A Billion Climate Refugees

That's billion with a "B." A billion people, as in just under one sixth of the world's population, could be displaced by climate changes, according to a report being released this week. An article about the report in The Age says,

GLOBAL warming will create at least 1 billion refugees by 2050 as water shortages and crop failures force people to leave their homes, sparking local wars over access to resources, a leading aid agency has said.
Published to mark Christian Aid Week, the report said the numbers of displaced people would dwarf the refugee crisis that followed World War II. Released yesterday, the report, Human Tide: The Real Migration Crisis, said that unless urgent action was taken, the added problems brought by environmental changes would spiral out of control.
Christian Aid said that as the developed world was responsible for most of the climate-changing pollution, it should bear the brunt of the cost of helping those worst hit by it — the poor.
"We believe that forced migration is now the most urgent threat facing poor people in the developing world," said lead author John Davison.
Scientists predict that average temperatures will rise by between 1.8 and 3 degrees this century because of greenhouse gas emissions, mainly from burning fossil fuels, causing floods and famines and putting million of lives at risk.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that by 2080, up to 3.2 billion people — a third of the planet's population — will be short of water. Up to 600 million will be short of food and up to 7 million will face coastal flooding.
"We estimate that, unless strong preventative action is taken, between now and 2050 climate change will push the number of displaced people globally to at least 1 billion," the Christian Aid report said.

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Tick-Tock, Tick-Tock

That's the sound of the time left to act decisively to avert the worst effects of climate change ticking away, according to the latest report of the Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change. R744.com, a website that bills itself as a "marketplace for CO2 technology, reports these key points from the report:

The world must stabilize the amount of greenhouse gases (GHG) in the atmosphere at 445 parts per million (ppm) by 2015 to keep global temperatures from rising more than 2° C over pre-industrial levels. To achieve the lowest targets would cost less than 3% of the global gross domestic product by 2030, or 0.1% per year. If nothing is done, however, the costs of escalating climate change will be much higher than these projected costs of climate protection. These are major findings from the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report issued on 4 May. It clearly invalidates arguments from policymakers that a full-scale attack on climate change is too costly and would cripple economies worldwide.

More specifically, the report, based on a study by more than 2,000 scientists, demands the use of already existing technologies to make cars, buildings and appliances far more efficient. For the building sector, the UN panel explicitly mentions the use of alternative refrigeration fluids as a key policy to reduce GHG emissions. Discouraging older technologies, setting mandatory fuel economy standards worldwide, and introducing tax penalties for emitting GHG would be vital for policymakers if the worst environmental and related financial consequences are to be avoided.
Results In more details, the IPCC report found the following:
GHG emissions increased 70% from 1970 to 2004, and are projected to increase 25-90% by 2030 if current emissions trends continue and no action is taken.

Even an increase to 2° C – the lowest target to be achieved - could lead to water shortages for 2 billion people by 2050, and threaten extinction for 20-30% of all species.
Both bottom-up and top-down studies indicate that there is substantial economic potential for the mitigation of global GHG emissions over the coming decades. Technology transfer, international cooperation, tax credits and minimum energy efficiency requirements are preferred options.Reactions"We're looking for an energy revolution that's as comprehensive as the one that occurred at the beginning of the 20th century. None of us can predict the future," but "it may not be impossible to make that kind of revolution again," said Dr. Moomaw, a lead author of the report."The time for making excuses is over... We now have the technologies and enough known policy measures that we know work. [...] Now the ball is in the court of governments and politicians," added Adil Najam, another lead author and associate professor at Tufts University's Fletcher School.

Next steps

The results from the IPCC report are expected to play a major role at the next G8 meeting next month, and in shaping the next round of talks seeking new binding emissions restrictions for the post-Kyoto era after 2012.

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IPCC Finishes Report

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has completed negotiations over the content of its third report about global warming, to be released on Friday, according to the New York Times. This report includes recommendations on how goverments should respond to a warming climate.

The world’s established and emerging powers will need to divert substantially from today’s main energy sources within a few decades to limit centuries of rising temperatures and seas driven by the buildup of heat-trapping emissions in the air, the top body studying climate change is poised to conclude.
In an all-night session capping four days of talks, economists, scientists, and government officials from more than 100 countries agreed in Bangkok early on Friday local time on most sections of a report outlining ways to limit such emissions, led by carbon dioxide, an unavoidable byproduct of burning coal and oil.
The near-final report, from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said prompt slowing of emissions could set the stage later in the century for stabilization of the concentration of carbon dioxide, which, at 380 parts per million now, has risen more than a third since the start of the industrial revolution and could easily double from the pre-industrial level within decades.
Dennis Tirpak, a lead author and former director of the Environmental Protection Agency’s climate division, declined to discuss details while the report was still in flux, but said the main message was clear: greenhouse gas emissions have soared since 1970 and could nearly double by 2030 if nothing is done.
Carbon dioxide is particularly important not only because so much is produced each year - about 25 billion tons - but because much of it persists in the atmosphere, building like unpaid credit card debt.
To stop the rise, the report’s authors said, countries would need to expand adoption of existing policies that can cut emissions - like a fuel tax or the binding limits set by the Kyoto Protocol - while also boosting research seeking new large-scale energy options. This work would include pushing for advances in solar and nuclear power.
According to several authors, the near-final report estimates that to bring global carbon dioxide emissions by 2030 to levels measured in 2000 would require a cost on released carbon dioxide of $50 to $100 a ton, a cost roughly on a par – in terms of fossil fuel prices – of an additional 25 to 50 cents for a gallon of gasoline.
The report projects that this shift might cause a small blunting of global economic activity, resulting in an overall reduction of perhaps one tenth of a percentage point per year through 2100 in the world’s total economic activity, authors said.
Some of the experts and government officials involved in the final discussions said in interviews and email messages that the costs could be substantially greater than that, adding that the report used very rosy assumptions.
But a variety of participants, including some from the United States government, said in interviews that it was hard to argue against such an investment given the potential costs of inaction.
This is the third report this year from the climate panel, which was formed under the auspices of the United Nations in 1988 to brief nations periodically on risks from human and natural changes in climate and options for limiting dangers.

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Is 2007 the Climate Change Tipping Point?

Is interest in saving the world from human-caused climate-change disasters taking permanent hold in people's consciousness, or will the current uptick in climate awareness turn out to be just a fad? Newsweek explores that frightening but very relevant question this week.

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Climate Change II: The Return of the Scary IPCC REPORT

The IPCC released part 2 of its four-part report on climate change. This part talks about climate changes that are happening now and the projections for future climates if warming trends continue.

Perhaps the most dramatic prediction for the US is the establishment of a permanent drought in the Southwest, according to Reuters.

The U.S. Southwest, home to some of the fastest growing cities in the country, could be on a path toward permanent drought caused by greenhouse warming, a new study said.

Dry conditions rivaling the Western droughts of the 1950s and the Dust Bowl that desiccated and then blew away the soil of the Great Plains states in the 1930s could hit the region and northern Mexico as early as 2030, according to the study, published in the journal Science on Thursday.
"The 30s and 50s droughts lasted at most eight or nine years. We're talking about something here that is a drier overall climate," Richard Seager, the study's lead author, and a research scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York, said in an interview.
"Once it's established, you're not going to be expecting precipitation to be turning back to levels we are familiar with in the later part of the 20th century."

A sudden sweeping shift to clean technologies such as wind and solar power or rapid success in burying CO2 emissions from coal plants in places like the United States, China and India could mean C02 emissions fall sooner and ease drought threats.

But that is unlikely given the infancy of such technologies. Washington predicts fossil fuels will remain the main source of energy until at least the mid-century.

"A sudden reduction in emissions would prevent the very worst from happening. But some part of this is already inevitable with the CO2 we've already put into the atmosphere," said Seager.

Here is a link to the actual report.
Here is a link to the New York Times story with an interactive feature and links to related articles.

IREJN is Connecticut's Interfaith Light and Power. Visit us at www.irejn.org.