99 months, and counting

In August, we marked the beginning of a 100 month countdown to stop irreversible climate change. The response has been astonishing

Andrew Simms
guardian.co.uk,
Monday September 01 2008 10:00 BST

Howl farewell to the dog days of August. They were mostly damp and drab, not to mention marking the beginning of a 100-month countdown to the world entering a new, more perilous phase of global warming. Not everything, though, can be blamed directly on climate change. For the record, weather varies enormously due to short-term atmospheric changes. The climate system, however, changes in response to the complex push and pull of many spheres, from solar radiation to ice cover and greenhouse gas levels. Weather is a subset of climate, whose long-term patterns will nevertheless change as the climate system alters.
One month ago, writing in the Guardian, we said that the world had 100 months to go before it stood to cross a threshold, after which we will all be playing a game of climate roulette. Runaway global warming is the bullet in the chamber. With all the work and words expended on the issue, still, we thought, a reality check was needed. Unlike other issues demanding a political solution, climate change is on a ticking clock. We either do, or we don't, avert runaway warming.
The response to pointing this out was astonishing.
In just the first three weeks, via the website, more than 135,000 people from more than 130 countries signed either themselves up to take regular monthly actions on climate change, or were directly asked to do so by friends. One man in New Zealand printed out the Guardian article and posted it to all 121 members of his national parliament. Rap star P Diddy reportedly grounded his airplane, although, just possibly, this might have had something more to do with the cost of fuel.
Many worried that in drawing attention to such a stark reality, the consequence would be a disabling sense of powerlessness. If you see someone crossing the road in front of a runaway truck, the balance has to be struck between shouting so loud that they freeze in their tracks, and closing your eyes to pretend it's not happening. Al Gore's team in the US has struggled with it. One of his campaign psychological advisors (this is the US, remember, they have such things) got in touch to say that the One Hundred Months initiative was just right, in terms of facing the inconvenient truth and leaving people with a sense that they can act to make every month count.
The countdown also came to the attention of the world's most important figure on climate change, the Nobel Prize-winning chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, R K Pachauri. He wrote to us commenting that: "It speaks highly of the effectiveness of this effort that so many people have signed themselves up for regular monthly campaigns over the next 100 months. This is most heartening, and it is efforts such as these that can make a difference to stabilize the earth's climate and in moving human society on the path of sustainable development."
From the Women's Institute in the UK, to the Green Belt movement in Kenya (led by Wangari Maathai, another Nobel Prize winner), groups have been signing up to push for accelerated action over the next 100 months.
New research from the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at Manchester University added extra urgency in the last month. Targets for tackling global warming often leave out vital greenhouse gas emissions, such as those stemming from international transport and the environmental domino effects referred to by scientists as "carbon cycle feedbacks". Tyndall's research director, Kevin Anderson, concludes that when these things are taken into account, the UK's emissions must peak by the year 2012 and then decline by at least 6 to 9 per cent annually. It is misleading to talk, as the government does, about long-term targets for the year 2050, because what matters is how greenhouse gases accumulate on a yearly basis. Our only option, he says, it to "radically and urgently curtail ... demand for energy".
The howling question then, with which to leave the British summer behind, is how to provide security to people in fuel poverty, and pay for the rapid transition to a low carbon economy?
Step forward the suddenly popular windfall tax. In October 2006, we proposed a recurrent additional tax on UK fossil fuel companies to pay into what we called an Oil Legacy Fund. It was to follow the fantastically successful Norwegian example which, over years, built up a financial safety net for future generations that was worth, at the last count, around 260bn euros (£198bn), or 75,000 euros (£57,000) for every man, woman and child in the country.
Revived by a combination of MPs, the regulator Ofgem and Labour activists in the Compass group, a powerful case is now being made in the face of high oil prices and Labour's current political difficulties.
Just three companies – BP, Centrica and Shell – together made £1,000 profit per second over the first six months of 2008. At the same time, every second, mankind overall is emitting 1,000 tonnes of CO2. As the climate clock keeps ticking, possibly the most important challenge is to end a system that allows vast profits to be made at the cost of undermining the climatic foundations of civilisation. A recurrent windfall tax would do that.
As Winston Churchill said in parliament in November 1936, "The era of procrastination, of half measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to its close. In its place, we are entering a period of consequences ... I never would have believed that we should have been allowed to go on getting into this plight, month by month ..."
On the climate clock, it is now 99 months, and counting.
To be part of the solution go to www.onehundredmonths.org – and tell your friends.