Este texto (
PDF) explica muito bem porque é que o Protocolo de Quioto não é solução para coisa nenhuma:
However, global warming will have serious costs ? the total cost is estimated at about $5 trillion. Such estimates are unavoidably uncertain but derive from models assessing the cost of global warming to a wide variety of societal areas such as agriculture, forestry, fisheries, energy, water supply, infrastructure, hurricane damage, drought damage, coast protection, land loss caused by a rise in sea level, loss of wetlands, forest loss, loss of species, loss of human life, pollution and migration.
The consequences of global warming will hit hardest on the developing countries, whereas the industrialized countries may actually benefit from a warming lower than 2-3°C.12 The developing countries are harder hit primarily because they are poor ? giving them less adaptive capacity.
Despite our intuition that we naturally need to do something drastic about such a costly global warming, we should not implement a cure that is actually more costly than the original affliction. Here, economic analyses clearly show that it will be far more expensive to cut CO2 emissions radically, than to pay the costs of adaptation to the increased temperatures.
The Bonn meeting was generally the implementation of the much more studied Kyoto Protocol, which aims to cut carbon emissions to 5.2 percent below 1990-levels in 2010, or a reduction of almost 30 percent, compared to no-intervention.
The effect of Kyoto (and even more so Bonn) on the climate will be minuscule. All models agree that the Kyoto Protocol will have surprisingly little impact. One model by a lead author of the 1996 IPCC report shows us (Figure 1) how an expected temperature increase of 2.1°C in 2100 will be diminished by the protocol to an increase of 1.9°C. Or to put it more clearly, the temperature that we would have
experienced in 2094 we have now postponed to 2100. In essence, the Kyoto Protocol does not negate global warming but merely buys the world six years.
If Kyoto is implemented with anything but global emissions trading ? a scheme which seems utterly unattainable, and was not at all addressed in Bonn ? it will not only be almost inconsequential for the climate, but it will also constitute a poor use of resources. The cost of such a Kyoto pact if implemented, just for the US, will be higher than the cost of solving the single most pressing problem for the world ? providing the entire world with clean drinking water and sanitation.
It is estimated that the latter would avoid 2 million deaths every year and prevent half a billion people becoming seriously ill each year.14 If no trading mechanism is implemented for Kyoto, the costs could approach $1 trillion, or almost five times the cost of world-wide water and sanitation coverage. For comparison, the total global aid today is about $50 billion annually.
If we were to go even further ? as suggested by many ? and curb global emissions to the 1990 level, the net cost to the world would seriously escalate to about $4 trillion extra ? comparable almost to the cost of global warming itself.17 Likewise, a temperature increase limit would cost anywhere from $3 to $33 trillion extra.
This emphasizes that we need to be very careful in our willingness to act on global warming. Basically, global warming will be expensive ($5 trillion) and there is very little good we can do about it. Even if we were to handle global warming optimally which would mean cutting emissions a little fairly far into the future, we can only cut the cost very little (about $0.3 trillion). However, if we choose to enact Kyoto or even more ambitious programmes, the world will lose. And this conclusion does not
just come from the output from a single model. Almost all the major computer models agree that even when chaotic consequences have been taken into consideration ?it is striking that the optimal policy involves little emissions reduction below uncontrolled rates until the middle of the [twenty-first] century at the earliest.
So is it not curious, then, that the typical reporting on global warming tells us all the bad things that could happen from CO2 emissions, but few or none of the bad things that could come from overly zealous regulation of such emissions? Indeed, why is it that global warming is not discussed with an open attitude, carefully attuned to avoid making big and costly mistakes to be paid for by our descendants, but rather with a fervor more fitting for preachers of opposing religions?
Figure 1 The expected increase in temperature with business-as-usual and with the Kyoto restrictions extended forever. Broken line shows the temperature for the business-as-usual scenario in 2094 is the same as the Kyoto temperature in 2100 (1.92°C). Source: Wigley 1998.
