More than three decades have passed since former prime minister Margaret Thatcher, in an address to the Royal Society, cautioned that humanity had “unwittingly begun a massive experiment with the system of this planet itself”. Her warning, in 1988, about the dangers of climate change was followed by other speeches in which she outlined how rising greenhouse gas emissions could trigger dangerous warming of the atmosphere.
It was a prescient admonition, made all the more remarkable for what occurred in its wake. While scientists – with increasing certainty – found more evidence to support the idea that surging fossil fuel emissions were heating the atmosphere, world leaders refused to take any meaningful action. The burning of oil and gas was allowed to continue and atmospheric greenhouse gas levels soared as a result, a process that has continued for the past three decades. During these years, humanity, despite knowing that global warming poses an existential threat to civilisation, has done virtually nothing about it. Indeed, it has frequently chosen paths of action that have only worsened our prospects of restricting climatic chaos.
Consider the figures. The world emitted an estimated 784bn tonnes of carbon dioxide from the dawn of the Industrial Revolution until 1990, when Mrs Thatcher was in the midst of her climate warning phase. Then, for the next 30 years, a further 831bn tonnes were belched into the atmosphere. Thus, over the past three decades, when, for the first time, we actually had a notion of the climatic peril we faced, we chose to emit more carbon dioxide than in all the previous centuries combined. Storms have worsened, heatwaves have increased in number and intensity, floods have increased and droughts have spread, while humanity has, effectively, done nearly everything it could to make the crisis worse.
Code red warning for humanity
It is against this deeply dispiriting background that the two-week Cop26 climate talks began today in Glasgow. More than 120 world leaders are set to gather at the summit, which will also be attended by thousands of lobbyists, activists, journalists, businessmen and politicians. What is agreed will have a profound impact on the lives of billions of people.
Under the Paris climate agreement that was reached in 2015, nations committed themselves to holding global temperatures rises to well below 2C from pre-industrial levels while pursuing efforts to keep that increase to nearer 1.5C. Countries then agreed to set up non-binding targets, in the form of proposed fossil fuel cuts, which would keep temperature rises to those limits. In Glasgow, delegates will analyse pledges made to date and calculate how they will affect global warming. The answers they get will be straightforward: these emission promises are desperately inadequate. According to last week’s UN analysis, the world is still on course to warm by 2.7C by the end of the century. This is a code red warning for humanity, as the UN secretary-general, António Guterres, has put it.
We should be clear about how a 2.7C warming would affect the world. Droughts and heatwaves would increase in frequency, intensity and duration; the great ice sheets of Greenland and west Antarctica would destabilise and crumble; ocean acidification would worsen; and sea levels would rise by around a centimetre every three years, leading to widespread inundation of low-lying nations. Tens of millions of people would be unable to feed themselves, coastal cities would have to be abandoned and large parts of our planet would become uninhabitable. Humanity clearly has much to gain from a successful Cop26 outcome. As David Attenborough has put it, the Glasgow summit is “our last chance to make the necessary step change” to protect the planet.
Achieving that goal will be extraordinarily difficult, however. Almost 200 nations will pursue widely differing agendas. Arab states want to continue drilling for oil for as long as possible. In contrast, Pacific island states, which could soon be wiped out by swiftly rising sea levels, seek a rapid halt to the extraction of all fossil fuels. Developing nations, like the rest of the world, are being asked to replace their old, polluting energy sources with green technologies. However, they say that funding for this should be heavily subsidised by wealthy nations. After all, the latter acquired their riches by creating the industries that have led us to this crisis, they point out. For their part, developed nations insist they will only cough up when poorer countries give strict commitments to cut emissions.
UK failure to prepare
Over this morass of competing claims, Britain, as hosts of the summit, will have a critically important role to play in “keeping 1.5 alive”, as ministers have framed the summit’s purpose. Our delegation, led by Boris Johnson and Alok Sharma, will have to sort out the key issues and bring order to proceedings. It will require enormous diplomatic skill, a task made all the harder because of past government actions including Britain’s recent, egregious decision to cut its foreign aid budget, a grievous misjudgment that has soured relations with developing nationswhich see the move as a sign of our indifference to their fate. Chancellor Rishi Sunak announced that the cutback would be reversed in 2024 in last week’s budget, but most delegates fear the original reduction has caused irreparable harm.
Then there is the issue of Brexit, which has absorbed the attention of UK diplomats for the past four years, a time when they should have begun to focus on Cop26. This distraction contrasts with France’s preparations for the Paris climate summit in 2015. For a year before that meeting, the French diplomatic service was focused entirely on efforts to ensure its success. Their UK counterparts have been allowed no such freedom or time, further weakening the host nation’s ability to influence events.
On top of these problems, Covid will have an impact on proceedings. Developing nations are angry that rich countries, including the UK, have monopolised access to vaccines while they have been left unprotected from the pandemic. Many delegates will arrive in Glasgow already aggrieved at the treatment meted out to their home countries and will be very wary of rich nations pitching climate plans to them.
Further headaches include the difficulties of President Joe Biden in passing his $500bn clean energy package through Congress; the intransigence of China in considering whether or not to bring forward its 2030 deadline for peaking net zero emissions; and the decision by Saudi Arabia to increase oil production over the next few years.
Perilous position
This is a lengthy list of problems and they raise a simple question: exactly what are the prospects of the world achieving a 1.5C limit on global warming in the wake of the Glasgow summit? The answer, say most UK delegates, is simple: our hopes are hanging by a thread. Indeed, very few expect sufficient emission-cut pledges are likely to be made in Glasgow and that the best hope is for Cop26 to agree to hold yearly audits of emission pledges as opposed to every five years, as now. With that kind of regularity, a sense of urgency could be imposed on climate negotiations and should be considered a prime goal for delegates. If that is achieved, there is a chance, a slim one, that we can contain global warming to 1.5C.
If this goal is missed, global carbon capture schemes will need to be established or the world will have to accept that a rise of 2C in average temperatures is unavoidable, though this latter scenario was once described by the distinguished US climate scientist James Hansen as “a prescription for long-term disaster”. Thus, long-term disaster would be the best the world could then hope for, while a 2.7C to 3C warming – the future to which we are currently heading if no new emission pledges are agreed – would simply be a prescription for short-term disaster.
Given these alternatives, it is clear just how perilous a position we find ourselves in, a situation that raises the issue of how we ended up mired in this meteorological mayhem. We should be clear. We are in this state because we ignored the warnings of scientists and we did so because we allowed corporations and businesses to dictate an agenda in which short-term interests took precedence over the planet’s long-term health. This is the legacy of climate change deniers whose influence was seized on by the rightwing press and used to spread the message that we could continue on our grim polluting ways. It is a point summed up by Britain’s Nobel prize winning climate scientist Peter Stott. “The task ahead is not impossible but it is now much harder than if humanity had acted sooner,” he says. “For that, the climate change deniers bear a heavy responsibility.”
We may yet emerge from Cop26 with our hopes of containing global temperatures to a 1.5C rise, but we should also keep in mind the needless danger we placed ourselves in by ignoring for so long what science was telling us.
