The consequences of global warming

The year 2021, still only in the third quarter, has given many causes for pause. Leaving aside the COVID-19 Pandemic which has brought down over 219 million persons and sent over 4.55 million to their graves on every continent. Outstanding events include: one hurricane taking lives, destroying infrastructure and creating floods and mayhem from Louisiana in the Gulf of Mexico to Connecticut and Maine in the Northeast Atlantic Ocean; floods in several other parts of the United States, Germany, Belgium, Romania, Italy, Austria, Turkey, China, India, Afghanistan, Pakistan, New Zealand; fires in many parts of the United States including California (worse year for fires in its history) and Oregon and Siberia in Russia, Turkey, Italy, France Algeria and Lebanon; historic melting of ice, ice caps and glaciers in Iceland; storms forming faster than any year on record with seven Atlantic hurricanes before the end of September.

And, if these real-time experiences were not enough, the records tell us among other things, that: 2019, just two years ago, was the second hottest and the second wettest year on record; and 13 of the 15 hottest years on record have occurred since 2000 with five of the wettest on record occurring since 2012.

It is not a stretch to say that every year since mankind has entered the third millennia has been hotter and wetter than the year before, a trend, not a cycle, as has been the natural order in times past. Should we have been surprised at these occurrences? Were we not warned?

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, like the “canaries in the coal mines”, island dwellers who lived surrounded by water began to warn the rest of the world that they were drowning and soon would be without homelands as the sea continuously encroached on their small islands. This, as industrialized countries indulged in a never-before-seen lifestyle of production, consumption and waste fueled by energy from the burning of carbon and the release of ever-increasing quantities of greenhouse gases (GHGs) into the atmosphere. Soon, the Pacific Islanders, joined by islanders from the Indian Ocean and the Caribbean Sea, were organized by two Trinidadians, Mrs Angela Cropper and M. Lincoln Myers, into the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) to shout, “ENOUGH”.

In response, the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in RIO, Brazil in 1992 and its first child, the United Nations Summit on Small Island Developing States in Barbados in 1994 secured, in their outcome documents, the “firm” commitment that the industrialized countries would put in place appropriate mitigating policies and measures. These measures and policies were designed top out GHG emissions in 1999 with reductions thereafter. These measures were intended to ensure that increases in ambient temperature would not exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by 2050.

Policies to achieve these objectives were to include mitigation and adaptation measures at home and financial and other transfers including technology to developing countries to assist them to adapt to the impacts of climate change and to mitigate their small but growing contribution. How have the major industrialized countries performed?

One finding in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report of 2006 should be sufficient to tell us. Between 1990 and 2004 GHG emissions of the major industrialized countries increased by 11.0 percent, despite commitments at UNCED to top out their emissions by 1999. The 2006 Report was a shocker. It laid bare the level of mitigation and adaptation actions that would be needed if dire consequences were to be averted. Mitigation, the more fundamental, called for an agreement among the major industrialized countries on the level of effort required of each to ensure that the overall target would be met. The Parties met in Bali, Indonesia in December 2007 and agreed on a plan and schedule for negotiations which would ensure that by the time Heads of States met in Copenhagen in December 2009 they would be able to agree on a plan which would lead to the target of 1.5 degree Celsius.

That implied planning for major changes in the lifestyle of the populations of the major industrialized countries. Their leaders, however, seemed to have had no intention of taking that political risk. From the first of the planned negotiating meetings in Bangkok, Thailand in March 2008 it became clear that they had no interest in an outcome that would require any constraint on or fundamental change in their production and consumption habits; their business model driven by a profit-maximizing private sector; and a newly-minted ideology that all States contribute equally to mitigation reduction regardless of their historical responsibilities or state of development.

They diverted attention by focusing on the total emissions of developing countries with large populations like China and India rather than per capita emissions and the need for all countries to bear responsibility. To our certain knowledge, this diversion worked for the first year, from Bangkok to Potsdam in Poland. We have no doubt it continued into the second year but something more insidious happened with the approach of the Copenhagen Meeting. Australia, which traditionally supported the Pacific Islands’ position, not only aligned itself with the position of the industrialized countries but proceeded to apply pressure to seek to get the islands to abandon the AOSIS’ long-held position of less than 1.5 Degrees Celsius. Perhaps even more interesting, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France and Prime Minister Gordon Brown of the United Kingdom turned up at a CARICOM Meeting in Grenada, then Coordinator of AOSIS, to persuade the Caribbean to abandon the AOSIS position and support their position of 2.0 degrees Celsius in exchange for some financial assistance. Apparently, they succeeded as Grenada was pushed over by a jab from another CARICOM leader. “What difference would 0.5 degrees make? The Grenadian prime minister did not say “the world”.

The Copenhagen Outcome spoke in terms of 2.0 degrees Celsius. The 2021 IPCC Assessment Report, superimposed on the 2021 realities, now torments us as leaders prepare for Conference of the Parties (COP) 26 in Glasgow, Scotland in November 2021. This report is screaming URGENT! Much more loudly than the 2006 report did. There is no scenario under the current NDCs where global GHG emissions would lead to 2.0 degrees Celsius in 2050. The more likely outturn would lie between 2.0 and 4.5. At the outer level, this would be three times the 1.5 which has always been feared by AOSIS members. The impacts, the fruits, will of course be not three but multiple times three the harvests we are now reaping. The mathematicians tell us that the combined effects of these phenomena are not additive.

This is truly existential for small islands and many low-lying coastal states. Given that reality, we will explore in part 2 to this article the stance which AOSIS members, in particular, will need to take at COP 26.

Byron Blake is former G77 and China negotiator on sustainable development.