Inaction Is Inexcusable – Copenhagen Climate Congress Edition

This week, the world's top climate scientists met in Copenhagen at the International Scientific Congress on Climate Change to update each other and the world on the latest climate change science. Over three days, more than 2,500 scientists from more than 80 countries debated and discussed their findings – the content of which can only be described as grim.

On Tuesday, the Congress' opening day, the big news and the subject of the opening press briefing was the announcement by a panel of experts that sea level was rising faster than predicted in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's 2007 Fourth Assessment Report. "The sea-level rise may well exceed one meter by 2100 if we continue on our path of increasing emissions. Even for a low emission scenario, the best estimate is about one meter," said Stefan Rahmstorf, a climate scientist with the Potsdam Institute for Climate impact Research and a member of the panel.

The IPCC's report projected a sea-level rise of 18 cm to 59 cm this century. The authors had hedged this, however, by stating that their estimate did not account for melting of ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica. Unfortunately, the sea-level rise appears to be irreversible, at least during our lifetimes and those of our children, their children, and generations beyond. "With stiff reductions in 2050 you can end the temperature curve (rise) quite quickly, but there's not much you can do to the sea-level rise anymore. We are setting in motion processes that will lead to sea levels rising for centuries to come," said Rahmstorf.

The Greenland ice sheet is contributing to sea level rising faster than expected but, in a rare piece of good news from the Congress, Jonathan Bamber of the University of Bristol reported findings that show the ice mass to be more resilient than previous studies suggested. The tipping point of the ice sheet, the point at which it is doomed to melt completely, is not 3°C, as IPCC and other reports had found, but 6°C. Bamber's findings, based partly on evidence from past climates, confirm that Greenland should be able to survive a temperature increase of 3°C or higher.

If we have any chance of hitting mid-century emissions reductions targets, it will be because energy efficiency was used to arrest growth in electricity demand and an ever-larger percentage of the demand that remained was met with power generated from renewable sources. On day two of the Congress, Peter Lund of the Helsinki University of Technology presented research that found that solar, wind, and other renewable energy technologies could supply 40% of the world's electricity by 2050. "With global political support and financial investment, previous notions that the potential for renewables was in some way limited to a negligible fraction of world demand were wrong," said Lund.

Outside of the Congress, renewable energy project announcements suggested the Lund's research-supported optimism is well-founded. Reuters reported today, for instance, that Italy's generous 20-year feed-in-tariff has catalyzed a solar boom. The industry body GIFI estimates that photovoltaic capacity in the country will see exponential growth over the next decade – from 280 megawatts connected to the grid in 2008 to an astounding 16,000 MW projected to be online by 2020.

In Denmark, DONG Energy announced it had awarded the world's largest offshore wind turbine contract to Siemens. The 500 turbines have a combined capacity of 1,800 MW. Denmark's neighbor across the Øresund, Sweden, meanwhile, announced Wednesday it would strengthen its already ambitious GHG reduction and renewable energy targets. The country now aims for renewable energy to comprise 50% of all energy produced in 2020, for Swedish cars to be fossil fuel-free by 2030, and for the country itself to be carbon neutral by 2050.

Inaction is inexcusable

Scientists gathered in Copenhagen not just to update existing science, but to deliver those findings directly to decision-makers. In this, what was ostensibly an academic conference had very overt political implications – and by design. The University of Copenhagen, the Congress organizer, was asked by the Danish government to collect, synthesize, and deliver science's position on climate change to the heads of state who will negotiate the treaty to succeed the Kyoto Protocol in Copenhagen at the end of the year.

At the closing session, the host (for now) of those international climate talks, Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, joined a panel that included Stefan Ramstorf, Lord Nicholas Stern, University of California, Berkeley Professor and Copenhagen Climate Council member Daniel Kammen, and Congress Chair Katherine Richardson, to receive the scientists' key messages.

You can read the Congress' "Final Messages" in full at my closing session recap, published today. Here are the six key messages in abbreviated form:

The recipient of these messages, Prime Minister Rasmussen, was, in the eyes of this observer at least, remarkably engaged. Normally staid and stiff in delivery, Rasmussen here stated that "energy efficiency is not a choice but an obligation," that "business as usual is dead," that "governments must realize it is in their interest to act," and that "if we fail to act, we fall."

Rasmussen pressed the scientists on the panel to definitively answer whether targets set by the E.U. and IPCC – limiting temperature increases to 2°C, and cutting global GHG emissions by 50% by 2050 – were sufficient. Rahmstorf stressed that Rasmussen and other political leaders need think of 2°C as an absolute ceiling, not as a speed bump on the way to 3°C or 4°C, and 50% by 2050 as an absolute minimum. "We need a safety margin," he said. You can watch video of the closing session at the Congress' website.

The fulcrum of science-backed optimism

Largely absent from the proceeding this week in Copenhagen, and not surprisingly so, was a sense of hope. Katherine Richardson conceded as much in her remarks at the closing ceremony. That's not to say that scientists are necessarily reticent to articulate why their work can be part of the solution to climate change.

Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Chu, the U.S. Energy Secretary and a former Copenhagen Climate Council member, conveyed this in an interview recorded for the U.S. public television series "Nova," which aired in January. In the interview, filmed last spring, well before he was tapped to be energy secretary, Chu explained why he remains hopeful that humanity can find a way to rescue itself from a self-induced calamity. "But on the other hand – and this goes to my core as a scientist – you have to remain optimistic. There's no physical law that says we can't be smart enough to use the limited resources we do have on Earth in a sustainable way, and that the population of 9 or 10 billion that are predicted can't enjoy the standard of living you and I enjoy today."

They may seem contradictory, but I think the warnings dispensed by scientists this week in Copenhagen and the optimism expressed by Chu can harmoniously co-exist. We needed science to shake politicians out of their complacency and torpor. But, now shaken, political leaders will need the fulcrum of science-backed optimism to lift the hopes of peers and constituents alike that solutions are at hand.

John Ashton, the U.K.'s special envoy for climate change and a veteran of science and politics, observed at the Congress on Tuesday that "politicians are not very good at understanding messages from scientists. We need a much stronger sense of urgency. We have not begun to close the gap between what we are doing and what needs to be done."

Scientists are only now warming to the notion that they need to be public advocates who popularize their own work – journalists alone can't be counted on to liberate scientists' warnings from the pages of musty journals neglected in library stacks – but they've always been comfortable feeding new ideas and innovations to business. If we are to have any hope of averting the worst impacts of climate change, we desperately need scientists to master both.

Justin Gerdes,

Web Editor