Doha: Normally, one set of annual UN climate talks looks much like another. But, as ministers fly in to the Qatari capital for the final week of this year’s meeting, the gap between the plodding nature of the 17-year-old talks and the pace at which scientists say the climate is now changing has rarely seemed so vast.
Extreme weather events and broken records in the past 12 months have prompted a volley of urgent warnings from usually staid institutions in the lead-up to this year’s negotiations.
“Climate change is taking place before our eyes,” said Michel Jarraud, head of the World Meteorological Organization as he set out its annual assessment of climate conditions.
This was a reference to the unprecedented melting of Arctic sea ice recorded in September, which followed record-shattering high temperatures in Europe and North America; dire floods across Africa and Asia; and an above-average Atlantic hurricane season for the third year in a row that culminated in October’s superstorm Sandy.
Overall, 2012 is on course to be the ninth warmest year since records began in 1850, said the WMO, one of several agencies to warn about the state of the climate. The World Bank, the International Energy Agency and the UN Environment Programme have also raised concern over the rise of the greenhouse gases blamed for global warming.
Unless these start to peak soon, experts say global average temperatures are likely to rise more than 2C above pre-industrial times. If this happens, some scientists fear the climate could start altering in ways that are difficult to predict and hard to reverse.
The process could be sharply accelerated by the melting of permafrost, the frozen ground that covers 24 per cent of exposed land in the northern hemisphere, the UNEP warned this week, because this could unleash huge amounts of potent greenhouse gases.
There is even a chance of warming beyond 4C by the 2060s unless action is taken to halt emissions, according to the World Bank, which said there was “no certainty” that adaptation to such a world was possible. Yet in Doha, negotiators are working on a deal agreed at last year’s UN talks in Durban, South Africa, to forge a global climate pact by 2015 that would be enforced from 2020.
Those dates seem distant to some observers, given the signs of change in the climate in the past 12 months. “It really is a mismatch,” says Bob Ward of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics. “The Arctic sea ice suggests things are happening more quickly than scientists expected, yet we are behaving as if things are happening slower than expected.”
Erwin Jackson of The Climate Institute think-tank in Australia adds: “This reminder of what climate change looks like needs to hit home in national capitals. Until that happens, countries will continue to come to these talks with inadequate policies.”
Some blame the unwieldy nature of the UN talks themselves, which are based on consensus voting and have soared in size from fewer than 800 delegates when they began in 1995 to more than 10,000 at their peak in 2009.
“But that sort of misses the point,” says John Ashton, who was until June the UK foreign secretary’s special representative for climate change. Negotiators can only go as far as their respective governments allow them, he says, adding that administrations are divided between those advocating higher and lower carbon policies, with the winners determining the nature of any deal agreed by 2015.
Meanwhile, a so-called “bottom-up” world of voluntary climate pledges seems likely to prevail. Since 2009, dozens of countries have formally submitted emissions reduction targets for 2020 to the UN.
China, the world’s largest emitter, says it will cut its carbon emissions intensity - or emissions per unit of gross domestic product - by up to 45 per cent in 2020 from 2005 levels.
The US, the second-largest emitter, says it will make a 17 per cent reduction by 2020 over 2005 levels and the EU has committed to a 20 per cent cut from 1990 levels. But only a few of the larger economies making such commitments are likely to meet their 2020 pledges, according to research published this week by the Ecofys environmental consultancy and the PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency.
