From: Bob Olsen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Sat, 07 Apr 2001 20:43:18 -0400
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Confidential UN report on climate change
UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
confidential report on climate change
Consequences of climate change similar to a global
nuclear war.
Toronto Star, Apr. 7, 2001. 03:17 AM
Why weather is a victim of politics
What do we know, or care, about global warming?
Peter Calamai SCIENCE REPORTER
MAKING A POINT: `Science delivered the goods but politics failed,'
says computer climate expert Andrew Weaver.
OUR CHANGING CLIMATE
The long and uneasy alliance between politics and science to combat global
climate change has finally broken down, perhaps irrevocably.
And the real losers are certain to be the public.
The bust-up came this week in the aftermath of the recent Bush
administration decision to oppose the Kyoto Protocol - the international
treaty to fight global warming - which the U.S. government helped negotiate.
The White House move, reversing campaign promises by President George W.
Bush, concerns researchers around the world who say they've kept their part
of the bargain: to find convincing scientific evidence that humanity's
activities are altering the Earth's climate, and heading toward much more
drastic upheaval.
``Science delivered the goods but politics failed,'' says Andrew Weaver, a
University of Victoria professor and world-ranking expert in computer
climate models.
Similar disillusion ran through the ranks of delegates from almost 100
governments who met this week in Nairobi, Kenya to formally accept reports
from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a U.N.-convened
conclave of top researchers in all aspects of climate science.
The reports, summaries of which were made public earlier this year, provide
the strongest scientific evidence yet for immediate global action to come to
grips with the inevitable effects of climate change.
We're now sure that the Northern Hemisphere is warming more than during any
period in the past 500 years and likely more than any time in the past
millennium.
Most of the warming over the past 50 years has probably been caused by such
human activities as levelling forests and burning fossil fuels. But natural
factors like volcanic eruptions, variations in the sun's radiation and cows
belching methane also play a role.
Computer models do faithfully reproduce most of the climate twists and turns
of the 20th century on a global scale. The models have also become much more
credible in projecting what's likely to happen to the world's climate if the
increase in greenhouse gases isn't curbed.
Scientists can now say with high confidence that regional changes in
temperature have had ``discernible impacts on many physical and biological
systems.'' This most recent conclusion was based on long-term studies of
more than 400 plants and animals and more than 100 telltale processes, such
as the retreat of glaciers.
Science isn't likely to find a saviour, a technological or biological marvel
that allows the world to keep burning coal, clearing rain forests and
driving gas-guzzling SUVs without having to pay a climate-change price.
But do these five answers justify a radical remaking of the world's economy
that would bring decades of upheaval, especially for North American society?
``It's all a gamble, but at some point soon we've got to throw the dice,''
says University of Calgary professor Bill Leiss, an expert in contentious
risk issues such as genetic engineering and climate change.
The climate change crusade has stirred passions from its beginnings, which
many pinpoint as a sweltering Canada Day weekend in Toronto in 1988.
That's when an international conference called for a 20 per cent reduction
by 2005 in the global emissions of greenhouses gases, backed by a major push
to nail down the underlying science that would prove the necessity for such
a huge cut.
Thirteen years later, science has largely delivered the evidence. Yet
emissions of greenhouse gases have gone up, rather than down.
Forget the oft-quoted target of reducing Canada's greenhouse gas emissions
by 6 per cent below the 1990 level, or by 20 per cent below the increased
levels of today. The best scientific estimate is that the world would have
to cut total emissions of greenhouse gases by more than half over the next
few decades simply to hold this century's rise in global average
temperatures to no more than 3 degrees, which is roughly five times the
temperature increase during the last century.
For an energy-intensive country like Canada, the best estimate is that
emissions would have to be cut by almost 70 per cent - to about a third of
today's level. The mere whisper of this figure paralyzes most Canadians and
their institutions, says Leiss, who is also president of the Royal Society
of Canada.
``It would appear to mean the end of our industrial civilization.
Governments are in complete denial. They can't deal with this. It's too big,
too horrendous,'' he says.
``They're terrified of the kind of dialogue they would have to have with the
public.''
Leiss researches and teaches such dialogue - called risk communications - at
Queen's University and the University of Calgary where he holds a research
chair.
For more than a decade, governments have avoided any tough decisions on
climate change, saying science had to provide better answers. Scientists
rose to the challenge. Working without pay, they provided their latest
research and best analytical expertise to governments through the U.N.'s
climate change panel.
The agreement was that the policy-makers would then deliver the political
goods. But the U.S. opposition to Kyoto, and Canada's subsequent waffling,
left the scientists disillusioned, says Weaver.
``Politics is losing touch with the science. The problem is that most people
don't recognize slow change in the climate, so governments are not being
pushed by the public to deal with the issue,'' he said.
The science hasn't managed to convince enough people that the necessary
societal changes are in the best interests of the economy and health, as
well as the environment, says Ralph Torrie, an Ottawa environmental
consultant long involved in climate issues.
``The prevailing paradigm is still that it's a boxing match with the economy
in one corner and the environment in another,'' he says
``In the end, to get action is going to require a positive motivation, not
people acting under the threat of losing a vote or losing a buck. That's a
corner we have to turn yet.''
Climate-change science also has some corners to turn. The reporting for this
series also found important questions that scientists can't answer now with
any assurance and may not be able to nail down for a considerable time,
including:
How will global climate change play out on a smaller scale, such as on the
Prairies or in southern Ontario? The scientist creating the regional climate
model for Canada says the model's projections of temperature and
precipitation aren't yet credible. Significant improvements will take at
least two years.
How will regional climate changes actually affect human health, agriculture
and biodiversity in Canada? The much-publicized forecasts of galloping
malaria, parched grain fields and vanishing species are little better than
educated guesses, because they have to be based on the untrustworthy
projections of regional climate change, plus large assumptions about the
sensitivity of complex living systems.
What is really happening to the Arctic's climate? Federal budget slashing
forced the closing of key stations in the North and elsewhere, even though
Canada's climate observing network is already sparser than those of most
industrial countries.
Do Canada's forests soak up more greenhouse gases than they emit? Are they a
carbon source or a sink?
This last issue is particularly controversial because the federal government
insists that the temporary storage of greenhouse gases in Canada's forests
counts for the same as permanent cuts in fossil fuel emissions from
tailpipes and smokestacks.
Yet studies by federal government scientists say Canada's forests are as
likely to be a carbon source as a carbon sink right now and are heading
toward being a significant source of greenhouse gases during the crucial
2008-2010 counting period of the Kyoto Protocol.
Beyond such political controversies and what researchers call the ``known
unknowns,'' much of the supposed serious disagreement among climate
scientists is more apparent than real. The normal scientific process of
poking and prodding for weaknesses in every statement sometimes makes it
look as if there is no consensus when there is.
Where climate researchers do disagree, sometimes deeply, is over two related
issues: the use made of their science in public summaries, and the best
strategies for tackling the threat posed by climate change.
Richard Lindzen, a professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology, is a highly regarded and outspoken climate researcher. He
voices the unease many scientists express privately over the IPCC's
headline-grabbing predictions.
These predictions come from a 20-page summary vetted by officials of the 100
countries involved. The supporting, detailed consensus from hundreds of
researchers - one for each working group - runs to more than 1,000 pages and
is not yet available to the public.
An example is the much-quoted January estimate that the world could warm as
much as 5.8 degrees Celsius by 2100. That startling figure came from feeding
the most hair-trigger computer climate model with the theoretical greenhouse
gas emissions of a world population of 15 billion, most of whom would strive
to emulate today's North American consumers and be unrestrained by any
international treaty.
But none of those explanatory details are included in the summary report.
``The IPCC people would argue that they present a temperature range, but
they know the press is going to pick the high end. That figure is truly
implausible,'' Lindzen says.
Yet climate modeller Weaver comes to the opposite conclusion about IPCC
claims.
``In the IPCC you emphasize uncertainty. So anything you see coming out is
far more uncertain than any individual person would actually think,'' says
Weaver, who was a lead author for one portion of the IPCC science report.
For this series, the Star had access to the two complete, though still
unreleased IPCC reports that cover climate science and the impacts of
climate change.
Just as fundamental as concern over the IPCC process is the debate among
climate experts over the best way to slow and eventually halt the extra
greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide, that
are created by human activities.
All three occur naturally and are part of the Earth's heating system. But
since the Industrial Revolution began in the 18th century, the atmospheric
concentrations of these three gases have risen 31 per cent, 151 per cent and
17 per cent respectively, throwing the planet's natural thermostat out of
whack.
Because three-quarters of humanity's recent carbon dioxide contributions
come from burning fossil fuels, the political focus has been on this gas,
chemically written as CO2.
But the U.S. scientist who initially put global warming on the political
agenda, NASA researcher Jim Hansen, caused a huge ruckus recently by arguing
for a two-track approach. By all means rein in CO2emissions from fossil fuel
use, Hansen wrote last summer, but also tackle methane emissions as well as
the black carbon soot and the ozone-laden smog responsible for air
pollution.
Hansen estimated that soot and ozone smog together now account for roughly
the same amount of global warming as carbon dioxide. Since soot and smog
also exact a direct toll on human health, unlike CO2, a reduction campaign
for those two pollutants might well be more politically saleable.
Methane's build-up in the atmosphere has been slowing for the past two
decades. Yet Hansen calculated that the gas still contributes half as much
to global warming as carbon dioxide, making it well worth more research.
Two major sources of methane are rice paddies and cows. Reducing the energy
lost in generating methane could boost production of rice, milk and meat - a
side benefit to curbing global warming.
Hansen called this an ``optimistic scenario, an alternative to the
doom-and-gloom of the IPCC.'' For his troubles, he was lambasted by many
environmentalists and some climate scientists but lauded by the pro-industry
lobby.
There's one other legacy from the 1988 Toronto Conference on the Changing
Atmosphere that first established the uneasy alliance between science and
politics. The opening line of its conclusions remains the most eloquent and
stark warning yet about climate change:
``Humanity is conducting an unintended, uncontrolled, globally pervasive
experiment, whose ultimate consequence could be second only to a global
nuclear war.''
Copyright 1996-2001. Toronto Star Newspapers Limited
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Liberate democracy from corporate control
Bob Olsen, Toronto [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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