Climate Politics in 2 minutes 20

This may look flaky, but don’t be fooled. It is as hard as they come, thumping home the facts with the sequential subtly of a pile driver.







Although scripted before COP16 in Cancun, anyone believing the Cancun Agreement renders its message irrelevant need only consider that, even after the accommodations made, we remain on course for temperature increases of at least 3.5ºC on International Energy Agency figures.

Anyone who views this as a success is referred to Six Degrees by Mark Lynas, winner of the Royal Society Science Books Prize in 2008.

Or, as Lord Julian Hunt, Visiting Professor at Delft University, Vice-President of Globe, and former Director-General of the UK Met Office put it recently in a Reuters Davos Notebook briefing for the World Economic Summit on the outcome of COP16 (my emphasis throughout):

‘However, despite these initiatives, we are now at a point at which preserving our current environment is probably unobtainable.’

‘Far from being another unsuccessful international environmental meeting, as some predicted, the Cancun Summit is likely to be looked back upon in years to come as a seminal moment. The accord endorsed the various actions of countries to limit green house gas emissions. However, more significantly for the long term it accepted that preserving the global environment in its present state is probably unattainable.’

‘In the absence of moves towards a much stronger, global and legally binding deal, the world is thus on the path of the ‘business as usual’ scenario envisaged recently as an unlikely worst case. And, the international community now has got to therefore consider unprecedented changes.’

‘What is absolutely clear is that temperature rises of a 3-4C magnitude will, most likely, pose an irreversible tipping point for continental sized areas of changing land cover, and for ice on sea and land. As a result, millions (if not tens of millions) of people are likely to be displaced by the effects of desertification and rising sea levels, and mountain snow melt.’

‘And, with this in mind, politicians and the public would do well to follow the Netherlands Delta commission; the report of the UK Adaptation Sub-Committee of the Committee on Climate Change; and China’s scientific agencies and seriously begin to consider planning for the monumental changes that will be apparent in the decades to come.’

And in closing:

‘The rising costs of dealing with these effects, such as coastal defences, reducing desertification and urban overheating, mean that preventative actions have to begin right away. It would be folly of the highest order to delay this process until economies grow further, as some influential economists continue to argue.”

END