It seems to have gone virtually unnoticed, but the world leaders at the weekend’s G8 summit look as if they have taken the biggest step in years in tackling climate change. And it’s quite apart from anything to do with carbon dioxide.
The summit’s final communiqué, the Camp David Declaration, supports “comprehensive actions” to reduce “short-lived climate pollutants”. These substances – including black carbon (soot), methane, ground-level ozone, and hydrofluorocarbons – are responsible for about half of global warming.
Straightforward measures to address them, a report by the United Nations Environment Programme concluded last year, would delay dangerous climate change by more than three decades, buying crucial time for the much more difficult process of slashing carbon dioxide emissions.
More important still, the measures would save some 2.4 million lives a year, mainly by cutting the inhalation of soot, chiefly emitted by vehicle diesel engines and by the inefficient wood and dung burning cookstoves used by most of the world’s poorest people – and increase grain harvests, at present hit by pollution, by 52 million tons a year.
While the international climate negotiations drag on, these pollutants can be reduced through existing national laws and regulations, using technologies that are already available. And many climate sceptics agree on the importance of doing so: Senator James Inhofe, who pioneered Republican rejection of action to curb carbon dioxide, supports it on black carbon, while Canada – which caused controversy this winter by quitting the Kyoto Protocol – has been in the forefront of countries urging an assault on such the short-lived agents of climate change.
The G8′s endorsement of action at the weekend is a triumph for the small Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development (IGSD), which has been campaigning for action on the pollutants while most climate scientists and green pressure groups have ignored them. In just a few short years it has brought the issue from invisibility to the agendas of the world’s most powerful leaders. In February six governments – including the US, Canada and Mexico – launched a five year programme to tackle them, and the rest of the G8 has now signed up to it. And it commissioned the World Bank to produce a report on how it can integrate ways of reducing them into its activities.
The leaders also reaffirmed their commitments to limiting the increase in the world’s temperature to less than two degrees centigrade over pre-industrial levels and phasing out subsidies for fossil fuels – and welcomed December’s Durban climate summit as “a significant breakthrough” towards reaching international agreements on cutting carbon dioxide by 2015.
It will remain important to continue this international effort. But as Durwood Zaelke, the IGSD president puts it “the solution-orientated approach” of the programme to address the short-lived pollutants can “show the world it is possible to start meeting the climate challenge.”
Well, as long as governments are for it ….
A high fallacy count:. 1 – Assuming that global warming will be hazardous. 2 – Assuming that global warming is entirely the result of man’s activities. 3 – Assuming that governments can control climates. 4 – Assuming that governments can harmlessly change the way people live. 5 – Assuming PM 2.5 will save one life. 6 – …..
Self-rationalizing government. What’s not to fear?
One eruption from one volcano negates any effort made by any government to control the climate.
The reason why soot has been ignored is simple. The poorer countries produce most of it. The ecoloons are not interested in solving any problems, just making sure that it’s the rich wot get the blame.
And the guilt.
Yet another declaration. The declare a lot but as luck would have it everyone is broke so anything that costs money will be relegated to the bottom drawer. The economic crisis couldn’t have come at a better time. Let’s hope it lasts a while
This is 100% pure crap. More baseless excuses to tax, steal, control and demonize while gloating about their own moral superiority over the rest of us useless eaters. I dream of the day this so-called ‘scientific’ dictatorship is destroyed.
If they don’t get a declaration that meets the expectations of those who encourage them, they won’t get any more expenses-paid vacations at Shangri-la.
The nice thing about moving the focus from CO2 to methane etc. is that there are fewer and less vulnerable policy victims involved. Not that these people want to be nice.
What a crock. The G8 can control the climate by controlling pollutants. When CO2 wasn’t the whole story, they discovered that evil black carbon to try to explain it. Soot in industrialized nations has decreased. You’d think they would want to decrease the soot from dung fires by finding ways to modernize the third world. Seems that our leaders are absolutely clueless. But what do you expect from a group with members who believe they can control the climate and one who can stop the oceans from rising?