Dark clouds gather over Copenhagen deal

Two and a half years ago, when the Copenhagen conference on global warming was being planned, the rapid melt of sea ice in the summer Arctic convinced many scientists that global warming was advancing far more rapidly than even the gloomiest predictions had asserted.

This observation, combined with others — the accelerating disappearance of high-altitude glaciers, the record intensity of both droughts and floods in many parts of the world, the rapid acidification of seawater as emissions of greenhouse gases force oceans to absorb ever-greater quantities of carbon dioxide — caused many to urge quicker and more comprehensive action than in the past.

For instance, some of the authors of the authoritative report on global warming by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in the winter of 2007 soon announced that the data on which it was based were out of date.

Last March they convened a meeting in Denmark that one participant dubbed the “end of the world conference” to review new papers on a wide variety of natural systems, and concluded that “the climate system is already moving beyond the patterns of natural variability within which our society and economy have developed and thrived.”

A NASA team headed by James Hansen, one of the world’s foremost climatologists, put a number on this new apprehension: If we wished “to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilisation developed and to which life on Earth is adapted,” we would need to reduce the level of CO2 in the atmosphere from its current 390 parts per million to no more than 350, and do it as soon as possible.

That figure still exceeds the preindustrial revolution concentration of 275 parts per million, but Hansen’s team calculated that it might be sufficient to stave off a number of catastrophic changes including the final melt of glaciers, further seawater acidification, and shifts in monsoon and other rain patterns.

Before long, Rajendra Pachauri, the UN’s chief climate scientist, endorsed the goal of reducing carbon levels to 350 parts per million, even though it went far beyond what his IPCC colleagues had concluded just two years earlier.

“What is happening, and what is likely to happen, convinces me that the world must be really ambitious and very determined at moving toward a 350 target,” he said. Faced with this alarming new data, the long-planned Copenhagen conference in December seemed providentially timed.

Originally seen as a venue for modest adjustments of existing policies — a place to update the 1997 Kyoto accords to include more countries and tougher emissions targets — it assumed greater import in many minds, especially once the election of Barack Obama seemed to remove one of the most powerful obstacles to concerted international action on fighting climate change.

Though they knew the odds remained long, many environmental groups and activists were hopeful that the conference would produce a major breakthrough.

In September a coalition of groups under the ominous “TckTckTck” banner held rallies around the world at which many protesters brandished alarm clocks to show that time was running out for governments to act.

Some of the biggest demonstrations took place in cities like Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and Bujumbura, Burundi; there were 300 rallies across mainland China, and a similar number in India.

In some of these places, the demonstrators ran serious risks in daring to take independent action.

The momentum continued right through the Copenhagen meetings.

Numerous delegations from poor nations pressed much harder than in the past for what environmental groups were calling a “fair, ambitious, and binding treaty,” and by the time the meeting entered its final days at least 112 countries had formally endorsed the 350 target and an effort to hold global temperature increases below 1.5 degrees centigrade.

Unfortunately, they were the wrong countries — they included mostly the small, poor countries who have little economic or political clout.

These countries will be the first victims of climate change, and many of them already face rising seas or spreading drought as a result of global warming.

They remained largely unimpressed by Western promises.

Partly they were unimpressed because the money is considerably less – by a factor of three or four – than some recent estimates of the cost both of the damage they will suffer from climate change and of their transition to more renewable energy sources.

And partly they were resistant because much was left vague — Clinton spoke of an unspecified mix of public, private, and “alternative” revenues to be raised jointly by all rich countries.

But mostly it was because they’d come to realise that there’s not enough money in the world to save your nation if the waves come over the seawalls, as may happen in island nations like Kiribati or delta regions like Bangladesh, or if the drought grows so severe that your pastures turn to desert, as has occurred in parts of Kenya.

Poor nations

“Development,” long the main demand of the poor nations, simply isn’t possible if their rivers are drying up. At this point, one African delegate told me, “any development is going to have to be green development.”

And so — for much longer than expected — these poor nations continued to press the case for dramatic emissions reductions from the rich world as the only guarantee of their survival.

Since Obama is clearly more interested in action on climate than his predecessors were, it’s easy to fix blame for his chary rhetoric, and America’s inaction, on Congress and to say that the president’s hands were tied.

We can’t know for sure whether he could have made more progress on Capitol Hill if he’d pushed harder, though that’s what many environmentalists have contended.

All we can say with certainty is that in Copenhagen he offered no new targets beyond the quite weak ones his congressional majority had put in the first drafts of the legislation now working its way through Congress.

McKibben is a scholar in residence at Middlebury College, and the author of “The End of Nature” and “Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future.”