Rio de Janeiro, Kyoto, Bali, Copenhagen, Cancun, Durban, Lima – and now Paris.
To a sceptic, some of the places chosen by the United Nations over the past 23 years to host its intermittent, high-level wrangling sessions over the fate of the planet reads a lot like a bucket list of desirable holiday destinations.
But these days “sceptic” isn’t a word heard in polite society within earshot of the phrase “climate change” – doubting the science behind the claim that the world is getting increasingly and dangerously warmer is akin to outing oneself as a Holocaust denier.
Instead, all 196 national signatories to the UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change accept two basic premises: that the world is heating up dangerously thanks to our unbridled enthusiasm for fossil fuels; and that if we haven’t limited the temperature increase to 2°C by the end of the century – compared to the pre-industrial period – then our goose will be cooked.
That’s the goal of the 21st Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework on Climate Change (COP21), currently meeting in Paris: to forge “a new international agreement on climate change, applicable to all, to keep global warming below 2°C”.
Will such an agreement be reached? We’ll know by the time the conference ends next Friday. But whether it will have any effect on the planet’s headlong rush to overheating remains to be seen.
The BBC reported this week that “assessments of the more than 180 national climate-action plans submitted by countries to the summit suggest that, if they are implemented, the world will see a rise of nearer to 3°C.”
That certainly wouldn’t amuse the low-lying island states, such as those of the Pacific, that fear inundation, and are pressing for a target of 1.5°C.
History doesn’t lend much hope of a breakthrough – over the years, climate-change conferences have generated many doom-mongering predictions and a great deal of hot air, but little in the way of actual planet-saving progress.
The road to Paris could be said to have started 1,800 kilometres and 43 years ago in Stockholm, Sweden, where in June 1972, the UN staged the prototype climate-change conference. The Conference on the Human Environment “represented a first taking stock of the global human impact on the environment”.
Back then, with president Richard Nixon in office, the Vietnam War raging and terrorists bringing death to the Munich Olympics, climate change and the like wasn’t on many agendas.
Instead, the conference agreed to 26 “principles” – natural resources had to be safeguarded, science and technology must be used to improve the environment, wildlife must be protected, and so on.
So when did global warming “begin”? In 1988, according to a Nasa climate expert who gave evidence to a US Congressional committee in June that year.
In the first five months of 1988, the Earth had been warmer than in any other period since records began, Dr James Hansen told the committee. It was “time to stop waffling so much and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here”.
But after Stockholm, another 20 years passed before the world started to wake up.
In the words of the UN, the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio was “unprecedented for a UN conference, in terms of both its size and the scope of its concerns”.
More than 170 countries gathered to “rethink economic development and find ways to halt the destruction of irreplaceable natural resources and pollution of the planet”.
The conference’s message – “nothing less than a transformation of our attitudes and behaviour [will] bring about the necessary changes” – was embodied in the document around which all subsequent action has been shaped: the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
Every year since 1995, the Conference of Parties to the Convention, known as COP, has brought together signatory states to try to reach agreement on a way to reduce carbon emissions. Success has, at best, been mixed.
One of the landmark meetings followed in Japan two years later. Under the Kyoto protocol, 37 industrialised countries committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions to 5 per cent of 1990 levels between 2008 and 2012.
Unfortunately, there was a slight hiccup. The United States, one of the main greenhouse-gas creators, refused to play ball. And although the number of national success stories outnumbered the failures, 16 countries, including Canada, Australia, Denmark, Japan and Italy, managed to increase their outputs.
The bottom line for Kyoto was that between 1990 and 2012, with no restrictions placed on “developing” countries such as China and India, global carbon emissions grew and grew, with the only noticeable dip on the chart accounted for by the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008.
There was more disappointment in 2009, when 45,000 delegates met in Copenhagen for COP15, but failed to agree a binding global treaty to replace Kyoto.
Fingers were pointed in all directions, not least by the Bolivian President Evo Morales, who made headline news for his observation that the meeting had failed because of “the lack of political will by a small group of countries, led by the US”.
But Copenhagen was good for something. A non-binding accord noted “the scientific view that the increase in global temperature should be below 2°C”, a target that had been endorsed by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
That target is now centre stage in Paris, where the main objective of COP21 is to formulate a binding commitment to hit it.
So far, the rhetoric has been encouraging, if vaguely familiar, with 147 world leaders lining up to address the meeting in earnest tones.
“The next generation,” the US President Barack Obama told the delegates, “is watching, [and] I came here personally to say the United States not only recognises the problem, but is committed to do something about it.”
But the barriers to success are imposing. In addition to the fate of the planet, each country has its own domestic political agenda to consider. Neither China nor India, for example, seem likely to readily give up the cheap coal powering their development.
On Tuesday, an analysis presented at the conference by Climate Action Tracker suggested that if all coal plants in the pipeline around the world were to be built, “by 2030 emissions from coal power would be 400 per cent higher than what is consistent with [the] 2°C pathway”.
The study identified seven countries, including India and China, which had made formal promises to cap emissions, but were nevertheless pressing ahead with plans to generate more power with coal.
The reality that can’t be taken into account at COP21, as it couldn’t at previous meetings, is that global economics will ultimately play a greater role in climate change, for better or worse, than anything that countries agree to over croissants in Paris.
There are, for example, some encouraging signs that alternative energy is playing an increasingly important role. BP’s Statistical Review of World Energy, published in June, noted that while annual growth in demand for coal had dropped from 3.6 per cent to less than 0.5 per cent in a decade, and that in 2014 oil and gas demand grew just 1 per cent, demand was up for both wind (10 per cent) and solar power (38 per cent).
But the subtext of the report was less encouraging. Such shifts in consumption patterns almost certainly owe more to transient economic forces than to a globally united determination to clean up our act.
Renewables, as BP reported, were still providing only 3 per cent of the world’s energy needs, and the small annual growth in CO2 emissions – at 0.5 per cent, the lowest seen since 1998, barring the aftermath of the financial crisis – was down to “the deceleration in global energy demand and shift in the fuel mix”.
The real problem, as Oxfam pointed out on Wednesday, is that climate change is “inextricably linked to economic inequality”.
The poorest half of the world’s population, says a new report from the charity, “are responsible for only around 10 per cent of global emissions, yet live overwhelmingly in the countries most vulnerable to climate change – while the richest 10 per cent of people in the world are responsible for around 50 per cent of global emissions.”
Can Paris make a difference and stave off the environmental catastrophe predicted (again) in the most recent assessment report of the IPCC?
Unchecked, “climate change will increase the likelihood of severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts for people and ecosystems”, the panel reported in November last year.
The good news was that “implementing stringent mitigation activities can ensure that the impacts of climate change remain within a manageable range, creating a brighter and more sustainable future”.
But according to a timely pre-Paris report by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), we may already be out of time.
Reports from NOAA, Nasa and the Japan Meteorological Agency all agree that, with the century only 15 years old, we’re already halfway to the vital 2°C mark.
weekend@thenational.ae
Follow us @LifeNationalUAE
Follow us on Facebook for discussions, entertainment, reviews, wellness and news.
