Outside In | Hong Kong focus on science a timely move

Isn’t it sobering that 23 years have passed since the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change was agreed in Rio de Janeiro. So many spinning wheels in between. Similar procrastination out of this week’s Paris Climate talks will whisk us in no time to 2038. Are the ambitious targets being talked about in Paris so much hot air?

Jeffrey Sachs, head of Columbia University’s Earth Institute, both an advocate and an optimist, warns that if we are to remain under the 2 degrees Celsius warming ceiling between now and 2100, then annual carbon emissions have to fall from 35 billion tonnes today to 10 billion to 15 billion tonnes in 2050 – and to zero by 2070. Jeffrey, dream on. What possible evidence tells you our leaders can create the aggressive assault needed to bring carbon emissions to zero by 2070?

I have a passing sympathy with Bjorn Lomborg, sceptic and contrarian at the Copenhagen Consensus Centre, who wrote in the Financial Times last week: “This week’s climate conference will be no different from the others held in the past 20 years. There will be an agreement of some kind, and a lot of self-congratulatory talk, but many promises will not be kept.”

Lomborg notes that trillions of dollars will have to be spent cutting carbon emissions: “Spending money that way while billions (of people) lack food, (electricity), health, water and education, is nothing short of immoral.”

He reminds me that long before global warming destroys our present way of life, we face challenges that need to be addressed even more urgently. Global water shortages are acute, and creating increasing political stress. Our obsession with “stuff” is creating massive competition for global resources with potentially deadly conflicts already clear.

With global commodity prices at their lowest levels for over a decade, almost without exception, many of you might dismiss my concern. Oil and coal prices, coffee and sugar prices, soya and wheat prices, are all down 50 per cent to 70 per cent from their post 2000 peaks. But I am not sanguine. The price collapse is a direct result of the global recession that began seven years ago, and it may still be several years before the global economy begins to recover. But if we assume recovery will begin in earnest by 2020, with consumers in China and then later in India adding literally billions of people to our “stuff” consuming classes, then pressures on these resources will immediately soar. I am still betting that conflicts linked with competition for resources in increasingly short supply will create serious global conflicts long before we begin to pay any serious price for our failure adequately to address the climate challenge.