The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
ItÕs an old joke: everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it. The same is true for the climate. They are talking about it. They were at it again in Honolulu recently, discussing internationally binding commitments on greenhouse gas emissions (although Russia and India refused to allow any mention of that subject in the final statement). At the Bali meeting in December, China even hinted that it might consider something like binding emission caps in the long run. But there is no sense of urgency. Not, at least, the sense of urgency required to take actions that would invalidate the prediction, in the latest issue of the journal Science, that climate change may cost southern Africa more than 30 per cent of its main crop, maize (corn, mealies), by 2030. No part of the developing world can lose one-third of its main food crop without descending into desperate poverty and violence. Even some parts of the developed world would be in deep trouble at that point. One part of the developed world, Australia, is already in trouble, with its farmers facing what may be a permanent decline in the countryÕs ability to grow food, though AustraliaÕs wealth cushions the blow. But elsewhere, the mentality of ÒIt canÕt happen hereÓ persists. The two Democratic candidates for the presidency in the United States promise 80 per cent cuts in emissions by 2050, and John McCain for the Republicans promises 50 per cent cuts by the same date, and nobody points out that such a leisurely approach, applied in every country, condemns the world to a global temperature regime at least three or four degrees Celsius warmer than today. Nobody points out that those are average global temperatures which take into account the relatively cool air over the oceans, and that temperatures over land would be a good deal higher than that. Few people are aware that these higher temperatures will prevent pollination in many major food crops in parts of the world that are already so hot that they are near the threshold. Bulletin But here is a bulletin from the front. Over the past few weeks, in several countries, I have interviewed a couple of dozen senior scientists, government officials and think-tank specialists whose job is to think about climate change. And not one of them believes the forecasts on global warming issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change just last year. They think things are moving much faster. The IPCCÕs predictions in the 2007 report were frightening enough. Across the six scenarios it considered, it predicted Òbest estimateÓ rises in average global temperature of between 1.8 and 4.0 degrees Celsius by the end of the 21st century, with a maximum change of 6.4 degrees Celsius in the Òhigh scenarioÓ. But the thousands of peer-reviewed scientific papers that the IPCC examined in order to reach those conclusions dated from no later than early 2006, and most relied on data from several years before that. It means that the IPCC report took no notice of recent indications that the warming has accelerated dramatically. While it was being written, for example, we were still talking about the possibility of the Arctic Ocean being ice-free in late summer by 2042. Now itÕs 2013. Nor did the IPCC report incorporate any of the ÒfeedbackÓ phenomena suspected of being responsible for speeding up the heating, like the release of methane from thawing permafrost. Worst of all, there is now a fear the oceans, which normally absorb half of the carbon dioxide produced each year, are losing their ability to do so. Maybe the experts are all wrong. Here in the present, out ahead of the mounds of data that pile up in the rear-view mirror, there are only hunches to go on. But while climate talks pursue their stately progress toward some ill-defined destination, down in the trenches there is an undercurrent of panic in the conversations. The tipping points seem to be racing toward us a lot faster than people thought.
