Energy wars and the future of planet earth - part three

Join the new openDemocracy debate on the politics of climate change here

The challenge

In parts oneand twoof this series, Globolog touched on aspects of energy policy – and stuck a finger into some of the deep currents that will shape global politics and economics in the 21st century. This week, climate change: what is really happening and why does it matter?

Earlier this month, Paul Rogers, openDemocracy’s international security correspondent, argued that climate change would make life more difficult in developing countries, and exacerbate the divide and resentment between northern and southern countries. The countries of the north would have to move beyond dependence on fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas.

Rogers was picking up on matters that have preoccupied many policy makers for some time. In 1988 and 1989 Margaret Thatcher and Mikhail Gorbachev were among the first politicians to call for coordinated international action to meet the challenge of climate change. In 1991, Al Gore (US Vice President from 1993–2000) described the threat of climate change to humanity as ‘second only to nuclear war’. Ten years later Colin Powell, currently US Secretary of State, said ‘there are no military solutions to climate change’. Throughout this period, however, emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) have continued to rise fast.

Near-term trends

No one questions that the world is now warmer on average than at any time since detailed record keeping began. The last few decades have shown a consistent, and intensifying, warming trend worldwide. 2002 was the second warmest year on record after 1998. Nine of the ten warmest years on record have occurred in the last dozen years. In 2003, temperatures look set to rise even higher than they did in 1998.

The impact on the natural world is closely studied. In the last few decades, for example, many animal species in the northern hemisphere have moved north. In other areas, the effects on the environment and life are more complex. The April 2002 disintegration of the 3,250 square kilometre Larsen B ice shelf in Antarctica – some 500 billion tonnes of ice – may herald further melting, but there could also be a greater build-up of ice on the continent itself as wind and moisture patterns shift. In the changing climate, populations of penguins (which have fluctuated wildly in the past for natural reasons) are increasing on one side of continent, diminishing on other.

In 1998, around 90% of corals in the Indian Ocean were severely bleached or died (imagine if 90% of trees across Asia had lost their all their leaves in high summer). Since then some of the coral has been recovering slowly. But many areas of tropical ocean areas are warming faster than the global average rise, and scientists predict much larger and more serious impacts on coral over the next twenty to forty years if the trend continues.

Another dramatic example is the Imja glacier in Nepal. Twenty-five years ago this was rock and ice. Today it is a lake, a kilometre long and 100 metres deep, held in by a frozen rock wall known as a terminal moraine. But the ice that binds the moraine together is melting and, say glaciologists, unless the lake is drained it is almost certain to burst at some point. When it does, a massive wall of water will wash down into the valley below – one of the most densely populated in Nepal.

This would be one example of what environmental groups call the human cost of climate change.

What does the science say?

Few people dispute that there is abundant evidence of global warming. But there is less agreement on whether and how the trend will continue, and how far human activity is responsible through emissions of GHGs such as carbon dioxide and methane.

In the early days of awareness of the phenomenon, many environmental campaigners – and some scientists – made the mistake of claiming too much certainty for their predictions of what climate change might mean. This led to a backlash. Some of the sceptics were sincere, and right to point to the uncertainty in some aspects of climate science. But many were and are not.

a leading climate change scientist in actionLast year, Exxon Chairman Lee Raymond referred approvingly to a 1998 petition, supposedly signed by 17,000 scientists, which questioned the evidence for global warming. It later emerged that the petition had been circulated by an obscure organisation based in a shed in the backwoods of Oregon and had nothing to do with the National Academy of Sciences. Signatories allegedly included authorities on climate change such as Ginger Spice, a British pop star, and the doctors from M.A.S.H, a TV drama series.

Some critics love to point out that in 1975 scientists were warning that the world faced a new ice age. If scientists were so wrong then, they say, why should we believe them today when they are warning about the opposite problem?

The simple answer is that climate science and earth systems were poorly understood twenty-five years ago. Since then, thousands of very smart people have applied rigorous scientific method to the issues, and made progress. The progress is akin to other fields of research in the past quarter century – demonstrated by outputs such as DNA finger-printing, anti-retroviral drugs and the fact that there is more computing power inside a palm pilot than there was in the whole Apollo space programme.

How scientific understanding helps

An analogy with scientific understanding of HIV/AIDS is a good one. Until the 1980s this was an altogether mysterious phenomenon. Now it is well understood, and subject to effective therapy. These facts do not prevent some people from wanting to deny the science. For years, South African president Thabo Mbeki denied that HIV/AIDS was a real thing, and his government prevented the medical establishment from taking measures to deal with the problem by prescribing anti-retrovirals such as nevirapine, which sharply reduces the chance that infected mothers will pass HIV to new-born babies.

Last year, policy changed and government now recognises that anti-retrovirals are a good thing – as part of a much wider range of measures and public health campaigns. Mbeki himself may well remain sceptical. The point is that his delusions are no longer allowed to interfere with a more rational approach to the problem.

So it is with climate change. In taking an evidence-based approach and providing the best feasible summary of where the science stands, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) plays a central role. The process is as transparent as possible and distils millions of hours of the world’s best science on the future of climate.

At five-year intervals, the one hundred or so member governments propose their best climate scientists. From the nominations, the scientific leadership picks several hundred for each of three working groups, based on their publications in scientific journals. Each scientist is assigned responsibility for synthesising all the peer-reviewed literature on a particular aspect of the problem. More scientists are drafted in as critics and reviewers. By the end of the most recently completed five-year cycle (which published its results in 2001) at least 1,500 experts, including nearly every important climatologist on earth, was involved in the process.

You can read a summary of the Third Assessment Report online. Here are some of its key points.

• The atmospheric concentration of C02 has increased by 31% since 1750 (the start of the industrial revolution) as a result of humans burning fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas. The present concentration has definitely not been exceeded during the past 420,000 years and probably not during the past 20 million years. The current rate of increase is unprecedented during at least the past 20,000 years (and probably much longer).
• Confidence in the ability of computer-based models to project future climate has greatly increased in recent years. In the light of new evidence and taking into account the remaining uncertainties, most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely (66–90% chance) to have been due to the increase in GHG concentrations.
• In the 21st century the projected rate of warming will be much larger than the observed changes during the 20th century and is very likely (90–99% chance) to be without precedent during the last 10,000 years.
• Land areas will become warmer than the globe as a whole – in some areas exceeding the average by more than 40%. More El-Niño type conditions will arise in the tropical Pacific. Average rainfall will increase over mid and high latitudes (that is, further north and south). In low latitudes (the tropical zones) there will be both regional increases and decreases over various land areas. There will be larger year-to-year variation in rainfall.

Uncertainties

The IPCC outlines a range of predictions for how much global average temperatures could rise over the course of this century. But there is inherent uncertainty in these predictions for at least two reasons. First, the amount of warming depends on how much pollution takes place. Secondly, it cannot be known exactly how much global temperatures will rise with a given concentration of GHGs in the atmosphere.

Nevertheless, it is possible to estimate the probability of various amounts of temperature rise. A team at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has shown that, if emissions continue to rise on trend, the median increase on 1990 temperatures by 2090–2100 will be 2.3° Celsius. But the actual rise could be more or less than this. There is a 5% chance (one in twenty) that it will exceed 5.3° Celsius – an outcome which almost everyone agrees would have catastrophic effects. The MIT team illustrates the uncertainty with a roulette wheel, which you can spin for yourself.

When contemplating and modelling the consequences of a range of likely rises in global average temperature, there is at least one more level of uncertainty to take into account. That is, there may be sudden climatic changes as various thresholds are crossed. All these uncertainties, and others, need to be taken into account when determining policy.

Taking that last point, the crude analogy here is step change, a tipping point, or the straw that breaks a camel’s back. There is a growing body of evidence that the climate system can be jumpy: long, dormant spells are punctuated by drastic events. Instead of smoothly transitioning over 10,000 years from ice age to warm era, the earth jumps from one regime to another in just a few years, marked by severe floods and droughts. Temperatures in some regions can rise by as much as 10° Celsius in as little as a decade.

These big changes may result from small alterations to initial conditions, such as a small temperature change altering rates of rainfall or melting. Among the more notable – and linked – possibilities being modelled (although not necessarily the most likely) is the drying out of the Amazon and a shift of the North Atlantic Gulf Stream. This could mean that the richest food-growing areas in North America become much drier while countries such as the UK rapidly switch to a climate as harsh as sub-Arctic regions on the same latitude in North America such as Labrador.

The probabilities of this kind of thing happening may be small, but it is not clear that they are negligible. A favoured analogy from Henry Jacoby, leader of the MIT team, is: would you have insurance on your house? Those lucky enough to own a house, for example, may pay a small fraction of its rebuild cost – say 0.5% – every year in insurance. Unless you live in a particularly vulnerable place, the probability that in a given year your house will burn down from a cause against which you are insured – as distinct from, say, war or terrorism – may be in the tens of thousands to one. If the probability of climate change with catastrophic consequences to life and the economy is around twenty to one – many hundreds of times more likely than a house fire – it would be rational to pay something in insurance that has the effect of reducing one’s exposure.

What is to be done?

In the absence of certainty, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change signed by most countries, including the US, back in 1992 pledged to ‘achieve…stabilisation of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic [human-caused] interference with the climate system’ (see page nine of the convention). This sounds good, but it leaves wiggle room because it is not possible to say what concentrations of GHGs above the natural level will be dangerous. Many scientists agree that CO2 in the atmosphere should exceed no more than double the background rate before industrialisation.

A false dichotomy

The prominent climate scientist Stephen Schneider  recently counselled a midway approach in setting policy:

‘The current political debates in which mild/catastrophic views [of climate change] are polarized and get the bulk of the attention in the media and in front of [the US] congress is an unfortunate distortion of what the scientific community has reported in its assessments. Such false dichotomy debates impede, rather than enhance democracy since they are not accurately representing what is known and at what likelihood.’

‘The role of the science is clear: assess what can happen and what are the odds of it happening. The role of policy – driven by the beliefs of the public – is to make value judgements on how to react to the odds of various possibilities. It will take some major realignment of institutions like the media and congressional hearings apparatus to back away from the model of polarized advocates toward a doctrine of “perspective”: reporting and debating based on the assessment of the likelihood of various events, not giving advocates of extreme opposite views equal time or space.’

The range of views in the spectrum of political beliefs includes the likes of Bjorn Lomborg, who agrees climate change is a serious issue but believes the market will provide technological solutions in good time without government interference, and groups such as Rising Tide, which says any market in carbon emissions trading is ‘colonialism with a modern face’, and that there must be a ‘minimum of 60% reductions in carbon emissions now leading to a 90% cut in the next 10 years’.

For an analysis of Lomborg, see Tom Burke's article on openDemocracy and Colin Woodward on TomPaine.com. The Rising Tide approach, by contrast, would require that around two-thirds of economic activity would have to cease immediately. At the same time, most of the capital in the world, plus whatever could be raised on credit would have to be invested in new, non-polluting capital stock (correct me if this is wrong, guys). They envisage switching the entire world economy on to a footing akin to total war, where resources are overwhelmingly concentrated on the goal of climate ‘safety’.

Sufficient political will for such a position seems unlikely. Rightly or wrongly, for some time to come the consequences of extreme weather events in vulnerable regions are likely to be judged susceptible to cheaper and more direct – or plausible – solutions than ending the rich consumer lifestyle.

In the meantime, some slow steps have been taken towards marginal reduction in emissions by the big industrial economies, with the current US administration behaving on climate change a little bit like Thabo Mbeki did on HIV/AIDS. The impulse to get moving may come from the political mileage being made by Bush opponents out of matters such as a proposed bill for a mandatory national cap and trade scheme (see a previous Globolog).

Chicago Climate ExchangeOn 6 February, President Bush’s administration and industry leaders will unveil a broad array of pledges to curb GHG emissions through voluntary measures. The package could be facilitated by operations such as the Chicago Climate Exchange, which opened on 16January 2003. This enables big manufacturers and energy companies who want to cut emissions to find partners and trade credits with one another.

The Bush approach will not please everyone. Some in industry fear it is a mandatory programme in disguise – something they have fought very hard against and a principal reason that the US opted out of the Kyoto Protocol. On the other hand, those who want to see emissions actually reduced are also unenthusiastic. The administration's taget of an 18% reduction by 2010 in GHG intensity per unit of GDP would not mean a reduction in total emissions even if it is achieved because economic growth is likely to outpace the current rate of improvement in energy efficiency.

But there are developments at the state – as distinct from Federal – level in the US that could go much further. The states of New England and New Jersey have already agreed voluntary caps – initially falling short of Kyoto targets but ultimately to go further (a 10% cut on 1990 levels by 2020 with an ultimate goal of a 75% reduction).

Such curbs make a significant difference to total world emissions. If they were a nation, the six New England states, along with New York and New Jersey, would rank as the world’s eighth largest GHG emitter – on a par with France, Brazil, South Korea, Canada or Mexico.

In the European Union, a combination of circumstances, some of them fortuitous, has made it easier for politicians to accept the Kyoto targets. Britain’s dash for gas (replacing much more polluting coal in power generation) and the collapse of the East German economy created some headroom. But emissions by many other countries have risen steeply, and achieving further substantial reductions in emissions would require actively making hard choices and allocating substantial funds. One alternative - buying credits from the Russians whose economic collapse in the early 1990s gave them a huge amount of spare ‘hot air’ - is likely to prove very attractive to politicians.

What next?

Energy demand in rapidly developing countries such as India and China is growing fast. In the near term much of this will be met by coal, oil and gas. By 2020, greenhouse gas emissions from developing countries are likely to overtake those of the rich countries. The good news, potentially, is that because China and India, for two, are likely to remain importers of the overwhelming majority of their oil and gas needs, they will have strong incentives to use energy efficiently. In this they could be more like Japan than the US. Indeed, Shell in its scenarios for world energy to 2050 suggests that China could ‘leapfrog’ the west to achieve an energy economy largely based on hydrogen (most likely extracted from coal and natural gas, meaning that emissions could be reduced but would not be negligible).

The good news here is that innovation could provide enormous economic benefits. As Amory Lovinsputs it, if you had told members of the British Parliament in 1750 that a hundred-fold increase in industrial productivity was just around the corner many, if not most, would have dismissed it as sheer fantasy. Similar increases in energy and resource productivity are possible over coming decades. For a start, a comprehensive set of government mandated efficiency policies - requiring investment but delivering huge return at vanishingly low risk - could reduce total US energy needs by one third in well under twenty years. According to the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, such a programme would save consumers and businesses $500 billion (yes, billion) per year.

China, India and the US, if acting rationally, will have increased incentive to help ensure stability in leading energy exporting countries such as Russia and Iran. Iran, which has the world's second biggest reserves of natural gas, could be a pivotal case. The short term in Iran may be bumpy, but it is not out of the question to imagine a progressive, peacecful course of events in the mid term, providing better life chances for Iranians, and making wiser use of their huge natural resources. Religion-as-politics is on the wane: only 1–1.5% attend Friday prayers; and, according to recent polls,  74% are in favour of dialogue with the United States; 94% say the country is in urgent need of reform; 71% back a referendum to choose a new form of government; and 63% are looking for ‘fundamental change’ in the way the country is run.

But progress in one area could seem paltry beside difficulties in others. The melting of the Imja glacier in Nepal – which is (or was) part of the world’s third largest ice field after Antarctica and Greenland – may prove to be a harbinger of a bigger problem. If much of this icecap melts in the next few decades, flows in the rivers it feeds – such as the Indus, the Ganges, the Brahmaputra, the Mekong and the Yangtse – will rise sharply for a while, but are then likely to fall steeply. These waters support agriculture for about two billion people at present - and at least three billion by mid century.

In countries such as Pakistan, where water management is already a serious problem, difficulties would increase substantially. Already, Pakistan is not far from fulfilling any reasonable definition of a failed state. The country may enter a more conflictual period in the near term for other reasons (see, for example Seymour M. Hersch's report The Cold Test on Pakistan and North Korea in The New Yorker of 27 January, in which he quotes one proliferation expert: "Right now, the most dangerous country in the world is Pakistan.  If we're incinerated next week, it'll be because of...highly enriched uranium that was given to Al Qaeda by Pakistan").  But even if Pakistan remains relatively calm for now, the pressures on resources resulting from climate change could greatly increase tension before long.

Pace Stephen Schneider’s warnings about extremism, if the possibilities of climate change don’t seem too threatening and awful at present, that may only be because nearer-term dangers are so pressing and large.

Whether you think globalisation brings good things or believe everything should be localised, climate change is a cause for concern. It has the potential to help destabilise almost any form and level of human organisation – or non-organisation.

For this reason it will be worth following closely how  understanding of  regional vulnerability to climate change improves, and keeping a sharp eye out for the preliminary findings of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report, in the run up to formal publication in 2006.

For further information on climate change and energy politics see openDemocracy’s action contacts section. And join the debate at openDemocracy’s Climate Change forum.

Do you have a story about globalisation? Are you outraged or elated? Contact globolog@opendemocracy.net