Climate

It is now well established that action to avoid dangerous climate change must take place according to the principles of ‘responsibility and capability’, and the UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) subscribes to this view. Morally and in political terms developed countries should lead global mitigation by making significant domestic emissions reductions. But in a world of limited finance, reductions arguably be undertaken wherever they can be made for the lowest cost. Since emissions reductions in developed countries are insufficient to resolve the climate problem and are often more expensive to make than in developing countries, the principles of responsibility and capability might more productively be applied to the financing of global reductions: this would mean that the higher a country’s level of responsibility and capability, the greater its share of global climate finance. Technically, developed countries are already obliged to transfer finance to developing countries, under the UNFCCC, which states that ‘agreed full incremental’ costs in developing countries should be met by finance and technology from developed countries (Article 4.3).

The last Sunday in March will see the start of a two-week meeting of the UNFCCC in Bonn. This is the negotiators’ first meeting this year, meant to present a final agreement on establishing a global regime to replace the Kyoto Protocol. If everything goes smoothly, the many weeks of marathon negotiations will end in Copenhagen this December.

The U.S. subprime mortgage crisis has, together with other factors, plunged the world into financial chaos. Bank lending has dropped to a minimum as financial institutions scramble to procure desperately needed liquidity. Western governments have swiftly responded, turning taxpayers’ monies into ‘rescue packages’ that amount to several hundred billion euros.

Long-term aims are important for the consistency of policies in the area of climate protection, but the absence of medium-range aims is now holding back progress in the international negotiations on a new post-Kyoto agreement. Had Barack Obama made it to the White House just a few months earlier than he did, the negotiations as a whole might be much further along. On Monday, Czech Environment Minister Martin Bursík told a meeting of the European Council of Member State environment ministers that the impassiveness of the American position is preventing forward movement. Climate change and the EU position on the Copenhagen conference were the main topics of the meeting.

The concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrogen oxides in the atmosphere are rising rapidly.  This rise has been caused by anthropogenic emissions.  The absorption of carbon dioxide by terrestrial vegetation and the ocean reduces the amount of CO2 left in the atmosphere by approximately 46%.  The absorption spectra and therefore also the greenhouse impact of these molecules are known from basic physical calculations and laboratory experiments.  The prevailing positive climate feedbacks strengthen the direct radiation effect and lead to a “climate sensitivity” of 3±1 °C.  The global warming is the result of the doubling of pre-industrial carbon dioxide concentration from 280 ppm to 560 ppm.  This knowledge is undisputed amongst climate researchers, it is independent from model simulations, and it is based on fundamental physical equations.  This is the reason for future considerable warming as a consequence of further greenhouse gas emissions.

I want to talk about the fact that climate change seems to finally have showed up on the public agenda.  You know that for a long time this was basically a conversation among us experts and maybe among some elitist politicians or NGOs.  However, it seems to have now appeared on the public agenda, and I want to talk more about where the public really is on global warming and, resulting from that, what the needs for communication are at this point.  I will discuss how difficult it is to talk about climate change and how well we have done today, what we have achieved and what is left to do, and I will take a pretty critical look at that. Finally, I will share the insights from this project that I have been involved in for the last three or four years on communicating climate change in a way that actually facilitates societal response to this problem -- not just communicating to get the word out, but to actually mobilize the public, which is, I think, the necessity now.

While it is true that I have been also a journalist, I should start by saying that I am not really good at communicating these issues, in particular the economics of climate change to journalists, and I am always getting in trouble with them, for example, when explaining how emissions trading works. Nevertheless, I will do my job here trying to explain the economics of climate change.

Because I am here to talk about the Millennium Assessment (MA), I changed the title of my presentation a little bit from “climate” to “environmental”. Climate is, of course, a major part of the environment.  If you look at assessments, they are really a booming business, a lot of people are doing them, and they are not science, but communications.  Here are some examples: The Dutch Concern for Tomorrow was one of the first in the late 1970s, the UNEP Global Environmental Outlook, the World Water Forum, the Arctic Climate Change Assessment, and the Dutch Sustainability Outlook.  The Dutch Sustainability Outlook actually uses the IPCC scenarios, implements them for the Netherlands and then asks policy makers: What is your “business as usual” scenario?  Compared to the policy makers, this assessment shows that the majority (i.e. 7050 of the public want a much more sustainable green scenario.  That assessment really showed a big mismatch between the public and the ideas of policy makers.