Suhaly Bautista Professor Kamal New York University October 12, 2009 NYUUNSBA2
PLANETARY EMERGENCY: CLIMATE CHANGE INTRODUCTION The purpose of the following report is to identify, explain and analyze one of the most critical and urgent planetary emergencies of the twentyfirst century: climate change. We will then analyze the significance of climate change within the scope of the international community, the impacts of human activity on the environment and the relevance of this issue to the United Nations (UN). FACTS Before achieving a comprehensive understanding of climate change, we must first familiarize ourselves with some key terms and their meanings: climate, climate change, greenhouse gases, global warming and the greenhouse effect. Climate is how we describe the aggregated total of all the weather occurring over a period of years in any given place or region. Climate may include average weather conditions, regular weather sequences (i.e. seasons: winter, spring, summer, and fall), and specific weather events (i.e. tornadoes and floods). For example, we may describe the climate of New Orleans, Louisiana as “humid.” Climate change is the variation in the distribution of weather over a certain period of time. This variation may refer to changes over a particular region and/or the Earth and often take a very long time to occur. While weather will change quickly (from sunny to rainy), climate may take thousands of years to change (from humid to snowy for example). Climate change in a modernday context refers to the severe impacts of global warming on the Earth that are caused by increased levels of heat trapping greenhouse gases (principally carbon dioxide, methane and ozone) in the atmosphere. A greenhouse gas is any gas that absorbs infrared radiation in the atmosphere and thus traps in the heat of the sun, contributing to the warming of the planet. The most harmful and abundant greenhouse gas is carbon dioxide. Global warming is the increase in the average temperature of Earth’s surface, air and oceans. The greenhouse effect tells us that greenhouse gases make the Earth warmer by trapping the energy of the sun inside of the Earth’s atmosphere, working in the same way as a greenhouse for plants. “Sunlight enters the Earth's atmosphere, passing through the blanket of greenhouse gases. As it reaches the Earth's surface, land, water, and biosphere absorb the sunlight’s energy. Once absorbed, this energy is sent back into the atmosphere. Some of the energy passes back into space, but much of it remains trapped in the atmosphere by the greenhouse gases, causing our world to heat up.” 1 What does this all mean? The bottom line in the climate change dialogue is that the Earth has warmed over one degree Fahrenheit over the past 100 years. While this may not seem like a significant increase, this one degree has caused significant and devastating effects on the human population and the environment we occupy unlike anything the Earth has experienced in its approximately 4.5 billion years of existence. A gradual increase in temperature, even by a fraction of a degree, has major consequences for people, animals, plants and weather patterns. “The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which includes 2,000 scientists and experts from 154 countries, warned that the damage could be irreversable.”2 The Industrial Revolution (spanning from the 18th19th centuries) played a major role in spurring the human activities that have since added substantially to the level of greenhouse gases we inject into the atmosphere. To run our cars, planes, power plants, machines and factories for example, we burn fossil fuels (i.e. coal and oil), a process which releases heattrapping greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. “The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concludes that most of the observed temperature increase since the middle of the 20th century is caused by increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases resulting from human activity such as fossil fuel burning and deforestation.”2 The fact is that something powerful happened after the Industrial Revolution to cause the warming of the Earth. The eight warmest years on record (since 1850) have all occurred since 1998, with the warmest year being 2005, the same year as Hurricane Katrina. The Industrial Revolution changed the way humans lived, making life much easier for those who could afford it, but the phenomenon also produced catastrophic impacts on the Earth’s climate that are manifesting themselves in many aspects today. The threat of climate change to international security is indisputable. Scientists and other environmental experts may disagree on which specific models to use in order to calculate the more technical calculations regarding climate change, but the facts are shared and constant: sea levels are rising, weather patterns are changing, our oceans are warming and human activity is playing a major role in provoking these effects. As the earth warms, by the increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere, various negative effects have and will continue to take place, including sea level rise (which has risen about six to Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/science/recentcc.html Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) http://www.ipcc.ch/
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eight inches worldwide in the last 100 years), the melting of glaciers, the extinctions of species and ecosystems, the expansion of deserts, unpredictable precipitation patterns and extreme weather conditions across the world. The effect of climate change on the international community is acutely apparent, especially when we consider episodes such as Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005 or the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. These events do not simply affect the physical Earth but also the human beings that populate the Earth, causing death and destruction without discrimination. The Institute for Environment and Human Security (UNUEHS) claims, “There are at least 20 million environmental refugees worldwide more than those displaced by war and political repression combined.” 3 If the UN in fact aims “to maintain international peace and security,” holding to the mandates of the UN Charter, the international community must respond to this urgent crisis and ensure that the appropriate actions are taken to mitigate the effects of global warming. ANALYSIS The threats produced by climate change are substantial and unpredictable. However, the most important detail with regard to this planetary emergency is that the threats undeniably exist and more importantly that climate change reveals a serious threat to international peace and security, the UN’s principal concern. An event such as rising sea levels poses threats (such as high tidal waves and floods) to any coastal region of the world and puts the security of millions of people at risk. While there is a great debate about the proportion of responsibility that lies with human activity in the emergence of climate change, scientists do agree that wherever the greatest amount of cause may lie, it will produce some serious effects on the greater human population. We cannot think of nature’s reaction to climate change, in the form of hurricanes and tsunamis for example, as isolated incidents in our history. These events are not unrelated. “Globally, more than 2.5 billion people were affected by floods, earthquakes, hurricanes and other natural disasters between 1994 and 2003, a 60 percent increase over the previous two 10year periods, U.N. officials report.”1 Nature is responding viciously to human actions such as deforestation and fossil fuel burning. Climate change is not the warming of the earth alone, which in isolation would produce devastating effects such as transforming tropical regions into deserts. This issue translates into water and food shortages, the spread of disease, migration emergencies and the destruction of our habitats to name just some of the comprehensive global consequences. It is now the duty of the international community, seeing that all nations are or will ultimately be affected by climate change, to respond with urgency to this emergency and discontinue the practices destroying the planet. “In 2007, the IPCC published a report which stated that there will be serious consequences unless we act: rising sea levels; more frequent and less predictable floods—that will put millions of people in low lying regions at risk—severe droughts; famine, particularly in Africa and Central Asia; and the loss of up to a third of our plant and animal species. Diseases such as malaria and dengue fever will be spread more easily.”2 Because this is not simply a regional issue, affecting only one people or nation, we must act together, by means of the UN to affect global change with regard to this issue. Despite the sweeping responsibility of all global actors, there are main contributors to climate change and particularly to green house gas pollution, the top two countries being the United States and China (P5 nations). It is the duty of these nations to use their power within the Security Council to begin the process of modeling the actions necessary for reversing climate change and not to flex their muscles to continue polluting the Earth’s atmosphere for consumption. What can we do? “The available options are mitigation to reduce further emissions; adaptation to reduce the damage caused by warming; and, more speculatively, geoengineering to reverse global warming.”1 Whether by one, all, or a combination of these options, we need to deal with climate change immediately and as a cohesive whole, which is most greatly represented by the UN. Should we fail to do this, the consequences would be serious and farreaching and those people with the last capacity to adapt (developing countries and the poor for example) will suffer first and will be the worst affected. CONCLUSION Time is running out. While climate change hastily runs its course and humans continue to accelerate the rate of global warming, global leaders with the power to make serious changes are wasting time debating whether global warming is in fact happening instead of seeking the appropriate responses to mitigate the effects of a phenomenon that has already been scientifically accepted as fact. International leaders need to stop making excuses in order to continue engaging in the actions that are contributing to climate change. Instead, the UN, as an international authority, must step in to mandate immediate action by each member state regarding this issue and even take measures to impose consequences for those nations that do not comply. In 1992, The UN adopted the Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), outlining the critical steps to dealing with global warming. However, nations are not serious enough about the UNFCC to make the types of commitments that would yield observable change. Furthermore, nations benefiting from the byproducts of global warming (gasoline companies and factories for example) are even more hesitant to halt their actions. The global community needs to make far more binding commitments, and hold to them, in order for us to begin to reverse the effects of climate change. Also, member states must be accountable to one another for any destructive action taken on by a nation. The role of the UN is to place utmost
The Institute for Environment and Human Security (UNUEHS) http://www.ehs.unu.edu/
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importance on this issue and begin having more solid and demanding expectations on its member states, particularly those contributing most heavily to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The Kyoto Protocol is an attempt at creating more serious checks on climate change. It is an international agreement, placing heavy burden on developed nations, with binding targets for 37 industrialized countries for reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The Kyoto Protocol was adopted in Kyoto, Japan, on 11 December 1997 and entered into force on 16 February 2005. 184 parties have ratified its Protocol to date. This past September 2009, world leaders met to discuss the necessary steps to combat climate change. United States President, Barack Obama addressed the summit on climate change and pledged the full commitment of the United States to a global response. Unless these types of bold commitments are followed by subsequent action leading to reductions in global GHG emissions, we will continue along our current spiral towards imminent climate disasters. IMAGE A
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