PRESS CONFERENCE ON CLIMATE CHANGE, SIXTIETH ANNUAL DPI/NGO CONFERENCE

“I think we face a severe problem, one that’s extremely threatening, but one that we have the capability to deal with,” Michael Oppenheimer, the lead author of the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) told correspondents today at a Headquarters press conference. 

Mr. Oppenheimer is the Albert G. Milbank Professor of Geosciences and International Affairs in the Woodrow Wilson School and the Department of Geosciences at Princeton University.  He joined the Princeton faculty after more than two decades with Environmental Defense, a non-governmental organization, where he served as chief scientist and manager of the Global and Regional Atmosphere Program.  Joining him was the Chair of the upcoming Conference, Richard Jordan, of the International Council for Caring Communities.

The Sixtieth Annual DPI/NGO Conference, entitled “Climate change:  How it impacts us all”, to be held from 5 to 7 September at Headquarters, would use as its basis the three-part report released this year by the Intergovernmental Panel –- a joint venture between the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), bringing together an international network of climate scientists. 

Mr. Oppenheimer explained that the Panel was established under United Nations auspices following a General Assembly resolution in 1988.  Its purpose was to inform Governments with the expectation that there would be global negotiations on some sort of an accord to limit climate change.  Subsequently, there was the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol.  “And now we’re moving on in anticipation of negotiations on a post-Kyoto phase for the period after 2012,” he said.

According to the Panel’s latest report in May, some further warming was inevitable due to emissions in the atmosphere that had not yet manifested their full effect.  “Yet, by and large, the future remains in our hands and we have the ability to turn this thing around –- to slow emissions and eventually reduce them in a way which will allow a stable climate to develop toward the end of the century,” he said.

The Panel estimated that the cost of slowing emissions over the next few decades, of getting started, was the equivalent of a fraction of total global output, he said.  That would hardly be noticed against the “background jiggling of the economic system”.  The main problem –- his personal view –- in solving global warming, however, was neither economic nor technological, but it was political, which was why the United Nations in the end was very important.  

He said that the United Nations and non-governmental organizations had been very important in the transformation of the climate change issue, from an arcane, obscure, abstract, hard-to-understand issue that only a few people really cared about to the globally pervasive question that it was today.

Explaining the greenhouse effect, he said that certain gases existed naturally in the atmosphere; they were transparent, and the sunlight came through.  The same gases, however, trapped heat that would otherwise escape into space.  It was a kind of invisible blanket –- that was the greenhouse effect.  It was a good thing because, without it, the Earth would be about 60º Fahrenheit, 32  Celsius; it would be a frozen desert.  Human beings would not have evolved as a species, and neither would any other species.  The greenhouse problem arose because human beings were causing a build up in the levels of those gases.  Carbon dioxide -- the primary man-made greenhouse gas -- now had levels at about 30 per cent above what they were in pre-industrial times.

That meant that the Earth would inevitably warm; the Earth was already warming –- about three quarters of a degree Celsius, and more than a degree Fahrenheit warmer than it was 140 years ago, he said, adding, “it is just going to warm further until we restrain the emissions of those gases”.  In fact, carbon dioxide levels were now higher than they had been in 20 million years, and if the emissions of gases were not limited, they would soon be higher than they were 50 million years ago.  Fifty million years ago, the planet was totally different than it was today.  It was semi-tropical to tropical, and there were no ice sheets.  If that happened today, sea levels would be hundreds of feet higher and there would be no civilization along the coasts.  “So, these are the stakes we face,” he warned.

The Panel, in the report it issued in February, pointed out in very strong language that it was “unequivocal” that the Earth had warmed, that the warming was very likely attributable to the build-up of greenhouse gases, that sea levels had risen in response as glaciers melted and as ocean water expanded, that all those changes were accelerating, and that there had been a broad change in the climate aside from the temperature change.  The very circulation of the atmosphere -– the global winds -- had changed, hurricanes appeared to have gotten more intense, there was a drying in many areas of the world, and in others, there was excess precipitation and very heavy rain storms, possibly generating additional flooding.  The human effect of the build-up of the greenhouse gases was implicated in most of those changes, the Panel found.

The second report, which came out in April, indicated that all those climate changes were already having significant effects on human society and natural ecosystems.  For instance, there were changes in water availability, owing to more droughts in certain parts of the world.  There was difficulty coping with sea-level rise along the coast and, perhaps most importantly, as projections were made on where those changes were going, the world would be somewhere between 1° and 6º Celsius warmer than today if nothing was done to restrain emissions; sea-level rise would be up to two feet higher; the loss in biodiversity would be about 30 per cent if warming was only a few degrees, and up to 70 per cent if warming got in the range of 3° or 4° Celsius in the current century. 

Most importantly, he said, the largest effects were expected to happen in those parts of the world that had the least capability to deal with them, he said.  There were vulnerable populations in all parts of the world –- everyone saw that during Hurricane Katrina –- even in rich countries.  There, the world saw a profound inability to anticipate, defend and clean up afterwards, and still people were suffering.  That kind of vulnerability was only magnified in many countries a lot poorer than the United States.  One of the most marked projected effects of climate change was a drying at mid to low latitudes in tropics and subtropics, such as sub-Saharan Africa, parts of Mexico and South Africa.  There, questions would arise about whether people would have enough to feed themselves or whether malnutrition and starvation would become endemic instead of sporadic.

Asked why there was a sudden interest in global warming and climate change, he said that, here in the United States, it probably started with the strong hurricane systems of a few years ago.  Hurricane Katrina had had a very strong psychological effect on people’s views.  It had revealed the ineptitude of Government at all levels.  People had thought they did not have to worry about climate, that insurance and their Government would take care of it.  Hurricane Katrina revealed that there was a big gap between capacity to adapt and the actual political ability to adapt.  Even knowing that New Orleans could be hit by such a big hurricane, and that it had been hit by a pretty big hurricane 40 years ago, there was still inadequate preparation and inadequate response.  The limited ability to respond was so visible and so apparent. 

Hurricane Katrina “is a big metaphor for what is going to happen in the future,” he said.  People who did not have cars could not drive out of town, for instance.  A lot of lessons could be drawn from that.  Katrina drew people’s attention to that fact that “we’re not protected against or immune to the effects of the climate”.  Even if the hurricane itself had nothing to do with climate change –- and it was not known how much it had to do with climate change -- those images daily on television and in the newspapers had had a very telling effect on people’s psyches. 

He said that the second factor that sparked interest in climate change was the energy price crisis.  People started paying attention to energy security, oil availability, burning fossil fuels, being dependent on fossil fuels, the cost of energy -– that got the solution end of it in people’s minds.  The third factor was the “wonderful work” done by former United States Vice President Al Gore.  All of that worked together to generate a “perfect storm of public interest”, he said.

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