Talk of War Overshadows Climate Crisis

Calling All Realists

By Tom Athanasiou

FPIF

The abortive "Earth Summit" in Johannesburg is already fading from our overtaxed memories. Indeed, as I write this, the conference of the week is COP8, the Eighth Conference of Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. And it may be a whole lot more important than Johannesburg, if only as a marker, a way to date another death of innocence. For COP8 comes only days after Al Qaeda, in its latest blast of apocalyptic warfare, destroyed a pair of Balinese discos, and with them hundreds of lives. We should not forget, those of us who follow the game of global environmental policy, that Johannesburg's final preparatory conference was also in Bali, and only a few short miles away.

COP8 comes on a calendar no activist would have chosen. It's not so much that the climate talks are in limbo, but that their progress -- just now we're waiting for Kyoto to enter into force, and looking forward to debating the globalization of the climate regime -- seems abstract and even unreal against the background of an ever more gruesome world. The brutal post-boom economy, Al Qaeda's mad utopianism, an imminent U.S. invasion of Iraq: together they announce a new and bloody chapter in the history of our strange civilization, and set a geopolitical context in which semi-rational negotiations like those at the COPs can only seem odd, brave, acts of faith.

As if the climate talks could someday really matter.

With the winds of war blowing, it's a big if indeed. But what choice, really, do we have but to continue? War takes center stage, war and the economy, but ecological crisis is also gathering its forces, and the terms by which we'll finally face it are becoming clear. Climate, of course, is our special subject, and a close reading of the IPCC's measured prose yields a clear, unwelcome conclusion: We don't have much time.

Here's the executive summary: The usual "best case scenario," in which we manage to stabilize the atmosphere before its carbon dioxide concentration rises above 450 parts per million, assumes a "climate sensitivity" of 2.5°C, but this is looking to be an unrealistically low estimate. Furthermore, even if the climate sensitivity is that low, 450 ppm (which we'll far overshoot in anything like "business as usual") would yield a long-term temperature increase of 2°C, or even more once non-CO2 gases are included. Far from being "safe," this, according to the IPCC's Second Assessment Report, would mean significant ecosystem damage and loss of biodiversity ("whole forests may disappear"), major damage to food production in the most vulnerable parts of the world (60 to 350 million more people at risk of hunger), "significant loss of life" due to indirect health effects, particularly in developing countries, and a large increase in sea level.

And if the climate sensitivity turns out to be higher, all bets are off.

Which brings us back to the climate talks, now on the cusp of Kyoto's entry into force, and to the problem: Despite a full decade of negotiations, COP8 still will not engage the climate crisis with anything like an appropriate level of urgency. No country, North or South, is prepared to accept new emission-reduction commitments, and even the long-deferred "review of adequacy" (wherein negotiators will have to face the paucity of their own accomplishments) is still not certain to occur.

But the signs of reckoning are everywhere. Only a few years remain before 2005, when the official negotiating schedule demands that attention turn to the post-Kyoto agreement. When it does, we'll face a future unclouded by the ritual optimism of the 1990's boom. And as the science is getting clearer, it's difficult to avoid the real issue--making it, or not making it, to a "soft landing corridor."