Bali's crying shame
The drama of the UN climate change talks caught the world’s attention, but critics wonder whether they will secure its futureJonathan Leake in Bali
The baby turtles were cute, but they were also clearly suffering. The tropical sun was beating down on the beach in Bali as they swam round and round in their big plastic bowls full of slowly warming water. They were waiting to be liberated into the ocean – but first came the talking.
The turtle release was a side event to the United Nations climate change conference taking place a few hundred yards away in the Bali international convention centre, and that meant a host of dignitaries first had to make themselves heard.
As they droned on, with each speaker placing their own particular emphasis on the threats presented by global warming – not least to endangered species such as turtles – the energy of the captives began ebbing away. They stopped swimming and sat still in the water.
By the time those gathered on the beach were allowed to scoop up the turtles and carry them down to the water’s edge, some had almost lost the will to live and, when released, lay motionless on the sand.
Should we really be listening to the views of one man just because they are eye-catchingly more dramatic than the consensus?
Pushed into the cool of the water they did gradually revive and paddled slowly away, but to many observers it seemed the perfect metaphor for the events of the past fortnight in Bali: a lot of humans talking endlessly while nature suffers.
Last Thursday the World Meteorological Organisation revealed that 2007 had been one of the 10 hottest years on record, as were eight other years in the past decade.
In Bali, the best response that the politicians could manage yesterday was to agree a “road map” for more talks without any specific targets for cutting emissions of greenhouse gases.
Getting that agreement was certainly dramatic. Yesterday saw Yvo de Boer, the UN’s main climate change official, burst into tears while addressing the conference. The strain of multiple sleepless nights and tortured negotiations had become too much.
America even appeared to have been forced into concessions after its representative, Paula Dobriansky, was booed by delegates from other countries.
Optimists, including Hilary Benn, Britain’s environment secretary, hailed the agreement as “historic” yesterday, mainly because America had signed up to it.
Others, however, fear that it will prove too weak to achieve anything. As the exhausted delegates and politicians board their planes to travel home today, are the real prospects of controlling global warming any better than before the Bali talks began?
THE precedents are not good. It is 10 years since the world’s politicians held a similar gathering in Japan where they signed the Kyoto treaty. At the heart of Kyoto was a commitment from industrialised countries such as Britain, America, Australia and Russia to cut their greenhouse gas emissions. John Prescott, then environment secretary, helped to broker the agreement and proclaimed it as the deal that would save the world.
In reality Kyoto was a disappointment. The draft treaty had promised that the industrialised nations would reduce emissions of all greenhouse gases – there are six in total – by 6% from 1990 levels by 2008. The final version referred to only three gases, the date had slipped to 2012 and the level of cuts had fallen to 5.2%.
Australia ratified the treaty only after the election of a new prime minister last month and America, the world’s biggest emitter, has still not done so.
In 1997 mankind was already generating the equivalent of 40 billion tons of CO2 a year. Kyoto was meant to herald a new era in which such emissions would stabilise and then reverse. Instead they have risen faster than ever – up to 50 billion tons last year.
The International Energy Agency (IEA), an energy policy adviser to 27 industrialised countries, believes that trend is unlikely to change. In its recent World Energy Outlook report, it said emissions would be pushed well above 65 billion tons by 2030.
The IEA concluded that we still had a faint chance of keeping global temperature rises below 2.4C by 2020, but only if energy-related CO2 emissions were cut by 25% to 40%. Such a cut would be, said the IEA, “unprecedented”.
At the heart of the negotiations of the past fortnight was this extremely simple but tough target. The European Union was desperate to include it while America was determined to throw it out.
Last week Al Gore, the former US vice-president who is now enjoying a second career as an environmental activist, was among the first to acknowledge publicly that the target could not survive. “The truth is that the maximum now considered possible here in this conference is still far short of the minimum that will really solve this process,” he said.
The tough American approach was perhaps best revealed by James Connaughton, President George W Bush’s chief adviser on environmental issues. Late in the week he was asked why America, a global leader in so many other ways, was so unwilling to lead the fight against global warming.
“We are leading and we will continue to lead,” he growled, to gasps of amazement. “But leadership requires the rest of the world to fall in line and follow us.”
Connaughton is a lawyer rather than a scientist and was appointed by Bush after a career defending chemical manufacturers and aluminium smelters against environmental lawsuits.
Time after time, just as an agreement on emissions reduction targets had drawn near, the US delegation submitted amendments or new texts that threw the process into disarray. It was these tactics that eventually saw them get their way and have the emissions target figures removed.
They might have won even more concessions had it not been for a last-minute outburst from Kevin Conrad, head of Papua New Guinea’s delegation, who won mass applause when he told the Americans yesterday: “We seek your leadership, but if you cannot lead, leave it to the rest of us. Get out of the way.”
It was after this that America finally yielded and offered a deal.
Afterwards, some of the negotiators who emerged bleary-eyed and dishevelled from the 36 hours of talks were agreeing with Gore. “We might have a piece of paper we can call an agreement, but we lost almost all the scientifically determined emissions reduction targets that would have made it worthwhile,” said one.
Others, however, were more upbeat. Among them was Benn, who said: “What we have achieved here has never been done before.” Earlier in the week he had insisted that the 25% to 40% cuts would be an essential part of any deal but yesterday he said this did not matter: “The point is that we have got all the countries involved signed up to the negotiations, including America.”
The question now is whether the process that has begun in Bali has the potential to achieve the dramatic cuts in carbon emissions that the scientists say are needed.
It seems unlikely. Even if the political will is there, the science mitigates against it.
Vicky Pope, of the Met Office’s respected Hadley Centre for climate prediction, was just one of many scientists presenting new research in Bali. Sitting under the palm trees fringing the idyllic Nusa Dua beach, she pointed to the “small but scary” graph showing the latest predictions on the global temperature rises that we might expect as greenhouse gas levels rise.
The natural background level of CO2 is 273 parts per million (ppm) but human activities have pushed this up to 379ppm. At some time before 2030, greenhouse gas levels are predicted to reach the equivalent of 450ppm.
At this level, said Pope’s graph, global temperature rises of 2C are 80% certain. If CO2 levels reach 550ppm, as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of respected scientists has said they will, probably before 2030, then there is a 70% chance of the global rise exceeding 3C.
Such rises sound small on paper but in reality they would be disastrous. Scientists say Australia’s climate, already marginal, would become impossible, as would much of Africa’s and Asia’s. It is predicted that Britain would suffer longer drier summers and extreme weather ranging from droughts to floods and intense storms. The population might face food shortages as global food chains came under stress, with additional pressures from migration by environmental refugees.
In the longer term, other factors would come into play. Sea levels would rise, partly from the melting of ice but also from the thermal expansion of water.
One delegate in Bali knew all too well what effects that can have. “When the sea starts coming up through the floor you know global warming is real,” said Ehele Sopoaga. He comes from Tuvalu, which is among the world’s lowest-lying countries. It comprises nine coral atolls lying just south of the equator northeast of Australia.
He described how the islanders are now suffering what they call “king tides”. He said: “The higher sea water levels erode our coastlines and penetrate the ground, contaminating our wells and farmland and sometime even rising up through the floors of our homes. Sometimes it just appears and we have to rush around moving ourselves and our possessions to safety.”
Predictably, many Tuvaluans lost their faith in global climate talks long ago. Yet among the scientists there was a curious optimism. Talk to Pope, or almost any scientist involved in climate research, about what the figures show and they reel off similar lists of facts and figures that generally spell disaster.
If, however, you ask them a human question – such as what hope there might be for mankind should their predictions come true – and you get a very different kind of answer, one for which there appears to be precious little evidence. “I am just an optimist,” said Pope. “I believe we can solve this problem if only we work together.”
Politicians suffer from the same contradictions. Benn said: “There are now six billion of us on this small and fragile planet. There will be nine billion of us in less than 40 years’ time. What are we going to do when people start fighting, not about politics but about water? What will we do when people start arriving on our shores fleeing not political persecution but environmental catastrophe?”
Benn has no clear answers to such questions and yet he, too, professes to “great optimism” for the negotiations which will follow on from Bali. “People doubt the capacity of politics to change things,” he said.
“I don’t. It remains the best and only hope we have for the future of mankind.”
The optimism of politicians like Benn is cheering, but is it helpful? One consequence is to placate voters when, say many environmentalists, the situation is so dire that they should be taking to the streets in protest. “The targets for cutting emissions are hopeless,” said Tony Juniper, of Friends of the Earth. “If people really understood what they mean for our children’s future they would be up in arms about it.”
LAST week a new set of scientific reports reinforced that view – but in doing so perversely provided a glint of hope. In a conference that coincided with the Bali talks, thousands of scientists met in San Francisco at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union.
They reported how 2007 was becoming a “year of worsts”. So far the year has seen the least sea ice in the Arctic, the fastest retreat of mountain glaciers on Kilimanjaro and the quickest decline of snow in Greenland. Some even wondered if the Earth was now nearing a “tipping point” in which climate change would become irreversible.
Such bad news from US scientists is, however, good news for American environmental activists. Already local politicians are ignoring the environmental scepticism coming from the White House and responding to the scientific data.
Hundreds of US cities and many states have decided to cut their greenhouse gas emissions unilaterally. In the country that emits more than any other, that can make a difference to the rest of the world.
Michael Bloomberg, mayor of New York, was among those in Bali who said America was changing. “The evidence of escalating climate change is indisputable,” he said.
The change in America is profound and rapid – but will it be enough? Gore believes that, with presidential elections due next year, it just might be. “My country is principally responsible for obstructing progress here in Bali,” he said. “[But] over the next two years the United States is going to be somewhere it is not now.”
It is a faint hope that Gore is offering. Not one of the presidential candidates has made a commitment to cutting greenhouse gas emissions. America generates about 14% emissions and the figure is rising fast. Reversing that of all global CO2 trend would be a huge challenge.
Politicians, however, feel a need to please their public and Gore, like Benn and the other Bali negotiators, is clearly trying to offer the world at least some hope of avoiding the worst effects of climate change.
timesonline.co.uk |
