Why the Copenhagen meeting on Climate Change is important

Like Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his delegation going to Copenhagen this week, I, too, have been thinking about global warming—since 1985 when I read an article in the Canadian Journal of Zoology by two Canadian wildlife biologists (Sinclair, A. R. E. and J. M. Fryxell. 1985. The Sahel of Africa: ecology of a disaster. Canadian Journal of Zoology, 63:987-994). The article gave evidence that the weather was changing in the Sahel, the arid grassland region on the southern edge of the Sahara Desert, and that this was partly the reason for the mass starvations of livestock and people in the 1970s and 1980s. Remember the television images of people starving and dying in their thousands in Eritrea, and Biafra? Sinclair and Fryxel proposed that the cause of the climate change in the Sahel was desertification caused by land mis-management and they got it partly right. But they could not have known then, as we now do, that part of the drying was caused by our greenhouse gas emissions. Yes, you and I share responsibility for countless deaths from starvation in Africa. Our culpability grows when we realize that conflicts like those in Sudan and Somalia derive from the same source: too many goats, sheep, cows and camels competing for too little forage and forcing families, clans and countries to confront each other over water and territory.
(please let me know if you would like a more detailed discussion of the agove paragraph, with references).
In 1987, as a middle manager with Environment Canada, I attended my first briefing on climate change. That was the year Canada hosted an international meeting in Montreal that resulted in an agreement to ban chlorofluorocarbons (CFC), a gas used in refrigeration systems that causes atmospheric ozone depletion, another aspect of climate change.
Five years later I had risen enough in the ranks, as well as in the science, to be the briefer instead of the briefee. In 1993, in a briefing to the Regional Director General and the regional executives of Environment Canada, Pacific & Yukon Region in Vancouver, I quoted this from John H. Gibbons and his colleagues in the U.S. Congressional Office of Technology Assessment in a 1989 article from Scientific American on "Managing Planet Earth.":
“Even if industrial countries managed to halve their carbon dioxide emissions...population growth and economic development in the less developed countries would most likely drive up their carbon dioxin emissions from 450 to 900 kilograms per person per year by 2030. Annual worldwide emissions of carbon dioxide would then be 2.5 times what they are today....The path of industrial development in China, for instance, could have a greater effect on the atmospheric accumulation of carbon dioxide that of any other nation. China's critical role stems from its large and growing population, its tendency toward energy intensive processes, its poor energy efficiency and its massive reliance on coal.”
I prepared that briefing after my first visit to China and before the publication of my Environment Canada report, Biodiversity in British Columbia: our changing environment, which was in peer review at the time and was published in early 1994. It contained a chapter, which I wrote with co-author Eric Taylor of the Atmospheric Environment Service, “Atmospheric change in British Columbia.” The title itself says quite a lot, because, back then, Environment Canada had not officially accepted that climate change would, in fact, occur with continuing increases of greenhouse gases. I was not allowed to use the term, nor to imply that the changes that I documented as already occurring in British Columbia—increasing precipitation on the coast, drying and winter warming in the interior, increased frequency of forest fires and increased spread of destructive forest insects—were the result of human-caused climate change.
The purpose of my 1993 briefing to the regional executives was to explain why Canada should support the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the precursor to the Kyoto Protocol. I pointed out the example of China as one of several vigorously developing countries whose air emissions would be crucial to success in controlling global warming:
• China led the world in per capita economic growth during 1965-1989, and would continue to do so at least through 2025,
• World economic growth assumptions, and hence the projected rate of increase in greenhouse gasses, had to be revised upwards for the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) 1992 supplementary report, partly because of China's unexpectedly strong performance,
• In 1990 China's carbon dioxide emissions per unit of GNP were four times higher than the global average, and five time higher that OECD countries, owing to inefficient production, transportation/ transmission systems, and patterns of consumption,
• The greenhouse gas emission projections are highly sensitive to population and economic growth assumptions, and most of the uncertainty over future growth in greenhouse gas emissions was likely to depend on how developing countries such as China chose to meet their economic and social needs.
As an example of this last point, I noted that if China did not build the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River—the world’s largest, which was extremely controversial at the time—it would forgo electricity equivalent to the consumption of 40-50 million tons of raw coal, or to 10 nuclear generating stations, or to seven 2.4 million KW thermal generating stations and associated coal mines and railroad transportation. The dam would, according to Chinese official estimates, cut carbon dioxide, sulphur dioxide, carbon monoxide and nitrogen-oxide emissions by 100 millions tons, 2 million tons, 10,000 tons and 370,000 tons, respectively. Against these energy and climate change benefits, the dam would displace 1.2 million people and endanger many rare Yangtze River species, such as the unique Chinese river dolphin.
(The conservationists were right: the Chinese river dolphin was officially declared extinct on December 13, 2007.)
My take-home message to the Environment Canada executives was that the stability of our own ecosystems here at home, and the industries and commerce that they support, depend on the success of international agreements such as the UNFCCC.
Another chapter in Biodiversity in BC, “Threats to diversity of forest ecosystems in British Columbia” showed that insect infestations had increased exponentially during the 1980s and 1990s, coinciding with record warm winters. One species, the mountain pine beetle, had recently overwintered further north than ever before, and reproduced earlier. The damage had gone from an annual average of about 250,000 hectares to a peak of 1.1 million hectares and I warned that, with global warming, forest pests could increase further. Sure enough, by 2004, the scale had scale of insect damage had grown to 9.0 million in 2004, and the BC Government acknowledged that it was at least in part due to global warming.
In 2005, the federal government chipped in $100 million, on top of British Columbia’s $101 million, to combat the mountain pine beetle, just one of the two dozen species that regularly damage our forest. This a cost of not controlling climate change. Others include damage to forest and residences from forest fires, damage from increasing floods stronger storms, rising costs of insurance payouts and premiums, and so on. These costs grow annually are not hypothetical: British Columbians and other Canadians are paying cash for them.
There are even more ominous threats that centre on global trade. Canada sells a lot of food (mainly wheat) to other countries and buys a lot of food (mainly fresh produce and specialty foods) from them. Our selling depends on being able to produce surpluses and finding buyers who can afford them. Our buying depends on being able to afford it and finding sellers with surpluses. Given the climate change impacts in the most recent IPCC report, completed February 3, 2007, these are matters of increasing uncertainty. Climate change disruptions in food production and wealth generation systems in other countries will affect us. Our survival may depend on joining with other countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Meanwhile, in 1997, as Canada prepared for the negotiations on greenhouse gas controls under the UNFCCC, to be held in Kyoto later that year, Canada asked its top scientists to prepare an eight-volume “Country Study.” Its purpose was to brief negotiators and the bureaucracy that supported them on the implications of Climate change for Canada. Volume I, British Columbia and Yukon, contained my chapter on ecosystem response to climate change and 25 other chapters detailing the potential impacts on Canada’s environment and a range of response options that focused on greenhouse gas emission reductions. As a result, Canada signed the Kyoto Protocol in April 1998 and, with even stronger science evidence, ratified it in December 2002.
When I was first in Shanghai in 1993, the city’s 14 million people owned seven million bicycles and almost no private cars. Busses, trucks and a few taxis inched their way through streets filled with bicycles, pedestrians and handcarts. By 2003, the human population had increased by another 2 million (6 million, if outlying cities are included), the number of bicycles had increased at a lower rate than the people, and 200,000 private cars were in use
China’s CO2 emissions rose rapidly from 1978 to 1996, mostly as a result of increasing automobile use and new coal-fired power plants. Coal-fired power plants now provide 70% of its electricity supply, compared to 24% hydroelectric power. China gets just 2.3% of its electricity from nine nuclear power plants, but plans to build another 30 by 2020. Its CO2 emissions fell 7% by 2000, however, as a result of new hydroelectric power (principally from the Three Gorges Dam) and the closing of coal-fired plants. US emissions grew by 5% in the same period. Canada’s also grew. In 2005, China stopped construction of 22 more coal-fired power plants, possibly to try to embarrass the United States into signing on to the Kyoto Protocol.
The amount of pollution in China’s air is becoming legendary. In 1995, my wife and I visited Qingdao, a coastal city blessed with sea breezes that blow its pollution inland from its popular sandy beaches. We did not notice any particularly thick air. In December 2007, however, I returned to Qingdao, taking with me our 1995 tourist map of the city. A new edition of the map showed that the city had expanded to about 3 times its former size and the air pollution was more than noticeable: inland from the beach, it was so dirty that it hurt my eyes and lungs. One day the highway west (downwind) of the city was closed because drivers couldn’t see the road. My pictures taken in a nature sanctuary some 400 km northwest of Qingdao, halfway between there and Beijing, show migratory birds in a thick soup of air pollution on an otherwise clear, sunny winter day.
The data on China’s, the United States,’ India’s and other countries’ air emissions make a mockery of Canada’s politicians’ sudden efforts to convince us to give up our SUVs. (I drive one because as a wildlife biologist and I need it for fieldwork, but my wife and I gave up our second car years ago and willingly arrange our schedules accordingly.) Of course we as citizens need to do that because it is the right thing to do. We should recognize, however, that to make a meaningful impact on global warming, we will have to set rigorous emission limits for commercial vehicles and our most polluting industries. Even this will not actually dent global CO2 emissions much, but it will buy us a place at the table—the Copenhagen table—where we can hopefully influence the countries whose emissions do matter, such as the United States, China, and India. Our future depends on it.