Avoiding
dangerous climate change will require not just rapid reductions in
fossil fuel use but also a revolution in the structures of our economies
and societies, according to a momentous UN scientific report on climate
change to be released next week in Berlin. (Photo: Shutterstock)The
next chapter of the UN climate panel's scientific report on global
warming is due out next week in Berlin, but a draft of the document seen
by the Reuters news agency reveals that the main message for humanity
and society is simply this: time is running out.
According to
Reuters:
Government officials and top climate scientists will meet in Berlin
from April 7-12 to review the 29-page draft that also estimates the
needed shift to low-carbon energies would cost between two and six per
cent of world output by 2050.
It says nations will have to impose drastic curbs on their still
rising greenhouse gas emissions to keep a promise made by almost 200
countries in 2010 to limit global warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius
over pre-industrial times.
This third chapter of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC)’s Fifth Assessment Report will move away from the causes and
scientific consensus of climate change (covered in the first chapter)
and the impacts of global warming and changing climate patterns (covered
in the second), and focus on the possible steps that can be taken to
avoid the very worst case scenarios that scientists have set forth.
To avoid these dangers, the report will say, society will not only
need to rapidly reduce use of fossil fuels, but also revolutionize the
structures of its economies, food systems, and energy grids.
"Climate change is global-scale violence, against places and species as well as against human beings." —Rebecca Solnit
What this next chapter will highlight is that for all the alarming
warnings generated by the scientific community and confirmed by the
IPCC's comprehensive analysis of that science, is that world
government's and the powerful private sector have done next to nothing
to meet the challenge now before humanity.
“So far, world leaders have sorely lacked the political will to make the shift to low-carbon societies,"
said
Dipti Bhatnagar, Friends of the Earth International Climate Justice and
Energy coordinator, as she responded to the latest IPCC draft.
According to
Agence France-Presse, which also saw a draft of the chapter, the
panel suggests there is a 15-year window for affordable action to safely reach the UN's warming limit of two degrees Celsius.
“Scientists confirm that we must take urgent steps to avoid
triggering catastrophic climate change and its irreversible impacts on
humans and ecosystems. Real solutions to the climate crisis are already
available. We need community-based energy solutions, energy efficiency
and reduced consumption levels, not dangerous energy sources like fossil
fuels or nuclear power,” said Inga Roemer of Friends of the Earth
Germany / BUND.
Roemer was responding to potentially controversial aspects of the
IPCC recommendations, which may include the use of nuclear energy to
offset the imperative of scaling back reliance on fossil fuels.
Environmentalists have largely rejected those in the scientific
community who have suggested that nuclear power —even if "done right"
and safer—is a realistic and responsible solution to the carbon-based
energy system.
For all the warnings, however, what environmentalists and climate
activists are calling for is the paradigm shift that the science—and the
economic implications of the fossil fuel industry—have long been
showing is necessary.
As green activist and author Rebecca Solnit
writes at the
Guardian
on Monday, the consistent and current refusal by governments and
industry to address the crisis of human-caused climate change should be
called what it is: violence against humanity and planet Earth itself.
Solnit writes:
Climate change is anthropogenic – caused by human beings, some much
more than others. We know the consequences of that change: the
acidification of oceans and decline of many species in them, the slow
disappearance of island nations such as the Maldives, increased
flooding, drought, crop failure leading to food-price increases and
famine, increasingly turbulent weather. (Think Hurricane Sandy and the
recent typhoon in the Philippines, and heat waves that kill elderly
people by the tens of thousands.)
Climate change is violence.
So if we want to talk about violence and climate change – and we are
talking about it, after last week's horrifying report from the world's
top climate scientists – then let's talk about climate change as
violence. Rather than worrying about whether ordinary human beings will
react turbulently to the destruction of the very means of their
survival, let's worry about that destruction – and their survival. Of
course water failure, crop failure, flooding and more will lead to mass
migration and climate refugees – they already have – and this will lead
to conflict. Those conflicts are being set in motion now.
What comes next, Solnit says, is entirely up to humanity's capacity
to admit the problem, call it by its true name, and then systematically
and aggressively address it.
"That's a tired phrase, the destruction of the Earth," admits Solnit.
"But translate it into the face of a starving child and a barren field –
and then multiply that a few million times."
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