there had been no major dilution of the important messages, and several new important points were made.
For example, this summary was the first to acknowledge that the melting of the Greenland ice sheet from rising temperatures could result in huge rises in the sea level over centuries rather than millennia. "Many of my colleagues would consider that kind of melt a catastrophe" so rapid that mankind would not be able to adapt, said Michael Oppenheimer, a climate scientist at Princeton University who contributed to the panel's work.
Martin Parry, a British climate expert who was co-chairman of the delegation that wrote the second report, said many scientists now believed that warming by 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, above pre-industrial levels by the end of this century was inevitable because of a lag effect, even if current rising emissions trends could be reversed immediately.
"The sense of urgency when you put these pieces together is new and striking," Parry said. "I've come out of this process more pessimistic about the possibilities than I thought I would do."
Reaction was muted from the United States, whose policies were the object of criticism in the halls here this week. A U.S. delegation approved of the final product though it had insisted on some changes.
At a press conference after the report was approved Friday night, James Connaughton, chairman of the President's Council on Environmental Quality, said President George W. Bush had agreed with leaders of the other major industrialized nations that "the issue warrants urgent action and we need to bring forward in a more accelerated way the technologies that will make a lasting solution possible."
But he declined to say how much warming the Bush administration considered acceptable, saying "We don't have a view on that."
This latest report is mostly a compendium with easy-to-use charts and tables, intended to be a "pocket guide for policy makers." For example, one chart predicts that at 2 degrees of global temperature rise, up to 30 percent of species would be at risk of extinction and people would face a higher risk of death from heat waves, floods and droughts.
If 3 degrees of warming were reached, the report says, millions more people would experience flooding each year, about 30 percent of wetlands would be lost, global health services would be burdened, and there would be massive deaths of corals. Warming is associated with rises in sea level, ocean warming and an increased frequency of extreme weather events like heat waves and storms, the report says.
"It's extremely clear and is very explicit that the cost of inaction will be huge compared to the cost of action," said Jeff Sachs, head of Columbia University's Earth Institute. "We can't afford to wait for some perfect accord to replace Kyoto, for some grand agreement. We can afford to spend year bickering about it. We need to start acting now."
He said the delegates at Bali should take action immediately where they do agree. One possibility he cited would be to start demonstration projects on new technologies like carbon capture, which he called a "promising but not proved" system that pumps emissions underground instead of releasing them into the atmosphere. He said the energy ministers should immediately start a global fund to help poor countries avoid deforestation, which also causes emissions to increase because plants absorb carbon dioxide.
While acknowledging that the United States had tried to make some changes in the draft, Dr. Sharon Hays, leader of the U.S. delegation here, said the goal was not political but "to make sure the final report matches the science."
But Stephanie Tunmore, a campaigner with Greenpeace International who had observer status as the countries debated the text, questioned that explanation.
She said, for example, that the United States had tried to remove a section of the report titled "Reasons for Concern" that offers a litany of consequences of climate change that it called either likely or possible. One is the melting of ice sheets.
The United States argued there was no reason to include the summary because its parts were found in various placed in the panel's previous technical documents. But "Reasons for Concern" remained in the end.
"We think it's the strongest document so far from the panel," Ms. Tunmore said.
UN officials said disaster could be averted, but only with strong policies like increasing the energy efficiency of cars and setting up carbon markets, which effectively force companies and countries to pay in one way or another for the cost of the greenhouse gases they emit.
The European Union already has such a carbon trading system in place for many industries and is fighting to bring airlines into it.
"Stabilization of emissions can be achieved by deployment of a portfolio of technologies that exist or are already under development," Achim Steiner, head of the UN Environment Program, said here. But he said developed countries would have to help poorer ones in implementing such plans, which are often expensive.
He emphasized that the report sent a message to individuals as well as world leaders: "What we need is a new ethic in which every person changes lifestyle, attitude and behavior."
Others said politicians should focus more on how people will adapt to the changes that will almost certainly occur. "We can't mitigate our way out to this at this point, so we're going to have to put more emphasis on that," Parry said. "The Bali process treats adaptation as a poor sister, and we've lost 10 years by doing that."
Andrew C. Revkin contributed reporting.
iht.com |
