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The rich World's
policy on greenhouse gas now seems clear: millions will die
Our governments have set the wrong targets to tackle climate
change using outdated science, and they know it
By George Monbiot
05/01/07 "The
Guardian" -- - Rich nations seeking to cut
climate change have this in common: they lie. You won't find
this statement in the draft of the new report by the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was leaked to
the Guardian last week. But as soon as you understand the
numbers, the words form before your eyes. The governments making
genuine efforts to tackle global warming are using figures they
know to be false.
The British government, the European Union and the United
Nations all claim to be trying to prevent "dangerous" climate
change. Any level of climate change is dangerous for someone,
but there is a broad consensus about what this word means: two
degrees of warming above pre-industrial levels. It is dangerous
because of its direct impacts on people and places (it could,
for example, trigger the irreversible melting of the Greenland
ice sheet and the collapse of the Amazon rainforest) and because
it is likely to stimulate further warming, as it encourages the
world's natural systems to start releasing greenhouse gases.
The aim of preventing more than 2C of warming has been adopted
overtly by the UN and the European Union, and implicitly by the
British, German and Swedish governments. All of them say they
are hoping to confine the concentrations of greenhouse gases in
the atmosphere to a level that would prevent such a rise. And
all of them know that they have set the wrong targets, based on
outdated science. Fearful of the political implications, they
have failed to adjust to the levels the new research demands.
This isn't easy to follow, but please bear with me, as you
cannot understand the world's most important issue without
grappling with some numbers. The average global temperature is
affected by the concentration of greenhouse gases in the
atmosphere. This concentration is usually expressed as "carbon
dioxide equivalent". It is not an exact science - you cannot say
that a certain concentration of gases will lead to a precise
increase in temperature - but scientists discuss the
relationship in terms of probability. A paper published last
year by the climatologist Malte Meinshausen suggests that if
greenhouse gases reach a concentration of 550 parts per million,
carbon dioxide equivalent, there is a 63-99% chance (with an
average value of 82%) that global warming will exceed two
degrees. At 475 parts per million (ppm) the average likelihood
is 64%. Only if concentrations are stabilised at 400 parts or
below is there a low chance (an average of 28%) that
temperatures will rise by more than two degrees.
The IPCC's draft report contains similar figures. A
concentration of 510ppm gives us a 33% chance of preventing more
than two degrees of warming. A concentration of 590ppm gives us
a 10% chance. You begin to understand the scale of the challenge
when you discover that the current level of greenhouse gases in
the atmosphere (using the IPCC's formula) is 459ppm. We have
already exceeded the safe level. To give ourselves a high chance
of preventing dangerous climate change, we will need a programme
so drastic that greenhouse gases in the atmosphere end up below
the current concentrations. The sooner this happens, the greater
the chance of preventing two degrees of warming.
But no government has set itself this task. The European Union
and the Swedish government have established the world's most
stringent target. It is 550ppm, which gives us a near certainty
of an extra 2C. The British government makes use of a clever
conjuring trick. Its target is also "550 parts per million", but
550 parts of carbon dioxide alone. When you include the other
greenhouse gases, this translates into 666ppm, carbon dioxide
equivalent (a fitting figure). According to last autumn's Stern
report on the economics of climate change, at 650ppm there is a
60-95% chance of 3C of warming. The government's target, in
other words, commits us to a very dangerous level of climate
change.
The British government has been aware that it has set the wrong
target for at least four years. In 2003 the environment
department found that "with an atmospheric CO2 stabilisation
concentration of 550ppm, temperatures are expected to rise by
between 2C and 5C". In March last year it admitted that "a limit
closer to 450ppm or even lower, might be more appropriate to
meet a 2C stabilisation limit". Yet the target has not changed.
Last October I challenged the environment secretary, David
Miliband, over this issue on Channel 4 News. He responded as if
he had never come across it before.
The European Union is also aware that it is using the wrong
figures. In 2005 it found that "to have a reasonable chance to
limit global warming to no more than 2C, stabilisation of
concentrations well below 550ppm CO2 equivalent may be needed".
But its target hasn't changed either.
Embarrassingly for the government, and for leftwingers like me,
the only large political entity that seems able to confront this
is the British Conservative party. In a paper published a
fortnight ago, it called for an atmospheric stabilisation target
of 400-450ppm carbon dioxide equivalent. Will this become
policy? Does Cameron have the guts to do what his advisers say
he should?
In my book Heat, I estimate that to avoid two degrees of warming
we require a global emissions cut of 60% per capita between now
and 2030. This translates into an 87% cut in the United Kingdom.
This is a much stiffer target than the British government's -
which requires a 60% cut in the UK's emissions by 2050. But my
figure now appears to have been an underestimate. A recent paper
in the journal Climatic Change emphasises that the sensitivity
of global temperatures to greenhouse gas concentrations remains
uncertain. But if we use the average figure, to obtain a 50%
chance of preventing more than 2C of warming requires a global
cut of 80% by 2050.
This is a cut in total emissions, not in emissions per head. If
the population were to rise from 6 billion to 9 billion between
now and then, we would need an 87% cut in global emissions per
person. If carbon emissions are to be distributed equally, the
greater cut must be made by the biggest polluters: rich nations
like us. The UK's emissions per capita would need to fall by
91%.
But our governments appear quietly to have abandoned their aim
of preventing dangerous climate change. If so, they condemn
millions to death. What the IPCC report shows is that we have to
stop treating climate change as an urgent issue. We have to
start treating it as an international emergency.
We must open immediate negotiations with China, which threatens
to become the world's biggest emitter of greenhouse gases by
next November, partly because it manufactures many of the
products we use. We must work out how much it would cost to
decarbonise its growing economy, and help to pay. We need a
major diplomatic offensive - far more pressing than it has been
so far - to persuade the United States to do what it did in
1941, and turn the economy around on a dime. But above all we
need to show that we remain serious about fighting climate
change, by setting the targets the science demands.
http://www.monbiot.com
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