As one of the world's richest countries, Ireland goes to next week's global warming conference in Bali with a particular onus, argues Pat Finnegan.
As UN climate negotiations resume in Bali on Monday there is at least one significant asset close to hand. That is the massive weight of evidence presented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its fourth assessment report this year.
According to the IPCC, the scientific evidence is now unequivocal: the world is warming, and at a potentially dangerous rate. There is effectively now no doubt that emissions from human activities are causing the problem.
Left unchecked, warming will accelerate. A rise in global temperatures of more than two degrees centigrade from pre-industrial levels amounts, to all intents and purposes, to dangerous anthropogenic (human) interference with the climate system.
If we allow warming to proceed beyond two degrees centigrade, the range of potential impacts dwarf the current stresses we are already having to cope with such as unprecedented summer floods in the UK, fires in Greece and California, numbers of people displaced by rainfall, floods and cyclones in Asia, a record drought in Australia, rapidly increasing desertification in many parts of Africa, rapidly disintegrating icesheets in Greenland and Antarctica, ice retreat in the Arctic and retreating mountain glaciers almost everywhere.
Yet the IPCC has also concluded that the problem is manageable, just, if we all act together - now. However, that "now" means exactly that: now, straight away, no hesitation. The IPCC has calculated that limiting warming to as close as possible to two degrees centigrade means that global emissions must peak before 2015 and be reduced by at least 50 per cent (more likely 85 per cent) by 2050.
The IPCC also concludes that the Kyoto carbon markets are a significant step towards creating a global response to climate change.
Even the very marginal price signals already created - around €17/tonne CO2 - have already begun to stimulate decarbonisation policies and measures around the world.
However, the challenge for negotiators in Bali is at least twofold. During the second week of the Bali negotiations (on Tuesday December 11th, in fact) the Kyoto Protocol will be 10 years old. Ten years is a very long time to wait for action on climate change, and the current agreement only extends for the period 2008-2012.
Most of those 10 years have gone in evolving the somewhat complicated systems of inventories, monitoring, verification and trading regimes that underpin the credibility of the Kyoto markets. Credibility and system integrity are essential to convince investors that there is, in fact, a sustainable economic margin available to those prepared to decarbonise their investment decisions. This momentum needs to be scaled up and accelerated.
The second challenge for Bali negotiators is that Kyoto does not work at all without political agreement on the country-specific emissions caps that form the very foundation of the Kyoto "cap and trade" dynamic. The problem is the potential counterfactual: without political agreement on targets, there are no markets, hence no price signals, hence no decarbonisation. And then we are all on the slippery slope to climatic meltdown.
This is why the Bali negotiations concern everyone - effectively, all 6.4 billion of us. Within the next two weeks, negotiators must come up with a Bali roadmap for a concentrated period of negotiations leading to a new set of Kyoto targets that are ratifiable in every country in the world well before 2012.
Ireland must play its part. Under Article 3.1 of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), Ireland, as a highly developed country - the fourth richest in the world according to the UN this week - has a particular responsibility to take the lead in combating climate change.
We have the wealth. We have the renewable energy resources. What we appear to lack since 1994 at least, when UNFCCC first became law in Ireland, is the determination to live up to our obligations. Over two UN sessions this summer, signs have begun to emerge that, for the sake of a genuinely global agreement, developing countries, including China, may now be prepared to take on some sort of Kyoto-type commitments post-2012. Similarly, public opinion in the US is now evolving so fast that the next administration will almost certainly have to take action, whoever ends up in the White House. The consequence will be that the EU will then have to deliver its already-promised 20 per cent unilateral reduction below 1990 levels - but increased to 30 per cent in the light of global adherence to reduction objectives.
Irish emissions are currently at 25 per cent above 1990 levels, and are projected to be even higher by 2012. Unless the new Government can turn this trend completely around in the next five years or so, getting from plus 25 per cent to minus 30 per cent between 2012 and 2020 implies annual reductions of minus 7 per cent. Even if the Government starts to deliver its promised 3 per cent annual reductions straight away - which seems most unlikely - we would not reach minus 30 per cent until 2025. That's a long time for Ireland to deliver on something we signed up for in 1994.
Minister for the Environment John Gormley faces a tough task in Bali persuading developing country negotiators that, trust us, this time, Ireland will genuinely deliver. He will be presenting an inventory showing that Irish emissions are rising by almost 2 per cent a year precisely when they should be falling by at least twice this rate.
Figures like these from the fourth-richest country in the world are not the way to encourage much poorer countries to take on commitments. And they are nothing like a fair share of the task of peaking global emissions by 2015.
With our personal and national emissions so high, 4.2 million Irish people urgently need to start doing something rather more than hoping there's some way out, or hoping someone else will do the job for us. It's time to assume responsibility. It's time to start thinking about how to do those 30 per cent reductions by 2020.
Pat Finnegan is co-ordinator of Grian (www.grian.ie), a member group of the international Climate Action Network. He is also a member of Working Group 3 (Mitigation Policy) on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, www.ipcc.ch