Abandon Kyoto, scientists urge
Climate change protocol too narrow to properly combat global warming, they argue
Last Updated: Thursday, October 25, 2007 | 5:53 PM ET
CBC News
Two British researchers are suggesting policy makers abandon the Kyoto Protocol because the treaty has "failed" and is too limited to fix a complex problem.
"The Kyoto strategy is elegant but misplaced," wrote Gwyn Prins of the London School of Economics and Steve Rayner at Oxford in Wednesday's issue of the journal Nature.
"Climate change is not amenable to an elegant solution because it is not a discrete problem...It is impossible to change such complex systems in desired ways by focusing on just one thing."
The authors said that Kyoto has failed to deliver cuts in global emissions of greenhouse gases and may have been flawed from the start. The authors said part of this failure can be attributed to the decision to model it after past treaties dealing with nuclear proliferation or ozone depletion, issues which they argue are "relatively simple, compared to climate change."
They suggest the Kyoto Protocol be replaced when it expires in 2012 with an accord that focuses on the big emitters, puts public investment in energy research and development and increases spending on adaptation to climate change.
The authors also argue that responses to climate policy can be more effective when done on a smaller scale than when implemented from a large organization like the 170 signatories involved in Kyoto.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper echoed those sentiments on Thursday, saying, "Kyoto is a good idea but it doesn't work, it doesn't include major emitters."
Liberal MP David McGuinty countered that having fewer voices could dilute the effectiveness of the world's response to climate change.
"In my view anything that takes us away from a fully multi-lateral response to this issue is going to further divide the planet," he said.
A study published in Thursday's issue of the journal Science added further urgency to the issue of climate change, suggesting the information available to scientists today may be the best available given the uncertainty of the field.
Difficult to predict changes
Two University of Washington scientists said that despite more exacting science and access to more computer power, the sensitivity of climate regions to a variety of factors means more accurate predictions may not be possible.
"Foreseeable improvements in the understanding of physical processes, and in the estimation of their effects from observations, will not yield large reductions in the envelope of climate sensitivity," wrote Gerard Roe and Marcia Baker in the journal Science, published online Thursday.
The two scientists writing in Science used a mathematical equation to graph the potential temperature responses to rising greenhouse gas levels and found that the number of predicted extreme outcomes were unlikely to get smaller no matter how much research is done.
The scientists found that the more susceptible a region was to warming, the more difficult it was to accurately develop a climate model.
"Uncertainty and sensitivity have to go hand in hand. They're inextricable," said Roe, an associate professor of Earth and space sciences, in a statement. "We're used to systems in which reducing the uncertainty in the physics means reducing the uncertainty in the response by about the same proportion. But that's not how climate change works."
The Arctic has been identified as one region susceptible to more drastic changes, and recent studies have shown greater disparity between measurement changes than those predicted by climate models.
In research published in May 2007, scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the University of Colorado in Boulder found, using actual measurements, that Arctic sea ice was melting three times faster than predicted by many models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
