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CLIMATE CHANGE: Global Consensus, Lingering Discrepancies

Tito Drago

MADRID, Nov 14 2007 (IPS) - The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has achieved a general consensus with respect to the report presented at its 27th session this week in Spain, but it must still overcome discrepancies raised by some countries.

The world’s largest economies have finally reached consensus that climate change is happening and that the time to act is now, said Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

In view of the report’s findings, “Failing to recognise the urgency of this message and acting on it would be nothing less than criminally irresponsible,” he said.

“Climate change will hit hardest the poorest and most vulnerable countries” and “failing to act would constitute a direct attack on the poorest of the poor,” he warned, while adding that “its overall effect, however, will be felt by everyone and will in some cases threaten people’s very survival.”

A broad agreement that the global warming seen in the past half century is the result of human activities is the most far-reaching consensus to emerge from this week’s meeting, which has brought together hundreds of experts from around 130 countries in the Mediterranean coastal city of Valencia, from Monday through Saturday.

But there are discrepancies. China is insisting, for example, that the report state that climate change is the result of human activities over the last century, in order to put the largest share of the blame squarely on the shoulders of the world’s industrialised nations.


The experts are finalising a “synthesis report”, which distils the IPCC’s 2,500-page report issued in three parts earlier this year into a 25-page guide to be used by policymakers.

According to the IPCC, “Global atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide have increased markedly as a result of human activities since 1750 and now far exceed pre-industrial values determined from ice cores spanning many thousands of years.”

“The global increases in carbon dioxide concentration are due primarily to fossil fuel use and land-use change, while those of methane and nitrous oxide are primarily due to agriculture,” it adds.

These phenomena are the result of the industrialisation process in developed countries, which began in the second half of the 18th century in England.

The representatives of the United States, meanwhile, want the report to say that global warming has been seen over the last half century, that it is being fuelled by the use of coal in developing countries, and that it can be curbed by increasing the use of nuclear energy.

However, the IPCC stated in its three-volume report that nuclear power would not have a major impact on cutting global greenhouse gas emissions and that “safety, weapons proliferation and waste remain as constraints.”

The report recommends that at the same time that efforts are made to achieve cleaner power generation, governments should take action aimed at improving construction methods, boosting fuel efficiency in vehicles, curbing deforestation, and promoting lifestyle changes that result in energy savings.

The experts who drafted the IPCC report avoid using categorical terms, preferring instead phrases like “very likely,” “high level of probability,” or “very high confidence.”

They say, for example, that the rate of increase in CO2, methane and nitrous oxide concentrations seen since 1750 “is very likely to have been unprecedented in more than 10,000 years” and that the increase in CO2 between 1995 and 2005 was “the largest change for any decade in at least the last 200 years.”

But the experts warn that global warming and the rise in sea levels produced by human activities will continue for centuries, “even if greenhouse gas concentrations were to be stabilised.”

The debate, meanwhile, has fallen into semantics. On Tuesday, it took the experts more than an hour to discuss replacing “changes” in ice and precipitations for “reductions” in ice and precipitations. In the end, they decided to leave the term “changes” in place.

This episode and others indicate that the report has basically been approved and that most of the modifications that will be adopted this week will refer more to questions of redaction than to content.

“Eleven of the last twelve years (1995-2006) rank among the 12 warmest years” since 1850 and in the last century, the global surface air temperature increased by an average of 0.74 degrees Celsius, says the report.

“Most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations,” it adds.

The Spanish delegation wants the report to make it clear that the rising sea level and human activities are contributing to the loss of coastal wetlands and mangroves, and to the increase in flood damages in coastal areas around the world.

That is one of the 40 observations made by Spain, which also include an explicit warning that southern Europe and North Africa face major risks due to climate change, because of an increase in drought and the danger of wildfires.

The delegates from India and Britain, meanwhile, expressed concern that if the final summary is diluted, its importance as a tool for policymakers will be weakened, and complained that it fails to take into account the results of the latest scientific research, which has pointed to a slowing of the earth’s ability to absorb CO2 and other greenhouse gases.

The synthesis report, which is to be approved on Saturday, will be a key input for the December meeting of environment ministers from U.N. member countries in Bali, Indonesia, who will have the task of creating a “roadmap” for negotiations on a global climate change agreement to come into force after the Kyoto Protocol’s 2012 deadline.

Concrete advances will have to be made in Bali, say the experts, since climate change has “potential implications for world peace” because it will intensify the risk of drought and famine, forcing thousands of people to resettle, “especially to urban areas that may not have the capacity to shelter, feed and employ them.”

Threats to the environment are thus threats to humanity, and the responsibility for either curbing or failing to curb them essentially falls to political leaders, said experts at the IPCC meeting.

“It will not cost the earth to save the earth,” said a spokesman for the U.N. Environment Programme, Janos Pasztor, who urged governments to dedicate just 0.1 percent of their global domestic product to preserving the environment.

 
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