Stopping Climate Change? Rich Nations Aren't Even Trying

Giving Up on Two Degrees

by George Monbiot

From www.monbiot.com. Published in the The Guardian, 1st May 2007

The rich nations seeking to cut climate change have this in common: they lie. You won’t find this statement in the draft of the new report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was leaked to the Guardian last week. But as soon as you understand the numbers, the words form before your eyes. The governments making genuine efforts to tackle global warming are using figures they know to be false.

The British government, the European Union and the United Nations all claim to be trying to prevent “dangerous” climate change. Any level of climate change is dangerous for someone, but there is a broad consensus about what this word means: two degrees of warming above pre-industrial levels. It is dangerous because of its direct impacts on people and places (it could, for example, trigger the irreversible melting of the Greenland ice sheet [1] and the collapse of the Amazon rainforest [2]) and because it is likely to stimulate further warming, as it encourages the world’s natural systems to start releasing greenhouse gases.

The aim of preventing more than 2°C of warming has been adopted overtly by the UN [3] and the European Union [4] and implicitly by the British, German and Swedish governments. All of them say they are hoping to confine the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to a level which would prevent 2°C from being reached. And all of them know that they have set the wrong targets, based on outdated science. Fearful of the political implications, they have failed to adjust to the levels the new research demands.

This isn’t easy to follow, but please bear with me, as you cannot understand the world’s most important issue without grappling with some numbers. The average global temperature is affected by the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. This concentration is usually expressed as “carbon dioxide equivalent”. It is not an exact science – you cannot say that a certain concentration of gases will lead to a precise increase in temperature – but scientists discuss the relationship in terms of probability. A paper published last year by the climatologist Malte Meinshausen suggests that if greenhouse gases reach a concentration of 550 parts per million, carbon dioxide equivalent, there is a 63-99% chance (with an average value of 82%) that global warming will exceed two degrees [5]. At 475 parts the average likelihood is 64%. Only if concentrations are stabilized at 400 parts or below is there a low chance (an average of 28%) that temperatures will rise by over two degrees.

The IPCC’s draft report contains similar figures. A concentration of 510 parts per million (ppm) gives us a 33% chance of preventing more than two degrees of warming [6]. A concentration of 590ppm gives us a 10% chance [7]. You begin to understand the scale of the challenge when you discover that the current level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere (using the IPCC’s formula) is 459ppm [8]. We have already exceeded the safe level. To give ourselves a high chance of preventing dangerous climate change, we will need a programme so drastic that greenhouse gases in the atmosphere end up below the current concentrations. The sooner this happens, the greater the chance of preventing two degrees of warming.

But no government has set itself this task. The European Union and the Swedish government have established the world’s most stringent target. It is 550ppm, which gives us a near certainty of an extra 2°C. The British government makes use of a clever conjuring trick. Its target is also “550 parts per million”, but 550 parts of carbon dioxide alone. When you include the other greenhouse gases, this translates into 666ppm carbon dioxide equivalent (a fitting figure) [9]. According to the Stern Report, at 650ppm there is a 60 – 95% chance of 3°C of warming [10]. The government’s target, in other words, commits us to a very dangerous level of climate change.

The British government has been aware that it has set the wrong target for at least four years. In 2003 the environment department found that “with an atmospheric CO2 stabilization concentration of 550ppm, temperatures are expected to rise by between 2°C and 5°C” [11]. In March last year it admitted that “a limit closer to 450ppm or even lower, might be more appropriate to meet a 2°C stabilization limit.” [12] Yet the target has not changed. Last October I challenged the environment secretary, David Miliband, over this issue on Channel 4 News. He responded as if he had never come across it before.

The European Union is also aware that it is using the wrong figures. In 2005 it found that “to have a reasonable chance to limit global warming to no more than 2°C, stabilization of concentrations well below 550 ppm CO2 equivalent may be needed.” [13] But its target hasn’t changed either.

Embarrassingly for the government and for left-wingers like me, the only large political entity which seems able to confront this is the British Conservative Party. In a paper published a fortnight ago, it called for an atmospheric stabilization target of 400-450ppm carbon dioxide equivalent [14]. Will this become policy? Does Cameron have the guts to do what his advisers say he should?

In my book Heat I estimate that to avoid two degrees of warming we require a global emissions cut of 60% per capita between now and 2030 [15]. This translates into an 87% cut in the United Kingdom. This is a much stiffer target than the British government’s – which requires a 60% cut in the UK’s emissions by 2050. But my figure now appears to have been an underestimate. A recent paper in the journal Climatic Change emphasizes that the sensitivity of global temperatures to greenhouse gas concentrations remains uncertain. But if we use the average figure, to obtain a 50% chance of preventing more than 2°C of warming requires a global cut of 80% by 2050 [16].

This is a cut in total emissions, not in emissions per head. If the population were to rise from 6 to 9 billion between now and then, we would need an 87% cut in global emissions per person. If carbon emissions are to be distributed equally, the greater cut must be made by the biggest polluters: rich nations like us. The UK’s emissions per capita would need to fall by 91%.

But our governments appear quietly to have abandoned their aim of preventing dangerous climate change. If so, they condemn millions to death. What the IPCC report shows is that we have to stop treating climate change as an urgent issue. We have to start treating it as an international emergency.

We must open immediate negotiations with China, which threatens to become the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases by November this year [17], partly because it manufactures many of the products we use. We must work out how much it would cost to decarbonize its growing economy, and help to pay. We need a major diplomatic offensive – far more pressing than it has been so far – to persuade the United States to do what it did in 1941, and turn the economy around on a dime. But above all we need to show that we remain serious about fighting climate change, by setting the targets the science demands.

References:1. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, February 2007. Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Summary for Policymakers.

2. Rachel Warren, 2006. “Impacts of Global Climate Change at Different Annual Mean Global Temperature Increases.” In Hans Joachim Schellnhuber (Ed in Chief). Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change. Cambridge University Press.

3. F.R. Rijsberman and R.J. Swart (Eds), 1990. Targets and indicators of climate change: Report of Working Group II of the Advisory Group on Greenhouse Gases. Stockholm Environment Institute.

4. Council of the European Union, 11th March 2005. Information note 7242/05.

5. Malte Meinshausen, 2006. “What Does a 2°C Target Mean for Greenhouse Gas Concentrations? A Brief Analysis Based on Multi-Gas Emission Pathways and Several Climate Sensitivity Uncertainty Estimates.” In Hans Joachim Schellnhuber (Ed in Chief). Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change. Cambridge University Press.

6. The IPCC uses the words “Unlikely” and “Very Unlikely”. These have precise definitions in the IPCC process: a 33% likelihood and a 10% likelihood. For the full set of definitions, see Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, February 2007, ibid.

7. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2007. Mitigation of Climate Change. Unpublished draft report, version 3.0. Table SPM 1.

8. The figures the IPCC uses in Table SPM 1 suggest that the other greenhouse gases account for 21% of the climate change due to carbon dioxide alone. This is a high estimate – other authors (eg Sir Nicholas Stern, the UK Department for Environment), suggest 10 or 15%.

9. Again, I use the IPCC’s formula here. Other estimates would produce a slightly lower figure.

10. Sir Nicholas Stern, October 2006. The Economics of Climate Change. HM Treasury. Part 3, p194.

11. DEFRA, 2003. The Scientific Case for Setting a Long-Term Emission Reduction Target.

12. HM Government, March 2006. Climate Change: The UK Programme 2006.

13. Council of the European Union, ibid.

14. Nick Hurd MP and Clare Kerr, April 2007. Don’t give up on 2°C. Conservative Party’s Quality of Life Commission.

15. This is on the basis of a metric developed by Colin Forrest. He is not a professional climate scientist but his calculations can be replicated by any numerate person. For details, see Chapter 1 of Heat.

16. Nathan Rive et al, 10th March 2007. “To what extent can a long-term temperature target guide near-term climate change commitments?” Table 1. Climatic Change 82:373-391. DOI 10.1007/s10584-006-9193-4

17. John Vidal, 25th April 2007. “China could overtake US as biggest emissions culprit by November.” The Guardian.