World leaders 'ignored UN climate change target'
The United Nations’ leading climate change expert said Group of Eight nations had “clearly ignored” taking any concrete action to accomplish his panel’s new goal of limiting climate change.
Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, praised the G8 summit in Italy earlier this month for taking “a big step forward” by agreeing to limit the planet’s average temperature rise to 2C above levels recorded 150 years ago.
But he had harsh words for the world’s wealthiest countries, saying they “clearly ignored what the IPCC came up with” to reach that goal.
“It’s interesting that the G8 leaders agreed on this aspirational goal of (limiting) a temperature increase of (no more than) 2C, which certainly is a big step forward in my view,” said Mr Pachauri, whose scientific panel shared the Nobel Peace Prize with former US vice president Al Gore in 2007.
“But what I find as a dichotomy in this position is the fact that they clearly ignored what the IPCC came up with.”
The question of which nations will agree to limit their heat-trapping gases, mainly from fossil fuels, is taking on increasing urgency at the United Nations, which is sponsoring the key round of talks in December to achieve a climate deal in Copenhagen, Denmark.
UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon has made it his top priority to persuade nations to agree to a successor treaty to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol for reducing greenhouse gases, which expires at the end of 2012.
Mr Pachauri said the G8 leaders should also have accepted the panel’s conclusion that greenhouse gas emissions must peak no later than 2015 and then rich countries must reduce emissions from 2005 levels by between 25% and 40% by 2020.
Doing that, climate scientists say, may help the world avoid the worst effects of warming, which they say will lead to widespread drought, floods, higher sea levels and worsening storms.
“Now if the G8 leaders agreed on this two-degree increase as being the limit that could be accepted, then I think they should have also accepted the attendant requirement of global emissions peaking by 2015,” he said.
“And if that were to be the case, then they should most categorically have said that ... by 2020 there would have to be deep cuts in emissions.”
He said it also would have been helpful “if they had also spelled out what these deep cuts would be, but I’m afraid they haven’t talked either about the deep cuts”.
The IPCC met in Venice last week to review how the science of climate change is progressing, and to plan for its next major update, which is done every five to six years. Mr Pachauri said certain aspects would be done by early 2013, and the final synthesis report would be released in 2014.
Asked whether Copenhagen’s deal-makers had all the science they need to make informed decisions, Mr Pachauri said the last major report and climate projections were issued in November 2007 and “it seems to me that nothing tangible has happened to question what we have come up with”.
But Mr Pachauri, who also is director-general of India-based TERI, The Energy and Resources Institute, praised US president Barack Obama for making it a priority of his administration to achieve a climate deal in Copenhagen.
The Bush administration had been opposed to the Kyoto pact, saying it would harm the US economy and unfairly excluded cuts by developing nations such as India and China.
