Cloud cover rain forest in the Baram region in Sarawak state, Malaysia in early morning, Dec. 12, 2007. The UN's network of climate scientists, which shared the Nobel prize with former Vice President Al Gore, released four major reports in 2007, saying man-made global warming was incontrovertible and nations must sharply reduce emissions of heat-trapping emissions from industry, transport and agriculture. (Vincent Thian/Associated Press)

With startling suddenness, climate change became the environmental story of 2007.

From the new urgency among those in the scientific community to appeals for action from industry and a worried public, concern about climate change broadened and deepened across Canada and the world. And environmental effects that had been predicted for 10 or 20 years in the future began to happen now.

Al Gore (third from left) received his Nobel Peace Prize on Monday Dec. 10, 2007, and urged the United States and China to make the boldest moves on climate change or "stand accountable before history for their failure to act." (Odd Anderson/Associated Press)

Concern about the environment had already grown throughout 2006, partly triggered by the release of former U.S. vice-president Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth.

That was followed by a grim warning from economist Sir Nicolas Stern that the global costs of not curbing climate change could reach $7 trillion US by 2050.

The year 2007 was marked by a flood of scientific news, and Canadians in particular had reason to sit up and listen.

Canada

2007 is the beginning of International Polar Year, which is in fact two years of intense, focused science in the Arctic and the Antarctic.

Scientists had predicted Earth’s poles would feel the effects first, but they were stunned by the speed and degree of change in the Arctic this year. By September, the European Space Agency and the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo., aannounced the Arctic’s sea ice had shrunk to the lowest level recorded since satellite monitoring began almost 30 years ago.

The ESA said that every summer for the past 10 years, the Arctic has lost an average of 100,000 square kilometres of sea ice. In 2007, it lost one million square kilometres. For the first time the most direct route through the Northwest Passage was "fully navigable."

Suddenly, an issue that had simmered quietly but rarely erupted into public debate became big news: If the world’s cargo and cruise ships, oil tankers and warships could traverse the Northwest Passage with ease, what would that mean for Canadian sovereignty, let alone the Arctic environment?

But for all the global significance of an open passage, what many people talked about was how the melting ice threatens that great creature of the ice, the polar bear. The U.S. Geological Survey warned that two-thirds of the world's polar bears, including all of those in Alaska and most of Canada's Western Arctic, will be gone by 2050.

The territory of Nunavut, whose hunters depend on polar bears to bring in American trophy hunters, argued the bears are not at risk, and even that the populations are growing. Scientists who have studied the bears for decades disagreed. A team from the University of Alberta reported that by taking out the big males, hunting could lead to "rapid and sudden" collapse of the populations.

The bears are the most iconic of the ice animals, but biologists said climate change threatens other marine mammals, as well as some Arctic land animals. But the budget of the Canadian Wildlife Service was frozen this year, and many scientists found getting funding to understand that threat a struggle.

South of the Arctic Circle, people talked about the weird weather. Who in Ontario would complain about golfing in January? Some parts of Canada and some people may well benefit from a warmer climate, and the country’s wealth would make adaptation far easier than for the developing world.

Destruction from slash-and-burn shifting cultivation by natives is visible in the heart of Sarawak. The U.N.'s network of climate scientists, which shared this year's Nobel Peace Prize with former U.S. vice-president Al Gore, released four major reports in 2007 saying man-made global warming was incontrovertible and nations must sharply reduce emissions of heat-trapping emissions from industry, transport and agriculture. (Vincent Thian/Associated Press)

But the unpredictable nature of the weather in 2007, and the predictions of more frequent storms and floods, of melting glaciers and longer droughts, were unsettling. With water levels in Canada’s Great Lakes dropping, many began to seriously question what climate change could do to the country’s apparently abundant supply of fresh water.

The difference climate change could make to another problem in the Great Lakes is unclear, but it isn’t likely to be helpful. Species that have no right to be there — invasive species — are threatening native species not just in the Lakes, but across Canada. Biologists anticipate that warmer temperatures will be like a welcome mat for some foreign species, and that will make survival even more of a struggle for ones that evolved in our cooler climates.

Meanwhile, a tiny insect that is native, in this case to British Columbia, has been freed from the confines of its usual habitat by the warming trend. The population of the mountain pine beetle, usually kept in check by bitter cold winters, has erupted into a force that is destroying forests across British Columbia. In 2007, it crossed the Rockies and began to dine on the boreal forests of Alberta. Environment Canada’s prediction that the current winter will be very cold may be the forest’s best hope.

International Science

2007 was the year when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate change completed four years of work on its Fourth Assessment Report. The IPCC membership is made up of the world’s governments as well as hundreds of scientists who assess the work of many thousands of others. They draw conclusions about the physical science, the possible impacts and how to adapt to them, and how to mitigate or reduce climate change.

All that information eventually gets bound up into one tight little synthesis — a primer for policy-makers who are supposed to do something about it.

In Februrary, the report was released. It predicted average worldwide temperatures would increase between 1.8 and four degrees Celsius over the next century and that sea levels would rise between 18 and 59 per cent in that period. And it concluded, with 90% certainty, that human activities were “very likely” the cause.

Two months later, the IPCC’s second,and even more sobering, report was released. The world’s poorer, drier, wetter and low-lying regions will feel it the most, the report said, but it appears no country gets off lightly, with some part of heatwaves, drought, floods, storms, disease, coastline erosion, and species extinction affecting them.

And in May, the IPCC finished its third, or mitigation report: what it believes can, should, and must be done. Greenhouse gas emissions need to stabilize, it said, and begin declining within one or two decades. And to keep average temperatures from rising more more than 2.4 degrees Celcius, or low enough to avoid dangerous impacts, the world will need to cut emissions by 50 per cent to 85 per cent by the middle of the century.

A delegate to the U.N. climate conference walks past a sign put up by an environmental activist group at the international climate conference in Nusa Dua, Bali, Indonesia. (Binsar Bakkara, AP)

It can be done, said the IPCC, with technology that already exists, and for three per cent or less of the world’s GDP. How? Solar and nuclear power, biofuels, energy efficiency, altering lifestyle,and reducing deforestation were on the list.

Canada is among countries investigating one technology the report highlighted. Capturing the carbon that industry produces and then storing it somewhere other than the atmosphere is still experimental, expensive and controversial — but also promising for this country, with its huge production of oil, gas and coal.

The report also said the world needs economic incentives that put a price on carbon, such as a carbon tax or a carbon trading strategy. And in 2007 some individuals,organizations and political parties sought ways to become "carbon neutral."

For an individual, it might mean someone taking a plane trip would pay someone to plant trees to offset their carbon dioxide emissions. What industry and governments can do is not disimilar. Some countries are already trading carbon emissions by buying credits from other countries that aren’t emitting as much carbon as they are allowed to.

Canada is not yet one of them, although the federal government has proposed a domestic emissions trading system.

Other schemes, suitable for science fiction, became topics of serious discussion in 2007. Scientists began to explore dramatic ways to offset greenhouse gas emissions, such as fertilizing the oceans to grow more plankton to suck up more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. But the IPCC was skeptical and warned such options remain "largely speculative and unproven and with the risk of unknown side effects."

There was one more IPCC report to come before the policmakers met in Bali in December. And when the primer, or synthesis, was released, it was the most strongly worded report the organization had ever written. Evidence of the planet’s warming was "unequivocal" and it could lead to "abrupt or irreversible" effects on climate. The window to act is closing. And much, much more.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, saying global warming bears the seeds of "catastrophe," called on political leaders to push for "a real breakthrough" in Bali.

It can be done. Nations proved that in September, when they met in Montreal and agreed to speed up the phasing out of hydrochlorofluorocarbons, or HCFCs. Twenty years ago in the Montreal Protocol, nations had agreed to phase out the CFCs which were depleting the protective ozone layer high in the atmosphere, as well as acting as greenhouse gases. But the HCFCs that replaced them turned out to be greenhouse gases as well,and many times more potent.

An environmental activist dressed as a sunbathing penguin protests global warming during the U.N. Climate Conference in Bali, Indonesia. (Binsar Bakkara/Associated Press

The negotiations to speed up their end were hailed as an shining example of what can be achieved. Unfortunately, world economies do not run on HCFCs, they run on carbon fuels, and the history of negotiations over and since the Kyoto Accord has been rocky, to say the least.

All in all, 2007 didn’t give people concerned about climate change much to cheer about. Until October 12. That’s when the Norwegian Nobel Committee announed the Nobel Peace Prize would go to Al Gore and to the IPCC. The committee said Gore was probably "the single individual who has done the most to create greater worldwide understanding of the measures that need to be adopted." It praised the IPCC for working tirelessly "to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed" to counteract climate change.

But for all the fame that came to the IPCC and the former U.S. vice-president — and for all the scientific warning of irreversible change and tipping points and all the public’s desire for action — the year of climate change nonetheless was to lurch to an inconclusive end.

Almost 190 nations met in Bali, Indonesia, to draw up what was called a "roadmap to negotiations" for cuts to greenhouse gas emissions — the next phase of the Kyoto Protocol. Because the IPCC had warned that emissions need "to peak in the next 10 to 15 years and then be reduced to very low levels, well below half of levels in 2000 by mid-century," Europe and other nations pushed very hard to get the developed world to commit to a target of a 25 per cent to 40 per cent cut by 2020 from the levels in 1990.

As in so many climate change meetings before, the United States wanted nothing to do with a declaration that didn’t include cuts in rapidly industrializing countries, such as China, Indian, and Brazil. This time Canada, which in the past had said the industrialized world needs to lead the way, sided with the U.S.

In a cliffhanger ending, a compromise was reached.The agreement itself does not contain the numbers, but adds a footnote referring to the science which supported the numbers.

It was a small victory, and a weak one, for those who want an international agreement in place when the first phase of the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012. But without it, years might have been lost. Now, negotiations to get both developed and developing nations to cut emissions can begin immediately.

To Yvo de Boer, head of the UNFCCC, it was a breakthrough that represented the dismantling of what he called "the Berlin Wall of climate change" — the idea that only the rich must cut emissions. Over the next two years, in meetings small and large, nations will follow the Bali Roadmap and try to define the language for their next meeting in Copenhagen in 2009.