100 months and counting ..
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/aug/01/climatechange.carbonemissions


The final countdown
http://current.com/items/89158651_100_months_to_save_the_world_before_irreversib\
le_environmental_disaster


Time is fast running out to stop irreversible climate change, a group
of global warming experts warns today. We have only 100 months to
avoid disaster. Andrew Simms explains why we must act now - and where
to begin


If you shout "fire" in a crowded theatre, when there is none, you
understand that you might be arrested for irresponsible behaviour and
breach of the peace. But from today, I smell smoke, I see flames and I
think it is time to shout. I don't want you to panic, but I do think
it would be a good idea to form an orderly queue to leave the building.

Because in just 100 months' time, if we are lucky, and based on a
quite conservative estimate, we could reach a tipping point for the
beginnings of runaway climate change. That said, among people working
on global warming, there are countless models, scenarios, and
different iterations of all those models and scenarios. So, let us be
clear from the outset about exactly what we mean.

The concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere today, the
most prevalent greenhouse gas, is the highest it has been for the past
650,000 years. In the space of just 250 years, as a result of the
coal-fired Industrial Revolution, and changes to land use such as the
growth of cities and the felling of forests, we have released,
cumulatively, more than 1,800bn tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere.
Currently, approximately 1,000 tonnes of CO2 are released into the
Earth's atmosphere every second, due to human activity. Greenhouse
gases trap incoming solar radiation, warming the atmosphere. When
these gases accumulate beyond a certain level - often termed a
"tipping point" - global warming will accelerate, potentially beyond
control.

Faced with circumstances that clearly threaten human civilisation,
scientists at least have the sense of humour to term what drives this
process as "positive feedback". But if translated into an office
workplace environment, it's the sort of "positive feedback" from a
manager that would run along the lines of: "You're fired, you were
rubbish anyway, you have no future, your home has been demolished and
I've killed your dog."

In climate change, a number of feedback loops amplify warming through
physical processes that are either triggered by the initial warming
itself, or the increase in greenhouse gases. One example is the
melting of ice sheets. The loss of ice cover reduces the ability of
the Earth's surface to reflect heat and, by revealing darker surfaces,
increases the amount of heat absorbed. Other dynamics include the
decreasing ability of oceans to absorb CO2 due to higher wind
strengths linked to climate change. This has already been observed in
the Southern Ocean and North Atlantic, increasing the amount of CO2 in
the atmosphere, and adding to climate change.

Because of such self-reinforcing positive feedbacks (which, because of
the accidental humour of science, we must remind ourselves are, in
fact, negative), once a critical greenhouse concentration threshold is
passed, global warming will continue even if we stop releasing
additional greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. If that happens, the
Earth's climate will shift into another, more volatile state, with
different ocean circulation, wind and rainfall patterns. The
implications of which, according to a growing litany of research, are
potentially catastrophic for life on Earth. Such a change in the state
of the climate system is often referred to as irreversible climate change.

So, how exactly do we arrive at the ticking clock of 100 months? It's
possible to estimate the length of time it will take to reach a
tipping point. To do so you combine current greenhouse gas
concentrations with the best estimates for the rates at which
emissions are growing, the maximum concentration of greenhouse gases
allowable to forestall potentially irreversible changes to the climate
system, and the effect of those environmental feedbacks. We followed
the latest data and trends for carbon dioxide, then made allowances
for all human interferences that influence temperatures, both those
with warming and cooling effects. We followed the judgments of the
mainstream climate science community, represented by the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), on what it will take
to retain a good chance of not crossing the critical threshold of the
Earth's average surface temperature rising by 2C above pre-industrial
levels. We were cautious in several ways, optimistic even, and perhaps
too much so. A rise of 2C may mask big problems that begin at a lower
level of warming. For example, collapse of the Greenland ice sheet is
more than likely to be triggered by a local warming of 2.7C, which
could correspond to a global mean temperature increase of 2C or less.
The disintegration of the Greenland ice sheet could correspond to a
sea-level rise of up to 7 metres.

In arriving at our timescale, we also used the lower end of threats in
assessing the impact of vanishing ice cover and other carbon-cycle
feedbacks (those wanting more can download a note on method from
onehundredmonths.org). But the result is worrying enough.

We found that, given all of the above, 100 months from today we will
reach a concentration of greenhouse gases at which it is no longer
"likely" that we will stay below the 2C temperature rise threshold.
"Likely" in this context refers to the definition of risk used by the
IPCC. But, even just before that point, there is still a one third
chance of crossing the line.

Today is just another Friday in August. Drowsy and close. Office
workers' minds are fixed on the weekend, clock-watching, waiting
perhaps for a holiday if your finances have escaped the credit crunch
and rising food and fuel prices. In the evening, trains will be
littered with abandoned newspaper sports pages, all pretending
interest in the football transfers. For once it seems justified to
repeat TS Eliot's famous lines: "This is the way the world ends/Not
with a bang but a whimper."

But does it have to be this way? Must we curdle in our complacency and
allow our cynicism about politicians to give them an easy ride as they
fail to act in our, the national and the planet's best interest? There
is now a different clock to watch than the one on the office wall.
Contrary to being a counsel of despair, it tells us that everything we
do from now matters. And, possibly more so than at any other time in
recent history.

It tells us, for example, that only a government that was sleepwalking
or in a chemically induced coma would countenance building a third
runway at Heathrow, or a new generation of coal-fired power stations
such as the proposed new plant at Kingsnorth in Kent. Infrastructure
that is fossil-fuel-dependent locks in patterns of future greenhouse
gas emissions, radically reducing our ability to make the short- to
medium-term cuts that are necessary.

Deflecting blame and responsibility is a great skill of officialdom.
The most common strategies used by government recently have been
wringing their hands and blaming China's rising emissions, and telling
individuals to, well, be a bit more careful. On the first get-out, it
is delusory to think that countries such as China, India and Brazil
will fundamentally change until wealthy countries such as Britain take
a lead. And it is wildly unrealistic to think that individuals alone
can effect a comprehensive re-engineering of the nation's
fossil-fuel-dependent energy, food and transport systems. The
government must lead.

In their inability to take action commensurate with the scale and
timeframe of the climate problem, the government is mocked both by
Britain's own history, and by countries much smaller, poorer and more
economically isolated than we are.

The challenge is rapid transition of the economy in order to live
within our environmental means, while preserving and enhancing our
general wellbeing. In some important ways, we've been here before, and
can learn lessons from history. Under different circumstances, Britain
achieved astonishing things while preparing for, fighting and
recovering from the second world war. In the six years between 1938
and 1944, the economy was re-engineered and there were dramatic cuts
in resource use and household consumption. These coincided with rising
life expectancy and falling infant mortality. We consumed less of
almost everything, but ate more healthily and used our disposable
income on what, today, we might call "low-carbon good times".

A National Savings Movement held marches, processions and displays in
every city, town and village in the country. There were campaigns to
Holiday at Home and endless festivities such as dances, concerts,
boxing displays, swimming galas, and open-air theatre - all organised
by local authorities with the express purpose of saving fuel by
discouraging unnecessary travel. To lead by example, very public
energy restrictions were introduced in government and local authority
buildings, shops and railway stations. This was so successful that the
results beat cuts previously planned in an over-complex rationing
scheme. The public largely assented to measures to curb consumption
because they understood that they were to ensure "the fairest possible
distribution of the necessities and comforts of daily life".

Now, 2008, we face the fallout from the credit crisis, high oil and
rising food prices, and the massive added challenge of having to avert
climate change.

Does a war comparison sound dramatic? In April 2007, Margaret Beckett,
then foreign secretary, gave a largely overlooked lecture called
Climate Change: The Gathering Storm. "It was a time when Churchill,
perceiving the dangers that lay ahead, struggled to mobilise the
political will and industrial energy of the British Empire to meet
those dangers. He did so often in the face of strong opposition," she
said. "Climate change is the gathering storm of our generation. And
the implications - should we fail to act - could be no less dire: and
perhaps even more so."

In terms of what is possible in times of economic stress and
isolation, Cuba provides an even more embarrassing example to show up
our national tardiness. In a single year in 2006 Cuba rolled-out a
nationwide scheme replacing inefficient incandescent lightbulbs with
low-energy alternatives. Prior to that, at the end of the cold war,
after losing access to cheap Soviet oil, it switched over to growing
most of its food for domestic consumption on small scale, often urban
plots, using mostly low-fossil-fuel organic techniques. Half the food
consumed in the capital, Havana, was grown in the city's own gardens.
Cuba echoed and surpassed what America achieved in its push for
"Victory Gardening" during the second world war. Back then, led by
Eleanor Roosevelt, between 30-40% of vegetables for domestic
consumption were produced by the Victory Gardening movement.

So what can our own government do to turn things around today? Over
the next 100 months, they could launch a Green New Deal, taking
inspiration from President Roosevelt's famous 100-day programme
implementing his New Deal in the face of the dust bowls and
depression. Last week, a group of finance, energy and environmental
specialists produced just such a plan.

Addressed at the triple crunch of the credit crisis, high oil prices
and global warming, the plan is to rein in reckless financial
institutions and use a range of fiscal tools, new measures and reforms
to the tax system, such as a windfall tax on oil companies. The
resources raised can then be invested in a massive environmental
transformation programme that could insulate the economy from
recession, create countless new jobs and allow Britain to play its
part in meeting the climate challenge.

Goodbye new airport runways, goodbye new coal-fired power stations.
Next, as a precursor to enabling and building more sustainable systems
for transport, energy, food and overhauling the nation's building
stock, the government needs to brace itself to tackle the City.
Currently, financial institutions are giving us the worst of all
worlds. We have woken to find the foundations of our economy made up
of unstable, exotic financial instruments. At the same time, and
perversely, as awareness of climate change goes up, ever more money
pours through the City into the oil companies. These companies list
their fossil-fuel reserves as "proven" or "probable". A new category
of "unburnable" should be introduced, to fundamentally change the
balance of power in the City. Instead of using vast sums of public
money to bail out banks because they are considered "too big to fail",
they should be reduced in size until they are small enough to fail
without hurting anyone. It is only a climate system capable of
supporting human civilisation that is too big to fail.

Oil companies made profits when oil was $10 a barrel. With the price
now wobbling around $130, there is a huge amount of unearned profit
waiting for a windfall tax. Money raised - in this way and through
other changes in taxation, new priorities for pension funds and
innovatory types of bonds - would go towards a long-overdue massive
decarbonisation of our energy system. Decentralisation, renewables,
efficiency, conservation and demand management will all play a part.

Next comes a rolling programme to overhaul the nation's heat-leaking
building stock. This will have the benefit of massively cutting
emissions and at the same time tackling the sore of fuel poverty by
creating better insulated and designed homes. A transition from "one
person, one car" on the roads, to a variety of clean reliable forms of
public transport should be visible by the middle of our 100 months.
Similarly, weaning agriculture off fossil-fuel dependency will be a
phased process.

The end result will be real international leadership, removing the
excuses of other nations not to act. But it will also leave the people
of Britain more secure in terms of the food and energy supplies, and
with a more resilient economy capable of weathering whatever economic
and environmental shocks the world has to throw at us. Each of these
challenges will draw on things that we already know how to do, but
have missed the political will for.

So, there, I have said "Fire", and pointed to the nearest emergency
exit. Now it is time for the government to lead, and do its best to
make sure that neither a bang, nor a whimper ends the show.

· Andrew Simms is policy director and head of the climate change
programme at NEF (the new economics foundation). The material on
climate models for this article was prepared by Dr Victoria Johnson,
researcher at NEF on climate change. For regular suggestions for what
individuals and groups can do to take action, and links to a wide
range of organisations supporting the focus on the 100 months
countdown, go to: onehundredmonths.org. The Green New Deal can be
downloaded at neweconomics.org