4 degrees and beyond: Part I

Tweet

Trying to set co-ordinated global policy is hard enough. It’s even more challenging when the the goal posts keep moving, as new facts about the matter in hand come to light. Then you have to consider the different actors involved, each with their own interests to protect. Different sets of policies have different sets of consequences. Some may lose. Some may gain. Some feel they don’t have a voice; others, like spoiled children, get into a sulk and switch off when things don’t go their way.  And, all of this is awkwardly mixed up with power struggles, historical tensions, corporate lobbying and a cacophony of voices from civil society.

This is the current state of global climate change policy, so it should come as no surprise that efforts to reduce CO₂ - the main contributor to anthropogenic climate change -  are failing.

Growth in emissions may have slowed in the wake of the recession, but not as much as some experts had originally thought. Just over two weeks ago, a group of leading scientists from the Global Carbon Project reported that emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, ‘decreased by 1.3% in 2009 owing to the global financial crisis’, but that this was half the decrease they had anticipated a year ago. This is because the actual fall in GDP was less than what the IMF had forecast in October 2009. At the same time, improvements in carbon intensity of world GDP (carbon per unit of GDP) slowed to -0.7 per cent, less than half of the long-term average. The Global Carbon Project now predicts that if economic growth proceeds as expected, emissions will increase by 3 per cent, in 2010, approaching the high rates observed between 2000 and 2008.

Most policymakers and activists are seeking to avoid a global temperature rise of more than 2 ˚C. But there’s a serious mismatch between this target and the state of climate politics to date. With this widening gap between science and policy in mind, in 2008, a group of leading scientists began to plan an international symposium to consider the possibility and implications of a global temperature rise of 4 ˚C.

A year later, in an unusually dry September, leading scientists from around world descended on Oxford to take part in the conference Four degrees and beyond. Its aim - to explore what a future of 4 ˚C or higher might be like for society and ecosystems, how society might adapt to this change, and what it would take to reduce the risk of temperatures ever reaching this high.

It's worth noting, however, that a global rise of 4 ˚C does not, of course, mean that it gets hotter by 4 ˚C everywhere. This is a global average, so some areas would experience much higher levels of warming. For example North Africa could see tempeature rise during both summer and winter seasons by at least 6 ˚C.

Last week the Royal Society published the proceedings of the 2009 conference, in its journal Philosophical Transactions A. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be summarising the papers with my colleague Andy Wimbush, to provide a digestible resource for those who have neither the time nor inclination to read the full text [all open-access].

The overall message of the symposium is pretty clear, however: there is very little time left to act before we could be committing ourselves to a level of climate change that the majority of the planet’s inhabitants will find it difficult, if not impossible, to adapt to.

At the moment, we don’t even have a plan for 2 ˚C of warming, let alone 4 ˚C. Humanity is entering completely uncharted territory.  We’re in the tricky situation of needing solutions which are both hasty and failsafe. We simply don’t have time for things to go wrong.