ENVIRONMENT - "Nero" Fiddled While the World Burns

"CLIMATE CHANGE: Window of Opportunity Closing Rapidly" by Stephen Leahy, IPS News

The global financial crisis has pushed climate change off the front pages despite new evidence that it is happening faster and with stronger impacts than previous projections, a new report warns.

Meanwhile, some political leaders in Europe, Canada and elsewhere are saying that now is not the time to make sharp reductions in greenhouse gas emissions because the global economy is heading into a recession.

"It is clear that climate change is already having a greater impact than most scientists had anticipated, so it's vital that international mitigation and adaptation responses become swifter and more ambitious," said Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, professor of Climatology and Environmental Sciences at the Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium.

The new data is so compelling that van Ypersele, the newly elected vice chair of the authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has urged the European Union to aim for a lower temperature target than the 2 degrees C they adopted in 1996.

That will require emission reductions beyond the 20 percent lower than the 1990 baseline by the year 2020 that the EU has as a target but is struggling to meet.

The new climate data since the 2007 IPCC report includes the astonishingly rapid meltdown of the Arctic sea ice over the last two years. Arctic Ocean water temperatures are 5 degrees C warmer than normal this October, ensuring that winter ice will form later and be thinner, setting the stage for more melting next summer.

Experts are now predicting a summer with no permanent ice in the Arctic in as soon as five years -- for the first time in a million years, according to WWF's new report, "Climate change: faster, stronger, sooner". That is 30 to 60 years in advance of the IPCC projections.

"There's no stopping an ice-free Arctic in the summer," said Andrew Weaver, a climatologist at the University of Victoria in Canada.

"We've already passed the tipping point in the Arctic," Weaver, who was not involved in writing the report, told IPS.

The Canadian government, among many others, does not take the risks of climate change seriously, he said. Weaver recently published a book on climate change -- "Keeping Our Cool: Canada in a Warming World" -- to help the public understand the climate crisis and what needs to be done.

While many think the impacts of climate change are far off in the future, the WWF report cites studies reporting that yields of import food crops like wheat, maize and barley have been in decline since 1980, largely due to rising temperatures. That will worsen, especially in South Asia and southern Africa, where there will be sharp declines in yields in local food crops.

Warming oceans have already also increased the number and size of "dead zones" affecting global fisheries. Sea levels are also rising faster as Greenland and Antarctic glaciers melt far faster than predictions, putting coastal communities under greater threat from storm surges and salt-water intrusion into coastal fresh-water aquifers, the report notes.

"It was time to remind policy-makers of the heavy consequences of inaction on climate," said Delia Villagrasa, senior advisor at the WWF European Policy Office in Brussels.

This week's release of the WWF report was also in response to the media's preoccupation with the global financial crisis, Villagrasa told IPS.

The financial crisis is the result of not regulating a risky part of the global marketplace, but climate change is by far the more "risky market", and is in urgent need of regulation she said.

"Shifting to a green economy has many upsides, including economic growth, good jobs and reduced greenhouse gas emissions," she noted.

That view is mirrored by Wednesday's launch of the "Green Economy Initiative" to mobilize the global economy towards investments in clean technologies and "natural" infrastructure, such as forests and soils, as the best bet for real growth.

The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and leading economists said at the launch in London that there are enormous economic, social and environmental benefits in combating climate change and re-investing in natural infrastructure. These benefits range from new green jobs in clean tech and clean energy businesses up to ones in sustainable agriculture and conservation-based enterprises.

"Transformative ideas need to be discussed and transformative decisions taken," Achim Steiner, UNEP's executive director, said in a statement.

Transformative decisions are particularly needed at the next round of U.N. climate convention negotiations in Poznan, Poland in December, Steiner said.

The climate meetings in Poznan will lay the groundwork for a final global climate deal to be negotiated in Copenhagen in 2009. This new climate treaty will be the successor to the Kyoto Protocol and is likely to be the most important international agreement in human history.

Even though Europe has taken the lead on climate, it is now having trouble reaching agreement amongst its members, largely due to heavy lobbying from the same old suspects -- the oil, coal and heavy industry sectors, said Villagrasa.

"It is astonishing that interests representing one or two percent of the European economy are dictating policy," she said.

Italy, Poland and the Czech Republic, among other coal-powered countries, are fighting European emission reduction targets even though the vast majority of Europe's citizens want strong action on climate, she said.

Without strong European leadership, it is not clear how the global community will reach a new international agreement to reduce emissions at a level and timetable that reflects what the world's best scientists say are needed to stabilize the climate.

Meanwhile, in recent years annual emissions of climate-altering gases have already exceeded the IPCC worst-case scenarios, said Weaver. That means Earth's atmosphere is trapping more of the sun's heat sooner than expected, inevitably accelerating climate impacts.

"Copenhagen is the last chance for humanity to solve this," said Weaver.