In last week’s report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), we have a mayday alert. The fourth scientific assessment in 17 years tells us that the first tank battalions have already broken through the border.
In 1990, in a hotel in Berkshire, southern England, I listened to the scientists who had completed the IPCC’s first assessment. At a press conference, Margaret Thatcher, not otherwise known for eco-doom-mongering, warned that the report would ”change our way of life”, and that we would cry out in the future not for oil, but water. The world seemed to be listening. The UN called for multilateral negotiations and most governments signed up. But these have run now for 16 years, and have done little to stem emissions.
Many of the reasons for this failure sat with me in the room that day in 1990. The lobbyists from Exxon, Opec and the world’s coal groups could not persuade the scientists to soften their language, though they tried. But ever since, the ”carbon club” has spun a formidable web of obfuscation at best, lies at worst. This, plus the carbon pushers’ proxy ownership of key seats at the political table has kept us addicted to the fuels that cause most of the greenhouse problem.
The second and third assessments narrowed the uncertainties. By 1995 the IPCC’s scientists were persuaded that they could see the first faint imprint of human enhancement of the greenhouse effect, in the pattern of rising temperatures around the globe. This, plus BP’s farsighted defection from the carbon club’s ranks, which split the vested interest for the first time, allowed the negotiation of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997. The third report persuaded the rest of the world to keep the Kyoto process alive after the United States pulled out in 2001.
In 1990, at the World Climate Conference colleagues from Greenpeace and I called for a worst-case analysis to be considered. If this were a military exercise, we argued, we would be basing our policy response on the worst-case analysis, not the best-guess consensus.
We tabled a scenario wherein human greenhouse gas emissions stimulated huge emissions in nature, for example from melting permafrost and drying soils and forests.
In the very worst case, the amplifications could lead to a runaway effect, we argued, where feedbacks drown the potential to cut human emissions from fossil-fuel-burning and other sources. Billions needed to be invested in renewable and efficient-energy technologies, just as billions had been invested in taking out military insurance against a worst-case scenario of invasion during the Cold War. This was dismissed as scaremongering. But today, checking the feedbacks in that 17-year-old scenario against emerging reality, almost every box has to be ticked. — Â