[Yet there has been no sign that
national leaders are willing to discuss allocating the trillion-ton emissions
budget among countries, an approach that would confront the problem head-on,
but also raise deep questions of fairness. To the contrary, they are moving
toward a relatively weak agreement that would essentially let each country
decide for itself how much effort to put into limiting global warming, and even
that document would not take effect until 2020.]
By Justin Gillis
 |
| Machines digging for brown coal in front of a power plant near Credit Martin Meissner/Associated Press |
Despite growing efforts in many
countries to tackle the problem, the global situation is becoming more acute as
developing countries join the West in burning huge amounts of fossil fuels, the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said here on Sunday.
Failure to reduce emissions, the
group of scientists and other experts found, could threaten society with food
shortages, refugee crises, the flooding of major cities and entire island
nations, mass extinction of plants and animals, and a climate so drastically
altered it might become dangerous for people to work or play outside during the
hottest times of the year.
“Continued emission of greenhouse
gases will cause further warming and long-lasting changes in all components of
the climate system, increasing the likelihood of severe, pervasive and
irreversible impacts for people and ecosystems,” the report found.
In the starkest language it has ever
used, the expert panel made clear how far society remains from having any
serious policy to limit global warming.
Doing so would require leaving the
vast majority of the world’s reserves of fossil fuels in the ground or,
alternatively, developing methods to capture and bury the emissions resulting
from their use, the group said.
If governments are to meet their own
stated goal of limiting the warming of the planet to no more than 3.6 degrees
Fahrenheit, or 2 degrees Celsius, above the preindustrial level, they must
restrict emissions from additional fossil-fuel burning to about 1 trillion tons
of carbon dioxide, the panel said. At current growth rates, that budget is
likely to be exhausted in something like 30 years, possibly less.
Yet energy companies have booked coal
and petroleum reserves equal to several times that amount, and they are
spending some $600 billion a year to find more. Utilities and oil companies
continue to build coal-fired power plants and refineries, and governments are
spending another $600 billion or so directly subsidizing the consumption of
fossil fuels.
By contrast, the report found, less
than $400 billion a year is being spent around the world to reduce emissions or
otherwise cope with climate change. That is a small fraction of the revenue
spent on fossil fuels — it is less, for example, than the revenue of a single
American oil company, ExxonMobil.
The new report comes just a month before
international delegates convene in Lima , Peru
Appearing Sunday morning at a news
conference in Copenhagen Lima
“Science has spoken. There is no
ambiguity in their message,” Mr. Ban said. “Leaders must act. Time is not on
our side.”
Yet there
has been no sign that national leaders are willing to discuss allocating the
trillion-ton emissions budget among countries, an approach that would confront
the problem head-on, but also raise deep questions of fairness. To the
contrary, they are moving toward a relatively weak agreement that would
essentially let each country decide for itself how much effort to put into
limiting global warming, and even that document would not take effect until
2020.
“If they
choose not to talk about the carbon budget, they’re choosing not to address the
problem of climate change,” said Myles R. Allen, a climate scientist at Oxford University Britain
The Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change is a scientific body appointed by the world’s governments to
advise them on the causes and effects of global warming, and potential
solutions. The group was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, along with Al Gore,
for its efforts to call attention to the climate crisis.
The new report is a 175-page synopsis
of a much longer series of reports that the panel has issued over the past
year. It is the final step in a five-year effort by the body to analyze a vast
archive of published climate research.
It is the fifth such report from the
group since 1990, each finding greater certainty that the climate is warming
and that human activities are the primary cause.
“Human
influence has been detected in warming of the atmosphere and the ocean, in
changes in the global water cycle, in reductions in snow and ice, and in global
mean sea-level rise; and it is extremely likely to have been the dominant cause
of the observed warming since the mid-20th century,” the report declared.
A core
finding of the new report is that climate change is no longer a distant threat,
but is being felt all over the world. “It’s here and now,” Rajendra K.
Pachauri, the chairman of the panel, said in an interview. “It’s not something
in the future.”
The group cited mass die-offs of
forests, such as those killed by
heat-loving beetles in the American West; the melting of land ice virtually
everywhere in the world; an accelerating rise of the seas that is leading to increased coastal
flooding; and heat waves that have devastated crops and killed tens of
thousands of people.
The report contained the group’s most
explicit warning yet about the food supply, saying that climate change had
already become a small drag on overall global production, and could become a
far larger one if emissions continue unchecked.
A related finding is that climate
change poses serious risks to basic human progress, in areas such as
alleviating poverty. Under the worst-case scenarios, factors like high food
prices and intensified weather disasters would most likely leave poor people
worse off. In fact, the report said, that has already happened to a degree.
In Washington
The administration is pushing for new
limits on emissions from American power plants, but faces stiff resistance in
Congress and some states.
Michael Oppenheimer, a climate
scientist at Princeton University
If the level of greenhouse gases were
to continue rising at a rapid pace over coming decades, severe effects would be
avoided only if the climate turned out to be far less sensitive to those gases
than most scientists think likely, he said.
“We’ve seen many governments delay
and delay and delay on implementing comprehensive emissions cuts,” Dr.
Oppenheimer said. “So the need for a lot of luck looms larger and larger.
Personally, I think it’s a slim reed to lean on for the fate of the planet.”