Disasters are the new midwives of history. But in order to play this role, they need to be catastrophic, like the accidents in Chernobyl in 1986 and Fukushima in 2011 that led governments to suspend and even abolish their nuclear energy programs.
To spur real action on climate change, a disaster would have to be serious enough to change people’s minds, but not so great as to be uncontrollable, according to Martin Lees, Rector Emeritus of the United Nations University for Peace
“Urgent and deep cuts” in greenhouse gas emissions are needed to curb global warming and its impacts, stresses the statement “Action to Face the Urgent Realities of Climate Change”, presented at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) by the Climate Change Task Force (CCTF).
The CCTF was convened in 2009 by former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev (1985-1991) and is made up by 20 former world leaders, climate scientists and experts, including Lees.
Emissions are currently rising at a rate above the worst case scenario foreseen by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which projected an “intolerable” increase in global average temperature of over six degrees by 2100.
However, IPCC scientists are probably “underestimating the pace and intensity of climate change” due to caution and the complexities of peer review, warns the CCTF statement.
Despite these warnings, the issue of climate change was barely addressed at Rio+20, held in Rio de Janeiro 20 years after the Earth Summit hosted by the same city. The outcomes of the 1992 summit included international conventions on climate change, biodiversity and desertification.
Difficulties in reaching agreements and the failure of negotiations at the meetings of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 2009 in Copenhagen and 2010 in Cancún have led government leaders to avoid the issue of the climate and the polarization around it, Lees told Tierramérica. The most frequently cited justification for this avoidance is the global economic and financial crisis, which has mainly affected the countries of Europe, but it is “an extremely dangerous error to think that we must deal with the economy first, and the climate later,” says the CCTF, whose only Latin American member is former Chilean president Ricardo Lagos (2000-2006).
While economic-financial crises are cyclical and have been surmounted many times in the past, the climate crisis threatens irreversible and uncontrollable change, argue the authors.
The urgency of deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions is accentuated by the fact that the goal of limiting the increase in global average temperature to two degrees will not necessarily keep the planet safe.
As the CCTF statement points out, the consequences of an initial rise of only 0.8 degrees since pre-industrial times have already been “alarming”.
Perhaps they should have included a list of the “alarming consequences” cause they are hard to spot without a chart.
A treatise on how to exploit disasters in the pursuit of a political agenda; how quaint, and how Macchiavellian…
The truly greatest threats to humanity and “the planet” are: a public ignorant of science; a lazy and corrupt press; politicians. (I almost wrote “power-hungry politicians,” but realized the redundancy.)
I fear most the pubic so totally ignorant of science. And almost as much, those who prey on that ignorance with this kind of drivel. When the public finally catches on, ALL science will be suspect, just as we really need it to adjust to a rapidly cooling world. Thankfully, I’ll be gone by then, but my children and grandchildren are in for a modern “Dark Ages” when science falls out of favor in lieu of superstition. I suspect that much of what we’ve gained in the last 2 – 300 years will be lost to this new dark ages.
I am currently reading Michael Crichton’s “State of Fear”, and he addresses this very subject.