At a high-level academic conference on climate change this summer, climate experts confirmed the direst warnings of environmentalists.
Speaking at Exeter University in the United Kingdom (UK), Kevin Anderson (from the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at Manchester University) delivered a series of findings that have left even sunny optimists like politicians unnerved.
Carbon emissions are spiraling out of control, says Anderson, and to back up his claim he cites last year's report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In fact, Anderson says, So much extra pollution is being generated that previous climate (and emissions) targets are "fanciful at best, and dangerously misguided at worst".
So how bad is bad? Anderson says it's unlikely that carbon emissions levels can be kept below 650 parts per million (ppm) by the end of the century, since these levels are already well over 380ppm and rising at 2ppm per year. Additionally, natural control mechanisms like carbon sequestration in oceans and permafrost appear to be past their coping levels.
The consequences are, at best, a 2C (3.6F) rise in temperatures worldwide. Bob Watson, chief science advisor for the UK's Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) and former head of the IPCC, argued earlier this year that the world needed to be ready for a 4C rise. If Watson is correct, hundreds of species and hundreds of millions of people would disappear or be displaced as warming accelerates melting of the Greenland (Arctic) and West Antarctic ice sheets, as well as glaciers worldwide.
An October report to the Australian government concurs with this scenario by suggesting that the 450ppm goal is so far out of reach it could destroy any future global deal on emissions reductions. Dubbed the Australian Stern review, this report - prepared by Australian Research Council Federation Fellows David Karoly, Andy Pitman and Amanda Lynch (all associated with the 2007 IPCC report) - was delivered to Prime Minister Kevin Rudd by Ross Garnaut, an economics professor and one of Rudd's advisors.
The report states, in no uncertain terms, that developed nations must accept more warming than predicted, prepare to aid less developed nations with climate change displacement issues, and forge agreements before it becomes an even greater problem than currently predicted.
Proposing cuts of 5 percent per year over the next decade, the report outlines a regimen that still would not keep emissions below 450ppm. Alongside the most stringent plan proposed so far - the UK's Climate Change Act of 2008, which call for a 3-percent reduction through 2050 - the plan seems like grasping at straws in a hurricane. Even more unrealistic, admits Garnaut (economics professor at Melbourne University), is tighter constraints on emerging nations beginning in 2013, since developing economies like China are not likely to accept industrial cutbacks willingly when the West has already contributed most of the carbon emissions impacting on the planet.
Even if world leaders were to achieve emissions reductions standards to keep global temperatures from rising above 4C by the end of the century, Nature no longer seems willing to cooperate and is withdrawing Her natural carbon sinks.
Ocean acidity, a direct effect of carbon emissions, has already risen 10 times faster than predicted. The world's oceans can't harbor any more carbon without ecological meltdown.
The carbon sequestered in permafrost is now beginning to be released - for the first time in 11,000 years - as a result of global warming, most notably in the Canadian Arctic and Western Siberia. As the Arctic ice melts, the darker water raises temperatures, creating a negative feedback loop of warming. Siberian warming, first documented in 2005, threatens to release not only long-pent-up carbon dioxide, but methane as well. These gases, according to the online journal Bioscience, add up to 1,500 billion tonnes of gases, or twice the amount of greenhouse gas emissions already present in the atmosphere.
Scientists have calculated the warming potential of methane at 20 times that of carbon. Chris Rhodes, author, climate researcher and Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, says it is nearer 100 times.
Experts agree on only one thing: it would take a deeper global recession than the current one to affect enough cutbacks to keep the worst temperature-rise scenario from taking place by the end of the century. As the recession deepens, and threatens greater longevity, it appears to be the only silver lining in a very dark cloud of climate portents.
My concern is that it won't last long enough.
Related Reading:
NOAA's 2008 Arctic Report Card
China's Glaciers and People Are in Trouble
Image Credit:
David Mintz
This really is quite ludicrous and has no basis in fact. Anderson takes the IPCC report which is itself highly biased and ignores contrary evidence and plays computer games with it. He is a Professor of Engineering and is pproducing computer simulations. This is not science or anything remotely resembling it. Watson is an associate of Al Gore, having worked with the Clinton administration, and has a long history of alarmism. The whole scam is based on the perception that CO2 raises planetary temperature. There is no valid evidence for this anywhere, even in IPCC. They use falsified data such as the claim that CO2 levels were static for thousands of years at 290ppm before the industrial revolution, when over 90,000 chmical analyses going back to the 1800's show this to be untrue. CO2 lags temperature rise and increasing CO2 levels do not coincide with anthropogenic emissions over many years. The lies continue.
Written in December 2008