Climate Change: A Post - Bali Agenda (Post 1)

Article 1: the day after Bali

2007 saw the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) finally agree the text of a report that stated, once and for all, what the vast majority of scientists had been saying for many years previous: Our planet's climate is changing at an unprecedented rate according to all recorded data; and that rate of change is the direct result of the rapid increase in greenhouse gas emissions caused by humans from the time of the Industrial Revolution onwards.

It has taken almost thirty years since Brundtland and fifteen since Rio to reach the agreement embodied in the IPCC report. This has helped to promote the notion that climate change is not real and/or that it is not caused by human activity. Overall it has been a huge obstacle for those trying to develop and implement effective and realistic policies to reduce the increase in global energy demand and curb CO2 emissions. In 1999 the Kyoto Declaration set out emissions reduction targets. However, without the unequivocal scientific backing, provided by the IPCC in 2007, it was not ratified by all of the major polluters, in particular the US and Australia.

However, despite the scientific consensus that was reached in 2007, the summit of world leaders in Bali failed to agree emissions reduction targets. This is strange given that the summit was called as much in response to the IPCC report as to revive the now largely defunct Kyoto mechanism. Yet, just months after the 2007 report and at a time when even the USA and Australia looked willing to participate in the numbers game, Bali failed to produce a successor to Kyoto which would have created universal and effective emissions targets.

Bali has been hailed by some as a step in the right direction'. However, in truth the summit was high on rhetoric but low on action, another in the long line of ‘we need to talk more about doing something' agreements. In other words it was an agreement to agree a notion that even the English Courts would not recognise. It allowed, those nations that blocked the original Kyoto targets to come away from Bali basking in the glow of being slightly ‘greener' but did not force them into doing ‘something' to combat their emissions production.

It is with good cause then, that Climate change campaigners and others on the left may well have seen the Bali declaration in an altogether dimmer light. As we develop higher tech and more accurate means of measuring changes in the global environment and learn more about the complex interactions between natural systems the evidence only becomes more compelling. The IPCC report did not tell us anything we didn't already know. Its real value was in the agreements over methodologies and guidance for reporting that did not make the front pages. Whilst those agreements are invaluable to scientists and policy makers, the limits agreed for the maximum atmospheric emissions and subsequent temperature rises beyond which significant climate change is inevitable were really rather conservative.

The IPCC report agreed that significant climate change is inevitable once the atmospheric concentration of CO2 reaches 450 parts per million which, it is predicted, would limit the average global temperature rise to 3°C by the end of the century. Beyond these limits the effects of climate change are expected to become long-term (hundreds of years) and irreversible (unrecoverable ecosystem damage, ‘runaway climate change', etc).

Yet back in late 2006 the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) published 'High Stakes', a report that questioned those limits even before they were agreed internationally and asked some penetrating and relevant questions about the ability of policy makers to deliver and implement policies with a realistic chance of meeting them. Perhaps most tellingly the IPPR, which specialises in risk assessment, concluded that one of the greatest risks is spending more money on risk assessments and not enough on actually reducing emissions. It's hard to argue with a report that tries to argue its authors out of their jobs.

In next week's article I will examine in depth these uncertainties in the science behind current climate change predictions and the inherent risk of policy failure where the science is not correctly understood.

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Keith Baker - Technology and Science Editor (12/02/08)