Source: BBC World Service: Boston Calling
URL: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p010z9xh
Date: 01/12/2012
Event: Scientists "agree that the storm was a glimpse of the future, in a rapidly warming world"
Attribution: BBC World Service, WGBH
People:
Lisa Mullins: Hello, I'm Lisa Mullins and this is Boston Calling, from the BBC. It's our programme sampling how America hears the world and interacts with it. We're drawing from the weekday show that I help present, right here in Boston for American Public Radio. It's produced by Public Radio International, WGBH in Boston and, of course, the BBC. This week on Boston Calling, some Americans say that climate change is happening right before our eyes.
Stephen Wagner: The surge - full moon, high tide when it came ashore. You know, nine foot storm surge, just - there's nothing that can stop it. Nothing.
Lisa Mullins: But others aren't so sure. [Lisa Mullins then mentions other content that comes later in the programme.] First, though, the latest round of UN climate talks is under way now in Doha. More than 17,000 delegates from 200 nations have gathered in the Gulf state city. Large industrialised nations, such as the United States, are key to any effort to curb greenhouse gas emissions. The U.S. delegation has been defending its country's track record on fighting climate change. It says the U.S. has made enormous efforts to slow global warming and to help poor nations most affected by it. Others, including many Americans, take issue with that. They accuse Washington of hampering climate talks ever since the Bush administration abandoned the Kyoto Protocol. That 1997 treaty committed many industrialised nations to limit their emissions. The Obama administration has taken a series of steps to tackle climate change. But even it admits that more could and should be done. Superstorm Sandy, which devastated parts of New York and New Jersey in late October, may have provided some impetus. But there are still plenty of challenges, as Sam Eaton reports.
Sam Eaton: Stephen Wagner knows hurricane damage. He runs a flood restoration company and has been working in Louisiana since Hurricane Isaac slammed into the Gulf coast last summer. He came straight from there to Breezy Point, New York, a part of the city hardest hit by Hurricane Sandy.
Stephen Wagner: The surge - full moon, high tide when it came ashore. You know, nine foot storm surge, just - there's nothing that can stop it. Nothing.
Sam Eaton: Scientists are debating just how much of a role climate change may have played in Hurricane Sandy's devastation. But they generally agree that the storm was a glimpse of the future, in a rapidly warming world. For his part, Wagner says he's worked long enough cleaning up after storms to be convinced that that future is already here.
Stephen Wagner: Everything is getting bigger, coming later and moving slower. You now, the slower they go, the more destruction there is.
Sam Eaton: Hurricane Sandy drew global attention to the growing threats from climate change. But two new reports just out highlight the risk of those impacts becoming much, much worse. The first, from the International Energy Agency - the group issued a stark warning in its annual report. Based on current energy trends, it said global CO2 emissions will push average temperatures up far beyond the 2 degree Celsius limit. That country's set to avoid the most dangerous impacts of climate change. Then the World Bank issued essentially the same warning, that we're headed for an average increase of nearly 4 degrees Celsius. World Bank President Jim Yong Kim painted a stark picture of such a future.
Jim Yong Kim: There would be massive disruption in several of our most basic systems, the viability of coastal cities - and the window is narrowing. We've got to take action now.
Sam Eaton: The question, of course, is how? The Energy Agency says to avoid catastrophic warming, the world will have to leave some two thirds of its remaining fossil fuels in the ground, between now and 2050. Others take it a step further, arguing that emissions will have to drop by 80%. However you describe the challenge, it would mean a radical shift in our energy use. The problem is:
Klaus Lackner: There is one billion people who are at the top. And then there are nine billion people, in the future, who want to be in that same club. So that, essentially, makes energy consumption, potentially, ten times larger than it is today.
Sam Eaton: That's Klaus Lackner of the Lenfest Center for Sustainable Energy at Columbia University. He says the conventional view that economic growth is driven by the availability of cheap energy, mostly from fossil fuels, is still very much alive.
Klaus Lackner: So you have to convince people that a) a solution exists - which I don't think has happened yet - and that that solution is affordable.
Sam Eaton: Lackner is pessimistic about our ability to meet that challenge. But others say there are historic precedents. Ben Orlove is with Columbia University's Climate and Society programme.
Ben Orlove: Countries said "Yes, it's cheaper to get slave-produced crops. We just refuse to accept them - it's something we think is inhuman."
Sam Eaton: And some solutions do exist. Renewable energy is surging around the world, while costs are plunging. Meanwhile, the International Energy Agency said there are huge opportunities to cut energy use. And then there's technologies to capture and store carbon.
Klaus Lackner: Okay, let's go to the lab.
Sam Eaton: Columbia University's Klaus Lackner brings me into a room filled with machines that he hopes could some day cheaply suck carbon dioxide straight out of the air, and store it underground. There are prototypes for fake trees and huge sails made of material that would soak up CO2. Researchers around the world are working on similar technology. But many say without a broad economic penalty for carbon pollution, there's little incentive to adopt technologies like this.
Klaus Lackner: And I think that will require a change in attitude, that people actually see that the risks of not doing anything are starting to get big.
[Sounds of seagulls.]
Sam Eaton: With Sandy's wreckage still piled along the coast of New York and New Jersey, many people are saying that moment may finally have come - at least, in the U.S. But it's no sure thing. Back in Breezy Point, resident Maureen Logar says, even after Sandy badly damaged her home, climate change still isn't a concern.
Maureen Logar: Yeah, we've had other storms too, you don't really think about it. You know, we've gotten water - never as bad as this, and hopefully we won't have for another 70, 80 years. But it's not going to change the way we're living now. You know, you live for today.
Lisa Mullins: Rather sanguine perspective there, from one New York resident, ending that report from Sam Eaton.