Climate change seldom out of the news ~ Fr Seán McDonagh

Fr. Seán McDonagh SSC has written the following piece about climate change:

Climate change or events linked to climate change are seldom out of the news these days. Scientists tell us that 2010 may be the hottest year in recorded history. In July and August 2010, monsoon floods on the Indus river killed more than 1,600 people and adversely affected the lives of 20 million people, leaving many without their home, possessions or their livestock. The floods have wreaked havoc on roads and bridges and, as a result, aid agencies are finding it increasingly difficult to get clean water, food and medicine to vulnerable people. This undoubtedly will lead to many more deaths especially among children and the elderly. A heat wave in Russia has led to extensive forest fires which have also affected croplands. As a result, the Russian government banned the export of wheat. In the remote town of Zhouqu in China, torrential rain and mudslides have left hundreds of people dead and more than 1,100 were missing.

While none of these events can be directly related to climate change, they are consistent with the predictions which climate change scientists have been making during the past 20 years. Scientists have also been warning that unless decisive action is taken in the next few years to curb greenhouse gas emission an average rise in global temperature of 3.5 degrees Celsius is certainly on the cards. This would create a very hostile world both for humans and many other creatures. Polar bears and many other species would be heading towards extinction. Storms as ferocious as hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans and the Mississippi coast, would be occurring regularly in many parts of the world. Sea levels would continue to rise as glaciers melted in both Greenland and Antarctica and million of tonnes of methane would be released as permafrost thawed in both Siberia and Alaska. Vast tracts of rich agricultural land in places such Australia, North America, Europe, South America and Asia would be transformed into deserts or semi-deserts, thus creating famine conditions in many parts of the world.

Pakistan floods 1 On August 30th 2010, a report from the Amsterdam-based Inter-Academy Council (IAC) was highly critical of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) management structures and procedures. The IAC report arose from the fact that some of the claims in the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report (2007) were based on faulty data. The most serious error was the claim that the glaciers on the Himalayas would disappear by 2035. The report also recommended that the term of office of the Chairman be reduced to six year. The present chair, Rajendra Pachauri has been in place since 2002. It is important to state that the IAC report did not challenge the conclusion of the IPCC scientists who had written that they were 90 percent certain that human activity was driving climate change.

Another positive outcome towards the end of August was that Bjorn Lomborg, one of the most influential climate change sceptics declared that, “global warming is undoubtedly one of the chief concerns facing the world today,” and, “ a challenge which humanity must confront.” Though Lomborg denies that the claim in his forthcoming book, that “humanity must invest a $100 billion each year in tackling climate change” is a classic volt face, many commentators are convinced that it is. They point out that in his book The Skeptical Environmentalist Lomborg was opposed to investing money in tackling climate change. He argued that humanity should first of all focus on initiatives which could save the lives of million of people, such as insuring that everyone had access to clean, potable water and basic sanitation and efforts to eradicate malaria and HIV/Aids. In his forthcoming book, Lomborg and his colleagues argue that vast sums of money need to be set aside to carry out research on climate change in order to develop clean energy sources such as wind, wave, solar and even nuclear power. He estimates that $7 a tonne tax on carbon emissions would raise $250 billion each year. He would allocate $100 billion to researching and developing clean energy technologies. $50 billion would be used in adapting to the climate change already in the pipeline by building sea defences. $1 billion could be spent on climate engineering and the remaining $99 billion should be used on “getting virtually everybody on the planet healthcare, basic education, clean drinking water and so on.”