Binding agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions reached at recent summit meeting in Kyoto will not significantly slow climate change
In December, 1997 nations of the world met in Kyoto, Japan to negotiate a schedule to reduce their emissions of green house gasses. This conference was a follow up to the Montreal "Framework Convention" which set the non-binding goal of aiming to stabilize these emissions at the 1990 level by the year 2000.
We are only a year and a half away from the magic year 2000 and little to no progress has been made to meet this goal. In Canada the rate of emissions continued to increase - voluntary compliance proved to be a total failure. Canada continued to plan for massive mega-projects to exhume and consume more fossil fuels than ever before. Gas exploration and coal development projects like the Cheviot Mine proposal, and the taxpayer-subsidized Syncrude tar sands project proceeded into high gear.
Since the first conference which attempted to do something about human-caused global climate change six years ago, evidence has continued to mount indicating that human activity, especially the increased use of fossil fuels and rapid deforestation, is causing global warming. The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere continues to increase. Its greenhouse effect -its ability to retain solar radiation (heat) -manifested itself in the fact that 1997 was the hottest year on record. Meanwhile computer modelling has become more sophisticated and fewer and fewer scientists now doubt the fact that human activities are changing Earth's climate. The dire consequences of just drifting along without attempting to reduce greenhouse gasses are not fully clear, but enough is known to expect prudent people to act and err on the side of caution. This hasn't happened.
Daily measurements of atmospheric gasses made at Maouna Loa in remote Hawaii over last 40 years show a generally increasing CO2 concentration as well as an annual cycle. During the northern hemisphere's summer months, CO2 decreases. This reflects the uptake of carbon during increased photosynthetic activity of green plant especially forests then. This is followed by an increase in CO2 due to increased burning of fossil fuels and lowered photosynthetic activity in the winter.
It is hard to slow down the "engine of progress". Developing nations are firm in their right to expand industry and improve their citizens' standard of living. Developed nations are equally firm that they must stay competitive in the global marketplace and can't pass environmental regulations that make their goods too costly. Understanding these constraints, researchers calculated various options. They were the scientists' best estimates of the minimum emission reductions needed by the year 2010 in order to avoid drastic changes in climate. They were also designed so that further reductions in emissions after 2010 would not be too drastic so that they would be achievable and, at the same time, provide a "safe landing" in the future.
The safe landing " corridor" during the next 100 years must have:
- a global temperature increase of no more than 1 degree C because of human activities.
- a rate of change in global temperature of no more than 0.1 degree C per decade.
- a rise in sea level of no more than 0.2 metres.
- no need for emission reductions greater than 2 percent in any one year.
Does the Kyoto Protocol agreement accomplish this? It established a commitment period between the years 2008 and 2012 in which the total emissions from developed nations are to average five percent below the combined 1990 level. Each nation's commitment is different. Canada is to reduce its emissions by 6 percent; the US by 7 percent; European Union by 8 percent and Russia by 0 percent (being required only to stabilize them at 1990 level).
There are a lot of loopholes including deals where a country can sell "credits" gained from greater reductions to other countries which are not able to meet their goal; deals where a country can construct low-emission power projects in a developing country and "use" this as "credits" to meet its own domestic reduction goals. One of the fatal flaws of the Kyoto deal is that developing nations are not restricted in their emissions and there is no process by which they will become subject to binding commitments. The rationale was that developed nations must demonstrate their willingness and ability to curb greenhouse gasses first.
It's true that developed countries emit CO2 and other greenhouse gasses at a far higher rate than the developing world. Canada's per capita rate of greenhouse gas emissions is almost 4 times the global average and 16 times India's per person average.
But the big question is: will the Kyoto deal land the world within the "safe landing" corridor needed to avert catastrophic climate change. The answer is a big fat NO! To reach "safe landing" targets, the Kyoto Protocol would have had to require emission reductions from the developed world of between 37 to 64 percent of the 1990 levels by the year 2010!
The Kyoto Protocol was only a very small first step in combating rapid climate change. Future reductions will have to be deep and steep, particularly if some of the more recent scientific models which project climate change not as a linear process, but as a process of drastic, threshold-related changes are correct. In these models, when a certain (and unknown) threshold is reached, Earth's climate makes an abrupt shift to a new pattern of wind flows, ocean currents and precipitation.
Living in a state of denial is the worst thing we can do. The worst of the projected climate-related changes can only be avoided by significant action now!
