Passage 2 Can the World Share the Burden of Climate Change?
世界能否承擔(dān)氣候變化帶來(lái)的后果？ 《今日美國(guó)》
[00:03]Can the world share the burden of climate change?
[00:07]Fans of the Foundation series likely recall
[00:11]that the coolest part of Isaac Asimov's science-fiction works in the 1940s
[00:17]was the notion of "psychohistory," a combination of math and sociology
[00:23]that yielded extremely perfect predictions of how political movements
[00:28]would affect masses of people and fracture a strong empire in the Milky Way.
[00:35]Every few centuries, Hari Seldon, the long-dead genius behind psychohistory
[00:41]would emerge from a stored hologram to, usually,
[00:45]tell the heroes of Asimov's stories how to deal with the latest crisis,
[00:51]which had emerged just as he predicted it would.
[00:55]South-North Dialogue on Equity in the Greenhouse
[01:00]Scientists haven't come up with anything so exact, yet,
[01:04]but they haven't stopped trying.
[01:07]A new study looking at likely political responses to global warming
[01:12]takes a leaf from Hari Seldon's playbook
[01:15]and tries to estimate the appetite for political and economic change in Europe,
[01:21]the USA and some other countries in the coming decades.
[01:27]In particular, the Environmental Science and Policy study authors,
[01:32]led by Michel den Elzen of the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency,
[01:38]look at the odds that wealthy nations will buy into something called the
[01:43]"South-North Dialogue on Equity in the Greenhouse."
[01:48]This is a proposal that nations share the costs of
[01:52]avoiding global warming's worst effects through so-called "mitigation" efforts
[01:58](ideas range widely, from capturing carbon dioxide in large chimneys
[02:04]to burning less fossil fuel to using nuclear power instead),
[02:09]cooked up in 2004 by the researchers from 13 industrialized
[02:15]and developing countries, and based on a project sponsored
[02:19]by Germany's Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy
[02:26]and South Africa's Energy Research Centre.
[02:30]For anyone who hasn't seen the news for the last few months,
[02:35]a February report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
[02:40]concluded that global warming from the release of
[02:44]heat-trapping "greenhouse" gases was "very likely" in this century,
[02:50]driving average surface temperatures up about 3 to 7 degrees Fahrenheit,
[02:56]depending on the amount of emissions. On Friday,
[03:00]the same panel released a report finding that warming
[03:04]is already affecting plants, animals and people, with worse to come droughts,
[03:11]extinctions and desertification as conditions head
[03:16]towards the high end of the temperature projection.
[03:20]"The problem the world is facing is not whether mitigation is important,
[03:24]but rather "who" is mitigating and "how much" is being mitigated,
[03:30]" write the study authors. So,
[03:33]whose ox will be gored in cutting emissions of greenhouse gases, they ask,
[03:38]and how much pain from such efforts can the voters of each country sustain?
[03:45]The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC),
[03:52]which the USA and 40 other wealthy nations signed onto in 1992,
[03:58]says "the developed countries should take the lead in mitigation,"
[04:04]the study authors note.
[04:07]The issue of fairness in dealing with climate change
[04:10]has emerged all of sudden in the latest report of
[04:15]the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC),
[04:20]which notes that some countries in Africa and Asia and island nations
[04:26]around the world will bear the brunt of the changes from global warming,
[04:31]even as industrialized economies, such as the U.S.A., the European Union,
[04:37]Australia, Japan and some other countries,
[04:41]create most of the greenhouse gas emissions.
[04:45]FAIR 2.1 World Model
[04:48]Well, how would it work if developed nations led the fight?
[04:53]In order to take a try at it, the authors created a
[04:57]"political willingness" machine, called the "FAIR 2.1 world model,"
[05:03]which analyzes different future scenes for cutting greenhouse gas emissions
[05:09]which assumes a general willingness to deal with global warming
[05:14]and points out the financial effects.
[05:17]The authors came up with six often-used scenarios for future emissions,
[05:23]ranging from "business as usual" ones
[05:27]in which the emissions just keep on coming to ecologically-friendly ones
[05:32]in which the world's leading economies go green by 2020.
[05:39]According to these scenarios,
[05:41]the odds of the world's average temperature rising
[05:44]more than 3.6 degrees (when a lot of negative climate effects,
[05:49]such as coral reefs dying worldwide, kicks in) range from 13% to 75%,
[05:58]the authors say.
[06:00]What is the verdict? You may want to buy some air-conditioner stock.
[06:05]When it comes to greenhouse gas emissions, the authors find,
[06:09]"some countries will have to
[06:11]reduce their emissions drastically in the long-term."
[06:15]Fed into FAIR 2.1 world model,
[06:18]the more rigorous scenarios call for the USA to cut emissions
[06:23]by 2050 from 25% to 45% lower than 1990s levels,
[06:31]even as the economy grows.
[06:33]Just getting 2050 emissions down to 5% less than 1990 levels,
[06:40]which barely looks possible,
[06:43]puts the odds of breaking the 3.6 degree mark at 60% likely,
[06:49]the authors conclude. They guess that the political
[06:53]will doesn't exist to keep the temperatures down.
[06:58]A third report of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change
[07:02]looks at options for mitigation and adaptation to climate change,
[07:07]offering new technologies to deal with global warming.
[07:12]However mitigation experts,
[07:14]such as Jae Edmonds of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory,
[07:19]often say that no one technology will magically fix climate change.
[07:25]Instead it might take a
[07:27]"a renewed sense of urgency in industrialized countries
[07:31]in the world to lead the fight against climate change,"
[07:35]beyond the ordinary, according to the study authors. In other words,
[07:39]the developed countries may wake up all of a sudden and become urgent
[07:44]and bold enough to take the responsibility to combat the global warming
[07:49]prior to the developing countries.
[07:53]Uncertain Future of Climate Change
[07:56]In a nutshell, can the world share the burden of climate change?
[08:00]if no widely acceptable
[08:03]and practicable scheme is come up with to tackle global warming,
[08:08]what kind of climate may humans face in the future?
[08:12]What is the destiny of the Earth? And what is the fate of humans?
[08:16]Who knows? It seems that even Hari Selden might have trouble in forecasting
[08:23]that sort of change.
