Our view: Climate change: why we finally care

CYPRIOTS place are seriously worried about climate change, a European survey showed this month, with more than two thirds of them rating it as the gravest problem currently faced by humanity. In the choking traffic jams of gas-guzzling 4x4s, one could be forgiven for being sceptical of such fears, yet such concern at a long-term global phenomenon in a society often accused of short-term parochialism is revelatory of the distance the world has travelled since the last big climate talks more than a decade ago in Kyoto.
We shouldn’t knock such public perceptions as the world turns its attention on the current Copenhagen climate talks, widely trailed as the last chance to limit potentially catastrophic damage to the balance of our planet. Recent weeks and months have shown country after country – including big developing nations – raising their ambitions on controlling emissions. As well as scientific evidence, this is squarely down to public opinion, sceptical a decade ago, today afraid. World leaders would not seek to outdo one another on pledges to cut emissions, if they did not feel carried by a global wave of public pressure.
Public opinion is notably immune to long-term, global concerns. So what has changed? It’s simple: the danger is current, the threat no longer remote, but very present, very local in every corner of the globe.
A decade ago, many may have pushed climate change back into a remote corner of their brains, a vague concern, but one that would affect distant future generations, not their own. Now, when scientists talk about 2040, it is a date when many of us would hope to be alive, and if not us, then certainly our children. When they talk about potentially apocalyptic scenarios in 2100, we know that children born today may end their days on a devastated planet.
The facts have started to speak: 11 of the past 14 years have been the warmest on record, and the warnings for the future are stark. Even the most optimistic target of limiting temperature rises to 2 degrees Centigrade points to a bleak future for Cyprus, increasingly parched and starved of rain. We cannot fail to have observed the longer, hotter summers, the disappearance of seasons, the devastating impact of drought. The thought that it might get worse is enough to concentrate the minds of even the most sceptical of cynics.
Across the world, the reality of change has had a dramatic impact on public perceptions and political priorities. Hurricane Katrina went a long way to shift American denial of climate change, while the developing countries that were so resistant to emissions cuts have woken up to the fact that rising temperatures and sea levels will have a far more dramatic impact on them than on the rest of the world.
To limit temperature rises to 2 degrees, global emissions will need to peak and begin falling within the next 5-10 years. A bigger rise of 3-4 degrees – the smallest increase we can expect to follow inaction – would parch continents, turning farmland into desert. Half of all species could become extinct, untold millions of people would be displaced, whole nations drowned by the sea.
These are the realities that make success in Copenhagen so important. To achieve a deal, we need to change our mindset, both us the public and the politicians who represent us – we must stop seeing negotiations as a zero-sum game, marked by brinkmanship, distrust and competition between regions and nations. Only concerted global action can pull us back from the brink. As former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said this week, “climate change does not respect national borders. We are all in the same boat; a hole at one end will sink us all.”
It can be done. The global economic crisis proved the ability of governments to mobilise and work together when faced with a clear and present threat, finding trillions overnight to save the world’s financial systems from collapse – far more than the amounts at which they baulk to reduce emissions. And if it’s our pockets we are worried about, we should just look back to the dizzying surge in oil and food prices last year – a taste of things to come in a world where fossil fuels run dry and arable land a vanishing commodity.
This is not a threat that we can postpone until disaster stares us in the face. The eleventh hour is upon us now, even though the consequences may be years down the line. Public opinion is worried, of that vague, unsettling fear of a bleak unknown. Our leaders have the mandate to act: will they rise to the occasion, or will we go down as the generation that saw disaster coming and chose to look the other way?

The Cyprus Mail is the only English-language daily newspaper published in Cyprus. It was established in 1945 and today, with its popular and widely-read website, the Cyprus Mail is among the most trusted news sites in Cyprus. The newspaper is not affiliated with any political parties and has always striven to maintain its independence. Over the past 70-plus years, the Cyprus Mail, with a small dedicated team, has covered momentous events in Cyprus’ modern history, chronicling the last gasps of British colonial rule, Cyprus’ truncated independence, the coup and Turkish invasion, and the decades of negotiations to stitch the divided island back together, plus a myriad of scandals, murders, and human interests stories that capture the island and its -people. Observers describe it as politically conservative.