BERLIN - Delivering the latest stark news about climate change, a United Nations panel on Sunday warned that governments are not doing enough to avert profound risks in coming decades. But the experts found a silver lining: Not only is there still time to head off the worst, but the political will to do so also seems to be rising around the world.
In a report unveiled in Berlin, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that decades of foot-dragging by political leaders has propelled humanity into a critical situation, with greenhouse emissions rising faster than ever. Although it remains technically possible to keep planetary warming to a tolerable level, the goal can be achieved only through an intensive push over the next 15 years to bring those emissions under control, the committee found.
“We cannot afford to lose another decade,” said Ottmar Edenhofer, a German economist and co-chairman of the committee that wrote the report. “If we lose another decade, it becomes extremely costly to achieve climate stabilization.”
Ambitious action is becoming more affordable, the committee found. It is increasingly clear that measures such as tougher building codes and efficiency standards for cars and trucks can save energy and reduce emissions without harming people’s quality of life, the panel found. And the report said the costs of renewable energy like wind and solar power are falling so fast that deployment on a large scale is becoming practical.
Moreover, since the intergovernmental panel issued its last major report in 2007, more countries, states and cities have adopted climate plans, a measure of the growing political interest in tackling the problem. They include China and the United States, which are both doing more domestically than they have been willing to commit to in international treaty negotiations.
Yet the report found that the emissions problem is still outrunning the determination to tackle it, with atmospheric carbon-dioxide levels rising almost twice as fast in the first decade of this century as they did in the last decades of the 20th century. That reflects a rush to use coal-fired power plants in developing countries that are climbing up the income scale, especially China, while wealthier countries are making only slow progress in cutting their high emissions, the report said.
The report is likely to increase the pressure to secure an ambitious new global climate treaty that is supposed to be completed in late 2015 and take effect in 2020. But the divisions between wealthy countries and poorer countries that are making such a treaty difficult, and have long bedeviled international climate talks, were on display again in Berlin.
Some developing countries insisted on stripping charts from the report’s executive summary that could have been read as requiring greater effort from them, while wealthier countries - including the United States - struck out language that might have been seen as implying that they needed to write big checks to the developing countries. Both points survived in the full version of the report but were deleted from a synopsis meant to inform the world’s top political leaders.
“This report brings out the need for an unprecedented level of international cooperation,” said Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the panel.
The report does not prescribe the actions that governments need to take. But it makes clear that putting a price on emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, either through taxes or the sale of emission permits, is a fundamental approach that could help redirect investment toward climate-friendly technologies.
The panel said large changes in investments would be required. Fossil fuel investments in the power sector would drop about $30 billion annually while investments in low-carbon sources would grow by $147 billion. Meanwhile, annual investments in energy efficiency in transport, buildings and industry sectors would grow by $336 billion.
The International Energy Agency estimated last year that the power industry needs to invest $17 trillion from 2013 through 2035 to satisfy rising electricity demand. Investments made now in new fossil fuel-fired plants have implications for future emissions because they last for decades, the agency said.
“After the boom of coal in the last decade, the 21st century is now the century of renewable energies,” said Martin Kaiser, climate policy analyst at the environmental group Greenpeace. “That means a transition period of 20 to 30 years. That has to be organized and has to come quickly.”
The report warns that if greater efforts to cut emissions do not begin soon, future generations seeking to limit or reverse climate damage will have to depend on technologies that permanently remove greenhouse gases from the air; in effect, they will be trying to undo the damage caused by the people of today.
But these technologies do not exist on any appreciable scale, the report said, and there is no guarantee that they will be available in the future, much less that they will be affordable.
The researchers said emissions growth accelerated to an average of 2.2 percent a year for the 2000-10 period from an annual 1.3 percent the previous three decades. The panel warned that the longer countries delayed aggressive action, the more difficult it would be to limit global warming to the level that the international community has agreed to, namely a rise in the global average temperature of no more than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit above the preindustrial level.
Without additional measures to contain emissions, global temperatures will rise about 5 degrees to 7 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100 compared with current levels, the panel said.
Global greenhouse gas emissions would have to be lowered between 40 percent and 70 percent by mid-century from 2010 levels, and to“near-zero” by the end of the century, efforts that would be likely to limit warming to the international goal, the panel said.
The report found that if countries keep stalling on tougher climate rules, trillions of dollars will be invested in coming years in power plants, cars and buildings that use too much energy from fossil fuels. The result, the report said, would be an emissions path that would be almost impossible to alter in time to get to the carbon-pollution levels that scientists think are necessary by 2050.
The authors found that tackling the problem in a serious way would carry high costs, shaving a few hundredths of a percentage point off global economic growth each year. By the end of the century, societies would most likely be far richer than today, but almost 5 percent poorer than they would have been had they not spent the money to protect the climate, according to the study.
“Climate policy is nota free lunch,” Edenhofer said at a news conference Sunday in Berlin.
“The longer we delay, the higher would be the cost,” Pachauri said. “But despite that, the point I’m making is that even now, the cost is not something that’s going to bring about a major disruption of economic systems. It’s well within our reach.”
Against those costs, the economic benefits of acting are essentially impossible to calculate, the report found. The biggest reason is that scientists don’t know how likely it is that unchecked global warming could cause an expensive calamity, such as a rapid melting of ice sheets that would drown the world’s major coastal cities. This and other disasters are distinctly possible, the authors found.
In essence, the committee described money spent fighting climate change as a form of insurance against the most severe potential consequences.
“It is up to the public and up to decision-makers to decide if it is affordable or not,” Edenhofer said.
The report was quickly welcomed in Washington, where President Barack Obama is trying to adopt aggressive climate policies despite congressional opposition. His science adviser, John Holdren, said the report showed that “the longer society waits to implement strong measures to cut greenhouse gas emissions, the more costly and difficult it will become to limit climate change to less than catastrophic levels.”
Secretary of State John Kerry called it a global economic opportunity.
“So many of the technologies that will help us fight climate change are far cheaper, more readily available and better performing than they were when the last IPCC assessment was released less than a decade ago,” Kerry said.
“The IPCC is telling us in no uncertain terms that we are running out of time - but not out of solutions - if we are to avoid the worst effects of climate change,” said Frances Beinecke, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, a Washington-based environmental group. “That requires decisive actions to curb carbon pollution - and an all-out race to embrace renewable sources of energy. History is calling.” Information for this article was contributed by Justin Gillis and Coral Davenport of The New York Times; by Karl Ritter of The Associated Press; and by Alex Morales and Stefan Nicola of Bloomberg News.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 04/14/2014