1 The Kyoto Protocol : A Flawed Concept

In 2001 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its Third Assessment Report on the prospects for and likely impact of increases in global average temperature over the next century. The summary report of Working Group 1, on science, widened the range of likely temperature increase, compared with the IPCC's Second Assessment Report five years earlier, to 1.4-5.8 degrees centigrade, with the increase in the upper end of the range receiving wide public attention. The summary report of Working Group 2, on impacts, sketched a somber picture of how both human settlements and non-human ecologies might be adversely affected by the rise in temperature and an accompanying rise in sea level. A close reading of the WG 1 Report, however, reveals that the wider range, and in particular the increase in the upper end of the range, was not at all due to a reassessment of the scientific evidence accumulated and closely studied since the mid-1990s. Rather, it was due to a change in the way that emissions over the next century of greenhouse gases (GHG), mainly carbon dioxide (CO2) from fossil fuel consumption and deforestation, and methane (CH4) from agriculture and waste disposal, were characterized. Instead of the single "business as usual" emissions trajectory used in the Second Assessment Report(SAR), the Third Assessment Report(TAR) produces six different scenarios, depending on the evolution both of the world economy and of i ts energy system over the next 100 years. This refinement is in some respects an improvement over the single assumed trajectory, but to present the outlook as more likely more serious than the previous assessment is, to say the least, 2 misleading. The judgement about the likely temperature effect of a given GHG "forcing" was actually narrowed modestly in the Third Assessment Report, not widened. Shortly after release of the latest IPCC summaries, but presumably not because of them, newly elected President Bush of the United States announced, in an especially clumsy way, that his Administration would not support the Kyoto Protocol to the Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC) adopted in 1992. The Kyoto Protocol, negotiated in late 1997, established emissions ceilings on six specified greenhouse gases for 38 countries, with the 15 members of the European Union treated as a single unit, to be reached on average in the five year accounting period 2008-2012. It is not yet in force, in that the requisite countries (55, covering …