Climate catastrophe increasingly likely

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): "The bottom line is that we believe the last three or four years to have been the warmest of the millennium, and 1998 to have been the warmest of all," said Prof. Phil Jones of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia. Not of the century, of the millennium: the CRU's data are based on studies of tree-ring growth and ice-cores that have extended the detailed history of the world's climate back to a thousand years ago.

Jones's alarming message on global warming was underlined by this year's spate of extreme weather, from Hurricane Mitch in Central America to the devastating floods in China and Bangladesh.

So why did the people in Buenos Aires pay so little attention?

After two weeks of filibusters, walk-outs, and behind-the- scenes political bribery and blackmail, the environment ministers of 170 countries gathered in Buenos Aires to review the Climate Change Convention reached agreement recently. But on what?

They agreed that by the end of the year 2000 they would draw up a timetable for implementing the agreement made last year at Kyoto by which the developed countries (but only the developed countries) will cut emissions of 'greenhouse gases' by 5 percent by 2008-2012. The mountain, having labored mightily, produced a rather small mouse.

Back in 1990, the scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recommended a 60 percent cut in emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases produced by burning fossil fuels, in order to stabilize the world's climate at manageable levels. The Rio conference in 1992 that finally negotiated the Climate Change Convention noted their views, considered political realities, and aimed a lot lower.

It then took five years, until last year's Kyoto meeting, to get everybody to agree on the modest target of 5 percent cuts for the developed countries over the next 15 years. The United States, the world's biggest polluter (23 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions with 4 percent of the world's population) did not even sign the Kyoto Protocol until recently -- and only Fiji has actually ratified it.

So what was this year's Buenos Aires conference about? It was, alas, only about negotiating a timetable for implementing last year's agreement. In the end, it settled for a schedule by which that timetable will be fleshed out over the next two years. But it left 142 other issues unresolved, including key questions like whether developing countries will accept any emissions targets.

And that is as good as it gets in the world of international diplomacy. Twenty years ago, indeed, nobody in the trade would have believed this kind of global negotiation, involving binding controls on sovereign states, was possible at all.

True, the cuts now planned in global greenhouse gas emissions are so small, and phased over so long, as to be almost worthless.

But many of the participants at Buenos Aires understood that they were building a template for a follow-on treaty, involving deep cuts, that will only become possible when enough climate- related calamities have finally concentrated people's minds.

The Buenos Aires conference got a new forecast of when those calamities will arrive in data produced by Britain's Hadley Center for Climate Change. The new Hadley model, calculated on the world's largest computer, represents the ocean currents that drive so much of the world's climate much better. It predicts a steady increase in flooding, droughts and wild weather up to 2050, followed by a runaway greenhouse effect in the latter half of the century.

Coastal flooding will displace some tens of millions in low- lying areas like the Nile delta and Bangladesh by 2050, and almost a billion people will be hit by water shortages as droughts spread over huge areas. Diseases now confined to the tropics will flourish in formerly safe regions: malaria is expected to reach the Baltic by 2050. Killer storms like Mitch will become normal, and global food production will be severely affected.

The impact will be worst in central and southern Africa and in the United States, where grain yields will fall by up to 10 percent. Yields will rise in northern Europe and Canada, but not enough to make up the losses. And all these changes are inevitable, no matter how fast people start cutting emissions now.

The climate takes about 30 years to respond to new inputs of greenhouse gases, so this hottest-ever year of 1998 was caused by emissions from before 1968. All the additional climate changes predicted down to about 2030 are already locked in, because they are due to fuel that has already been burned in the past 30 years.

If we're lucky, these changes will be frightening enough to drive us into real emissions cuts -- the 60 percent recommended at the Rio conference six years ago, or even more -- early enough to forestall the runaway effect around 2050. Because the real shock in the new Hadley model was the spread of the deserts.

Previous models assumed that a rising level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (which stimulates plant growth) would partly damp itself out, because more plants would remove more CO2 from the atmosphere. But after 2050 the additional plant growth is canceled out by the failure of rainfall over key areas like the Amazon, the Mediterranean, and the eastern U.S., and the warming goes wild: predicted land temperatures for the end of the next century are 6 degrees C (10 degrees F) higher than at present.

There is still time to avert that kind of catastrophe, if major changes are made in the next ten to twenty years, so the game being played at these apparently pointless climate conferences is worth the candle. The numbers they are working with now are too small to matter, but the rules they are making, the precedents they are setting, even the institutions they are creating are not a waste of time. By the time we finally get serious about climate change, there will be no time left for these preliminaries.