The journey to Copenhagen started more than a century ago like a fairy tale but the unfolding climate change “drama” is by far more interesting, captivating and exciting than the plot of “Final Destination”-one of the best thriller movies I have ever seen.
The cast for this thriller of a ‘Climate Reality Show” cuts across Scientists, ordinary citizens, government bureaucrats, industrialists, politicians, journalists and various interest groups-both amorphous & crystalline.
The climate debate has assumed some kind of effervescence in the last decade when it dawned on the whole wide world that it was not the fate of some fictional Dramatis Personae; but that of ourselves, children and planet earth, that hangs in some kind of a dicey balance. Carbon, the very great carbon mystery was unfolding at some supersonic speed and the consequences of inaction were catastrophic.
The carbon/climate mystery & the quest to crack it represented an epic struggle of the efforts of thousands of men and women who over the course of the last century gambled on the chance of a useful discovery, putting their reputations on stake as to what they claimed to have found and not a few of these analytical minds took their findings to the public arena and this was where the battle line was drawn.
Sometime in the late 1890s, a Swedish scientist named Svante Arrhenius first muted the idea that as humanity burned fossil fuels such as coal and petroleum, more and more carbon dioxide gas are added to the Earth’s atmosphere, leading to increasing planet Earth’s average temperatures.
This “greenhouse effect” was only one of many speculations about climate, and not the most plausible at that time. It was thought that for whatever reasons, major changes in the earth’s temperature seemed impossible except over hundreds of thousands of years to come but there was just one lonely voice “crying in the wilderness” of speculations and counter-speculations that insisted that Climate Change or global warming as it were, was even coming to knock on our doors sooner than expected.
That lonely voice turned out to be that of a certain G.S. Callendar and throughout the 1950s, his claims provoked not a few scientists to take another hard look at his “rantings” with more scientific dispatch.
The new studies showed that, contrary to earlier rough estimates, carbon dioxide was indeed building up in the atmosphere and would bring with it some kind of warming. More detailed painstaking measurements and calculations drove home the point in the 1960’s by revealing that the level of Carbon dioxide was in fact rising; year-in year-out and so it appeared that something as serious as climate change could happen, or in the past had happened, within a few centuries back.
By early 1980s, more detailed scientific estimations & calculations re-emphasized that average temperatures could indeed rise up to a few degrees within the next century. That “next century” seemed very far off and the calculations seemed merely speculative and suggestive. However, some scientists who belonged to an opposing school of thought that believed human activity was saturating dust and smog particles in the atmosphere, which they said could block sunlight and cool the world. The only convergence point for most scientists on both sides of the divide was that they scarcely understood the largely complex climate system, and much more research was needed to fully explore same. The mass media became confused, sometimes predicting global warming with coastal areas flooded as the ice caps melted and at other times warning of the prospect of a catastrophic new ice age.
Some groups of scientists that reviewed the issues saw very little need for any major policy actions, although they did draw the attention of political authorities to the need for a greater research effort. However all that apathy changed in the early 1970s when the rise of environmental activism raised public awareness about the dangerous effects of human activities on planet earth. Curiosity about the environment and climate turned into concrete concerns for various actors led by the ubiquitous scientists whose activities then drew the ire of politicians and journalists alike as they were bashed, battered & even dubbed alarmists for not allowing ‘’sleeping dogs’ to rest peacefully but in the end, they achieved their number one objective-knowledge.
Knowledge is power and so today we have been empowered by information disseminated by these courageous heroes who ventured into the absurdity of the ultimate search for the unknown and so today we can all talk about ozone layer depletion, global warming, climate change, renewable energy, energy efficiency, Montreal accord, Kyoto Protocol, Bali and now ladies/gentle men: welcome to Copenhagen!
The journey to Copenhagen has been long and tortuous for both the “Cast & Crew”. The Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer in 1985 provided the initial platform and framework under which the Montreal accord was to be negotiated by attempting to define Countries’ responsibilities for simultaneously protecting human health and the environment against the adverse effects of ozone depletion.
Enter the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer which represented a landmark international agreement designed to protect our cherished ozone layer. The Montreal Protocol stipulates that the production and consumption of compounds that deplete ozone namely; Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), Halons, Carbon Tetrachloride, Hydro Chlorofluorocarbon (HCFC) etc, were to be phased out by the dawn of the Millennium year 2000.
Scientific theories and reports were replete with evidences suggesting that once emitted into the atmosphere, these ODS could significantly deplete the ozone layer that shields the planet from damaging radiations from the Sun.
The Montreal Protocol was first signed in 1987 and had been substantially amended in 1990 and 1992. As the whole world continues to feel the heat of global warming and glaring warning signals stare us in the face, the “Montreal deal” seemed too little an effort, too late in the day and as such a more global and synergized approach was needed to form a “resistance army” to frontally deal with the extant reality of Climate Change and Global warming.
The United Nations quickly set up the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) — to begin to explore what could be done to mitigate global warming and to adapt to whatever inevitable temperature increases we are stuck with. The UNFCCC was adopted on 9 May 1992 and opened for signatures a month later at the UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and it entered into force on 21 March 1994, after receiving the requisite 50 ratifications. Presently the Convention now has almost secured universal membership.
Since the adoption of the Convention, the Conference of Parties (COP) has continued to negotiate in order to fine tune decisions and conclusions that would advance its execution & these negotiations resulted in the adoption of the Kyoto Protocol at COP 3 (Kyoto, December 1997) which left many of its operational details unresolved.
Efforts to define these unresolved operational details had seen the COP hop from COP 4 (Buenos Aires, November 1998), COP 5 (Bonn, October/November 1999) to COP 6 (The Hague, November 2000). Several couple of cities had played host to the “Cast and Crew” of the “Climate Drama” and the next show would be staged in Copenhagen, Denmark in December 2009 and this explains why Copenhagen has been trying to outdo Obama as the buzzword in the last 6-months and the name Copenhagen will continue to echo and re-echo even in the next decade or two because any framework or protocol agreed and signed in Copenhagen would most likely direct the course of global development and industrial production in the next one or two decades.
The UNFCCC gave birth to the Inter Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCCC) whose main activity is to provide at regular intervals, Assessment Reports of the state of knowledge on climate change globally by their various Working Groups peopled by hundreds of climate experts and officials.
By 2001 the IPCC made a head way by unanimously arriving at a consensus: although the climate system was so complex that scientists would never reach complete certainty, it was much more likely than not that our civilization faced severe global warming.
This conclusion of the IPCC marked the acceptance of global warming and Climate change as extant realities of our time because Scientists had come to understand the most detailed things about how the climate could change during the next centuries and that these anticipated changes would depend mainly on what policies the global community would choose for its greenhouse gas emissions.
Since then the IPCC, representing the conscience of the international community on the subject matter had passed a verdict that the world should as a matter of urgency & necessity take very pro-active steps to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
The Clean Development Mechanism CDM, as the key ingredient of the Kyoto Accord, sought to allow massive investments in clean-energy projects such as wind farms and solar power stations in developing countries and earn carbon offsets in return which could be sold to help buyers in rich western nations meet mandatory emissions targets. But the CDM had been hampered by bureaucracy & avoidable red-tape which could take up to 24 months to get approvals.
A modified version of the CDM called Programme of Activities (PoA) had been test run by the United Nations and the PoA scheme sought to allow the simultaneous launch of identical emissions-reduction projects across a much wider user base in a single programme thereby lowering overall costs and easing the roll-out process.
The PoA offered the promise of improving livelihoods and greatly expanding the reach and potential investment returns of the U.N.’s existing Clean Development Mechanism which would expire by 2012 and Copenhagen seemed pregnant with a legally binding treaty that would commit individual countries to making even more ambitious effort to cut greenhouse emissions post 2012.
By the dawn of the millennium, improved technology and abundance of data of many kinds had strengthened the conclusion that emissions arising from human activities were very likely to cause serious climate damage. The IPCC reaffirmed in their report published in 2007 that depending on what steps the global community took to restrict emissions, by the end of the century we could expect the planet’s average temperature to rise anywhere between about 1.4-6°C, although only a small fraction of this warming had happened so far with long predicted effects already becoming visible the world over – more deadly heat waves, rising sea level, stronger floods and droughts, the spread of tropical diseases and the decline of sensitive species, change in ocean circulation, disintegrating ice sheets.
Emerging evidences showed that the warming was itself starting to cause changes that would generate still more warming. Politicians were beginning to pay greater attention and the gentlemen of the press and other elites began to trust the scientists who had predicted back in the years that by the end of the century, the world would be warmer. Some segment of the public did continue to doubt, supported by a few scientists and policy makers who still hold tenaciously to contrary views fueled by a combination of ideological conviction or sheer stubbornness like United States Republican Senator James Inhofe who has been a most vocal opponent of any legislation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by clinging on to the outdated theory of no “sound scientific” evidence that the world is suffering due to carbon emissions resulting from human activities.
This tiny minority of Climate Change opposition had not deterred an ever increasing number of individuals, government, and corporate entities from realizing that something had to be done by taking some proactive effective steps at surprisingly little cost compared to the monumental cost of inaction.
Talking about action, European Union leaders seemed to have agreed an offer to put on the table during the much hyped global climate talks in Copenhagen this December after successfully managing an initial disagreement over how to split the huge “climate Debt” bill knowing that developing countries would need about 100 billion Euros a year by 2020 to battle climate change and It was calculated that the EU’s portion of that amount to be somewhere between 40 percent. An excited British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said “I think this will be seen as one of the major breakthroughs that is necessary for us to get a Copenhagen agreement,” after the EU came up with their Copenhagen Financial Obligation position at a summit in Brussels recently.
Already, anti-poverty campaigners led by Oxfam suspected the western countries’ “Climate compensation Money” would simply be drawn from existing aid commitments and they feared if rich countries stole from aid budgets to pay their climate debt, the fight against poverty would go into reverse gear.
In June 2009, the United States House of Representatives painstakingly passed a bill to reduce U.S. emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases blamed for global warming but their Senators appeared more ambitious with a pending bill that required U.S. manufacturers, utilities and refineries to reduce their carbon pollution output by 20% by 2020, from 2005 levels but opposition to such ambitious plans led by Republicans said the proposed climate-change bill would cause significant job losses by encouraging manufacturers to relocate their plants outside of the U.S , in countries that do not have strict carbon controls.
Nevertheless, the Obama administration is hoping for more progress by Congress before the Copenhagen summit gets underway.
Developing countries had already made it clear they would not sign up to tackling climate change without enough funds from rich nations who should bear most of the responsibility for causing global warming by powering their industries with fossil fuel. Developing countries would have to use such funds to adapt their agriculture and explore new sources of water in drought prone belts.
For Africa, this is the time to wake up from slumber and show the world that we remain a vital factor in the climate negotiations and there were signs that is already happening because something unusual happened at the recently concluded United Nations climate talks in Barcelona. A delegate from the Gambia, speaking on behalf of all African countries, signified with a walk out threat that Africa will not negotiate until rich, western countries make concrete commitments on carbon emissions targets.
Africa’s attempt to steal the show at the Barcelona UN Climate talks was considered a small revolution because usually delegates from African countries don’t speak up forcefully, even if they disagree with what’s being said.
Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi rightly deserves to lead the African negotiators when the Copenhagen talks gets underway because his voice has been most vocal of all the African Heads of State and he seems to understand the dynamics and politics of the climate debacle, often launching series of offensive at the western economies for causing the deadly famine that plagued his country men and women in the not too distant past. This time, Africa seemed to have shown the world that she won’t be left out of a climate treaty in Copenhagen this December.
The much hyped and anticipated Copenhagen Protocol (COP-15) will outline stricter global emission standards, which would be binding on all signatory countries. So far, Nigeria is signatory to the Kyoto Protocol and those preceding it.
Changes to the Earth’s land cover, climate, and ecosystems are endangering the health of hundreds of millions, possibly billions, of people worldwide and now represent the greatest public health challenge of the 21st century due to food and water scarcity, altered distribution of infectious diseases, increased air pollution, natural disasters, and population displacement–that collectively threaten large segments of the human population and Copenhagen might just hold the key to reverse these dangerous trends.
Nigeria seems to be nervous, with good reasons, about the future of its vast oil & gas deposits as the global economy tilts towards low carbon but the good news is that oil & gas resources would continue to play vital roles in providing the energy needed to power the global economy in the foreseeable future according to reports.
Nevertheless, this writer believes that an Off-Grid Alternative Green Electricity Generation (OAGEG) approach can strike the “Triple E” delicate balance between Economic Empowerment, Energy Security, & Environmental Protection and is the first step towards setting Nigeria irreversibly on the path of sustainable development. Highly unexplored in this clime, this means that opportunities exist to positively impact our Economy, Public Health, and Environment.
Stanley Ijeoma is an Abuja based Enviropreneur & CEO Schrodinger Nigeria Limited.
Email: schrodinger.limited@gmail.com
Tel: +234-806-2344-178.
Skype: schrodingerr
