Now at just over the halfway point of the 10-day UN climate change talks in Montreal, there has been a freeze in the positions of the two sides. While there is hardly a single qualified climate specialist, or anyone else for that matter, who believes the earth’s surface is not warming, the big question which Montreal will most likely fail to answer is how dangerous that warming is and how dangerous it will ultimately be to the planet and its inhabitants.
There is little doubt that rising levels of industrial pollution are unnaturally enhancing the greenhouse effect; in this phenomena, increasing amounts of heat are trapped near the earth instead of escaping into space. The main causes of the effect are the burning of fossil fuels — oil, coal and gas — as well as changes in land use. The consequence of increasing carbon dioxide and other pollutant levels, the worst case scenarios suggest, will be higher than average global temperatures which translate into unpredictable weather and rising sea levels.
The skeptics, however, are not even close to pressing the panic button. Some say human influence on earth’s climate is negligible, and that isolating greenhouse gas levels in an immensely complex natural system is meaningless. Others insist the greenhouse measurements are flawed and predictions based on them unreliable. Yet others believe a warmer world would be better for most of us.
The debate as to who is closer to the truth makes it difficult to create a worldwide consensus on climate control, not least because of the sheer cost of cutting down on greenhouse gas emissions. The 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which commits rich countries to reducing emissions, does not require developing countries to cut theirs. For them, cuts in emissions might have significant social costs in slowing the growth that feeds economic development, creates jobs and helps propel the poor out of poverty.
The big irony is that, in their haste to move forward, the countries which are not overly concerned with climate control and would sidestep the issue for short-term economic gains could in fact be helping weather patterns to change — producing more heat waves, droughts, floods and violent storms which are the very factors that will ultimately harm the forward economic movement they originally sought.
For now — and despite Montreal and the 10 other climate conventions since they began at the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit in 1992 — economic aspirations will probably win out. On the really big questions — whether there should be a binding treaty post-Kyoto, and whether developing nations should be subject to any targets at all — little progress is likely. The growing alarm about the potential impact of climate change is not something that can be pushed aside and ignored. That would only add to the danger and peril. A prudent look at all the relevant data and statistics with a careful analysis to follow would be the wisest and most desirable step.
