Man-made global warming. Is it too late to stop climate catastrophe?

Gideon Polya, “Man-made global warming. Is it too late to stop climate catastrophe?”, MWC New, 13 November 2009.

Man-made global warming. Is it too late to stop climate catastrophe?

Humanity and the biosphere are acutely threatened by man-made global warming but ignorant or corporate-funded climate denialism, the effective climate denialism of political inaction and the growing enormity of what needs to be done lead scientists to say that it is probably too late to stop climate catastrophe.

The progression towards climate catastrophe can be illustrated by my own example. I am a scientist with a 5 decade research career in biological chemistry, a discipline intimately related to the acute problem of man-made global warming. I was first made aware of our impact on the biosphere (the world of living things) when I read Rachel Carson’s seminal book “Silent Spring” on the effects of man-made pollution back in the early 1960s. As a biology and chemistry student in the beautiful island state of Tasmania, these environmentalist attitudes were reinforced by the utter beauty of the threatened Tasmanian rain forest, the exposure of the heavy metal pollution of our beautiful Derwent River by my Chemistry Professor Harry Bloom and the example of the likely extinction of the Tasmanian Tiger (the striped dog-like marsupial Thylacine, Thylacinus cynocephalus) (the subject of a sustained but fruitless search by my Zoology lecturer Dr Eric Guiler). Working as a research fellow in America exposed me to the realities of big-scale industrial pollution and on my return to Australia I was introduced in the early 1970s to the “The Limits to Growth” in which the Club of Rome modelled the consequences of a rapidly growing world population and finite resource supplies.

As a research scientist in the area of biological chemistry I was thus well aware of the Population Bomb, the increasing devastation of the biosphere and the finiteness of our resources, including soil, fresh water, minerals, fossil fuels, oceans and atmosphere. As an undergraduate, basic spectroscopy made me aware of the “greenhouse effect” (essentially discovered by English chemist John Tyndall in the 19th century) by which increased atmospheric greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide (CO2) , methane (CH4), and nitrous oxide (N2O) absorb light and warm the planet. Indeed a prized possession is “the 1886 5th edition of “Fragments of Science” by John Tyndall FRS in which he describes the warming of irradiated CO2. Further, a founding father of the Physical Chemistry we were taught at university, Svante Arrhenius, had predicted the warming effect of elevated CO2 in the atmosphere and correctly hypothesized the connection between lowered atmospheric CO2 concentration with ice ages.

My first real alarm about our pollution of the atmosphere came in the early 1970s with ”The Limits to Growth” of the Club of Rome and was reinforced in the 1980s with my experience of smog in Northern and Southern Hemisphere cities and the discovery of the Ozone (O3) Hole over the Antarctic that steadily expanded to encompass Tasmania and Southern Australia, including Melbourne, Victoria where I was domiciled since 1972. Fair-skinned Australians such as me are susceptible to UV damage (Australia has the world’s highest melanoma skin cancer incidence) and in the 1980s the increased “burning” of the Victorian sun became very evident. By the end of the 1980s the World had reacted quite promptly to the Ozone Hole with the 1989 Montreal Protocol that limited the pollution of the atmosphere with substances that deplete ozone (notably chlorofluorohydrocarbons or CFCs, that were widely used refrigeration and spray can gases). In 1995 Drs Paul Crutzen, M. Molina and F.S. Rowland were awarded the Nobel Prize for their work on Ozone depletion.

However the 1980s brought scientific recognition of the dangers of global warming due to increasing CO2 and other greenhouse gases (including CFCs) in the atmosphere. As a practicing scientist I could not avoid seeing the mounting concerns expressed by expert scientists in peer-reviewed papers in the top multi-disciplinary scientific journals Science (USA) and Nature (UK) that all scientists read each week. These concerns also got to the lay public via popular journals such as Scientific American (USA) and New Scientist (UK). These concerns were so serious back in the 1980s that they led to the formation of the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), established by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) in 1988. The IPCC subsequently produced increasingly alarmed reports, the latest being the Fourth Assessment Report in 2007 that drew on the research of hundreds of thousands of scientists and directly involved thousands of scientific experts from around the World.

Scientists are notoriously conservative and discipline-focussed, and like other scholars publish their scholarly research and opinions in peer-reviewed scholarly journals. It is relatively rare for scientists to “come out” publicly on issues at the science/society interface and, as big a generalization, when they do so it is because (a) they are seriously concerned about irreversible environmental or human health catastrophes (environmental destruction, species extinction, human mortality) or (b) they are espousing causes that coincidentally help the profits of and find support from Big Business. In 1995 I was so alarmed by the worsening man-made global warming that I published a detailed account of the threat to Bangladesh from man-made global warming. I distributed this message to media, universities and MPs in Australia and an Indian-born Australian Greens Senator Christabel Chamarette tabled my message and made a speech about it in Federal Parliament. In 1998 I published a book entitled “Jane Austen and the Black Hole of British History . Colonial rapacity, holocaust denial and the crisis biological sustainability”. My work was about past Bengali Holocausts under the rapacious British and the looming threat to Bengal from climate change – it resulted in a nation-wide broadcast by me on the National ABC Radio National network. An updated 2008 edition has just been published.

At the end of 2003, after over 3 decades as a full-time academic scientist, I became semi-retired - I have been recently giving the equivalent of a full time academic’s undergraduate theory and laboratory class tuition in 10% o f the time and for 10% of the money to second year science university students. This has given me loads of time for 7 days per week public advocacy at the science/society interface about the horrendous human consequences of wars and occupations (see my book “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950”) and the acute seriousness of the worsening Climate Emergency. I became a founding member of the Melbourne-based Yarra Valley Climate Action Group (YVCAG), the Victorian Climate Emergency Network (CEN) and 300.org (all of which, informed by the latest science, advocate a return of the atmospheric CO2 concentration from the present 390 parts per million (ppm) to a safe level of about 300 ppm.

Privately, my fellow practising or retired scientific colleagues and also my fellow climate activists are overwhelmingly deeply pessimistic about whether it will be possible to avert climate catastrophe. However we climate activists are resolved that as long as there is life there is hope and we continue to try to inform the public, media and politicians about the worsening climate emergency. However, 3 key recent reports add to our deep pessimism as briefly outlined below.

1. Professor Kevin Anderson and Dr Alice Bows (UK climate scientists, Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, University of Manchester) have recently estimated that an annual 6-8% DECREASE in greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution is required to stabilize atmospheric CO₂-e (carbon dioxide equivalent) at a still catastrophic 450 ppm (parts per million): “According to the analysis conducted in this paper, stabilizing at 450 ppmv [carbon dioxide equivalent = CO2-e, atmospheric concentration of all major GHGs measured in parts per million of CO2-equivalent] requires, at least, global energy related emissions to peak by 2015, rapidly decline at 6-8% per year between 2020 and 2040, and for full decarbonization sometime soon after 2050 …Unless economic growth can be reconciled with unprecedented rates of decarbonization (in excess of 6% per year), it is difficult to envisage anything other than a planned economic recession being compatible with stabilization at or below 650 ppmv CO2-e ... Ultimately, the latest scientific understanding of climate change allied with current emissions trends and a commitment to “limiting average global temperature increases to below 4^oC above pre-industrial levels”, demands a radical reframing of both the climate change agenda, and the economic characterization of contemporary society” [1].

Unfortunately the best on offer is DECREASING GHG pollution by 2% per annum (e.g. by the US and the UK) and world leading annual per capita GHG polluter, climate criminal Apartheid Australia is effectively committed to INCREASING its Domestic plus Exported GHG pollution by 2% per annum.

2. Dr Samuel Fankhauser (economist and climate change specialist at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, London School of Economics; member of the UK Committee on Climate Change, a government watchdog that monitors UK climate change policy; former Deputy Chief Economist at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD); served on the 1995, 2001 and 2007 assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)), was reported by IPS (2009) thus: “A future global climate change treaty must limit the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million (ppm), and not 450 ppm, the currently proposed level, Samuel Fankhauser told a Forum of pro-environment legislators from the eight most industrialised countries and emerging economies here[Copenhagen] …A British economist and researcher on climate change, Fankhauser said the limit he is urging is the only way to avoid the irreversible bleaching of coral in coastal areas, with all that this implies for people's livelihoods and the environment.”. Dr Fankhauser was directly quoted thus : “"Action against climate change might cost up to three percent of the world's GDP during the next 40 years," Fankhauser told IPS. "But this price is still cheaper than doing nothing about it…The global climate change sector is already booming. Revenues generated by measures against climate change have surpassed 500 billion dollars in 2008, and could be worth some two trillion dollars by 2020…[500 million people] live within 100 kilometres of reef ecosystems, and benefit from these services…Another important service provided by coral reefs and healthy seashore ecosystems is climate regulation and coastal protection, through carbon sequestration, waste treatment, and protection against hurricanes and the like.”

However a poll of the 120 global MPs at the Forum by Forum chair British MP Barry Gardiner, asked them whether they believed limiting CO2 concentration to 350 ppm by 2050 was practicable. Only two legislators said yes. A dismayed Barry Gardiner MP told the meeting: "We should be terrified. If you of all people do not believe that an ambitious goal is realistic, then we are lost." [2].

3. Drs Robert Goodland and Jeff Anhang (environmental specialists from the World Bank Group) have recently re-assessed the estimate by the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) that livestock (major methane polluters) contributed 18% of annual man-made GHG pollution. They have found that (a) annual man-made GHG pollution is 63,695 tons, rather than the FAO estimate of 41,756 tons (i.e. the problem is 50% bigger than hitherto thought) and (b) that correcting for unaccounted and misallocated GHGs in current GHG inventories yields total GHGs attributable to livestock products of more than 32,564 tons (or more than 51% of the revised total of 63, 695 tons). [3].

The US is one of the world’s biggest meat consumers yet in the Waxman-Markey Bill of the Obama Administration agricultural pollution is excluded from the Cap (maximum permitted GHG pollution) of the proposed Cap-and-Trade Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS). In climate criminal Australia (a world leader in annual per capita GHG pollution) the Labor Government’s initial ETS proposal excludes agriculture for several years and the Labor Government is likely to compromise with the ultra-conservative Liberal-National Party Opposition and agree to exclude agriculture completely (i.e. exclude any action over 50% of the GHG pollution problem).

In summary, Copenhagen is shaping up to be a climate policy disaster.

While top climate scientists demand a return of atmospheric CO2 from the current 390 ppm (and increasing at 2.5 ppm per year) to 300-350 ppm, world governments are all committed to INCREASING GHG pollution.

While a 6-8% annual decrease in GHG is needed just maintain 450 ppm CO2-equivalent (noting that the atmospheric GHG concentration is currently about 460 ppm CO2-e) the best on offer is a 2% annual reduction (a bit like going over the cliff at 5 kilometers per hour rather than 50 kph).

While a conservative scientific assessment is of the need for 350 ppm CO2 by 2050, an appalling 118 out of 120 world MPs polled rejected this as infeasible.

And if that were not bad enough, the annual GHG pollution now appears to be 50% bigger than previously thought, the livestock GHG contribution is over 51% rather than 18% and major GHG polluters want to ignore agricultural GHG pollution (i.e. exclude any action over 50% of the GHG pollution problem)..

Unfortunately, my scientist and climate activist colleagues may well be correct when they overwhelmingly confide that it is probably too late to stop the looming climate catastrophe.

[1]. Kevin Anderson & Alice Bows, “Reframing the climate change challenge in light of post-2000 emission trends”, Proc. Trans. Roy. Soc, A, 2008: http://www.tyndall.ac.uk/publications/journal_papers/fulltext.pdf .

[2]. Julio Godoy, “Climate change target too ambitious, say lawmakers”, IPS, 26 October 2009: http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=49010 .

[3]. Robert Goodland and Jeff Anhang, “ Livestock and climate change. What if the key actors in climate change are …cows, pigs and chickens/”, World Watch, November/December 2009: http://www.worldwatch.org/files/pdf/Livestock%20and%20Climate%20Change.pdf .