ECI Annual Review 2006/2007 - Environmental Change Institute ...

6
The Road to San Gimignano
The recent Stern Review on the economics of climate change has made an asteroidal impact on the global
warming debate and keeps sending shockwaves across civil society – in the UK and abroad. Many researchers
from the Tyndall Centre, the ECI and the Potsdam Institute have provided crucial scientific
evidence underpinning that review, which marks – at last – the beginning of a new era: now is the time
for solving – rather than denying, ignoring, ridiculing, or just endlessly discussing - the climate problem.
German Government
seems to have grasped
“The
this challenge and will
make the climate-energy nexus
a top priority of its G8-EU twin
presidency in 2007. This means
that the fragile Gleneagles baton
is properly passed on and that the
haphazard “entente cordiale” on
sustainability between the UK and
Germany is about to grow stronger
- and more systematically.
The German Chancellor Ms Merkel has
asked me to advise her on the pertinent
scientific aspects for the forthcoming
G8-EU agendas and on the mediumterm
Kyoto-plus negotiations. Is there
anything I can recommend to her, apart
from carefully studying the Stern Review
and to watch out for the 4th IPCC Assessment
Report (InterGovernmental
Panel on Climate Change) which is due
in early 2007? Let me touch upon two
issues of overriding importance.
First, the current state-of-the-art estimates
of the multiple potential damages
associated with anthropogenic global
warming (as reflected in the Stern Review)
are highly unsatisfactory. They
may grossly overrate those damages
since the analysis does not genuinely
account for the adaptive elasticity of
societies. Even worse, however, is the
fact that they may fatally underrate the
negative consequences of unbridled
climate change. This has to do with the
still unfalsified hypothesis that human
interference with the atmosphere might
activate a number of switches in the
Earth System (“tipping elements”) that
could interact through teleconnections
and positive feedbacks to bring about a
“domino dynamics” that transforms the
planetary environment in a radical - but
not entirely unprecedented - way. Let us
not forget that our old globe has been
turned into a snowball as well as into a
hothouse in the past, by natural forces
alone.
Finding out whether something
comparable could happen under human
pressure in the future may well be the
“Number 1” scientific challenge of the
decade. My gut feeling is that a thorough
Earth System analysis employing fully
integrated simulation models will safely
rule out the possibility of anthropogenic
“runaway greenhouse” phenomena. Yet
that analysis needs to be done, and fairly
soon, and it will demand commitments
and resources on the Manhattan Project
scale. As the latter term is widely
stigmatized for understandable reasons,
I have suggested a San Gimignano (SG)
Project – bearing in mind that this
beautiful medieval town is often dubbed
“the Manhattan of Tuscany”. After all,
we can do with a bit of humour in our
serious world-saving business.
Second, the recent Conference of Parties
to the United Nations Framework Convention
on Climate Change (COP 12)
in Nairobi has shed a harsh light on the
intensifying crisis of multilateral climate
diplomacy. Thus, even if an analytic
SG I Project confirms that confining
global warming to 2ºC above the
pre-industrial value ensures planetary
climate stability, there is no guarantee
whatsoever that the world community
is actually able to hold that temperature
line. Progress towards an effective
post-Kyoto regime seems excruciatingly
slow, while the winds of climate change
appear to blow stronger every month.
Here is where a strategic SG II Project,
an Apollo Program-calibre innovation
effort to decarbonize the global energy
systems, needs to kick in.
The economic aspects of such a crash
program are sketched in a special issue
of the Energy Journal (Edenhofer et
al. 2006, see below), which also served
as a crucial source of information for
the Stern Review. But what about the
political implementation? There is no
world government that could stipulate,
top-down, some 50-year plan towards a
zero-emissions civilization.
There is, however, a promising bottom-up
way forward, namely the “Road
Atlas” approach. This approach complements
the conventional demand logic
– set global greenhouse gas emissions
caps, allocate politically correct country
quota, and trade away regional barriers
and inefficiencies – by a supply-side
strategy based on individual commitments
within a “club of the willing”.
The members of this club (nation states,
cities, corporations, etc.) develop and
submit their specific roadmap towards
decarbonisation, indicating criteria,
milestones, and measures in the period
till, say, 2030. In other words, they all
make a public and verifiable statement
about how far they are willing to “leap
for sustainability” in the mid-term
future. Once the figures are on the accounting
table, one can add them up
to see whether the sum of emissions’
reduction pledges is anywhere near a
significant contribution to a climate
solution. This approach could generate
multiple benefits, not least a powerful
realpolitik check inducing interactive
amendment of the individual roadmaps
and the aggressive recruitment of additional
club members.
I can well imagine that Germany suggests
producing a core atlas in 2007 of
pertinent “decarb” strategies for the G8
+ 5 countries, i.e., including the US,
China and India. This would still be a
fairly thin – yet most instructive – compendium
with the potential of rapid
growth through additional contributions
in due course.
The club could hold its annual assembly
(for reviewing, revising and rejoicing) in
San Gimignano. I visited the place just
two months ago and found it as ravishing
as ever!”
Edenhofer, O., Carraro, C., Köhler, J.,
Grubb, M. (Eds.) (2006) Endogenous
Technological Change and the Economics
of Atmospheric Stabilisation. A Special
Issue of the Energy Journal.
Professor John Schellnhuber CBE has recently
been appointed ‘Chief Sustainability Scientist’ for
the German Government. He is Founding Director
of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact
Research and a Distinguished Science Adviser
and former Research Director of the UK’s Tyndall
Centre for Climate Change Research. He is
also a James Martin 21st Century School Fellow
at the ECI.