World wakes to climate calamity

Stephanie Peatling, Wendy Frew and Jo Chandler
February 3, 2007
SMH

THE world has been delivered its strongest warning yet that human actions are causing global warming and that greenhouse gas emissions must be reined in by 2020 if humanity wants a chance to avoid catastrophic climate change.

A turbulent future of violent storms, devastating drought, higher temperatures and rising sea levels is inevitable, according to the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which released its 1200-page report in Paris last night. The work of 2500 scientists over six years, it is considered the most authoritative evaluation of climate change ever produced.

It details six scenarios under which temperatures are predicted to rise from at least 1.1 degrees and possibly as much as 6.4 degrees by 2100.

The final text of the report says it is "very likely" that human activities led by burning fossil fuels account for most of the warming in the past 50 years. It puts this at a 90 per cent certainty - a significant ramping up of the language of the last report of the panel in 2001, which said the link was "likely". Scientists at the final four-day workshop said this was the most important paragraph of the report.

"There can be no question that the increase in greenhouse gases are dominated by human activities," said the senior US Government scientist, Susan Solomon. She called the warming of the Earth "unequivocal and said greenhouse gases entering the atmosphere were not being cancelled by its normal processes.

The report provides what may be cold comfort in slightly reduced projections on rising sea levels - from 18 centimetres to 59cm by 2100, instead of 9cm to 88cm, as forecast in 2001. But there is a flat pronouncement that global warming is essentially a runaway train that cannot be stopped for hundreds of years.

Human-caused warming and rises in sea levels "would continue for centuries" because the process has already started, "even if greenhouse gas concentrations were to be stabilised", said the 21-page executive summary, which will be delivered to the world's policy makers.

"The observed widespread warming of the atmosphere and ocean, together with ice-mass loss, support the conclusion that it is extremely unlikely that global climate change of the past 50 years can be explained without external forcing, and very likely that is not due to known natural causes alone," it said.

The Australian of the Year, the scientist Tim Flannery, said the highest temperature forecasts could spell disaster for many species. "[It] lays out a sort of middle-of-the road trajectory, which is alarming enough, I can tell you, for this century," Professor Flannery said. "Three degrees will be a disaster for all life on Earth. We will lose somewhere between two out of every 10 and six out of every 10 species living on the planet at that level of warming. It will set in train a series of climate consequences that will run for a thousand years."


The forecasted temperature rise is likely to mean Australia's average temperature rises by 0.7 within the next 20 years and as much as four degrees by the end of the century, the former head of CSIRO's atmospheric research division, Graeme Pearman, said.

Other than a subsequent drop in rainfall, Professor Pearman said temperature and sea rises would have serious consequences for coastal communities.

"Australia has continued to develop more and more towards a coastal community," he said.
Building codes had not been developed that would cope with the storms expected to lash the coast in coming years. The report had depressed him, Professor Pearman said.

"We've been hoping someone would find we were wrong. It simply confirms the issue. It's the issue of whether human societies in general have the capacity to respond to a major threat like this. At the moment I'm not sure we are going to have that. I'm not sure we're going to respond in time."

The 2001 report led scientists to castigate the Australian Government for not taking urgent action six years ago.

Labor will now head into the federal election determined to stake out the green vote with a climate policy that argues the cost of doing nothing will destroy the economy and the environment.

The Minister for Environment and Water, Malcolm Turnbull, said people needed to learn how to adapt to hotter temperatures.

"We have to deal with our built environment in terms of how we deal with heat and energy efficiency and, of course, we have to use water more efficiently," Mr Turnbull said. He said meeting the Kyoto target - which allows Australia's emissions to continue to rise - was "virtuous" but would not change anything.

"Of course we should seek to reduce them [emissions], because we are committed to becoming a good global citizen," he said.

The Government is exploring an emissions trading scheme and nuclear power as part of its climate-change strategy and has already committed millions of dollars to experimental technology such as clean coal and geosequestration. But these strategies are unlikely to deliver significant reductions in emissions for several decades.

Polling by green groups shows voters see the environment as a big point of difference between the Government and the Opposition.

A meeting of Labor's shadow cabinet last week agreed to keep the former leader Kim Beazley's pledge to cut greenhouse gas emissions by half by 2050.


The Opposition has already promised to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, introduce emissions trading and boost the use of renewable energy, but it has not provided any clear timetable for how it would achieve the cuts.

"We cannot deal with the water crisis without dealing with the climate-change crisis at the same time," said the Opposition Leader, Kevin Rudd.

The CSIRO says Australia's emissions must fall 60 per cent by 2050 compared with 1990. But the latest government figures show that by the end of this decade alone, gas emissions from electricity production will have risen by half on their 1990 levels.

The president of the Australian Academy of Science, Professor Kurt Lambeck, said yesterday: "This intensive review of the past five years' scientific evidence was undertaken by hundreds of scientists worldwide and confirms what we already know - we have now lost five years that could have been used in implementing remedial actions."

At the Paris meeting, there was a last-ditch bid to water down the statement from two nations — Saudi Arabia and another unnamed country (not the US or Australia) among the 130 countries represented at the plenary. It eventually passed intact after the meeting accepted a suggestion - initiated by the small Australian delegation - to deal with the dissenting country's concerns in a footnote. It states that there are remaining uncertainties over climate change "based on current methodologies".

Other areas of disagreement were over how much sea levels would rise, and concerns about the ferocity of future cyclones, said Dr Geoff Love, head of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology and a member of the Australian team.

But he said it was not so much about the science as about the semantics in the summary.
As the report co-author Philip Mote, the Washington state climatologist, said in translating his fellow scientists' language: "We did it."

He added: "Scientists are pretty well done arguing about whether the warming in the last 50 years is related to burning fossil fuels."

Professor Flannery said: "It's our problem. We have to do something about it. We have the tools. We're so far lacking the will."