Originally published on the CGS blog on May 4, 2007.
After an all-night session, scientists and officials from more than one hundred countries hashing out the latest IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) working group report finally reached consensus in Bangkok early this morning .
The report focuses on climate mitigation (how to curb climate change) and concludes that drastic international action must be taken to keep global warming in check but that the cost of action is modest. It estimates that preventing earth’s average temperature from rising more than 2’C (3.6’F) will be around 0.12 percent of annual global GDP.
For those of you out there who aren’t climate junkies, the 2’C “ceiling” is important because this is the threshold past which scientists predict that the climate spins out of control completely, with catastrophic consequences.
But to stay within that 2-degree limit we have no time to waste. “We have to cut global emissions of carbon dioxide by between 50 and 85 percent by 2050, the report said.” Current policies won’t achieve anywhere close to that level of cuts. “Greenhouse gases, which have risen 70 percent since the Industrial Revolution, could rise an additional 90 percent by 2030 under business-as-usual scenarios.”
The report’s conclusions, in combination with the reports earlier this year detailing the scope and impact of climate change, will be centerpieces in climate discussions at the G8 summit.
‘several of the reports’ authors pointed out that the ball was now in the court of governments to take action. I will certainly be staying tuned to track these negotiations, but I would argue that governments cannot solve this problem alone.
Perhaps more than any other challenge of our time, climate change illustrates the need for us to think beyond borders, both intellectual and international, to come up with effective solutions. Here in the U.S., it was only when local communities got involved that we saw a ground-shift in the politics of climate change. As citizens who recognize the need for global solutions, how can we help to channel this momentum from the local to the global?
