[The greenhouse effect has been worrying responsible world citizens since the 1990s. I acquainted myself with the debate as it stood in 1999; this is the result. It was published in Business Standard of 16 December 1999.]
Are we at last in a greenhouse?
Summers in
north India have been get quite hot recently. Everyone will remember the
scorching summer of 1998. The last summer did not quite reach the same searing
heights; but it felt even hotter since it went on and on. Meteorological data
show no decline in the monsoon rains; but they seem to have receded towards
winter. Does this show that the world is getting hotter – that the greenhouse
effect is at last discernible?
Similar
concerns are echoed in the United States. This summer there was a drought on
the eastern seaboard; there was much talk that the globe was warming up.
Further south, the coast from the gulf to Virginia is very prone to hurricanes,
and in the last quarter of 1998 saw more tornadoes in the US than any previous
quarter in recorded history; so people fear that the greenhouse effect must be
making the weather more violent. Storm damage has led to insurance claims of
$200-300 billion; that too is attributed to the changing climate. And yet, we
are far from living in a hothouse. The 1990s have been warm. But as Gregg
Easterbrook pointed out in a recent issue of The New Republic, the
highest temperature ever recorded was in 1922 in Africa, in 1913 in the US, in
1905 in Latin America, in 1889 in Australia, and in 1881 in Europe.
The
prediction that the earth will get warmer is based on models of world weather
called general circulation models; these models relate the direction and
strength of undersea currents and terrestrial wind movements to temperatures
and temperature differences. The GCMs of the 1980s were predicting that the
rising emissions of greenhouse gases – carbon dioxide and hydrofluorocarbons
would lead to a rise of about 3 degrees centigrade in the average global
temperature by the end of the 21st century. This projection has been
brought down to 2 degrees now.
Meteorological
records do not reach back much beyond the 1870s; the number of stations for
which they are available became sizeable only in the 20th century.
It is pretty clear, however, that the world temperature has risen by about half
a degree in the twentieth century. There is also fairly reliably evidence that
in recent years, spring, in the sense of the day of the year when frosts end,
has been coming earlier in the US. Does that prove the greenhouse effect?
Maybe; but there are other influences on world temperature. The world passes
through cycles of freezing and thawing. There was an ice age from 1500 onwards;
it seems to have ended around the middle of the nineteenth century. So the
warming we have seen in this century may only show the upswing in the cycle.
But all
respectable scientists accept the connection between the concentration of CO2 and CFC in
the atmostphere and the global temperature. Large rises world temperature would
have unwelcome consequences; for instance, the polar icecaps would melt, the
sea level would rise, and millions of hectares of land, some of it very densely
populated as in Bangladesh, would disappear. Hence it is worth worrying about
global warming; and by now, all the governments in the world are treating the
problem with some seriousness. What they disagree about is who should do
anything about it. The developing countries assert that most of the world’s
carbon dioxide is generated by thermal energy consumed in industrial countries
and that they should reduce their consumption; the industrial countries assert
that the developing countries’ energy consumption was rising much faster and
that unless its rise was curbed, it would only replace the cuts made in
industrial countries’ energy consumption.
Anyway, the
squabbling nations got together in Kyoto and worked out a protocol in 1997, in
which industrial countries were supposed to cut their greenhouse gas emissions.
They could also, instead of cutting their own emissions, pay developing
countries to reduce emissions by the same amount; thus, reductions in emissions
could be traded. Developing countries made rather soft promises of reducing the
emissions of CFCs, which contribute far more to global warming per ton than
carbon dioxide.
But the
industrial countries themselves torpedoed the Kyoto protocol. Even before it
was initialled in Japan, the US senate voted 95-0 to reject it. After it was
initialed, President Clinton should have sent it to the Senate for
ratification; but knowing that it would not pass, he has not done so. The story
is the same as with CTBT, which also Clinton backs but does not have the clout
to get the Senate to pass.
Although
developing countries would hate to admit it, the Kyoto protocol is a great
bargain for them, including India. Their energy efficiency is abysmally low,
and can be raised at much less cost than that of industrial countries; as long
as they sell their own emission reductions to industrial countries at higher
price than it would cost them, they can make a tidy profit. Industrial
countries would even pay for the technological changes that would raise
developing countries’ energy efficiency and pay them something extra. For
precisely that reason, American senators are against the protocol. They see it
as a new foreign aid programme; these believers in freedom and private
enterprise are dead against charity. In the meanwhile, the European Union is
turning against the idea of emission trading. Its argument is that every
country must carry out the emission reductions it contracts to make; but quite
incidentally, making those emission reductions would hurt the United States
more since the car is so much more embedded into its social fabric.
The Kyoto
protocol is not such a bargain for the world, though. The developing countries
are increasing their energy consumption so rapidly that the reductions the
industrial countries are supposed to make will have very little impact. The
protocol needs to be renegotiated, and India and China need to accept
commitments to reduce emissions. If I were negotiating for India, I would do so
readily – and get the best price of it I can.
