Key Factor #5: Urgency

“To protect the climate system for present and future generations”

Nothing in this expression of the core objective of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992 resounds with the urgency of the emergency unfolding around us. Given the damage Climate Change could potentially inflict on the world, akin to warfare, the barriers placed before the soil C solution seem trivial, given its potential.

Natural disasters – such as Cyclone Katrina in New Orleans – can destroy the infrastructure of life and threaten civil society. We can expect more Katrinas. The rate of natural diasters per year has more than doubled since 2000, according to the UN’s World Meteorological Organisation. There were 190 in the 1980s, 270 in the 1990s, but the number has jumped to 553 between 2000 and 2005. (23)

Australia is particularly under threat, according to our police and military, from climate change refugees, driven in their millions by rising seas and failing crops, to invade our shores in vast numbers.

• Australian Federal Police Commissioner Mick Keelty: “Climate Change will be the security issue of the 21st century… We could see a catastrophic decline in the availability of fresh water. Crops could fail, disease could be rampant, and flooding might be so frequent that people en masse would be on the move... It's not difficult to see the policing implications that might arise in the not-too-distant future… In their millions, people could begin to look for new land and they will cross oceans and borders to do it… Existing cultural tensions may be exacerbated as large numbers of people undertake forced migration.” (24)

• Chief of Defence Force, Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston: The Australian Defence Force has identified climate change as a national security threat for the first time, as it predicted the military would become more involved in stabilising failing states than fighting conventional wars. ACM Houston said the military faced security challenges it had not envisaged before, specifically "climate change and the impacts of global demography". (25)

• Britain's Chief Scientist Sir David King: “In Asia around the Indian coastline, Bangladesh, Indonesia, their rising sea levels and storm levels will actually remove the habitat of a significant proportion of the population. By 2080 we’re estimating something like 50 to 100 million people displaced from their place of habitat. Now that isn’t going to only impact on those regions. That will destabilize the political and economic basis of the global system, and of course this is something to be avoided.” Australia’s region could become one of the most troubled by climate refugees, says Sir David King. (26)

• Pentagon Report (Schwartz and Randall 2003): A report commissioned by the United States Pentagon found that gradual global warming could lead to a relatively abrupt slowing of the ocean’s thermohaline conveyor, which could lead to harsher winter weather and lead to resource skirmishes and even wars because of food shortages, decreased availability of fresh water, and disrupted energy supplies. (27) “The United States and Australia are likely to build defensive fortresses around their countries because they have the resources and reserves to achieve self-sufficiency…. Borders will be strengthened around the country to hold back unwanted starving immigrants…This report suggests that, because of the potentially dire consequences, the risk of abrupt climate change, although uncertain and quite possibly small, should be elevated beyond a scientific debate to a U.S. national security concern.” The report says Indonesia – home to 200 million Muslims – is likely to descend into disorder.

The Carbon Coalition contends that the world community should – in light of the urgent need for a solution of the capacity and capability of soils – take a risk on a relatively ‘untried’ technology: soil sequestration.

The UNFCCC exists “To protect the climate system for present and future generations”. Nowhere in its charter does it exists to create and accounting system. Nowhere does it say all solutions must be triple tested and compliant with all relevant standards.

The world does not have time to fill out all the forms at the Quartermaster’s store to requisition a gun. The enemy is at the gates.


FOOTNOTES:

(23) “Distribution of Natural Disasters : By Origin, (1900-2005)”, International Strategy For Disaster Reduction, World Meteorological Organisation http://www.unisdr.org/disaster-statistics/occurrence-trends-century.htm
(24) ABC News Sept 25, 2007
(25) “Climate threat in military's sights,”, Sydney Morning Herald, May17, 2007
(26) The Science Show, ABCTV, 22 October, 2005
(27) Shwartz, P. and Randall, D. An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United Nations National Security. Report to US Pentagon. October 2003.