While Glaciers Retreat, SLCF Reduction Must Go Forward
By Brooks B. Yeager,
Executive Vice President for Policy,
Clean Air-Cool Planet
While progress in crafting an effective international response to climate change has been proceeding, as they say, “at a glacial pace,” the glaciers themselves have not. They’ve been retreating and losing ice at an accelerating rate – one that threatens to change the face of the planet in a matter of decades. That’s a key reason that Clean Air-Cool Planet sent Pam Pearson and me here to Copenhagen.
Our mission, working with our long-time partners Ellen Baum and Armond Cohen of the Clean Air Task Force, is to make sure the delegates here understand that the Arctic – and in fact glaciers and ice sheets the world over – are in big trouble, and to point out to them that there is an early action strategy that might help slow down the worst warming until we’re able to solve the carbon dioxide problem and get the atmosphere back into balance.
So we’ve held a series of side events looking at the situation in the Arctic and the Himalayas, and particularly at the role of so-called “short-lived climate forcers” (SLCFs), contaminants such as black carbon, tropospheric ozone, and methane, which the scientists tell us are a big part of the problem. In contrast with carbon dioxide, which has a lifetime of hundreds of years, these substances only last in the atmosphere a short time – thus a successful effort to reduce their emissions would have a relatively near-term impact on the rate of warming. We believe SLCF reductions could, in fact, be part of an effective “early action strategy” designed to delay the most severe warming impacts and to “buy time” for the nations of the world to shift to a low-carbon energy economy.
And yet of the three SLCFs, only methane is in the Kyoto “basket of gases” and therefore subject to regulation under the Climate Convention. And even though methane is a much more powerful global warming gas, molecule for molecule, than carbon dioxide, available methane control strategies have been for the most part ignored while governments have been working on the carbon dioxide problem.
There’s no question that we have to lower our carbon footprint, and transform our energy economies, to deal with global warming in the long term. But there are steps we could be taking now that would have a powerful and beneficial near-term impact. That’s the key message of the “Methane Blue Ribbon Panel,” a group of eminent scientists and policy-makers who issued a report here Friday calling for the creation of a Global Methane Fund to invest in strategies to reduce methane emissions worldwide. Many of these strategies, such as gathering methane from landfills and abandoned mines and using it to provide heat and power, can actually make profits once they are set up and running. But they need initial investment capital, and in the current financial crisis, that’s been exceedingly hard to come by. So a modest investment from donor governments such as the U.S. and Europe could make a big difference.
Tags: arctic policy, arctic warming, COP-15, copenhagen, methane
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