The Kyoto Protocol comes into effect next week, but without the muscle to slow global warming and avert climatic catastrophes, argues Frank McDonald, Environment Editor.
It has been a long time since the gavel came down in Japan's old imperial capital and bleary-eyed delegates adopted the Kyoto Protocol after an all-night session in December, 1997. More than seven years later, the world's only international treaty to combat climate change will finally come into force next Wednesday.
The fact that this is happening at all is a tribute to the determination of tireless environmental campaigners and progressive governments, particularly in Europe, who realise that global warming must be tackled sooner rather than later - otherwise, we all face the grim prospect of having "normal life" thrown into turmoil.
The tsunami that caused such loss of life and devastation in south Asia was a natural disaster on a catastrophic scale. Climate change is more gradual, but there can be no doubt that it will bring more frequent storms and other "extreme weather events" such as the freak tornado that struck Clonee, Co Meath, after Christmas.
That's why the insurance industry has been to the fore in calling for international action to avert, or at least confront, these incalculable risks. Losses caused by natural disasters are doubling every decade, and experts have forecast that the economic cost of climate change would reach €150 billion a year by 2012 if current trends continue.
Take winter skiing, for example. Switzerland's 230 ski resorts are 85 per cent "snow-reliable" at present. But this is likely to drop to 63 per cent between 2030 and 2050, and it could possibly plummet to 44 per cent. The same is true, to a greater or lesser extent, of ski resorts in Austria, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, France and Scotland.
Antarctica is being watched more closely by scientists following the collapse into the Southern Ocean of Larsen B, an ice shelf bigger than the US state of Rhode Island, in 2002, and the collapse of smaller Larsen A in 1995. Now they are "warily watching the Larsen C ice shelf, farther south and 20 times larger", as Associated Press (AP)reported this month. FEB Larsen C appears to be thinning and this could be the precursor to its break-up, according to Robert Thomas, a researcher with NASA, the US space agency.
"We should bear in mind what is happening to the Larsen ice shelves because if it also happens to a big shelf, we are going to be in trouble," he told AP. And that's putting it mildly.
Thomas was referring to the "floating giants" from the Ross and Ronne ice shelves - each of which covers an area of some 200,000 square miles, an area bigger than California. If they were to disintegrate, sea levels would rise higher than anticipated. Even the two Larsen collapses have shifted ice into the ocean at eight times the previous rate.
With Europe warming up faster than the rest of the world, the European Environment Agency has forecast that the continent's cold winters could be a thing of the past by 2080. That might seem like good news - until you consider that summers are also likely to be marked by heatwaves such as the one in 2003 that resulted in an estimated 20,000 deaths.
There were also massive economic losses from severe flash-floods in central Europe in summer 2002. They were typical of the extreme events predicted by climate change modelling. The failure of the monsoon season in India in the same year was also a foretaste of unpleasant things to come as the Earth becomes warmer.
The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, comprising more than 2,000 scientists worldwide, projects that temperatures will increase by between 1.4 and 5.8 degrees Celsius by 2100. Its 2001 report cited "new and stronger" evidence of a discernible human influence on the climate, especially over the past 50 years.
Not that the Kyoto Protocol is going to do much to alleviate the problem.
Under the treaty, industrialised countries pledged to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions blamed for causing climate change by 5 per cent overall, based on 1990 levels, in the period 2008-2012. This would represent a fraction of what climate scientists say is needed.
The atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels, have risen by 30 per cent over the past 200 years and are set to double during this century if this rate of growth continues.
Industrialised countries, with 20 per cent of the world's population, are responsible for 60 per cent of the increase.
But not even Kyoto's 5 per cent reduction will have to be met in real terms. Following tortuous negotiations at UN climate change summits in The Hague (2000) and Bonn (2001), that figure was whittled down to just 2 per cent through the adoption of a series of compromise proposals to give the protocol a chance of being ratified.
The US, despite being world's most prodigious producer of greenhouse gases - accounting for 24 per cent of the global total - had already pulled out by then. President George W. Bush made it clear in March 2000 that it would not ratify Kyoto, in order to protect its own economic interests. This is unlikely to change during his second term.
The Bush administration was banking on its strategy sinking Kyoto altogether. But Russia's decision to ratify the protocol, however belated, meant it exceeded the magic formula required to bring it into force - ratification by 55 industrialised countries which are responsible for at least 55 per cent of this group's emissions of greenhouse gases.
Now the US stands accused by environmental lobbyists of frustrating progress towards making deeper cuts in emissions in the "post-Kyoto" period, after 2012. At the last climate change summit in Buenos Aires last December, Greenpeace hoped everyone had noted the "bullying and blocking tactics" of the US delegation at the talks.
The complex agreement hammered out in the Argentine capital originally contained plans for a series of informal meetings to discuss the future of the climate regime. At the insistence of the US, this was reduced to one "seminar" - and its delegation even tried to ensure that the agenda should include any discussions on future cuts.
This is absurd. One of the US arguments against the protocol was that it didn't oblige major developing countries such as China and India to reduce their emissions. Yet the salient feature of any "post-Kyoto" regime is that they would be drawn into the net - after the older industrialised countries had demonstrated their "bona fides" first.
Even the Bush administration can hardly ignore the danger signals. Last year, Florida became the first US state since 1886 to be hit by four hurricanes in one season. This might well be a fluke, but what about the precautionary principle? The one that says we don't wait around for "all" the evidence to come in before taking action.
Sustainable development also comes into play. The commonly-accepted definition of this term is "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs". If it is is to mean anything, climate change has to be tackled - unless we want to pass the parcel to our children.