Long live the Climate Convention:)

So today were are all - except our polluting American friends - 'celebrating' the entry into force of the Kyoto-protocol, aren't we. Proudly we can now pronounce we are living up to our 'environmental responsibility' to at least try to limit the growth of emissions, while all the same continuing our way to exceed our targets.
Not that these targets really would have meant much anyway. Even if the targeted limits of the emissions for all – incl. the US for my hypotheses here - the industrialised countries would have been hit, the growth in the newly industrialising countries would have led to an overall rise in any case.
Well, this hypothesis was highly optimistic anyway, in reality we are heading towards a fairly big increase and realistically there is little we can do. Ideas of significantly cutting emissions are not realisable, because a) we are far to much occupied to blame each other, and b) we don’t really have a practicable idea of how to do it, while all the same constantly trying to get richer. Let’s face it the Kyoto-protocol was designed to account emissions away strait from the beginning. To reduce European emissions by ‘forest management’, the convenient drop in the Eastern European countries through to the collapse of communism and projects in the developing countries is not really reducing our emissions. We simply lack a plausible solution to produce enough energy for our lifestyle, and we are not really prepared to change our lifestyle.
So as it is, we are going to scientifically discover the real effects of the greenhouse effect by experiment. OK, we can’t try it again afterwards with different conditions to really understand the different elements, but sooner or later we will learn how the planet adopts to a change in the atmospheric composition. That it will adopt it is not really a question – the planet has experienced it before, ice-ages, extreme hot periods and the changes in-between – what is more interesting, is how such a change actually takes place? Will the Climate slowly change or will it get into chaos first? Or does a overall minor change in the chemical composition not really have any effect after all, which admittedly isn’t very likely but possible, given the complexity of the planet?
As a scientist I would embrace the times ahead. I mean when do you ever get the opportunity to experiment with a planet? There is a lot of potential knowledge out there, maybe we can gather enough information on the way, so that we can some-when intentionally control the climate. You never know!
As a human being however, I’m not so sure about it. You see, I can’t help feeling that the idea of taking a complex, very finely tuned system, with lots of interwoven factors which somehow all interact with each other, and shaking it, isn’t a very good idea. I don’t know, but I can’t ignore the idea that fiddling with one factor will cause reactions in other parts of the system. If the temperature changes, changes in areas such as global vegetation, seasons and winds, appear to me as fairly likely. And somehow I also can’t ignore the idea that such changes will have some consequences on our species as well. Not that I seriously fear we could be extinguished – weed doesn’t die – but maybe our lifestyle could be significantly be effected.
And overall the fundamental question of how to satisfy our ever growing demand for energy without undertaking significant changes in the way we live is still open. And research-funding in this area was reduced in the last years by the different governments all over the world. OK in the private sector an increase has simultaneously occurred, but if our problem is energy why are we investing so much in increased efficiency of existing methods – which even if done by 100% energy-efficiency still generate CO2 – instead of in new methods? The quest for a reliable source of energy that is available in sufficient amounts to satisfy human demands and expandable to reach all areas on the globe, while at the same time not having waste products that threaten the global stability, is still open. In its current form renewable energy sources are quantitative simply not capable of delivering this.
If the Kyoto-protocol had established a global, collectively financed institution for research in this area, rather than a compliance committee to supervise politically accounted figures, that no one meets anyway, more progress to solve the problem could have been achieved, and eventually we might come into the position to at least stop our little planetary experiment, in case it gets a bit inconvenient. As it is we are financing politicians and accountants instead of scientist. But then it was never one of the human strengths to think collectively and act in order to solve a problem at hand. Better to talk than to think – or business as usual!