Climate change warning ignored
Forget the Mayan calendar with its ambiguous predictions of the end of the world, in Doha, Qatar, this week scientists are painting a much more stark and calculable future.
If the human species continues on its current trajectory of promising to take action on climate change but refusing to do so, by the end of this century the Earth will be an unbearable 4 C to 6.1 C warmer than it was in 1990.
That is two to three times the upper limit the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggests is manageable. The IPCC has been warning about the dangers of climate change since 1988, its chair R.K. Pachauri told the Doha convention last week. Since then the agency has expanded its capacity to measure the impact carbon is having on the environment and concluded its earlier predictions were too conservative and the impacts have been greater than anticipated.
And that impact is being felt from the tropics to the poles, with increased severity and duration of droughts, loss of Arctic and Antarctic ice, heavier localized flooding, hotter daytime and nighttime temperatures and rising sea levels.
Meanwhile, new technology has meant the availability of carbon energy sources has never been so great.
“Neither adaptation nor mitigation alone can avoid all climate change impacts,” Dr. Pachauri said.
While there have been some successes in reducing emissions, overall the Kyoto accord hasn’t worked because it failed to include developing nations such as China and did nothing to encourage a reduction in the consumption of the products that produce emissions.
It was also used to attack the use of nuclear power, an energy source scientists are now belatedly insisting must be quickly put in place if the world is to have the breathing room to adopt the mitigation projects required to save the most vulnerable.
The question is whether the bleak picture painted in Qatar this week is enough to convince people to act. The evidence is that it won’t.
Saskatchewan, for example, is among the worst offenders on a per-capita basis largely because of its reliance on coal to fuel its electrical generation. SaskPower is working on a costly and unproved carbon capture and sequestration project to mitigate those emissions, which, if the technology is successful and transportable, could help other jurisdictions reduce their outputs.
But decades have been lost since former premier Allan Blakeney preached in 1980 the responsible use of nuclear power while naysayers dressed as environmentalists preached the evil of the technology. The impact of their persistent campaign is felt greatest among the poor on the planet.
And this week’s civic budget deliberations seem to indicate Saskatchewan is still willing to whistle past this graveyard. Although city hall is adopting measures to reduce its carbon footprint, councillors wasted no time debating these efforts.
Instead there was a dogged determination to find money to spend on pavement, even taking $25,700 from a fund to make bike lanes safer to use for potholes instead.
Considering the tone of the debate 13,000 kilometres away, one would think Saskatoon’s council is debating on another planet.