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CLIMATE CHANGE: CO2 Cuts Needed Across the Earth
WASHINGTON (IPS) - Imagine that the world's leading industrial nations stopped spewing greenhouse gases tomorrow. Now stop smiling: Severe climate change would still plague the world within a generation because of pollution in developing countries.

So says the Centre for Global Development (CGD), a think tank here, in a study timed to coincide with United Nations climate talks in Bali, the Indonesian tourist destination.

Within 20 years, researchers say, Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, the Middle East, and the Pacific Islands will produce as much carbon dioxide as fouled the atmosphere in 1992, when the international community raised the global warming alarm at the first Earth Summit in Brazil.

Thus, it would be self-defeating to focus only on the need to cut greenhouse emissions in North America, Europe, Japan, the former Soviet Union, Australia and New Zealand, the paper concludes.

Under the Kyoto Protocol to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, only so-called Annex 1 heavily-industrialised countries must make mandatory cuts -- to five percent below 1990 levels by 2012. One hundred and thirty-seven other developing countries, including major energy consumers like China, have ratified the treaty, but have no formal obligation beyond monitoring and reporting emissions.

"From the perspective of the South's own self-interest, focussing exclusively on the Northern sources of this problem is a dangerous distraction," said David Wheeler, the study's lead author and a former top development research economist at the World Bank.

"Emissions from the South alone are more than enough to catalyse a climate crisis for the South," he said.

Even so, the study, "Another Inconvenient Truth", should not be seen as letting wealthy nations off the hook, said Nancy Birdsall, the CGD president.

"To avoid a shared global disaster, we in the rich countries need to cut our own emissions quickly and do much more to help developing countries shift to a low-carbon future while at the same time meeting the just aspirations of their people for a better life," Birdsall said.

For their part, developing countries at the U.N. climate talks in Bali said Wednesday they need rapid transfers of technology to reduce pollution and improve energy efficiency if they are to raise living standards without spoiling Earth's atmosphere.

The Group of 77 (G77), which represents 132 mainly developing countries and China, complained that instead of helping, wealthy nations were using copyright and other intellectual property rights issues to impede the transfer of eco-friendly scientific know-how while maintaining a singular focus on cutting emissions in booming economies like China's.

U.N., World Bank and Western officials long have said that private firms hold much of the technology in question and need the right market incentives to sell their know-how to developing countries.

Scientists blame carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases for rising atmospheric temperatures and their increasingly frequent results: drought, floods, sinking coasts and islands, growing deserts, and the spread of tropical diseases in temperate zones. The burning of fossil fuels like oil and coal is a leading cause of this pollution, as are deforestation and industrial animal farming, with its massive herds and giant feedlots.

Wheeler and study co-author Kevin Ummel recently compiled an online database of carbon dioxide pollution emitted by power plants and companies around the world. They said they found the world's most polluting plant in Taiwan and its biggest corporate emitter in China -- both developing-world locales.

Wheeler and Ummel calculated separate historical emissions paths for two groups of countries, high-income countries in the North and developing ones in the South, using newly available data covering the period 1850-2005.

Next, they projected these trends into the near future using scenarios from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the international scientific body that won this year's Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore, the former U.S. vice president turned environmental filmmaker.

The researchers concluded that by 2040, cumulative carbon dioxide emissions from the South alone would drive the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide past the current level of 387 parts per million (ppm). By 2060, the level would exceed 450 ppm, the threshold that the IPCC associates with large, irreversible consequences.

By the end of the century, the atmospheric concentration due to the South alone would near 600 ppm, well past what the study, citing the international climate panel, termed "the extreme danger zone for catastrophic climate change".

However horrifying the projections might seem to environmentalists, they likely understate the problem because they include neither emissions of other potent greenhouse gases, like methane, nor additional contributions from side effects of ongoing global warming.

The Dec. 3-14 Bali talks are aimed at hashing out deeper emissions cuts beyond 2012, when the Kyoto Protocol is set to expire.

All industrialised countries except the United States have ratified the 1997 treaty, which includes a provision for funds to help poor countries adapt to climate change.

Predictably, the talks so far have been marked by rancour over Washington's refusal to embrace specific targets for reducing greenhouse gas pollution.

Rich countries also are being assailed over financing. They have paid 67 million dollars into a U.N. fund to help the world's poorest countries adapt to climate change, the international charity Oxfam said in a report Tuesday. It derided the figure as "less than what Americans spend on suntan lotion each month".

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