Nirmal Ghosh, Straits Times 11 Mar 08;
INFORMATION that emerged last year set off alarm bells on global warming, but we may still be oversleeping. Some of the world's foremost climate scientists now say that global warming is far more advanced than was believed at last year's Bali conference on the Kyoto Protocol.
Proposed targets for reducing emissions of greenhouse gases - the main drivers of global warming - under the Kyoto Protocol and beyond, they say, are looking outdated. The impact of climate change is happening at lower temperature increases and more quickly than projected.
The most striking symptom of this is the Arctic's floating sea ice. It is headed towards summer disintegration as early as 2013, a century ahead of the projections of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
In what scientists describe as 'positive feedback', the warmer the planet gets, the faster it warms.
For instance, a warmer planet sparks more forest fires - which in turn pump more carbon dioxide (CO2) into the air, warming the planet further. When the Arctic region's frozen peat known as permafrost melts, it releases methane - a greenhouse gas 21 times more powerful than CO2 - which again further drives global warming.
In fact, the data shows that we are now producing more CO2 at the same time as the ability of the planet's surface to absorb it is falling - mainly because of deforestation.
The combination of these factors creates 'positive feedback', accelerating global warming.
In the words of the Climate Code Red report released this month in Australia: 'We have already created the conditions for extremely dangerous climate change...that will induce further, and possibly uncontrollable, feedback.'
The report was done for Friends of the Earth by the think tanks Carbon Equity and Green Leap Strategic Institute.
It is almost too hot for many in the government and corporate sectors to handle. They remain locked in what the report calls 'failure-inducing compromise'.
The Australian report brings together a far more up-to-date picture than the IPCC report did. Because of time lags, the IPCC report contained data which in many cases was already outdated by the time the report was published.
Code Red brings together views from a range of scientists involved in climate change research, including some of the world's foremost thinkers on the subject like Dr James Hansen of Nasa's Goddard Institute of Space Studies.
Dr Hansen told an Australian radio station last week: 'As it stands now, we will lose the Arctic sea ice without any more greenhouse gases, because there is (already) additional warming in the pipeline.'
He added: 'Talking about a date (by which we should reduce greenhouse gases) which is quite a distance in the future is...a way for politicians to get out of doing something now. They put off the target to a date when they'll be out of office.'
The 101-page Code Red report concludes that the climate 'will not respond to incremental modification of the business-as-usual model'.
The summer melting of the Arctic's floating ice - supplemented soon by melting in western Antarctica - will trigger a sea level rise of 5m or more by 2100.
Meanwhile, many coastal cities and their fresh-water supplies will be compromised by salt water. Marine life will be affected by acidification.
The report warns that if the acceleration is too rapid, humanity will no longer have the power to reverse the processes it has set in motion. The planet will look very different from now - and the changes will come within the lifetimes of most adults alive today.
Warning against 'trading off thousands if not millions of species, and perhaps hundreds of millions of people, by opting for compromised goals', the report's authors, Mr Philip Sutton of Green Leap and Mr David Spratt of Carbon Equity, say global warming demands an emergency response beyond 'business as usual' and 'politics as usual'.
It is not that the IPCC did not warn of this. But the IPCC's data had by late 2007 been outstripped by growth in greenhouse gases - not only from countries like India and China but also from developed nations such as Australia.
Another problem, the Code Red authors contend, is scientific reticence. Many whose work centres on climate change have struggled to gain recognition on the issue and remain concerned about being dismissed as 'alarmist' and 'crazy'.
'Now that the science is showing that the situation is far worse than most scientists expected only a short while ago, this ingrained reticence is adding to the problem,' they said.
There is also pressure - mainly from industry and countries heavily reliant on fossil fuels - to dilute worst-case estimates.
The report does not include the views of professors Steve Rayner of Oxford's James Martin Institute of Science and Civilisation, and Gwyn Prins of the Mackinder Centre for the Study of Long Wave Events at the London School of Economics. But it echoes what they wrote at the time of last year's Bali conference: 'Kyoto has given only an illusion of action. It has become the sole focus of our efforts and, as a result, we have wasted 15 years.'
What do the scientists and the authors of the Climate Code Red report advocate? They draw on the example of World War II to show that human society can indeed change.
After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour in December 1941, America's military imperatives demanded 'a rapid conversion of great swathes of economic capacity from civil to military purposes'.
'Within weeks, car production lines became tank lines and manufacture of passenger cars ceased for the duration of the war, new methods to mass- produce military aircraft were devised, and consumer spending was dampened by selling 'war bonds' to fund the cost of rapidly expanding military production and control inflation,' they say.
'Price controls were introduced and rationing of key goods was mandated. Yet the economy, real wages and profits all grew, though civil rights were significantly curtailed.'
It is just such a response that is needed to deal with global warming. Humanity will have to change the way its societies and economies are structured - both by using new technologies and ruthlessly eliminating or taxing greenhouse gas emissions.
That means fundamental changes - but not intolerable ones compared to the ravages of global warming. As Mr Sutton and Mr Spratt write: 'We can do without jet-transported Californian spring cherries at our fresh food markets in the middle of a cold Melbourne winter.'
