The Big Deal: Breaking the deadlock on global climate change politics
The Copenhagen climate summit could end by breaking a decade long deadlock that has been blocking any real progress on global climate change politics and policy. If that happens, this outcome should not be underrated.
Sergio Abranches
The fundamental issue about large scale risk is the uncertainty about the probability of the chain of events that will trigger the transition from the status quo to another, very different and more hostile, state. The core of climate change risk is this combination of the identification of the possibility of a catastrophic risk and the uncertainty about the likelihood of its realization within a given time frame.
Events with high probabilities are not technically risks. They are dangerous or hazardous events with high probability, hence low uncertainty. Risk emerges out of uncertainty. Harmful unexpected surprises pose a risk worse than well-known, highly likely, dangers. The reason is that uncertainty may breed complacency and inertia, whereas present and visible dangers tend to stimulate preparedness.
As the negative consequences are formidable, that science says there is a small chance it will happen should be reason enough to take strong action to try to prevent it from happening or to reduce its intensity. All controversy about probabilities, model accuracy, data quality is academic and scientific and should not be stopped. It is a prerequisite for the advancement of knowledge. Science advances through doubt and contestation. Certainty stalls scientific inquisitiveness.
At the practical level, however, once the existence of risk is asserted beyond a reasonable doubt, there is ground for action. Societies cannot afford to wait until uncertainty is eliminated to take action against catastrophic risk. They should act under uncertainty to prevent the worst scenarios. A decade long political deadlock has been impeding the world from taking effective global action to face climate risk. The knot is political, not scientific. If the politics is not solved, there will be no incentive to develop innovative policy that meets the scientific requirements to manage global climate risk. No adequate regulatory framework to provide inducements and constraints to the markets to look for new technologies and new patterns of production will be defined without previous global and domestic political accords.
Let’s consider the following quote from Mark New, Diana Liverman and Kevin Anderson’s “Mind the Gap”, just published by Nature:
While adapting to a 2°C temperature rise may mostly involve adjustments of existing practices, a world at 4°C presents large and complex challenges that are likely to require fundamental socioeconomic and technological transformations, rather than adjustments assuming such transformations are achievable through planning at all. Moving from 2 to 4°C would also bring, for any particular location, an accumulating load of increasingly severe impacts. While one or a few impacts considered in isolation may be manageable, a ‘perfect storm’ of multiple severe impacts may be catastrophic.
It is a synthesis of scientific evidence beyond reasonable doubt in spite of an important degree of uncertainty about the specifics – the CRU Hack episode notwithstanding – that points to a catastrophic scenario.
The conclusion is rather straightforward:
The challenges involved in reducing emissions soon and fast enough to have even a small chance of keeping temperatures below 2 °C are much larger than most people realize, requiring unprecedented collective will among the governments of both the developed and developing world. Ongoing climate negotiations offer little to suggest that sufficient collective will currently exists to meet this mitigation challenge. Yet aiming to reduce emissions to keep the average temperature below 2 °C remains a crucial political objective. To try and possibly fail at achieving this goal is better than to renounce the effort, as the larger the gap between the 2 °C target and the final temperature change, the more catastrophic the consequences. The risk of allowing the world to experience 4 °C of warming this century demands both accelerated efforts at effective mitigation and serious planning for adaptation to changes that may be larger than those usually considered.
COP15 is about breaking the political deadlock that is impairing a more consequential global discussion about global policy mitigation and adaptation action. There is a clear imbalance between the politics and the science of climate change. While the science has become clearer over the next decade, the politics has been deadlocked by a decade of denial. The first political step to make the politics of climate change to converge to the scientific requirements for mitigation and adaptation is breaking the deadlock. The Copenhagen summit should focus more on the binary and extraordinarily difficult political operation of switching from “Nay” to “Aye”, from political denial to political engagement.
This shift requires hard political negotiation, facing strong lobbies both domestically and globally by all major developed and developing powers. It will bring about a power shift from old high carbon coalitions to emerging low carbon coalitions. It requires an enormous feat of political engineering. I don’t think we should underestimate the possibility of this happening in Copenhagen. If so, it will be the first and crucial building block for a new political architecture of climate politics.
Tags: Climate Change, climate science, COP15, Copenhagen, globalwarming