The truth just got more inconvenient

Nuala Moran, Senior Editor.

This was the optimistic note struck by James McCarthy, President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), as he opened the annual meeting in Chicago last week. There was a palpable sense of relief amongst those gathered in the city, as the scientific establishment emerged from eight years in which its evidence was doubted or ignored, and its contribution to policy and good governance restricted.

So the only way is up. A good job too, because as the AAAS also heard, the mountain just got higher.

On the back of rampant economic expansion in China, India and elsewhere, there has been a rapid increase in the use of fossil fuels, in particular coal, since 2000. Chris Field of Stanford University, one the leading experts on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) told the meeting that this has set in train feedback loops that could cause significant upsets in the global climate.

The unsettling fact is that global warming inputs are now, “beyond anything we’ve considered seriously in climate model simulations.” It’s pretty scary that in all the ‘what ifs’ the IPCC has assessed, it has worked on less threatening data sets than the one that actually confronts us.

In its latest assessment published in 2007, the IPCC forecast average global temperatures would rise by between 1.1 degrees centigrade to 6.4 degrees centigrade by 2100. But the figure of 6.4 degrees centigrade is based on lower emissions of carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases than is, in fact, the case. Field said that given the increase in emissions the 2007 forecast “seriously underestimated” the potential severity of global warming.

The dire prognosis was echoed by former US vice president Al Gore, who gave a revised and yet more worrying presentation of the data in his film, An Inconvenient Truth. Gore acknowledged his debt to scientists, including McCarthy, who have framed and informed his campaign against climate change. And he added a plea to his audience of 1,600 American scientists to become politically engaged in the “historic struggle” against climate change, saying, “Scientists can no longer accept a division between the work you do and the civilisation you live in.”

Critics of Gore hold that he is long on prognostication and short on solutions. Now he is suggesting three solutions for the price of one, calling for the development of clean and sustainable energy technologies to replace the use of fossil fuels. That, he said was the “single thread”, that would simultaneously solve the crisis of dependence on foreign oil imports, the crisis of global warming and the economic crisis.

Europe too, faces these crises. It’s time to join in a concerted push on clean tech here as well.