lightblueline

Tom Athanasiou (Silver City, NM and Washington, DC: Foreign Policy In Focus, February 21, 2007), writes that we are approaching a new climate threshold:

"What happens if the temperature—or, more precisely, the average global surface warming since pre-industrial times—rises past 2°C?

Even though we're not yet at the edge of the 2°C line, the Earth's ice sheets are already becoming unstable. The Greenland ice sheet, in particular, appears to be at significant risk of collapse at a warming of less than 2°C, and this would eventually mean about seven meters of sea-level rise. Since only three meters would put virtually all coastal cities and their hundreds of millions of people at great hazard, and given that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is also at eventual risk, the ice situation is already, by any reasonable standard, 'dangerous.'"

He notes that there are foreign policy consequences to this new global climate threat:

"If we're to avoid a catastrophe, then the Chinese—and the Indians, and the South Africans, and the Brazilians, and the Mexicans, and the Indonesians, and all the rest of the people of the "big poor countries" at a minimum—are going to have to embark, in good and earnest faith, on a crash program of economic decarbonization. But this is only going to happen if the rich countries pay the costs of that crash program. A global climate regime must not only drive efficiency and clean technology, but also enable human development and poverty alleviation, and by so doing gain friends, and momentum, throughout the world.

This means in practice that the South, which has lost the opportunity to develop along the fossil-intensive path pioneered by the North, must be guaranteed the right to develop in a new way, one that's consistent with the imperative of stabilizing the climate system. This claim, moreover, is not fundamentally ethical but realist. Something like this "greenhouse development right" is needed to break the global impasse over developmental equity in a climate-constrained world.

And this is the real inconvenient truth.

...
Climate change is now manifestly an emergency, but the dramatic response is nowhere on the horizon. Instead, and despite a thickening flurry of efforts designed to find ways forward, the international drive for a viable global climate regime is settling into a terrible impasse. This impasse, moreover, will not be broken without active U.S. leadership. That, as any realist will gladly tell you, is still how the world works."

You can read the whole article here:

The Inconvenient Truth, Part II