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Photos: AP, AFP and S. Subramanium

REVERSING change: Both R.K. Pachauri and Al Gore have been working to spread the message.

If the IPCC scientists toiled to credibly calculate human influences that are changing the earth’s climate, Gore has carried the message to global audiences with patience, perseverance and a convincing scientific style. The best-known contribution to the campaign against global warming and climate change is his slideshow lecture-turned-documentary film, “An Inconvenient Truth”, which won Oscars for best documentary and best song.

The Nobel Peace Prize will now disseminate the message with even greater credibility. As the announcement said, “their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change” have won IPCC and Al Gore the prize.

Climate change, resulting from global warming, has been moving to the mainstream political debate in recent years as the implementation phase of the Kyoto Protocol from 2008 to 2012 draws closer. Several sceptics, ranging from statisticians to pulp novelists, have tried to debunk the forecasts for a warming earth while “special interests” in the existing fossil-fuel based carbon economy have been working hard to prevent mainstream international policy from recognising the existing science.

For Gore, the facts about the changing climate were becoming clear even 25 years ago. He organised a hearing in 1982 for the US House of Representatives, at which the outspoken climatologist, James Hansen, presented a summary of three papers on greenhouse gases released by human activity that were warming the earth. This was among other testimonies to come, notably from Dr. Hansen, about the role played by carbon dioxide and non-CO2 gases (methane, nitrous oxide and halocarbons) in global warming. In climate change jargon, the scientist explained, this influence of human activity is a “forcing”, a mechanism that changes the energy balance of the earth from pre-industrial times to the present with effects on the earth’s temperature.

Gore went the extra mile to expose concerted attempts to bury the data on climate change. When Dr. Hansen was to testify in 1989 to the Senate, he and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration were pressured to tone down his testimony; in a strategic move, he agreed but faxed his original paper to Gore, who as the head of a Senate Committee provided Dr. Hansen the opportunity to testify that his views differed from those that he was being forced to provide. It is clear from such evidence that climate change science has had to overcome powerful commercial interests and political interference.

If Al Gore is perhaps the best known campaigner on the issue, the message itself is the result of painstaking work by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The panel was established in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organisation and the United Nations Environment Programme and has produced reports roughly every five years from 1990 to guide policymakers on climate change, each report lending greater credibility to the theory that human activity is leading to rising greenhouse gas emissions and thus speeding up global warming abnormally.

In its just published fourth assessment, the IPCC headed by Dr. R.K. Pachauri has concluded, aided by 30,000 comments on its report from 600 experts, that the probability of human activities causing global warming is now 90 per cent. This is a significant increase in confidence from the earlier report in 2001 which put the probability figure at 66 per cent.

It may be tempting to question the logic of founding a massive global campaign on such probabilities. Is there sufficient reason to change the way energy is produced and used? Where is the extensive cause-effect evidence to support curbs on greenhouse gas emissions and heavy investments in alternative technologies?

Remaining passive is not an option, says Dr. Hansen, director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies at NASA and adjunct professor of earth and environmental sciences at Columbia University. Unlike the problem of pollution, which was tackled when industrial growth brought the first wave of ill-effects to the developed countries (smog from coal burning, acid rain and dead fish in water bodies), climate change cannot be managed post facto.

On the contrary, the disconcerting projection is that there is definite climate change “in the pipeline” because a sufficiently high concentration of greenhouse gases led by CO2 is already present in the atmosphere to cause future warming.

The Australian scientist Tim Flannery in his well researched book, The Weather Makers: The History and Future Impact of Climate Change, points out that the CO2 level in the atmosphere in 1800, at the start of the industrial revolution, was 280 parts per million (ppm). The most recent estimate of the level of this gas is 380 ppm.

Present knowledge indicates that dangerous changes could take place in the climate if CO2 concentrations exceed double the pre-industrial revolution level by 2100; that threshold level is put at 550 ppm. It must come as a jolt, however, that humans have already expended their allowance; they have been acting in an unthinking and profligate fashion, emitting nearly twice the quantum through the 1990s than they should, if future gas concentrations must remain at manageable levels.

Without agreement on a time-table to curb greenhouse gas emissions involving historic emitters such as the United States and Australia (the European Union is more proactive) and emerging economies like China and India, the world has a severe problem on its hands.

The costs of not attending to what some say is humanity’s biggest test could mean huge economic losses for all countries by the middle of the 21st century, with the poorest countries — already some of the warmest in the world — and their people, suffering earliest and the most; a new class of climate refugees may be created in these countries.

In Dr. Hansen’s assessment, without measures to peg carbon dioxide concentration at 450 ppm (the limit he considers the threshold for dangerous climate change), significant sea level rise may be unavoidable and this would badly affect many countries. The Economics of Climate Change assessed by a panel headed by Sir Nicholas Stern of the United Kingdom (the Stern Review) point to an annual expenditure equivalent to one per cent of the world’s GDP to keep all greenhouse gases at a carbon dioxide equivalent level of 500 to 550 ppm by 2050, although some would say that is too liberal.

The major investments would have to be in cleaning up the production of coal-based power, raising efficiency of vehicles run on fossil fuels and shifting industry and agriculture to sustainable paths (see accompanying story). Massive funding of mitigation programmes for the countries most at risk is another key factor.

With the credentials of the Peace Prize to back them, the United Nations, the IPCC and its working groups on such aspects of climate change as the physical science, the effects of nature and society, and methods for mitigation can produce convincing reports. And hope that governments will rise up to the challenge.

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