Accelerating and worsening impacts of climate change

12/1/08

By Bo Ekman, President, Johan Rockström and Anders Wijkman

When climate negotiators meet this week in Poznan , only one year is left before a hoped-for post-Kyoto agreement in Copenhagen next year. A lot is at stake. The IPCC reports from 2007 underlined the seriousness of the problems we face. Since then, there have been remarkable developments in climate and global environment change science. Important new observations of the accelerating and worsening impacts of climate change have been reported, which were simply unknown to scientists only a few years ago.

This new scientific evidence gained in recent years is the backbone of a new book – “Grasping the climate crisis – a provocation from the Tällberg Foundation” – that we have launched to challenge those participating at the meeting in Poznan.

The world is presently facing a breakdown of the global financial system. There were warnings before the crisis but they were not listened to. We fear that all the warnings about climate change will meet the same fate. The reason, of course, is the way climate negotiations are presently organised. Instead of heeding to the most recent and, indeed, alarming scientific reports, the “reduction targets” being discussed seem to be negotiated compromises of what seems politically possible to achieve – not what is required to stabilise the climate system. Moreover, we strongly believe that negotiations so far have given far too little consideration to the imperatives of equity and justice. The rich countries created the problem and have a moral obligation to provide broad support to developing countries for adaptation and risk reduction as well as for their efforts to avoid being locked in a fossil-based economy.

A major objective set for the negotiations is to avoid an increase in the average temperature on the planet by more than 2° degrees C. New scientific findings claim this objective is not ambitious enough to be on the safe side. A warming of 2° degrees would mean that the summer ice in the Arctic is gone. It is also likely to result in a melting of the Tibetan glaciers and an acceleration of the melting of the Greenland ice-sheet. The consequences would be devastating. The sea level could rise by 2-3 meters in this Century. Freshwater provisions for more than a Billion people in Asia would be at risk. The conclusions drawn by many scientists is to lower the temperature target to 1,7° degrees.

Just as important are reports showing that the possibilities to meet even the 2° degrees target are extremely slim. A new study from the Tyndall Centre argues that even an optimistic interpretation of the current trajectory of greenhouse gas emissions, and the feed-back mechanisms on Earth, is unlikely to show a stabilisation of greenhouse gas much below a temperature increase in the range of 3,2 - 4,0 °C.

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