Contraction and Convergence: The Global Solution to Climate Change (Schumacher Briefings) - Softcover

Meyer, Aubrey

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1870098943 ISBN 13: 9781870098946

Publisher: Green Books, 2000

Synopsis

This Briefing explains the origins of the climate crisis and describes some of the dangerous trends created by global warming. The global policy framework of 'Contraction & Convergence' (C&C) described was created and introduced to the United Nations in the 1990s by the Global Commons Institute (GCI) to avert these trends. Based on the thesis of 'Equity & Survival', C&C seeks to ensure future prosperity and choice by applying the global rationale of precaution, equity and efficiency in that order. C&C has become the most widely cited and arguably the most widely supported framework proposal in the global debate on what to do about climate change.

About this title

About the Author

Aubrey Meyer was born in Bradford and grew up in South Africa. He first studied music, which lead to a very successful orchestral career, including playing Viola in the London Philharmonic Orchestra in the 1980s. It was while searching for a subject for a musical that he was inspired to join the UK Green Party and then to co-found the Global Commons Institute (GCI) in London. He is a contributor to Feasta – the Dublin-based foundation for the economics of sustainability.

From the Back Cover

The global climate is now visibly changing because of human pollution of the atmosphere. According to eminent scientists and businesspeople, its 'devastating trends' are the greatest challenge ever to face humanity.

This Briefing describes the global policy framework of 'Contraction & Convergence' (C&C), developed by a small organisation called the Global Commons Institute (GCI) to avert these trends. The C&C framework, which has been pioneered and advocated by GCI at the United Nations over the past decade, is based on the thesis of 'Equity and Survival'. It seeks to ensure future prosperity and choice by applying the global rationale of precaution, equity and efficiency in that order.

Many leaders from government, business and environmental organisations now support C&C as a realistic framework within which the international community can take the necessary action to solve the critical problem of climate change.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Contraction & Convergence

The Global Solution to Climate Change

By Aubrey Meyer

UIT Cambridge Ltd

Copyright © 2007 Aubrey Meyer
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-870098-94-6

Contents

Acknowledgements, 
Foreword by James Bruges, 
Author's Note, 
Introduction & Summary, 
Chapter 1 How the Climate Crisis Developed, 
Chapter 2 How the Thesis of 'Equity and Survival' Came About, 
Chapter 3 The Antithesis: The Efficiency of 'No-Regrets', 
Chapter 4 The Synthesis: Contraction & Convergence, 
Chapter 5 The Rising Tide of Support for C&C, 
Chapter 6 Framework versus Guesswork, 
Chapter 7 Looking Back, Seeing Forward, 
Open Letter to World Leaders — please sign, 
References, 
Resources, 

CHAPTER 1

How the Climate Crisis Developed

The Antarctic ice tells the tale well. Samples of the air trapped in cores recovered from drill holes show that the concentration of CO2 in the Earth's atmosphere has varied between 180 and 280 parts per million by volume (ppmv) over the past half a million years. The cores can tell us about the way temperatures changed too, and an analysis of the proportions of the oxygen isotopes O18 and O16 in the trapped air shows that local temperature rose and fell in a pattern that consistently corresponds with the rise and fall of the CO2 concentration.

This does not mean that temperature simply 'followed' CO2 levels up and down. For one thing, we don't know the direction of causation — it might have been that temperature rose and CO2 followed it rather than the other way about. Equally, it might have been that some other factor or factors influenced the rise and fall of both temperature and CO2 levels: other factors were certainly involved. However, the cores show an undeniable but not necessarily exclusive link between temperature and CO2levels.

It would have been surprising had they shown anything else, because the existence of the link between the two is totally noncontroversial. It is a matter of simple physics, and even those who argue that the global warming we have experienced so far is nothing to worry about accept that if emissions go on increasing, concentrations of greenhouse gases must reach the point where they have a dangerous warming effect.

The common feature about all greenhouse gases is that they are opaque to particular frequencies of infrared light — radiant heat — and prevent it being radiated off into outer space. This helps to keep our planet warm. Indeed, without this effect, we would not be here. However, because human activities have increased the level of ghgs in the atmosphere above their natural level, they have increased the opacity of the sky to radiant heat. Solar radiation arrives as ultra-violet and visible light, frequencies not affected by the ghgs, and heat the Earth's surface. This then gives out lower-frequency infrared radiation that is blocked by the ghgs from escaping into space. Instead, it excites the ghg molecules, thus warming the atmosphere and raising global temperature above what it would otherwise be.

Increasingly rapid rates of fossil fuel burning since industrialization began 200 years ago have caused CO2 and other greenhouse gases to be pumped into the global atmosphere as 'waste' at such a high rate that the natural re-absorption and breakdown systems have been unable to cope. The normal equilibrium between the sources of the gases and the 'sinks' which absorb them or break them down has broken down As a result, CO2 levels are now 30% higher than any time registered in the ice-core records and are rising fast. Indeed, the surprising and frightening thing about atmospheric pollution is how recently and rapidly it has come about. There is nothing equivalent in the ice-core record. As late as 1960 we had added only 20 per cent to the pre-industrial level of CO2, but we will be 100 per cent above it as early as 2030 if fossil fuel consumption continues to grow at its present rate. The published literature includes projections up to 200% and even 300% above preindustrial atmospheric CO2 concentration, with temperature trends rising inexorably in consequence (see chart below).

Most scientists and informed observers now regard the links between these rising emissions, concentrations and temperature as being completely beyond dispute and accept that the mean temperature of the planet is rising largely as a result of higher greenhouse gas concentrations. As James Hansen of NASA says, 'There should no longer be an issue about whether global warming is occurring, but what is the rate of warming, what is its practical significance, and what should be done about it.'

These questions are difficult to answer because we don't know exactly what effect this extra heat will have. What we can say, however, is that some of the effects, like a continuing rise in global temperatures, are now unavoidable. Although the extent and pace of this rise are uncertain, many climate scientists put the risks it poses as somewhere between dangerous and catastrophically dangerous. One of their fears is that, rather than changes being gradual, there will be a sudden flip to a new and quite different climate regime. In this, the worst-case scenario, the survival of all but a tiny minority of the human race comes into question.

I am not being alarmist. With the greenhouse effect, every successive study seems to produce more worrying projections than its predecessor because many of them discover powerful positive feedback mechanisms that will accelerate warming rather than slow it. One such positive feedback mechanism was disclosed in November 1998 when the British Government's Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research issued a set of projections that showed that if nothing was done to restrict fossil fuel consumption, the rate at which the world warmed would accelerate because some positive feedbacks kicked in. Average world land temperatures, which have risen by almost 2°C since 1900, would soar by a further 3°C over the next fifty years, the report said. This would be by far the most significant change in the global climate since the end of the last ice age. This refers to temperatures on the land, which warms up more quickly than the sea. The Earth's surface temperature, which obviously includes both land and sea, has risen by just under 1°C.

The report added that this warming would not be uniform. Increases around the poles would be much greater than at the Equator, with northern Russia, northern Canada and Greenland acquiring average temperatures some 6-8°C above their current level. Other workers have come up with similar results. The temperatures in the area from which the ice core samples were taken in Antarctica would rise by 15°C according to the Global Dynamics Institute in Rome, which based its projection on the data the cores themselves provide.

Naturally, a lot of snow and ice would melt if this happened, and the resulting water, coupled with the thermal expansion of the warming seas, would cause sea levels to rise by 21cm. Unless massive defences were built, this rise would put some 78 million people at risk of annual flooding, compared with 10 million in 1990. Indeed, this figure is almost certainly a gross underestimate because the model that produced it does not allow any increase in the number or ferocity of storms, not to mention catastrophic rates of on-land ice-decay in Antarctica, Greenland and elsewhere.

Although the warming would allow trees in the northern hemisphere to grow closer to the pole and thus take up extra carbon dioxide from the air, forests would contract elsewhere and release greenhouse gases as they rotted or burned. Quite soon, the release rate would outweigh the rate of absorption. 'Tropical forests will die back in many areas of northern Brazil. In other areas of the world, tropical grasslands will be transformed into desert or temperate grassland,' the Hadley report says. 'After 2050, as a result of vegetation dieback and change, the terrestrial land surface becomes a source of carbon releasing approximately [10 billion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere each year].' Although this release rate is equivalent to a third of current emission levels and would consequently accelerate warming, the report says that the feedback 'is not yet included in climate models'

A second positive feedback was also left out of the Hadley model because too little is known about it. Huge quantities of methane — a much more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2 — are stored on the seabed and in permafrost, the permanently frozen earth that covers at least a fifth of the planet. The gas is combined with water or ice to form a solid called methane gas hydrate. 'Rising temperatures destabilize the hydrate and cause the emission of methane,' Euan Nisbet of Royal Holloway College, University of London, writes in his book Leaving Eden. 'One of the nightmares of climatologists is that the liberation of methane from permafrost will enhance the Arctic warming because of the greenhouse effect of the methane, and so induce further release of methane and thus increased warming, in a runaway feedback cycle.' He fears that warming will also release methane from hydrate in shallow Arctic seas. 'Any slight warming of the Arctic water will release hydrate from the sea floor sediments almost immediately,' he writes. 'The danger of a thermal runaway caused by methane release from permafrost is minor but real ... The social implications are profound.'

Several other potentially damaging feedbacks were also omitted from the Hadley study. One is that as oceans warm, they become less capable of absorbing carbon dioxide, that therefore builds up in the air more rapidly. A second is that changes in the chemistry of the upper air will affect the rate at which methane — which is relatively short-lived in the atmosphere at present — gets broken down. Taken together, these four effects can only mean that there is a significant risk that warming will spiral out of control during the next century unless greenhouse emissions are drastically reduced.

Although only 70% of the man-made warming effect is due to increases in CO2 levels, it is convenient to treat all the warming as if it was (with two exceptions) all CO2-related, in the sense that it is the direct or indirect result of the consumption of fossil fuels. One exception is the methane from rubbish dumps, rice paddies and cattle farts. Two things can be said about this. One is that there would probably be fewer dumps and cattle if fossil fuels were not used. The other is that the carbon in the methane they give off comes from the decay or digestion of vegetable matter rather than from fossil sources, so it is part of the natural carbon cycle and can be disregarded. True, an increase in cattle numbers or rice cultivation will lead to an increase in the rate at which methane is emitted into the atmosphere. This will cause temperatures to rise until a new equilibrium is reached between the rate at which the methane is broken down in the atmosphere and the higher release rate. As the effect is therefore a one-off, it is the fossil-fuel sources of methane that need our attention. The other exception is the CFCs. While these are already being phased out under the Montreal Protocol to protect the ozone layer, some of the chemicals being introduced to replace them have an even greater warming effect.

James Hansen, the NASA scientist I quoted just now, has recently produced a paper in which he argues that, because the combustion of fossil fuels produces aerosols which reflect incoming solar radiation back into space and these limit the warming caused by the CO2 emitted, we should give priority to making reductions in the emissions of the other ghgs. However, as the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere grows, its heating effect will soon outweigh the cooling effect produced by the aerosols. Hansen recognizes this and says his paper 'does not alter the desirability of limiting CO2. His point about priority is a tactical rather than a strategic one, and Contraction & Convergence is nothing if not a strategy.

Reducing the combustion of fossil fuels by the amount required to stabilize the level of ghgs in the atmosphere is no easy task, for two reasons. One is that the cuts required from industrialized countries are of the order of 80% and that the systems of production and consumption in those countries are so heavily energy-dependent that cuts of this order would require them to be totally transformed. The transport sector would be particularly harshly hit. However, given a long enough period to change systems and to develop comprehensive energy-saving programmes and replacement non-fossil sources of energy, no major problems should arise. It is just a question of will, of being prepared to give up the major subsidy that the use of fossil energy provides for our current activities at the potential cost of our future survival.

The other difficulty is much more fundamental. The graphs below, and the graph at the beginning of Chapter 2, show that there is a remarkably close correlation between the rate of increase in the world's use of fossil energy and the rate of global economic growth.

This link between growth and CO2 emissions presents an enormous problem, because our economic system collapses if economic growth fails to occur. As Richard Douthwaite, who has worked with GCI since its early days, puts it in The Growth Illusion:

What happens in [industrial countries like] Britain or Ireland if the economy does not grow? In both countries, new investment is taking place each year: Britain devotes around 20 per cent of its GNP each year to increasing — not just maintaining — its capital stock, which is the national collection of machines, factories, roads, houses and so on. In Ireland, the equivalent figure is 19 per cent a year. If there is no growth, it means that huge sums — in Britain almost £130,000 million in 1997 — have been spent without generating any return.

The immediate effect is on industry. Firms that have borrowed from their banks or shareholders to expand, find that they have not earned anything extra to pay the additional interest or dividend they are committed to pay and that, because of international competition they cannot restore their margins by inflating their prices. The extra interest payments have to be met out of existing profits, which are consequently reduced, leaving less available for investment from retained earnings the next year. But less investment is needed anyway, since each business has underused capacity created by the current year's unproductive investment. So investment programmes for next year are cut back, causing job losses among builders, machinery suppliers, architects, lawyers and financiers. Naturally, the newly unemployed have less to spend with the businesses that supply them and chain stores, travel agents and garages are forced to make lay-offs too. And so we enter a downward spiral, with no growth leading to an actual depression, not just a year or two of marking time. In our present economic system, the choice is between growth and collapse, not growth and stability. No wonder people want growth so badly.

The fear of an economic collapse is the reason that governments work so closely with businesspeople to ensure that growth continues year after year, regardless of whether or not the increased production itself benefits the majority of the population. In fact, the evidence is that it does not, because an increasing proportion of everything produced has to be consumed by the system itself to keep it running, and thus is not available to go, at least directly, to meet people's needs or to improve the quality of their lives. Professor Herman Daly, who has argued the case for a steady-state, non-growth economy, has pointed out that conventional economic theory would lead one to expect that, at some point, the social and environmental costs of generating economic growth would exceed the benefit it brings. 'I think in fact that growth in the United States now, aggregate growth, is uneconomic because it's increasing costs faster than it's increasing benefits,' he told an audience in Dublin in 1999.

If this is correct in other rich countries — and many studies show that it is — then the only benefit of keeping the growth process going there is that it prevents these economies falling into severe depressions and throwing millions of people out of work. Against this, the fossil energy consumed in order to keep economic depression at bay is already altering the web of life on this planet for all time and threatens to cause a climatic disaster that could cost billions of human lives.

The amount of energy required to keep growing is huge. Professor Malcolm Slesser has shown that roughly half of all the fossil energy consumed is taken up by keeping economies expanding, despite the fact that they may be, by any objective standard, already prosperous enough.

As discussed in more detail in Chapter Three, the UN set up a working group of economists in 1993 to advise the governments of the world on the extent to which they should react to global warming. How much warming was it economic to head off? When I saw the documentation for the conference at which the group was established, it was apparent that the ground rules had already been set and the Canadian secretariat had decided that the real question the economists had to answer was 'how much global warming can we stop without preventing the continuation of economic expansion?'

One of the arguments made for further growth is that it is needed to relieve global poverty, but there is abundant evidence that it is not doing anything of the sort. How could it, given that growth feeds upon itself? What happens is that a country burns more fossil energy in order to grow. This makes it richer, which in turn gives it the resources to become richer still by burning even more fuel and growing again. As Chapter Three will show, under this model, drastic patterns of expansion and divergence have emerged, with the gap between the rich and poor widening both within countries and between them. In 1999, the UNDP's Human Development Report stated that the income gap between the fifth of the world's people living in the richest countries and the fifth in the poorest had grown from 30 to 1 in 1960, rising to 60 to 1 in 1990 and 74 to 1 in 1997. Putting this into a historical context, the gap was only 3 to 1 in 1820, before the large-scale use of fossil fuel began.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Green Books
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1870098943
• ISBN 13: 9781870098946
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 96