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-------Original Message-------
Date: 12/06/05 07:57:38
Subject: [euratom] Montreal could prove a costly distraction
Montreal could prove a costly distraction
02.12.2005 - 09:59 CET | By Peter Sain ley Berry EUOBSERVER /
COMMENT - Should you ever find yourself at a loose end with a group
of engineers and sailors then I can recommend an interesting party
game.
It is to imagine that you are the ill-fated Captain Smith of the
Titanic and that the ship has just struck the iceberg. What are you
going to do?
Indeed, I offer to producer James Cameron, the plot for a new film in
which, thanks to some heroic interventions, the Titanic doesn't sink
and all the passengers are rescued.
There are broadly two possible strategies open to you to save the
ship.
The first is to try to stop the water coming in. The second is to
live with the influx while concentrating your energies on finding
clever ways to stabilise the ship, absorb the incoming water and
manage the rescue.
The two approaches mirror transatlantic attitudes to the problem of
climate change, now being addressed by the 189 signatories to the UN
Climate Change Convention in Montreal.
The purpose of the meeting is to decide what should happen when the
Kyoto Treaty expires in seven years time.
Kyoto set targets for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.
Although 157 nations signed the treaty, it only really bites on 35
developed countries, including the European Union.
The United States declined to sign the treaty, much to the fury of
the Europeans, being unwilling to be bound to any targets which, it
suggested, would be costly to achieve and ineffective into the
bargain.
Clean and green ideas
Instead the Americans have preferred to concentrate their energies on
devising technologies that will lower emissions.
Clean and green ideas that will reduce the output of carbon into the
atmosphere or lock it away by a process known as sequestration. Even
against a rising background of global energy demand, which, so the
International Energy Agency tell us, is set to rise by 50 per cent in
the next 25 years.
By contrast the Europeans want Kyoto's targets to be followed by new,
stricter goals, accompanied by the development of carbon trading.
Which strategy will better save the Titanic - curbing the inflow or
managing the wider problem?
The public could be forgiven for imagining that the sky was some sort
of dustbin rapidly being filled with carbon dioxide as a result of
our predilection for burning fossil fuels and that this was why the
world was now heating up.
Unless we change our gas-guzzling ways, so fashionable theory has it,
we shall soon be overcome by deserts, swamped by rising seas,
inundated by freak weather and millions will die.
I wouldn't want to argue with this except to point out two things.
First, the Titanic has already struck the iceberg, as it were, and
secondly, that man's intervention in the planet's carbon cycle goes
an awful lot further than the burning of fossil fuels which, I would
argue, is relatively trivial in comparison. Let me explain why.
Area of another global warming peak
We know from a study of the Arctic ice cores that for the last four
hundred thousand years the world has experienced alternate cycles of
heating and cooling, the peaks being broadly 100,000 years apart.
More or less on schedule we saw the ice age some 50,000 years ago.
Now we are in the area of another global warming peak.
The graph of carbon dioxide concentrations over this period mirrors
that of temperature to the extent that one can broadly predict
temperature from carbon dioxide and vice versa.
But which came first: the chicken or the egg? There are good reasons
to suppose that temperature leads carbon dioxide: for if it didn't,
surely the earth would just go on getting hotter and hotter?
Moreover, as no one was burning fossil fuels 100,000 years ago, why
did the earth heat up?
Secondly, the limited data that we have beyond present times suggests
that the earth was already in the current warming cycle long before
we started to burn fossil fuels in any quantity.
In recent years we seem to have embarked on a super-warming period,
but without 100 years of data we shall not be able to tell whether or
not this is trend or fluctuation.
So the probability is that we shall be experiencing global warming -
and go on experiencing global warming - even if we were never to burn
another lump of coal or barrel of oil again.
So why Kyoto? Whatever the natural level of warming may be, there
seems to be pretty strong evidence that carbon dioxide increases it.
It therefore makes sense to try to reduce carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere and in the sea.
The sea is important because according to the scientists at the
United Nations Environment Programme there is 50 times more dissolved
carbon in the sea than in the atmosphere.
The same scientists also suggest that the carbon exchange between the
atmosphere and the surface waters of the sea is some 20 times the
annual discharge of carbon from burning fossil fuels. Twenty years
worth of emissions dissolve into and out of the sea each year.
In addition land plants take from the atmosphere the equivalent of
twelve years worth of emissions each year, while a similar amount is
released as they decay. These natural flows are some 30 times the
artificial fossil fuel flow, which suggests that attention to the
natural flows might just possibly be more rewarding as a strategy for
reducing carbon in the sky.
For example, cutting emissions by 15 per cent (the Kyoto target for
Europe was 8 per cent on 1990 levels) would yield an annual benefit
of approximately 1 billion tonnes of carbon. A mere 1 per cent of
additional carbon sequestration into the biosphere could achieve the
same result.
I'm with the Americans
It is easy to rail against the factory chimney, the long motorway
queue of smoking exhausts. Yet we do not rail against the unseen
death and destruction wreaked upon the seabed by heavy beam trawlers
that can render a whole habitat worthless in a single pass. We do not
rail, much, against over-fishing, or the pollution of the sea.
Yet a tonne of carbon locked in the shells of shellfish is a tonne of
carbon safe for millions of years. The great limestone cliffs that
wall much of the European seaboard are little more than carbon
sequestered by a billion generations of shellfish.
The danger with the current European focus on targets for reducing
greenhouse gas emissions is that it may simply deflect attention from
the destruction of the teeming biosphere.
As China, India and other countries develop, the probable danger
comes not from their carbon emissions but from their impact on the
terrestrial, and in particular the marine, carbon-absorbing
biosphere.
Every tonne of forest cut down for factories, every tonne of
shellfish destroyed by pollution, represents a carbon load equivalent
to, but far more dangerous than, a tonne of oil burnt.
For a tonne of shellfish will lock away the tonne of oil emissions
for a million years in shells at the bottom of the sea. And each year
they will repeat the process. The logic of targeting the oil burn
while killing the shellfish seems perverse.
On the Titanic analogy it is like plundering the pumps for material
to plug the side of the ship. On this one, therefore, I'm with the
Americans
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