THE VICE-CHAIR of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has said he is very optimistic of a strong political agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions at next month’s global conference in Copenhagen.
Prof Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, head of climatology and environmental sciences at the University Catholique de Louvain, said while it was certain no legal text would emerge from Copenhagen, he believed “there will be a strong political commitment to reach a final text within a few months”.
Prof van Ypersele was delivering a lecture in Dublin last night, the last in a series organised by the Environmental Protection Agency. He grounded his optimism on the fact the level of awareness of climate change among citizens and governments had greatly increased since the Kyoto conference more than a decade ago.
He pointed out that only two heads of state had attended Kyoto, even though then US vice-president Al Gore had been there.
“At Copenhagen there will be 65 and probably more,” he said, adding he could not imagine that three years of preparatory work for the conference would go to waste. However, he said, notwithstanding his optimism, he also believed the deal that would be struck would be “insufficient” to counter the temperature.
During his lecture, Prof van Ypersele strongly defended the work and record of the IPCC, pointing out it had recourse to 2,500 scientists and had more than 800 contributors for its latest report.
He said that in each successive report of the four published to date, the IPCC had attributed with increasing confidence the rise in global temperatures to human emissions of greenhouse gases.
He said the net increase of 3.2 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere warranted a 50 per cent reduction in emissions. However, he said the warming of oceans and deforestation had led to a reduction in the capacity of the globe to absorb CO2 (cooler oceans and forests act as carbon sinks).
He said coal was available in much larger quantities and would be there long after oil and gas supplies had been depleted.