Rice production in the Philippines could fall by 50 to 70 percent by 2020 as yields drop due to the effects of climate change, the advocacy group Oxfam International said in a report last week. Agricultural yields are forecast to drop about 10 percent for every 1-degree centigrade rise in temperatures in countries like the Philippines.

Oxfam said that chronic hunger may be “the defining human tragedy of this century” as climate change causes growing seasons to shift, crops to fail and storms and droughts to ravage fields.

But a huge drop in agricultural yields is just one of the serious effects of climate change. Heherson T. Alvarez, presidential adviser on global warming and climate change, who talked with Inquirer editors and reporters recently, said that “creeping climate change” is causing stronger typhoons and cyclones all over the world. The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has observed a large increase in the energy, number and wind speeds of typhoons in some regions during the last few decades in association with warmer sea surface temperatures.

Alvarez cited the warning of scientists that the world is moving toward a dangerous tipping point—the point at which climate change becomes irreversible. The level of greenhouse gases trapped in the atmosphere is now 372 parts per million (ppm). Scientists say that if the 450 ppm level is reached, that would be the tipping point.

When the tipping point is reached, global temperature will increase by 2 degrees centigrade. The temperature increase will melt ice caps in Greenland and the polar regions, and melting ice will raise sea level by a few meters, Alvarez said. A one-meter increase in sea level could drastically affect living conditions in 64 of the Philippines’ 81 provinces, he said. The melting ice caps would produce similar effects on other archipelagic countries as well as on the coastlines of the continents.

Alarmed by the possible effects of climate change, Alvarez, speaking on behalf of the Philippines at the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Conference in Bonn in April, urged Annex I parties to make deep and early cuts on greenhouse gas emissions: more than 30 to 40 percent from 2013 to 2017 and more than 50 percent from 2018 to 2022 from the 1990 levels. (The Annex I parties are the United States, the 27 European Union countries, Japan, the Russian Federation, Australia and Canada.)

The most serious attempt to get the world to reduce greenhouse gas emissions started with the Kyoto Protocol which was adopted in 1997 and which entered into force in 2005. The United States, under then President George W. Bush, rejected it and took part in the talks only as an observer.

Now, the whole world is looking forward to the climate conference in Copenhagen in December, especially because US President Barack Obama, while campaigning for the presidency, proposed that the US progressively reduce emissions to 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050.

The Copenhagen conference has taken on a special urgency in view of the finding of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change this year of compelling scientific evidence of global warming and the necessity of urgent and comprehensive reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

The road to Copenhagen is expected to be stony and torturous, particularly because the highly industrialized and developed countries like the US are expected to insist on smaller cuts and over a longer period of time—not the deep and early cuts that the Philippines has proposed.

The Philippines took the lead in the United Nations Framework Convention in Bonn last month. The smaller, less developed countries should band together and try to exert moral suasion on the highly developed countries to accept deeper and early cuts. They could enlist the help of bigger nations like China and India that are sympathetic to their cause.

The more highly developed countries should realize that unless the entire world makes drastic cuts in greenhouse gas emissions now, it could reach the point of irreversible climate change by 2050. That could mean considerable areas of archipelagic countries going under the sea as well as the permanent flooding of the coastal areas of the continents.