Climate change depends on system change.

• Author: Dixon, Norm
• Position: 80% Less Energy - Reprint

Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth has helped dramatize the enormity of the global environmental crisis. The scale of the threat posed by industrially induced global warming, and the short time in which to take meaningful action to prevent catastrophic consequences, make the question of how to combat global warming arguably the most urgent one facing humanity.

Globally, the 10 hottest years on record have been in the past 12 years. The atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases--primarily carbon dioxide (C[O.sub.2]) from the burning of fossil fuels, as well as methane, nitrous oxides, water vapor and other gases--is rapidly rising. These gases trap heat and cause warming.

In 2001, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned that unless C[O.sub.2] levels are stabilized at around twice the pre-industrial level, the Earth's average atmospheric temperature will rise by up to 5.8[degrees]C by 2100. To keep warming to below 2[degrees]C, at which it is hoped the worst effects could be avoided, the IPCC recommended that human-generated greenhouse gas emissions be slashed by at least 60-80% by 2050 at the latest.

If greenhouse gas emissions are not reduced, sea levels are forecast to rise between 20 centimeters and one meter by 2100, flooding some of the world's most densely populated cities. Global warming will trigger severe storms and floods, worse droughts and expanding deserts, severe shortages of fresh water and increased epidemics of dangerous tropical diseases. The world's impoverished majority will, and already are, bearing the brunt.

Radical British columnist George Monbiot convincingly argues that the more accurate target for emission cuts by the advanced industrialized countries should be an average of 90% by 2030. For the United States and Australia he urges a 94% cut.

The price of prolonged inaction could be catastrophic. If the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets collapse, sea levels could rise by up to 10 meters; more moderate melting could slow or shut down the circulation of ocean currents responsible for the relatively mild temperatures of Northern Europe.

More recent studies reveal that warming could cause the abrupt release of large quantities of methane--a greenhouse gas 21 times more powerful than C[O.sub.2]--stored in the frozen but thawing tundra.

Fiddling while Rome burns

Yet as the scientific warnings have multiplied and become louder, governments' response has been to opt for inadequate, voluntary, gradual measures that will cost big business as little as possible.

While scientists began warning of global warming in the 1980s, it was not until December 1997 that an international treaty, the Kyoto Protocol, was finally agreed. The US, which emits 25% of the total industrial greenhouse gases, and Australia refuse to ratify the protocol.

Under the protocol the rich industrialized countries, the major emitters, are required to cut their average emissions by only 5.2% below 1990 levels. They have until 2012 to achieve this. There are no reduction targets or timetables for beyond 2012.

Figures released in October 2006 show that since 1990 annual greenhouse gas emissions from the richest countries have risen and, adjusted for the paper reductions following the collapse of the Eastern European economies, were more than 11% greater in 2004. Of the 41 richest Kyoto ratifiers, 34 had increased emissions between 1990 and 2004. US emissions are up 21.1%...