Putin finally got the message.
Kyoto coming to force is a geopolitical ground shift. Russian
ratification pushes this global climate protection agreement over
the threshold required to become international law.
You can feel the tectonic plates of global politics grating on
one another as the rest of the world signs up to the Protocol and
leaves the Bush administration and their largest single share of
the globe's greenhouse gas emissions behind.
We can only hope that the industrial revolution of the 20th
century will be followed by an energy revolution of equal magnitude
in the 21st.
The goal of the international climate regime is to "avoid
dangerous climate change." Unfortunately, "dangerous" is in the eye
of the beholder, or the victim. To Pacific islanders whose homes
are vanishing beneath the waves, to Arctic indigenous people whose
way of life is being erased due to climate change already, we have
already crossed that threshold. The same could be said for
devastated homeowners in the Caribbean, Florida and the recent
victims of typhoons in Japan. The tens of thousands of people who
died in the summer heat waves in Europe two years ago also probably
thought it was a bit "dangerous."
What's another two degrees?
Scientists have drawn a line in the sand: a point at which the
impacts of climate change become not just bad, but calamitous and
in some cases irreversible.
They benchmark it at "2º celsius (3.6 fahrenheit) global average
temperature increase above pre-industrial levels." If we turned off
the smokestacks today the greenhouse gases already loaded into the
atmosphere would take us to 1.3º celsius (2.3 fahrenheit).
If global temperatures hit that barrier, it's bad news for all
of us. It raises the likelihood of the complete meltdown of the
Greenland ice sheet, and possible collapse of the Amazon rainforest
ecosystem. Tens of millions of people could suddenly be hungry,
hundreds of millions would find themselves threatened with malaria
in places where malaria had never previously occurred, millions
could have their homes flooded and billions could be without enough
water.
"Already we are witnessing increased storms at sea and floods in
our cities," Chief UK Scientist David King said recently. "Global
warming will increase the level and frequency at which we
experience heightened weather patterns." Dr. King is also on record
as saying climate change is a bigger threat than terrorism.
"Action is affordable. Inaction is not," he told the third
Greenpeace Business Lecture in central London.
Fortunately, some in the US are breaking ranks with the Bush
Administration's opposition to the treaty and ExxonMobil's
corporate strategy of active lobbying to undermine it. (see
Greenpeace Briefing -
Kyoto, the USA and business)
We believe that the world needs to bring total emissions back to
1990 levels by about 2020, then reduce them by 50 percent by
mid-century. (see Greenpeace Briefing -
How much climate change can we bear?)
But even that may be too conservative a strategy if the recent
unexplained spikes in carbon dioxide emissions continue for the
next few years on trend.
Now that we have the Protocol in place, the only question which
remains is whether politicians can act faster than the climate can
change.
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