BERLIN — The advent of every new report from the UN panel on climate change triggers certain rituals. ADVERTISING BERLIN — The advent of every new report from the UN panel on climate change triggers certain rituals. Grim-faced experts flash
BERLIN — The advent of every new report from the UN panel on climate change triggers certain rituals.
Grim-faced experts flash power point presentations on the wall, with graphics and tables that hammer home the same point: If humanity doesn’t get serious about preventing global warming, things will get exponentially worse and costly.
On Sunday in Berlin, a working group of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will tell the world how it could reduce greenhouse gases to keep temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius.
It has been seven years since the panel released its last trio of reports.
The report will follow one released in September that reinforced the scientific reasons for climate change — human activity. In March, a second report projected the impacts: Devastation of homes, property, food, water and human migration.
Now it will be up to the third working group to say how to fix it.
A focus of the new report will be how to reduce greenhouse emissions. The main culprit is carbon dioxide (CO2), produced mainly by the burning of fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas. The consequences are polar and glacial ice melt, rising sea levels, extreme weather.
For the first time in the IPCC’s 25 years, the report of working group three will include a separate chapter on finance and investments, one of the report’s authors told dpa.
“I expect this to be really instrumental in fostering more action, more ambition,” Benoit Lefevre said.
He noted successes in places like Mexico, where the wind power industry over eight years grew from two small projects to a huge industry with annual investments of $1.14 billion. A big factor was money from special green funds that provided confidence to private investors.
The problem is finding the money to do more of the same.
Of the estimated $5 trillion in annual global capital investments, only a trickle currently goes into green projects — about $360 billion, according to the Climate Policy Initiative.
In fact, what is needed is all of that global investment plus $700 billion — or $5.7 trillion total — to be funneled into green projects, if the world is to avoid catastrophe, according to the World Economic Forum.
“The idea is to shift what’s going into ‘brown’ to go into ‘green,’ ” Lefevre said.
He said he is optimistic that solutions can be found.
“What I expect this report to say, to show, is that it’s possible to stay below 2 degrees,” he said. “I expect this report to outline how to do this.”
The challenge is daunting. Even if every country delivers on its pledge to reduce emissions, the world will be 18 to 20 percent behind where it needs to be by 2020, Lefevre noted.
A quick check at the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center shows how emissions rocketed since 1960. In 2013, the largest amount of emissions ever — 36 billion tons — was recorded, a fact that sets even the most sober of scientists into sighs of despair.
The international wrangling at pricey climate conferences since Kyoto in 1997 has led nowhere. The next hope — albeit small — is Paris 2015, which is hoped to produce a treaty in which not only industrialized nations but also developing and emerging economies pledge to reductions.
One of the biggest challenges is bridging the long stretch of time between investments in immediate action and seeing possible results, says Oliver Geden from the Wissenschaft und Politik foundation.
“That is a new concept for political action,” he said. Reducing carbon emissions in the atmosphere is quite different from closing the ozone hole. In the latter case, the damaging chlorofluorocarbons could be replaced with existing substances, maintaining the profit advantages for the producers.
“On the other hand, reducing carbon dioxides will directly intervene with the entire economic structure,” Geden said.
Among the options are decarbonizing transport, storing CO2 in underground sinks, producing fuel through biomass and creating a functioning global carbon trade market. Each has its downsides.
“I’m a realistic optimist,” said Elmar Kriegler from the Potsdam Institute for climate research, who worked on the report. “The next 20 years are decisive.”
