Many thanks to Fr Seán McDonagh for sending us the following article:
On November 28th 2012, the third day of the United Framework Conference on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Doha, Qatar, a report released by the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), stated that ice melt in the Arctic ocean reached a record new low with a loss from March to September of a staggering 11.83 million square miles, an area larger than the United States. In the words of Michel Jarruad, Secretary-General of the WMO, “The alarming rate of its melt this year highlighted the far-reaching changes taking place on Earth’s oceans and biosphere. Climate change is taking place before our eyes and will continue to do so as a result of the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, which have risen constantly and again reached new records.”
2012 was one of the hottest years on record. There was a devastating drought in the agricultural heartland of the United States, in Russia, Southern Europe and Western Australia. Floods swamped areas in west Africa and much of the temperature in much of the Northern Hemisphere reached record levels, while Britain and Ireland had record amounts of rain. The super hurricane Sandy caused loss of life and enormous damage in the Caribbean and the eastern seaboard of the United States in October 2012.
In November 2012 three major reports on climate change were published. The World Bank report stated that, even with a 2 degree Celsius rise in average global temperature, India would lose half of its grain crops and Africa one third of its arable land. It predicted that drought and famines would spread to important food producing areas in Northern China and the US Midwest. Much of the Middle East, India and Pakistan will face devastating droughts, as water supplies could collapse within 10 to 20 years.
The Pricewaterhouse Coopers (PwC) report was even more alarming. It argued that the climate crisis is rapidly turning into a planetary nightmare. It projects that, unless serious remedial action is taken, the world could be facing a 4 to 6 degree average warming and not a 2 degree warming. As of 2012, the average global temperature has increased by a mere 0.8 degrees Celsius according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and yet, severe weather events are increasing dramatically. Leo Johnston of PwC says that “this isn’t about shock tactics, it’s simple maths.” The authors of the PwC report calculated that, to have a 50:50 chance of avoiding the 2 degree climate ‘red line’ there would need to be an average carbon reduction of 5.1 percent annually from now until 2050. Unfortunately, the opposite is happening. There is at least an annual growth in greenhouse gas emissions of 2.5 percent. If this continues, humanity will pass “through the gates of hell” according to the PwC report.
The European Environment Agency’s report, Climate Change, Impact and Vulnerability in Europe 2012, also paints a gloomy picture. It claims that climate change will exacerbate current socio-economic vulnerabilities.
In the face of such dire climate news, the inability of the international community to deliver a serious binding treaty on reducing substantially greenhouse gas emission is so frustrating. Rich countries such as the US and Europe are not willing to take serious actions to curb emissions, while poor nations feel that they should not have to bear the burden so that rich countries can continue to live in an affluent, carbon addicted way.
Delegates in Doha squabbled over how much rich countries must pay into the Adaptation Fund designed to help poorer ones adapt to and combat the impacts of climate change. There were the usual disputes centred around whether rich countries would sign onto an extension of a legally binding emissions pact, the Kyoto Protocol, that would run until 2020. Poor countries also wanted access to non-fossil fuel technologies, called clean development mechanism (CDMs), to reduce poverty among their people.
Many people are unaware that fossil fuels, the main cause of climate change, receive massive subsidies in countries across the globe. It seems like madness to subsidise something that causes enormous damage now and will continue to do so, in an even more destructive way, into the future. In Doha, Costa Rica, Switzerland and the Philippines called for the abolition of subsidies on fossil fuel.
