Global warming: Hope amid gloom

Here we go again. Yesterday, the world’s governments and top climate scientists published the most devastating assessment yet of what global warming threatens to do to the planet. And that, in turn, will intensify a new bid to forge an international agreement to tackle it. World leaders will meet in New York in September to address climate change for the first time since the ill-fated 2009 Copenhagen Summit. Then they assemble again in Paris in December next year to try once more to conclude a pact to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouses gases. But they are approaching it in a very different atmosphere from five years ago. Not that the scientific warnings are any the less severe — quite the reverse.

The final draft of yesterday’s report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — released in Yokohama, Japan — predicts that, unless speedy action is taken, floods and droughts will greatly increase, “hundreds of millions” of coastal dwellers will have to flee their homes, and the yields of major crops will fall even as population grows. It will follow another IPCC report, in September, stating with at least 95 per cent certainty that humanity is heating up the planet. A third, to be published later this month, will conclude that not nearly enough is being done to head off disaster.

And this week, a World Meteorological Organisation report concluded that recent extreme weather — such as floods, the icy American winter and an unprecedentedly hot 2013 in Australia — are consistent with global warming, while the Met Office warned that heat waves worse than the one that killed 2,000 Britons in 2003 will blight most summers by the 2040s. Last time, such warnings were almost universally accepted, but they now fall on much more sceptical ears. That is partly because the predecessor to yesterday’s report contained several inaccuracies, most notably vastly overestimating the rate at which Himalayan glaciers are melting. Over the intervening years, fashionable scepticism has replaced fashionable concern over climate change.

And government leaders, traumatised by their experience in Copenhagen, have tended to stay quiet. So while expectations were sky-high for what was dubbed “Hopenhagen”, they are rock-bottom for Paris next year. Yet, it is possible that the present pessimism is equally misplaced. For there have also been more positive changes. Almost unnoticed in Britain, the two main obstacles to agreement in the Danish capital — the US and China — are taking a lead in combating global warming, no small thing considering that they together account for two-fifths of world emissions.

US President Barack Obama — who privately feels his record on climate change was the biggest failure of his first term — has made it a top priority for his second. Unable to get climate laws through a Republican House of Representatives, he is instead resorting to executive orders to cut carbon dioxide emissions from vehicles and power stations. Together with the rapid expansion of shale gas — less polluting than coal — these are likely, unexpectedly, to enable the US meet the target of a 17 per cent reduction by 2020 unveiled, to widespread scepticism, in Copenhagen. Even more improbably, China, which burns about half the world’s coal, is beginning to move away from it, partly to clean up the smogs that kill an estimated quarter of a million of its citizens each year.

Scores of planned new coal plants are being scrapped, while last December, the national energy administration announced that, for the first time, more renewable energy than fossil-fuel power generation capacity joined the grid in the first 10 months of 2013. Some expect China’s emissions to peak in the next decade. The two governments have agreed to cooperate and the US is prioritising an international agreement in Paris.

Meanwhile, 61 of the 66 countries responsible for 88 per cent of the world’s emissions have passed legislation to control them: In all, nearly 500 laws have been adopted worldwide. There is also a shift from seeing combating climate change as sacrificing growth to realising that it can increase it. Renewable energy is taking off; its worldwide capacity is already over 10 times what was predicted at the turn of the millennium.

And opposition to action is beginning to fade. One survey shows that even most US Republicans under the age of 35 regard sceptics as “ignorant”, “out of touch” or “crazy”. It could, of course, all yet go horribly wrong, as in Copenhagen. Even at best, no agreement in Paris is likely to match up to what is needed to control global warming. But, despite the prevailing gloom, a more solid basis for making a start on tackling the threat may be coming into place than in the heady atmosphere of 2009.