Kyoto Will Not
Work, Warns Expert
By Michael McCarthy
09 December 2004
The
Independent
The West's approach to fighting global
warming, enshrined in the Kyoto protocol, will not work, a leading climate
scientist said yesterday.
The struggle by
developed countries to cut back their emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2),
the principal greenhouse gas, will always be overtaken by the rising
new emissions of the developing nations, led by China and India, who
are not parties to the Kyoto treaty, said Professor Wallace Broecker
of Columbia University, New York.
Only radical new
technologies for extracting carbon dioxide directly from the air would
halt global warming, said the professor, who is regarded as one of the
fathers of climate change studies.
Dr Broecker gave
a blunt verdict on the effectiveness of the Kyoto treaty, on which Tony
Blair is staking huge political capital next year, when Britain will
chair both the EU and the G8 group of rich nations and try to put climate
change at the top of the international agenda.
He said: "What
you guys are tinkering around with in Kyoto is just a drop in the bucket."
His view will be
more unwelcome news for Mr Blair, who admitted yesterday that the Government's
target for reducing CO2 emissions by 20 per cent by 2010 was likely
to be missed by a large margin, although the Kyoto target is likely
to be met.
Dr Broecker's criticism
of Kyoto centres on the fact that the treaty only commits the rich industrialised
countries of the West to cut carbon emissions. The developing nations,
led by China and India, are not yet required to do anything. Their burgeoning
economic development is largely being powered by coal and other fossil
fuels, and the CO2 emissions that this produces will far outweigh the
cuts of all the West's energy conservation and alternative energy schemes,
he said. Extracting CO2 direct from the air, liquefying it and then
storing it, he said, offered the only realistic hope of preventing climate
change that would be catastrophic for the world. It was a practical
solution and he believed it could be done without excessive cost.
"Alternative
energy, and energy conservation ... are going to fall far short of stopping
the build-up of CO2," he said. "But extracting CO2 direct
from the air can do the job."
Dr Broecker, 73,
professor of geology at Columbia's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory,
is the world's leading interpreter of the Earth's operation as a linked
biological, chemical and physical system. In the 1980s, he identified
the world-wide "conveyor belt" of ocean currents which plays
a key role in regulating the planet's climate. The shutting-down of
this conveyor belt by global warming - which then led paradoxically
to a new Ice Age in the northern hemisphere - was the subject of the
Hollywood disaster film The Day After Tomorrow.
In July 1987 he
set out his fears in a celebrated paper in Nature, "Unpleasant
Surprises in the Greenhouse?", which was perhaps the first widely
noticed sounding of the global warming alarm.