here is an interesting article about climat I found on http://www.monbiot.com
you can read it in French on contreinfo.info If you think preventing climate change is politically difficult, look at the political problems of adapting to it.
By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian, 16th March 2009.
Quietly in public, loudly in private, climate scientists everywhere
are saying the same thing: it’s over. The years in which more than two
degrees of global warming could have been prevented have passed, the
opportunities squandered by denial and delay. On current trajectories
we’ll be lucky to get away with four degrees. Mitigation (limiting
greenhouse gas pollution) has failed; now we must adapt to what nature
sends our way. If we can.
This, at any rate, was the repeated whisper at the climate change
conference in Copenhagen last week(1). It’s more or less what Bob
Watson, the environment department’s chief scientific adviser, has been
telling the British government(2). It is the obvious if unspoken
conclusion of scores of scientific papers. Recent work by scientists at
the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, for example, suggests
that even global cuts of 3% a year, starting in 2020, could leave us
with four degrees of warming by the end of the century(3,4). At the
moment emissions are heading in the opposite direction at roughly the
same rate. If this continues, what does it mean? Six? Eight? Ten
degrees? Who knows?
Faced with such figures, I can’t blame anyone for throwing up his
hands. But before you succumb to this fatalism, let me talk you through
the options.
Yes, it is true that mitigation has so far failed. Sabotaged by
Clinton(5), abandoned by Bush, attended half-heartedly by the other
rich nations, the global climate talks have so far been a total
failure. The targets they have set bear no relationship to the science
and are negated anyway by loopholes and false accounting. Nations like
the UK which are meeting their obligations under the Kyoto protocol
have succeeded only by outsourcing their pollution to other
countries(6,7). Nations like Canada, which are flouting their
obligations, face no meaningful sanctions.
Lord Stern made it too easy: he appears to have underestimated the
costs of mitigation. As the professor of energy policy Dieter Helm has
shown, Stern’s assumption that our consumption can continue to grow
while our emissions fall is implausible(8). To have any hope of making
substantial cuts we have both to reduce our consumption and transfer
resources to countries like China to pay for the switch to low-carbon
technologies. As Helm notes, “there is not much in the study of human
nature—and indeed human biology—to give support to the optimist.”
But we cannot abandon mitigation unless we have a better option. We
don’t. If you think our attempts to prevent emissions are futile, take
a look at our efforts to adapt.
Where Stern appears to be correct is in proposing that the costs of
stopping climate breakdown - great as they would be - are far lower
than the costs of living with it. Germany is spending E600m just on a
new sea wall for Hamburg(9) - and this money was committed before the
news came through that sea level rises this century could be two or
three times as great as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
has predicted(10). The Netherlands will spend E2.2bn on dykes between
now and 2015; again they are likely to be inadequate. The UN suggests
that the rich countries should be transferring $50-75bn a year to the
poor ones now to help them cope with climate change, with a massive
increase later on(11). But nothing like this is happening.
A Guardian investigation reveals that the rich nations have promised
$18bn to help the poor nations adapt to climate change over the past
seven years, but they have disbursed only 5% of that money(12). Much of
it has been transferred from foreign aid budgets anyway: a net gain for
the poor of nothing(13). Oxfam has made a compelling case for how
adaptation should be funded: nations should pay according to the amount
of carbon they produce per capita, coupled with their position on the
human development index(14). On this basis, the US should supply over
40% of the money and the European Union over 30%, with Japan, Canada,
Australia and Korea making up the balance. But what are the chances of
getting them to cough up?
There’s a limit to what this money could buy anyway. The
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that “global mean
temperature changes greater than 4°C above 1990-2000 levels” would
“exceed … the adaptive capacity of many systems.”(15) At this point
there’s nothing you can do, for example, to prevent the loss of
ecosystems, the melting of glaciers and the disintegration of major ice
sheets. Elsewhere it spells out the consequences more starkly: global
food production, it says, is “very likely to decrease above about
3°C”(16). Buy your way out of that.
And it doesn’t stop there. The IPCC also finds that, above three
degrees of warming, the world’s vegetation will become “a net source of
carbon”(17). This is just one of the climate feedbacks triggered by a
high level of warming. Four degrees might take us inexorably to five or
six: the end - for humans - of just about everything.
Until recently, scientists spoke of carbon concentrations - and
temperatures - peaking and then falling back. But a recent paper in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that “climate
change … is largely irreversible for 1,000 years after emissions
stop.”(18) Even if we were to cut carbon emissions to zero today, by
the year 3000 our contribution to atmospheric concentrations would
decline by just 40%. High temperatures would remain more or less
constant until then. If we produce it we’re stuck with it.
In the rich nations we will muddle through, for a few generations,
and spend nearly everything we have on coping. But where the money is
needed most there will be nothing. The ecological debt the rich world
owes to the poor will never be discharged, just as it has never
accepted that it should offer reparations for the slave trade and for
the pillage of gold, silver, rubber, sugar and all the other
commodities taken without due payment from its colonies. Finding the
political will for crash cuts in carbon production is improbable. But
finding the political will - when the disasters have already begun - to
spend adaptation money on poor nations rather than on ourselves will be
impossible.
The world won’t adapt and can’t adapt: the only adaptive response to
a global shortage of food is starvation. Of the two strategies it is
mitigation, not adaptation, which turns out to be the most feasible
option, even if this stretches the concept of feasibility to the
limits. As Dieter Helm points out, the action required today is
unlikely but “not impossible. It is a matter ultimately of human well
being and ethics.”(19)
Yes, it might already be too late - even if we reduced emissions to
zero tomorrow - to prevent more than two degrees of warming, but we
cannot behave as if it is, for in doing so we make the prediction come
true. Tough as this fight may be, improbable as success might seem, we
cannot afford to surrender.
www.monbiot.com