Earlier this month news came from Richard Douthwaite and his colleagues, David Healy and Brian Davey.
They are proposing to re-focus the Feasta Climate Group, because it now seems unlikely that an agreement to cut the world’s CO2 emissions from its coal, gas and oil consumption will be reached in the foreseeable future.
More cheeringly they add that it is more likely that these emissions will fall rapidly as a result of supply difficulties caused by the progressive depletion of their sources.
The figures in the table below indicate that the UNFCCC’s single-minded concentration on reducing fossil fuel CO2 emissions has been a mistake and that, while it should continue to regard fossil CO2 as extremely important, it should devote much more attention than it is currently giving to devising policies to reduce the other emissions that are causing warming.
Chart 1: The various sources of warming and cooling as they stand today and how they could be in 20 years if emissions stopped immediately. Source: New Scientist.
At the group’s recent Climate Weekend in Cloughjordan, it was agreed that the Feasta climate group should begin to work along these lines too.
The major emissions for which the group and the UNFCCC should be trying to develop policies are, in order of their current warming effect, methane (23.8% of the current warming effect if water vapour is ignored), black carbon, (15%), halocarbons, (10.3%), nitrous oxide (4.7%) and low-level (tropospheric) ozone (4.2%).
Just as different policies are needed to deal with CO2 from fossil fuel use and from deforestation, different policies will be needed to deal with the various sources of the other gases.
The Feasta climate group plans to change radically in order to begin to develop a full set of policies for developing sinks and for reducing emissions of the most important greenhouse gases.
To read the proposal in full click here.
