Copenhagen won't prevent disaster, warns top scientist
The cuts in greenhouse gas emissions being proposed at the Copenhagen climate conference, which opens today, are completely inadequate to stop dangerous climate change, one of Britain's leading climate scientists warns.
Current proposals, including recent ones from major emitting nations such as the US, China and India, are "little more than token gestures", compared to what the science deems necessary to give even a 50-50 chance of staying below the danger threshold, says Professor Kevin Anderson, Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of Manchester.
Writing in The Independent today, Professor Anderson cautions that with the commitments currently on the table in Copenhagen, global emissions of carbon dioxide will peak far too late for temperature rises to stay below two degrees Centigrade above the pre-industrial level, which is regarded as the limit that the earth and human society can safely stand.
Nations must now make much more radical commitments, he says, even if it means sacrificing economic growth.
Professor Anderson is one of the world's leading experts on CO2 emissions rates, and his comments represent a sobering reality check about just how great is the task which the world now faces in bringing global warming under control.
The meeting in the Danish capital, which lasts for the next two weeks and will be attended in its final stages by most of the world's leaders including President Barack Obama and Gordon Brown, will attempt to construct a new climate treaty under which all countries will eventually cut back their CO2.
In the run-up to the conference, most of the world's biggest carbon emitters, led by China and the USA, and including the European Union and Britain, have "put numbers on the table" indicating the reductions they are prepared to make, if negotiations are successful in the round.
The targets announced for the first time in the last fortnight by America, China and India, in particular, have been regarded as a considerable step forward.
But the sum of all the commitments is simply inadequate for the point where emissions peak as a whole and then start to decline to come early enough, Professor Anderson says.
The date of the emissions peak is increasingly seen as a vital point in checking the progress of the warming.
Last year, the Met Office's Hadley Centre for climate prediction and research said that if global emissions peaked in 2015 or 2016 and then declined annually at a rate of four per cent, there would be a 50-50 chance – but no more than that – of keeping the rise in temperatures to two degrees, the goal upon which much of the world's climate policy is premised.
For every ten years that the peak was delayed, the Hadley Centre said, the world would be committed to another 0.5 of a degree of warming.
Professor Anderson points out that there is a widespread assumption that an emissions peak might come relatively early, but asserts that the political and economic will to bring this about is actually absent.
He writes: "For example, the [Lord] Stern and the [UK] Committee on Climate Change reports are premised on global emissions reaching their highest levels by 2015 and 2016 respectively, before beginning a process of year-on-year reductions."
He goes on: "However, amongst those working on climate change there is near universal acknowledgment that such early peaking years are politically unacceptable – yet the Stern and the CCC analyses remain pivotal in the formation of emission-reduction policy.
"The statements by the US, China and India, allied with commitments from other nations, suggest peaking global emissions between 2020 and 2030 is about as hard as the economic and political orthodoxy is prepared to push in terms of emission reductions.
"If peaking global emissions between 2020 and 2030 is left unquestioned, the cumulative quantity of greenhouse gases emitted will be sufficient to put temperatures on a 4 degrees C or higher trajectory."
In recent years, emissions have shot up in a way no-on