Global warming
Opinion
Global warming - a hot topic
The inevitable discussion on global warming at this year’s South Pacific Forum meeting will be a singularly appropriate topic, given that the host is the Marshall Islands.
If the worst scenario predictions of cli matologists are correct, about 80 per cent of the Forum venue on Majuro Atoll will be inundated as sea levels rise because of climate change over the next century.
This prospect, if nothing else, should focus the attention of Forum leaders on the subject. But the question is: Will it happen?
Is the world - and particularly the low lying Pacific Island states - facing a crisis of almost unimaginable dimension or is all the furore over the warming of the planet much ado about nothing?
Two recent visitors to New Zealand highlighted the debate - a debate that has divided the world’s scientific community and put governments (especially New Zealand and Australia, which have a spe cial responsibility to the Pacific Island nations) in a quandary. One supported the view of the majority of scientists that the earth has entered a period of climatic instability likely to cause “widespread economic, social and environmental dislo cation over the next century”.
Proponents like Greenpeace’s Bill Hare say this can only be avoided by urgent action to'limit emissions of green house gases - carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) pro duced by burning fossil fuels like coal and using petrol in cars.
The minority sceptics, like American Patrick Michaels who admits he gets 20 per cent of his research funding from the coal industry, say the problem is “at most, a minor nuisance compared with the ben efits of our technological world”.
Greenpeace brought Hare, the organi sation’s international climate policy direc tor based in Amsterdam, to Wellington to lobby the New Zealand government for stronger measures to reduce C0 2 emis sions. The Business Roundtable, New Zealand’s powerful corporate lobby group, brought Michaels, research profes sor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia, here to stimulate debate by putting the opposing view.
The clash of opinions was given added piquancy by the release of a United Nations report declaring that 1995 was the hottest year on record.
The global mean surface temperature over land and sea was the highest since records were first kept in 1861, it said.
The average temperature was 0.4 degrees Celsius above the 1961-90 aver age - and that in a year without the so called El Nino weather pattern which had kept temperatures over the Pacific higher than normal in recent years.
This was grist to Hare’s mill, apparent ly confirming predictions made by the UN’s Inter-govemmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that the globe was warming up at a pace beyond the lim its of ecosystems to adapt. But Michaels was unfazed.
He said the planet had warmed about 0.5 degrees Cin the past 120 years, but at least half of this occurred before the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide emis sions. It was, he said, a natural phe nomenon due to the fact that the sun is a slightly variable star. The increase in tem perature that could be attributed to the greenhouse effect was minor, Michaels insisted, was much less than the original IPCC forecast in 1990 and even the majority of scientists were downgrading their estimates of global warming.
While Hare said governmental action to reduce emissions immediately was essential, Michaels said the problem was not serious enough to “immolate” economies with “impressively expensive” measures to reduce C0 2 . It would be, Michaels said, economic suicide both for the developed and developing world. The cost was simply not warranted.
Now the fact is, the international com munity has recognised there is a problem of global warming and the associated threat of sea-level rise and the Pacific Island nations, along with countries in the Carribean, are rightly very concerned.
More than 150 countries, including New Zealand, have signed a Framework Convention on Climate Change, which was adopted at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio. This requires them to cut emissions by the turn of the century to 1990 levels.
In 1994, the New Zealand government said its net emissions by the Year 2000 would, in fact, be more than 50 per cent lower than in 1990.
Recent calculations, however, have shown that far from coming down, New Zealand’s CO2 emissions are actually increasing - and at a furious rate.
The Ministry of Energy now says the country’s net emissions are projected to rise 73 per cent between 1990 and 2000, the second highest rate of growths in the
Oecd.
When gross emissions, which take into account changes in forests (which absorb CO2) and other factors, are projected, we do little better. With a forecast rise of 22 per cent, New Zealand is behind only Finland and Portugal.
“New Zealand has hardly done a thing,” said Hare. “There has been virtu ally no action at the commercial level to slow down emissions. The Pacific Island countries will be putting on strong pres sure at the Forum.” The government, not wishing to wreck the economic recovery with high-cost measures, has relied on voluntary agreements with industry to bring down the emissions.
They are clearly not working and Energy Minister Doug Kidd has warned that a carbon tax on industry will be intro duced next year if there is no improve ment.
“If, in order to meet our international obligations, it becomes necessary to put in place more stringent measures, there will be an economic cost,” he said.
Greenpeace says the tax should come sooner rather than later and should be combined with strict emission standards on motor vehicles, which account for 40 per cent of all C0 2 in the air. Michaels said the tax was not necessary and indus try should be able to keep that money to improve energy efficiency and develop technology.
The Pacific Island countries, he said, should look to that technology to adapt to a situation that will not be anywhere near as bad as some predict.
That is, says Greenpeace, a simplistic view that will not take the heat out of this years’s Forum debate. ■