Climate Change
Climate change could be the greatest threat to human society we’ve ever faced.
While Peak Oil has remained a concept at the fringe of public debate and policy, climate change has gathered speed as the key environmental issue demanding attention alongside more traditional concerns about economics and security. The creation of the IPCC in 1988 reflected the scientific consensus in the mid 1980’s that increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide was caused by human emissions but the realisation that climate change was already happening began to take shape in the 1990’s and by 2007 even political leaders in the USA and Australia (who had become infamous for denying climate change) began to accept it as a reality. It has been the increase in drought and extreme weather events more than increases in average temperatures or subtle ecological changes that have spurred the political and public realisation that climate change is already happening.
Strategies for reducing greenhouse gas emissions have become almost synonymous with the sustainability concept. New financial instruments such as carbon trading have developed despite the uncertainty about international agreements to underpin and sustain them. Renewable energy sources have grown significantly especially in countries with the most progressive responses to climate change. At the same time geological sequestration of carbon dioxide has been strongly promoted as a way to allow coal-fired power stations to continue to provide the bulk of the world’s electric power without creating climate chaos. The nuclear industry has been recast as an environmental saviour.
Despite all the focus on the issue, the emissions of greenhouse gases world wide has continued to parallel economic growth. All the talking, all the documentaries, all the international negotiations have resulted in a net achievement of less than nothing: global emissions just keep going up and up. Consequently the emissions increases have been higher than even the worst case (business as usual) scenarios produced in the earlier reports by the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change).
The most recent evidence on climate change is showing that the rate of onset of warming in the Arctic makes the IPCC’s fourth report look incompetent in its failure to be alarmist enough. Greenland ice cap melting and sea ice retreat are occurring now far faster than expected.
We wouldn’t be the first life form to wipe itself out. But what would be unique about us is that we did it knowingly. And there’s the crux of it. We are the most intelligent creature ever to evolve. The first to understand how the overstretching resources->extinction pathway works and the first with the potential to use our big brains to jump off that pathway before it’s too late. Without radical behavioural and organisational change that will radically change the foundations of our growth economy, greenhouse gas emissions along with other environmental impacts will not decline. Economic recession is the only proven mechanism for a rapid reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and may now be the only real hope for maintaining the earth in a habitable state. Further, most of the proposals for mitigation from Kyoto to the feverish efforts to construct post Kyoto solutions have been framed in ignorance of Peak Oil.