Sergio Abranches

The last official preparatory meeting to the Climate Change Convention in Durban is taking place in Panama, since last Saturday. Negotiators will attempt to arrive at feasible drafts to be tabled at the next session of the Climate Convention, COP17, in Durban, South Africa. The signs are that an agreement on the core issues deadlocking conversations is unlikely to happen.

A radical polarization between developed and developing countries emerged since the first preparatory meetings, early this year. This was somehow surprising. COP16, in Cancun, seemed to have restored confidence among parties, and to point towards a more cooperative dialogue. No party or observer would really imagine that a major deal was possible this year, or even next year, especially after the worsening of global economic conditions with a new turn of the financial crisis. But there was some hope that a few meaningful strides would be possible, until conditions were ripe for a final deal.

It seems unlikely that global climate negotiators will be able to solve conflicting views on the core issues that are deadlocking climate talks in this climate of sharp polarization. The present situation seems to indicate that countries have moved backwards to the old veto politics that impeded any significant global climate deal for one decade.

This persistent deadlock threatens the credibility of the Climate Convention (UNFCCC) as the multilateral instrument to negotiate a future, substantive and encompassing global climate deal. A deal that is binding to all major emitters, setting emissions reduction targets that meet the scientific consensus about the minimum levels necessary to achieve relative climate security.

The divide between developed and developing countries seems to have increased over the last months. On the one side developing countries say there will be no broader deal prior to the approval of a second commitment period for the Kyoto Protocol. The first period ends in 2012. Developing countries argue that they are already committed to reduction goals proportionate to their historical obligations, and commitments from developed countries are still lacking.

It is true that the aggregate commitment from developed countries is still behind scientific requirements. The goals set for the United States in Copenhagen are too low for the major developed emitter. There is little  room in most developing countries to implement emissions reduction policies without substantial financial and technological support from developed countries. But this is definitely not true for the larger emerging economies such as China, India, Brazil, Mexico, and several others. These countries are doing less than they could and should, particularly when we take into account their future emissions, and the pace their emissions is increasing as their economies grow.

Insisting on the continuation of the Kyoto Protocol seems increasingly less credible as a strategy to achieve a meaningful global climate deal. The countries that owe more on the side of further commitments to reduce their emissions are all outside it, namely the United States, China, Brazil, India, and a few other G20 members.

It is more plausible to say that their concern is not really with the future of global climate change policy, but with the immediate impact of the first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol ending, without a decision about a second one. The focus of concern is what would happen to the financial and technological cooperation mechanisms under the Protocol and to the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) that allows for investments in emissions reducing ventures in developing countries to be used as offsets by developed countries.

The negotiators for the European Union said, on a press briefing in Panama, that CDM projects would continue to be accepted as offsets within EU’s own cap and trade framework, even if Kyoto Protocol’s commitments are not renewed.

While developing countries insist on placing the Kyoto Protocol on center stage of negotiations, developed countries are playing it down. U.S. chief negotiator, Todd Stern has been clear in all his statements that his country is out of it, and has no intention to approve it in the future. The U.S. stance has not changed in Panama. The representative from Japan reiterated his country will not be a party to a second commitment period. New Zealand said that they remain prepared to take on a second commitment period only in the context of a comprehensive global agreement that contains legally-binding emission reduction targets for all major emitters. Australia’s position is more or less the same, if not a bit more direct in the sense of only accepting a successor to Kyoto that reaches all major emitters at once.

A second commitment period seems far away, unless there is enough progress on the “long-term” negotiations (AWG-LCA) aiming at a concomitant and comparable deal that encompasses all large emitters, developed and emerging, especially those outside the reach of the Kyoto Protocol.  This global deal, however, is nowhere in sight.

The Kyoto Protocol has very few virtues as far as necessary climate change mitigation is concerned. It is the only legal framework we have. It helped to create a carbon market. But, alas, in spite of being legal, it reaches about a third of  the global emissions encompassed by the pledges registered under the Copenhagen Agreement. It is legal, but it is hardly binding, because there is no enforcement mechanism in place. Its compliance instruments are either lacking or too weak to make a difference. If what counts is the moral and political constraints of being a signatory, than it does not differ too much from the Copenhagen Agreement, especially after its main elements were approved into the Climate Change Convention framework in Cancun. The carbon market has so far failed to prove itself as a working mechanism to effectively reduce emissions, and is far from becoming a global institution.

UNFCCC’s executive secretary, Christiana Figueres, reported progress on the design of the Green Climate Fund (GCF) and the Technology Executive Committee (TEC), but she raised concerns about the need for progress on monitoring, review and verification (MRV). She has also said that negotiators are for some time working against the clock under the Kyoto Protocol. On the motivational side, she said that Durban needs to address further commitments for developed countries under the Protocol and the evolution of the mitigation framework under the Convention for developed and developing countries. That is precisely the key for the deadlock.

Informally what is already under negotiation is a transition regime once the first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol ends. The major concern is what will happen to the financial and technological cooperation mechanisms created by the Protocol and with CDM. It doesn’t seem too difficult to foresee that a legal extension of these mechanisms beyond the Protocol’s first commitment period is far more probable to happen than the approval of a meaningful second period. This transition rule and progress on the institutional design of technology cooperation and of the Green Fund seem to be the feasible goals for Durban.

The institutional rules that govern the UN’s decision-making process feeds cross-cutting vetoes and has a clear bias towards the status quo. Usually the only viable exit from a deadlocked status quo is muddling through, or accepting piecemeal, minimal changes at a time. The unanimity rule precludes substantial consensus-based decisions leading to a change of regime. This is particularly true for the global climate change regime. If unanimity is to be enforced in absolute terms, no substantive consensus would be possible in this heterogeneous assembly of 193 countries, that ranges from oil producers to small islands threatened to disappear; from giant emitters, developed and developing, to poor countries that have very low emissions. Some of the smaller emitters show nevertheless a far more consequential disposition to find a new path towards low-carbon development, than most of the fast growing large emitters.

In Copenhagen, the application of the absolute interpretation of the unanimity rule led to the collapse of a deal based on a large consensus among all relevant players. It was defeated by the veto of a handful of ideology-orientated countries, largely peripheral to global politics, and to global climate policy. In Cancun, a more relativistic interpretation of the unanimity rule allowed the waiver of a small minority’s whimsical veto, and the approval of the Cancun Agreements.

If negotiators fail to find a way to solve the gridlock within the next few years, the UNFCCC risks loosing its credibility and legitimacy. It will come to be seen as an irrelevant segment of climate politics, one dominated by diplomatic fencing. The sustainability of the Climate Convention will be in jeopardy. But, much worse, if the logjam extends beyond 2012 the danger increases of the world loosing the possibility of maintaing unavoidable climate change within relatively safe boundaries.

Sergio Abranches

Moving from a high-carbon to a low-carbon economy entails replacing the global energy and industrial high-carbon infrastructure over the next decades. UN’s recent Economic and Social Survey 2011 – The Great Green Technological Transformation estimates replacement costs at $15-$20 trillion, or between one quarter and one third of global income.This is a herculean task. One that has been interpreted more as an insuperable obstacle than as a great opportunity. The cost and magnitude of the shift seems, at first glance, to be a formidable barrier. It takes diverting a large chunk of global savings and investment towards this task. If we do it as fast as science has been asking us to to, we’ll leave unexploited a wealth of high-carbon, relatively low cost resources. But look again. Using these resources represents an unaffordable climatic and environmental cost. The huge mobilization of monetary values to invest in new activities, new materials, new energy sources, new technologies could feed a long boom cycle of economic activity over several decades. Income and profit gains will more than compensate for the cost of replacement. We could start a long cycle of global growth that would add up to one of history’s longer-lasting periods of increasing prosperity.

Because climate change is a global phenomenon, the shift towards a low-carbon economy has to be a global one. It creates distributive risks and advantages. Leaders of several developing and underdeveloped nations argue that it represents a burden they cannot afford. They also say that since they’re not responsible for the GHG emissions that caused the problem, they have no obligation to act. This reasoning corresponds to the “insurmountable obstacle syndrome”. Seeing change as a hindrance impossible to overcome is self-defeating, especially when there is no viable alternative. Besides there is no opting out for anyone.

Obstacles should be viewed as motivations, not deterrents. Rich countries have the opportunity to create an investment dynamic that will by itself be a source of strong job and income creation. Developing and underdeveloped countries have what I call, after Alexander Gerschenkron, the advantages of backwardness. As the UN survey puts it, “developing countries may be able to leapfrog directly to renewable energy sources”. Instead of trying to catch up developed countries through the high-carbon path, they can shortcut to the low-carbon advanced economy.

Read full article here.

We we are on a hazardous route for some time:  exceeding the safe limits of greenhouse gases emissions, pollution and other forms of extracting the planet’s resources as well as throwing the remains of our activities on its atmosphere, water and soil.

Sérgio Abranches

What we take from Earth and what we deposit on the planet environment has been called our footprint. And we know that our footprint has ceased to be sustainable a long time ago.

We have created several imbalances, and they have become increasingly more acute, through an intricate feedback system. Now, Gaia is taking its revenge, James Lovelock has said. Its air is clogging us, water is becoming scarce, soil eroded, dust choking large populations in Asia and Africa, and covering whole villages. And the planet is warming faster than ever.

We know all that. Some don’t want to believe it. Some don’t care. The majority of us are deeply concerned.

A fresh view of this process has just been forwarded by a group of outstanding scientists, including Nobel Laureate Paul Crutzen, plus Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Will Steffen, Katherine Richardson, Jonathan Foley, and the lead author of the paper, Johan Rockström, Executive Director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre.

This new approach, the Journal Nature tells us on a splendid feature article, has been proposed to define preconditions for human development. “Crossing certain biophysical thresholds could have disastrous consequences for humanity”, Nature explains. The authors concluded that “three of nine interlinked [identified and quantified] planetary boundaries have already been overstepped.”

How did they come to their conclusion? An article from the Stockholm Resilience Center, “Tipping towards the unknown”, tells us how. “The scientists first identified the Earth System processes and potential biophysical thresholds, which, if crossed, could generate unacceptable environmental change for humanity”. The thresholds allowed them to identify the “boundaries” that should be respected in order to reduce the risk of crossing them.

Nine planetary boundaries were identified, including climate change, stratospheric ozone, land use change, freshwater use, biological diversity, ocean acidification, nitrogen and phosphorus inputs to the biosphere and oceans, aerosol loading and chemical pollution.

The authors “estimate that humanity has already transgressed three planetary boundaries: for climate change, biodiversity loss and changes to the global nitrogen cycle.” Moreover, “planetary boundaries are interdependent, because transgressing one may both shift the position of, or result in transgressing, other boundaries.” The study contends that “social impacts of transgressing boundaries will be a function of the social-ecological resilience of the affected societies.”

As they say, in the summary of the research paper, “Planetary Boundaries: Exploring the safe operating space for humanity”, the “concept of ‘planetary boundaries’ lays the groundwork for shifting our approach to governance and management, away from the essentially sectoral analyses of limits to growth aimed at minimizing negative externalities, towards the estimation of the safe space for human development.” These planetary boundaries define, the ‘planetary playing field’ for humanity, “if we want to be sure of avoiding major human-induced environmental change on a global scale.”

The authors conclude saying that: “There is little doubt, that the complexities of interconnected slow and fast processes and feedbacks in the Earth System provide humanity with a challenging paradox. On the one hand these dynamics underpin the resilience that enables planet Earth to stay within a state conducive to human development. On the other hand they lull us into a false sense of security, because incremental change can lead to the unexpected crossing of thresholds that drive the Earth System (…) abruptly into states deleterious or even catastrophic to human well-being. The concept of planetary boundaries provides a framework for humanity to operate within this paradox.”

Extraordinary innovative, ground-breaking study. A recommended read.

Sergio Abranches

Obama’s election was, after all, mostly like every other presidential race in the US. A business as usual election of a business as usual administration. So says Princeton’s political scientist Larry M. Bartels.

Sergio Abranches

What if we are living now at the edge of tremendous changes and breakthroughs that will lead the humankind to evolve faster than ever along the twenty-first century? What if we are at the edge of a tipping-point in the history of humankind?

Mathematician and sci-fi writer Vernor Vinge wrote, back in 1993, that acceleration of technological progress has taken us to “the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth.”  Vinge, one of the first writers to envisage cyberspace, wrote on an essay for NASA in 1993, later published by the Whole Earth Review, that the cause of this sweeping change would be “the imminent creation by technology of entities with greater than human intelligence.” He called this tipping point a singularity.

A singularity, in physics, in astronomy, is where the laws of physics as we know them break down. My friend Ulisses Leitão, professor of Physics and Linux evangelist, tells me that the greatest singularity, is the Big Bang moment: “density would be so high, tending to infinity, that present Physics would not be able to describe its physical behavior. It would require a unified theory of all fundamental forces of Nature: electromagnetic, strong nuclear, weak nuclear and gravitational. A theory encompassing Quantum Physics (small dimensions), Relativistic (high energy), and Universal Gravitation (large distances). “This theory doesn’t exist, we’ve been searching for it for the last 60 years…” If the search is possible, i.e. if we have the tools to search for it, than, in the long run, the theory is possible. That’s the point to me.

Vinge thinks that technological singularity means a moment beyond which huge, but unpredictable, changes occur, as John Hind explains on an article for the Guardian, in 2002. On his original presentation of singularity, Vernor Vinge said that “when greater-than-human intelligence drives progress, that progress will be much more rapid.” He went even farther: “there seems no reason why progress itself would not involve the creation of still more intelligent entities, on a still-shorter time scale.” That is thinking as creatively about the future as possible.

Envisaging inevitable surprises we can anticipate without ever knowing in advance their consequences to us, as Peter Schwartz proposes in his 2003 book Inevitable Surprises: Thinking Ahead in a Time of Turbulence, is also about creative thinking. They are two different and equally valid ways of thinking about a “history” for the future that is boldly visionary and technically sound.

Inevitable surprises we can anticipate, as hypothesized by Peter Schwartz, are not in contradiction with the possibility that we are plunging into a singularity, a whirlpool of vertiginous change. The former tells us about changes we can anticipate, but not know its consequences. The latter tells about a tipping point after which change will accelerate beyond imagining to arrive at a quantum leap on human evolution that goes beyond everything we’ve known so far.

The difference is that one way of thinking points to the possibility of anticipating the changes that could create the means for the emergence of singularity. The other invites us to try to anticipate the broader consequences of these events. To look at the time, Vinge invites us, “where our old models must be discarded and a new reality rules.” From the human point of view this change will be “a throwing away of all the previous rules, perhaps in the blink of an eye, an exponential runaway beyond any hope of control.”

Can you imagine how much controversy this idea has created in the academic and intellectual circles more than 15 years ago? Reaction to the singularity hypothesis was widespread. Supporters have also multiplied. Social scientist Robin Hanson once collected several comments on Vinge’s singularity. One comment has direct implications for the whole idea of looking into the future: it stated that nothing is certain, we’re always dealing with hypothesis. Nick Bostrom, director of the Future of Humanity Institute said that he did not “regard the singularity as being a certainty, just one of the more likely scenarios”.

Singularity has raised controversy since the first time Vernor Vinge used the idea, fictionally and rather diffusely, on a novel, Marooned In Real Time. On the story, a character says, at a certain point of the plot: “It was the Singularity, a place where extrapolation breaks down and new models must be applied. And those new models are beyond our intelligence.” It is a breaking point, a paradigm shift beyond the concepts we’re used to. Similar to the passage from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment.

It is easy to understand why all the controversy. We are talking about two orders of unknowns and neither is really easy to look into. The future is an entertaining idea until we start to realize it points to our ineluctable finitude. We have to make ourselves comfortable with the idea of looking beyond ourselves and our beloved ones. Singularity radicalizes this vision. It points beyond human dominance in the universe. Not comfortable at all. Ray Kurzweil and several others took this idea much further, into the real of transhumanism. But that’s far beyond my view.

Stewart Brand has a point worth recalling in his The Clock of the Long Now: time is asymmetrical to us. We can see the past but we can’t change it. Yet we still argue about the past, I’d add. We cannot see the future, he continues, but we can influence it. He is not implying we can control the way future events will unfold. It is not about trying to control the future, but trying to give it, i.e. to future generations, the tools to help itself.

Isn’t that precisely what we are trying to do about climate change? We know, or most of us know, we cannot control natural laws. There is very little we can do with the tools we have today about the amount of GHG we’ve already sent to our atmosphere, or the global warming we’ve already bought with the carbon we’ve emitted so far. We can develop tools to adapt human society to these very likely events, though. We can develop tools and the required means of governance to reduce future emissions and avoid worst case scenarios.

None of these challenges is about certainty, about knowing beyond any doubt. Certainty will always fall within the realm of our finitude. It is about uncertainty, risk, chances we should no take. We can estimate probabilities and educatedly guess probable consequences. To do that we must look into the future, and doing it with art, creativity, imagination and boldness helps a lot. Worst than to reveal good and bad things that might be brewing in our future, would be to make these views dull and obvious.

I, for myself, as far as climate change is concerned, would rather be warned of risk greater than what is most likely to happen than to be informed of risk that might fall short of probable outcomes. The same is true for me regarding the future history of this century. I’d rather think that humankind will have overcome its frailties, brutality and insensitiveness; learn solidarity to the sufferings of those different from oneself; domesticate the propensity of the powerful to oppression and of the rich to amass far more wealth they can manage; than to imagine it will be all the same in 2100.

There is a tipping point looming on the horizon of our future. It may not have anything to do with Vinge’s singularity. We can only be sure of one thing: change will be overwhelming and our old models will have to be discarded, a new reality will rule.

“It is almost halfway through the rainy season, and the monsoon in many parts of South Asia continues to remain unreliable. In some places it has been crippling weak, while in others it has been devastatingly intense.”

Reading this report by BBC News’ environmental reporter Navin Singh Khadka (here), I remembered a paper by a group of scientists headed by Thimothy Lenton, of the School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia, and Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, “Tipping elements in the Earth’s climate system”, published at the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, PNAS, early last year (here). There, the authors draw on the pertinent literature and the results of an international workshop to evaluate “policy-relevant tipping elements in the climate system”, in order to “compile a short list.” They also try to assess where their tipping points lie. Tipping points are critical thresholds at which a tiny perturbation can qualitatively alter the state or development of a system. They introduced another term, “tipping element” to describe large-scale components of the Earth system that may pass a tipping point.

Among these tipping elements, they listed the Indian summer monsoon as an element that could be rapidly destabilized, starting to display a more erratic pattern oscillating between extremes of weakness and strength. The other element that could pass the tipping point later on would be the Sahara/Sahel and West African Monsoon.

One of the uncertainties pointed out by the paper was whether the Sahara and surrounding regions would become drier or wetter. A story from National Geographic sent to me by biologist Fabio Olmos, who also called my attention to the BBC News report, points to the second hypothesis. It says that “scientists are now seeing signals that the Sahara desert and surrounding regions are greening due to increasing rainfall.” (here)

It seems that actual events are pointing to approaching climate tipping points.