On the verge of an abyss
Not even the current COVID-19 global emergency to which there, as yet, appears to be no end in sight could distract United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres from sounding what, in diplomatic terms, was a resounding alarm in response to the just released World Meteorological Organization (WMO) State of the Global Climate Report. Leaving aside the thick crust of technical overburden which a report of this nature will, of necessity, contain, what the WMO is essentially saying is that for all the formidable international diplomatic curriculum attached to the issue of climate change, we are essentially making no more than painstaking progress in the desirable direction.
The earth’s temperature, we were told earlier this week by the WMO, continues to rise unchecked. Last year, 2020, it says, was one of the three hottest years on record. There’s more. In 2020 the average global temperature was somewhere in the region of 1.2 degrees Celsius above pre industrial level. This the WMO says takes us “dangerously close” to the 1.5 degree Celsius limit widely regarded as a close to absolute cutoff for pushing back the worst excesses of climate change. We are, the UN Secretary General said, on the basis of what the WMO has had to say, “on the verge of an abyss.”
What is significant about the WMO’s recent verdict on the global state of play insofar as climate change is concerned is that it comes at a time when the issue is attracting unprecedented levels of international diplomatic attention. As the issue has attracted increasing levels of multi-directional lobby it has gradually drawn into its debating circle some of the world’s leading climate despoilers, not least companies involved in fossil fuel recovery, who appear to have finally recognized that no amount of finessing the issue of throwing multimillion dollar PR budgets at the problem will provide a remedy.
The WMO’s recent report comes on the back of increasing numbers of international fora on climate change that attract governments as well as throngs of pressure groups, “giant circuses” as one journalist described the 2011 Copenhagen Climate Summit. Between then and now climate conferrals have grown in their numbers and in the range of issues on their agendas, giving rise to the question as to whether what the WMO is in fact saying in its recent report is that we are in fact in the presence of pure theatre and that talk of change is a mere chimera.
Down the road, the climate change discourse is likely to become increasingly controversial. While the noise associated with pollution-related climate change is being driven mostly by the throngs of environmental lobbyists in developed countries, the viability of traditional energy sources such as fossil fuels is being called into question by the First World environmental lobby even as underdeveloped countries in Africa, Latin America and
the Caribbean begin to see their longer-term developmental objectives as linked to fossil fuel economies. There are risks of serious confrontation here.
Herein lies the problem with what the UN Secretary General had to say recently. One of the real difficulties with the global climate change discourse is that it is being prosecuted by different vested interests so that the intensity of the global discourse provides no certainty of consensus that moves the process in a single direction. Put differently, the international discourse on climate change is, perhaps more than any other global issue, driven by strong vested interests; and yet if we are to heed the most recent alarm bells rung by the WMO and echoed by the UN Secretary General, we simply must find a collective way of pulling back from the abyss.