UN:It was the year in which climate change came into the mainstream - thanks to Sir Nicholas Stern, writes Frank McDonald, Environment Editor
Germany gained great credit from soccer fans and the media for its faultless staging of the World Cup last summer. But the organisers went further than any of their predecessors with a Green Goal initiative, which resulted in the 16-day tournament offsetting all of its carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.
It will go down in history as the first climate neutral World Cup, according to the environmental scorecard. Not only was renewable energy deployed at stadiums and public transport used as much as possible, but emissions were also offset by supporting clean energy projects in India and South Africa.
The scorecard shows that the volume of greenhouse gases saved by Green Goal more than compensated for the 92,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions generated by the tournament - including long-haul flights from all over the world. The 2010 winter Olympics in Vancouver is set to do the same.
What these important initiatives show is that concern about climate change has become mainstream, in sport as much as any other areas of life. They simply would not have happened 10 or 15 years ago, when global warming seemed a distant, uncertain threat which few but the doomsayers took seriously.
Perceptions of the problem we face have changed a lot since then. There's now a widespread realisation that the world really is warming up and that the unpleasant consequences of rising temperatures - notably the frequency and severity of storms and other natural disasters - are very serious indeed.
Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth brought climate change to a mass audience, shocking many with the clarity of its message, while the British government's Stern review - published in October - knocked the stuffing out of president George Bush's argument that taking action would be far too costly.
Quite the reverse, as the Scots say. Sir Nicholas Stern warned that not taking action will prove infinitely more expensive; the overall costs and risks of climate change, he calculated, will amount to losing at least 5 per cent and possibly as much as 20 per cent of global GDP each year, "now and forever". This grim prognosis couldn't be ignored, especially as it was put forward by such an impeccable establishment figure as Stern, second permanent secretary at the UK Treasury and former chief economist at the World Bank. Concern about climate change had crossed the professional species barrier.
Sir Nicholas travelled to Nairobi a couple of weeks later to drive home his message at the 12th UN Climate Change Conference. There is also no doubt that his 580-page report was one of the major factors that has helped to change the atmosphere of the negotiations, particularly in putting the sceptics to flight.
As British environment secretary David Miliband said: "it was clear from the discussions that the science of climate change is now overwhelmingly accepted". He also had no doubt that the Stern review "has made a historic dent in the economic argument that the world cannot afford to reduce its emissions".
The science is expected to be underpinned even more firmly by the Fourth Assessment report of the UN's Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which is due to be published in installments in 2007, starting in February. The last such scientific assessment, the third since 1988, came out in 2001.
Rajendra K Pachauri, the Indian scientist who chairs the 2,000-member panel, has said that the latest assessment is likely to show that global temperatures are higher now than they have been for 12,000 years, Greenland's ice-sheet is melting at a dramatic rate and that sea levels are steadily rising worldwide.
Though all the work by teams of scientists and meteorologists is subjected to multiple stages of peer review and often diluted in the interests of reaching a consensus before publication, Pachauri believes that the IPCC's Fourth Assessment report could provide "just the right impetus" to concentrate minds.
The Nairobi conference did not achieve much in terms of concrete measures to cut greenhouse gas emissions, but it marked a watershed of sorts in political thinking about global warming. In the end, there was a widespread acceptance that radical action must be taken to curb rising temperatures.
Time is running out. The Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change - so far the only international instrument to deal with this critical issue - only covers the period 2008-2012 and was designed to cut emissions from 35 developed countries by an average of 5 per cent, a fraction of what the scientists say is needed.
Under the EU "burden-sharing" deal negotiated in mid-1998, Ireland - as one of the less developed member states - was allowed to increase its emissions by 13 per cent relative to Kyoto's 1990 base year. The latest figures show that we are 23 per cent ahead and must now buy our way out of the problem.
In his Budget for 2007, Minister for Finance Brian Cowen announced an allocation of €270 million for the purchase of carbon credits abroad to offset Ireland's own emissions. This is a legitimate tactic under Kyoto's "flexible mechanisms", but it can hardly be equated with well-targeted domestic measures.
Tweaking vehicle registration tax and motor tax to reflect carbon dioxide emissions was first proposed by the National Climate Change Strategy in 2000, but it will not take effect until January 1st, 2008, at the earliest - even though road transport is the fastest growing contributor to the problem.
A revised climate change strategy is currently being finalised and will be published early in the new year, according to Minister for the Environment Dick Roche. This will have to go beyond mere platitudes to include a range of serious measures aimed at reducing Ireland's contribution to climate change.
What is needed to make this happen is an end to Taoiseach Bertie Ahern's agnosticism on the issue. He must read more than a summary of the Stern review over the holiday period and realise - as British prime minister Tony Blair does - that global warming represents a real threat to the world economy.