The Crash Dummies of Climate Change.

How many feet does it take to bring a moving vehicle to a full stop?

As any (good) motorist will tell you, it’s almost entirely dependent on the speed at which the vehicle is travelling.

Climate change is a vehicle that is going far too fast to have any hope of coming to a stop before it hits the wall. What we need to figure out is how we plan to cushion the impact so we can survive it afterwards.

A big part of the problem is that many people don’t seem to realise the speed we are going, and they can’t see the wall coming.

Almost half of all Americans believe that the climate threat is exaggerated according to a new poll published recently in the Guardian newspaper. A similar poll in the UK recently showed the number of adults that believed climate change poses a real threat dropped by 30% over the past year to just 31%.

No doubt such scepticism is partly as a result of the recent “climategate” scandal and plenty of media publicity over so-called data fixing. It is now at the stage where scientists can’t even express a critical opinion of each other’s work (which is after all what they are supposed to do) without being accused of distorting information or deliberately trying to confuse the public.

I really can’t figure out why we are still debating the issue of whether the climate is warming or not, or whether climate change is happening at all. We know that the Arctic is losing sea ice. We know that mountain glaciers in Europe and Asia are retreating. We know that concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are at the highest levels ever seen (by human eyes anyway).

There is so much evidence out there, but we don’t want to believe it because if we accept it we can’t hide behind our scepticism and use it as an excuse to do nothing about it. And for many that’s the issue – realising we have a problem means that we might just have to change our lifestyles. Most, who enjoy a degree of comfort and security, don’t want to do that.

Yes, some are fastening their seat belts in the vague hope that these flimsy devices will offer them some protection, but there are still far too many who aren’t even bothering to buckle up at all.

Global emissions targets that have been agreed to are woefully inadequate and the short-sighted and haphazard way that world governments have planned (or should I say not planned) initiatives to reduce carbon emissions may end up causing more problems than they ever solve.

The European Union has warned that loopholes in United Nations climate treaties could actually cause an increase in emissions in the next decade. A leaked report obtained by Reuters says the use of spare carbon emissions permits left after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and loose rules on emissions from agriculture and deforestation could reduce the depth of real-world emissions cuts by rich nations to 6.8 to 9%.

The trouble is everyone has to wake up to the reality that, no matter how hard we now try and stomp on the brakes, we are all going to hit the wall and when we do it will significantly rearrange our features, so we aren’t going to be as pretty afterwards.

We can go on relying on technology to be the air bag that we hope will shield us from any serious damage, but in reality we’re still going to end up with some broken bones.

But how can we blame everyone else when our nations and their politicians genuflect to the world’s biggest industries and pay thinly veiled lip-service to the whole problem, whilst hoping the collision doesn’t come in their term of office.

Carbon emissions trader, Carbon Exchange has been crowing about finally making a profit of $3.3 million thanks to higher trading volumes. It said that trading at the European Climate Exchange increased 82% last year to 5.1 billion metric tons.

That’s 5.1 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions being traded. Which means that they are being bought by companies or governments that need them to offset the amount of emissions they are producing. 

Or they are being purchased by speculators who are buying them in the hope that the price will increase as regulations tighten (or the planet’s environmental mess worsens).

Another Guardian article says that a number of European companies are hoarding surplus carbon credits worth millions of dollars that they “amassed from over-allocation of permits to pollute from the European emissions trading scheme, and by buying cheap credits from carbon-cutting projects in developing countries.”

These surplus credits can either be held in reserve to be used if they can’t meet their own emission targets or sold at a profit if the carbon market becomes more lucrative.

Either way there isn’t much incentive for the worst polluters to stop what they are doing right now. That day will only come when the price of those carbon credits goes up and it becomes significantly more expensive to purchase offsets than clean up their act.

That isn’t going to happen in time to reduce emissions to the point that is needed to reverse the cumulative processes of climate change already under way.

So the net effect is we are not only slamming our foot on the accelerator to make us go faster, but spraying the road with water to make it more slippery.

The vehicle’s brakes are now just an accessory.

copyright 2010, Angela Lovell

Picture: NHTSA