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The
Arctic Methane Emergency Group finally releases its commentary on the
failure of the COP21 climate talks recently held in Paris. Our group
has decided to take a stand after much deliberation to try to end the
madness of climate change denial on all levels in the face of
incontrovertible scientific evidence of an impending planetary
emergency. The global climate leadership organizations of COP21 have
been mired in consensus bureaucracy and lacked the political will,
ability and courage to take the actions necessary to mitigate this
emergency and are just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic
while kicking the can down the road.
This
letter, signed by many of the esteemed climate scientists in our
group, hope to sound the alarm that we have no time to waste in
taking action to avert the melting of the Arctic and Antarctica
causing destructive sea level rise, the loss of Arctic sea ice and
reflective albedo which leads to extreme weather patterns, floods,
droughts, and water shortages causing crop loss, starvation and the
massive refugee situation which is just the tip of the proverbial
iceberg. Tipping points are rapidly approaching and we are losing our
window of opportunity to slow down this process to give long-term
climate mitigation strategies time to be developed and implemented.
We
want to thank John Nissen, the Chairman of the Arctic Methane
Emergency Group for leading this deliberation and facilitating this
letter.
Keith
Nealy Climate Consulting
Arctic
Methane Emergency Group, AMEG
COP21:
Paris deal far too weak to prevent devastating climate change,
academics warn
Exclusive:
Some of the world’s top climate scientists have launched a
blistering attack on the deal
9
January, 2016
The
Paris Agreement to tackle global warming has actually dealt a major
setback to the fight against climate change, leading academics will
warn.
The
deal may have been trumpeted by world leaders but is far too weak to
do help prevent devastating harm to the Earth, it is claimed.
In
a joint letter to The
Independent,
some of the world’s top climate scientists launch a blistering
attack on the deal, warning that it offers “false hope” that
could ultimately prove to be counterproductive in the battle to curb
global warming.
The
letter, which carries eleven signatures including professors Peter
Wadhams and Stephen Salter, of the universities of Cambridge and
Edinburgh, warns that the Paris Agreement is dangerously inadequate.
Because
of the Paris failure, the academics say the world’s only chance of
saving itself from rampant global warming is a giant push into
controversial and largely untested geo-engineering technologies that
seek to cool the planet by manipulating the Earth’s climate system.
The
scientists, who also include University of California professor James
Kennett, argues that “deadly flaws” in the deal struck in the
French capital last month mean it gives the impression that global
warming is now being properly addressed when in fact the measures
fall woefully short of what is needed to avoid runaway climate
change.
This
means that the kind of extreme action that needs to be taken
immediately to have any chance of avoiding devastating global
warming, such as massive and swift cuts to worldwide carbon emissions
– which only fell by about 1 per cent last year – will not now be
taken, they say.
Pla
“The
hollow cheering of success at the end of the Paris Agreement proved
yet again that people will hear what they want to hear and disregard
the rest. What they disregarded were the deadly flaws lying just
beneath its veneer of success,” the academics write in the the
letter, also signed by Dr Alan Gadian of the University of Leeds and
Professor Paul Beckwith of the University of Ottowa in Canada.
“What
people wanted to hear was that an agreement had been reached on
climate change that would save the world while leaving lifestyles and
aspirations unchanged. The solution it proposes is not to agree on an
urgent mechanism to ensure immediate cuts in emissions, but to kick
the can down the road.”
The
authors don’t dispute the huge diplomatic achievement of the Paris
Agreement – getting 195 world leaders to sign up to a global
warming target of between 1.5C to 2C and pledging action to cut
carbon emissions.
But
they say the actions agreed are far too weak to get anywhere close to
that target. Furthermore, the pledges countries have made to cut
their carbon emissions are not sufficiently binding to ensure they
are met, while the Paris Agreement will not force them to “rachet”
them up as often as they need to.
Of
even greater concern, they say, is the lack of dramatic immediate
action that was agreed to tackle global warming. The Paris Agreement
only comes into force in 2020 – by which point huge amounts of
additional CO2 will have been pumped into the atmosphere. The
signatories claim this makes it all but impossible to limit global
warming to 2C, let alone 1.5C.
“The
Paris Agreement’s heart was in the right place but the content is
worse than inept. It was a real triumph for international diplomacy
and sends a strong message that the sceptics have lost their case and
that the science is correct on climate change. The rest is little
more than fluff and risks locking in failure,” said Professor Kevin
Anderson of Manchester University, who has not signed the letter but
agrees with its argument.
Peter
Wadhams, professor of ocean physics at the University of Cambridge
and a signatory of the letter, said the prospects for curbing global
warming following the Paris Agreement are now so dire that he
advocates a charge into geo-engineering – not something he
recommends lightly. “Other things being equal I’m not a great fan
of geo-engineering but I think it absolutely necessary given the
situation we’re in. It’s a sticking plaster solution. But you
need it because looking at the world, nobody’s instantly changing
their pattern of life,” Prof Wadhams said.
Pumping
huge amounts of water spray into clouds to make them bigger and
brighter so that they reflect sunlight back into the atmosphere –
known as Marine Cloud Brightening – offers the best geo-engineering
prospect, he said.
Geo-engineering
technologies – which also envisage putting giant mirrors in space
or whitening the surface of the ocean to deflect incoming solar
radiation back into space – are controversial because of fears that
they are technically demanding, would be extremely expensive while
interfering with the climate system could have damaging unintended
consequences for the planet.
A
spokesman for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate
Change said: “The Paris Agreement is a resounding declaration
of political intent by all the world’s nations. We are fully
confident that countries are not sitting on their haunches waiting
until 2020 before doing anything,” he said.
The letter
The
hollow cheering of success at the end of COP21 agreement proved yet
again that people will hear what they want to hear and disregard the
rest. What people wanted to hear was that an agreement had been
reached on climate change that would save the world while leaving
lifestyles and aspirations unchanged.
What
they disregarded were the deadly flaws lying just beneath its veneer
of success. As early as the third page of the draft agreement
is the acknowledgment that its CO2 target won’t keep the
global temperate rise below 2 deg C, the level that was once set as
the critical safe limit. The solution it proposes is not to agree on
an urgent mechanism to ensure immediate cuts in emissions, but to
kick the can down the road by committing to calculate a new carbon
budget for a 1.5 deg C temperature increase that can be talked about
in 2020.
Given
that we can’t agree on the climate models or the CO2budget to keep
temperatures rises to 2 deg C, then we are naïve to think we will
agree on a much tougher target in five years when, in all likelihood,
the exponentially increasing atmospheric CO2 levels mean it will
be too late.
More
ominously, these inadequate targets require mankind to do something
much more than cut emissions with a glorious renewable technology
programme that will exceed any other past human endeavour. They also
require carbon to be sucked out the air. The favoured method is to
out-compete the fossil fuel industry by providing biomass for power
stations. This involves rapidly growing trees and grasses faster than
nature has ever done on land we don’t have, then burning it in
power stations that will capture and compress the CO2 using an
infrastructure we don’t have and with technology that won’t work
on the scale we need and to finally store it in places we can’t
find. To maintain the good news agenda, all of this was omitted
from the agreement.
The
roar of devastating global storms has now drowned the false cheer
from Paris and brutally brought into focus the extent of our failure
to address climate change. The unfortunate truth is that things are
going to get much worse. The planet’s excess heat is now melting
the Arctic Ice cap like a hot knife through butter and is doing so in
the middle of winter. Unless stopped, this Arctic heating will lead
to a rapid release of the methane clathrates from the sea floor of
the Arctic and herald the next phase of catastrophically intense
climate change that our civilisation will not survive.
The
time for the wishful thinking and blind optimism that has
characterised the debate on climate change is over. The time for hard
facts and decisions is now. Our backs are against the wall and
we must now start the process of preparing for geo-engineering. We
must do this in the knowledge that its chances of success are small
and the risks of implementation are great.
We
must look at the full spectrum of geoengineering. This will cover
initiatives that increase carbon sequestration by restoration of rain
forests to the seeding of oceans. It will extend to solar radiation
management techniques such as artificially whitening clouds and, in
extremis, replicating the aerosols from volcanic activity. It will
have to look at what areas that we selectively target, such as the
methane emitting regions of the Arctic and which areas we avoid.
The
high political and environmental risks associated with this must be
made clear so that it is never used as an alternative to making the
carbon cuts that are urgently needed. Instead cognisance of these
must be used to challenge the narrative of wishful thinking that has
infested the climate change talks for the past twenty one years and
which reached its zenith with the CO21 agreement. In today’s
international vacuum on this, it is imperative that our government
takes a lead.
Signed
by
Professor
Paul Beckwith, University of Ottowa
Professor
Stephen Salter – Edinburgh University
Professor
Peter Wadhams – Cambridge University
Professor
James Kennett of University of California.
Dr
Hugh Hunt – Cambridge University
Dr.
Alan Gadian -Senior Scientist, Nation Centre for Atmospheric
Sciences, University of Leeds
Dr.
Mayer Hillman - Senior Fellow Emeritus of the Institute of the Policy
Studies Institute
Dr.
John Latham – University of Manchester
Aubrey
Meyer – Director, Global Commons Institute.
John
Nissen - Chair Arctic Methane Emergency Group
Kevin
Lister - Author of "The Vortex of Violence and why we are losing
the war on climate change"
