Climate change has been described as the most serious threat facing humanity by world leaders and the collective voice of the scientific community. Global emissions need to peak between 2015 and 2020 and then start declining, while we simultaneously attempt to bring billions out of poverty. It is widely agreed we have at most a 12-year window of opportunity in which to de-carbonise our economies or plunge into climate disaster.
Increasingly alarming statistics are being announced on a regular basis. In April 2008 NASA’s top climatologist, Jim Hansen, said the sensitivity of the climate to the heat-trapping abilities of greenhouse gases is twice the IPCC estimate. Hansen says the EU target of 550 parts per million of C02 – the most stringent in the world – should be slashed to 350ppm if we want to avert catastrophe. Ice sheets are melting and weather patterns are changing much faster than anyone has predicted. We are already at 383 and counting and were at 325 parts per million in 1970. Even Sir Nicholas Stern said in April 2008 of his seminal report published just 18 months previously: “We underestimated the risks… we underestimated the damage associated with the temperature increases… and we underestimated the probabilities of temperature increases”.
Several experts views climate change as a greater threat than terrorism, including former senior IPCC member Sir John Houghton, former UK Government Chief Scientific Advisor David King, and Prof. Stephen Hawking who said: “The West should have a war on global warming rather than a war on terror”.
“The West should have a war on global warming rather than a war on terror”, Prof. Stephen Hawking
We are perilously close to locking ourselves in to a 2-degrees+ temperature change, beyond which naturally stored carbon and methane (for instance from melting permafrost) will be released and an unstoppable feedback-loop meltdown will occur.
It is estimated that the UK needs to be cutting emissions by at least 8% per year by 2012, yet currently we are struggling to reach 1% per year. UK Government figures show an emissions reduction of 15% since 1990 – but when emissions resulting from our overseas travel and the production of imported goods are included, the UK has actually increased its emissions by 19% during that period.
The International Energy Agency projects that to meet the world’s rapidly growing need for energy we need to invest $21 trillion between now and 2030. Sir Nicholas Stern’s 2006 report on the economics of climate change stated that if we started the radical shift to zero carbon in 2007, costs could be 1% of GDP but a delay could see this figure rise to 5% or beyond. The figure of 1% would mean a cost of $617bn globally to mitigate and adapt. But even Stern, whose report was based on aiming for a 550ppm target, now agrees the targets were too high. We should be aiming closer to 400 or 350ppm.
The carbon that caused the escalation of Hurricane Katrina was of course emitted decades earlier; even with immediate huge reductions it will take several decades for us to reach the recognised atmospheric stability of 350 parts per million of carbon. This tipping point is perilously close. “Business as usual” efficiencies have taken us as far as they can in de-carbonising the economy – only radical action can now avert climate crisis.
