The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, released on Friday, underscores the link between energy and climate change but, other than emphasising energy-efficiency measures and championing renewable energy, falls short of offering the world a politically workable mitigation plan. Titled "Mitigation and Climate Change," this summary report follows the release of two other IPCC assessments earlier this year — one on "Physical Science Basis" in February, and the second on "Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability" last month.

Climate change is a real and serious problem, and its effects could stress vulnerable nations and spur civil and political unrest. Yet the creeping politicisation of the subject will only make it harder to build international consensus and cooperation on a concrete plan of action. One way politicisation is happening is by seeking to "securitise" the risks of climate change. Take the insistence of some to add climate security to the agenda of the United Nations Security Council.

The Security Council, at the instance of Britain, held its first-ever debate on the security dimensions of climate change on April 17, with a number of delegates raising doubts whether the Council was the proper forum to discuss the issue. In 2005, as president of both the Group of Eight and European Union, British Prime Minister Tony Blair elevated global warming to the top of their agendas, and then the following year moved secretary Margaret Beckett from the environment to foreign portfolio. While London needs to be commended for its new foreign-policy focus on climate change, its effort to put the subject on the Security Council agenda could do more harm than good to the cause it now fervently espouses.

No doubt there is an ominous link between global warming and security, given the spectre of resource conflicts, failed states, large-scale migrations and higher frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, such as cyclones, flooding and droughts. Some developments would demand intervention by the armed forces. Yet climate change, despite its potential to engender greater intrastate and interstate conflict, can be tackled only through a consensual international approach.

"Securitising" climate change in the context of global geopolitics may be a way to turn the issue from one limited to eco-warriors to a subject of major international concern. It may also be a way to facilitate the heavy-lifting needed to give the problem the urgency and financial resources it deserves. But having succeeded in highlighting climate change as a core international challenge, the emphasis now has to shift to building consensus on counteraction.

If climate change were to become part of the agenda of the Security Council — a hotbed of big-power politics — it would actually undercut such consensus building. With five unelected, yet permanent, members dictating the terms of the debate, we would get international divisiveness when the need is for enduring consensus on a global response to climate change.

In today’s world, no international mission can succeed unless it enjoys international coherence and consensus. In fact, this is the key lesson one can learn from the way the global war on terror now stands derailed, even as the scourge of transnational terrorism has spread deeper and wider in the world.

It is not a surprise that Britain’s attempt during its last month’s Security Council presidency to put climate change on the Council agenda received a frosty response from the Group of 77 developing countries, China and Russia. Even the United States wasn’t enthused by the idea. The G-77 protested over the "ever-increasing encroachment by the Security Council" on the role of other UN bodies, including the General Assembly, the Commission on Sustainable Development and the UN Environment Programme.

Another invidious way politicisation is happening is through exaggeration and embellishment of the technical evidence on global warming. Take the reports of the IPCC, a joint body of the World Meteorological Organisation and UN Environment Programme. Ever since the IPCC in 1990 began releasing its assessments every five or six years, the panel has become gradually wiser, with its projected ocean-level increases due to global warming on a continuing downward slide.

From projecting in the 1990s a 67-centimetre-rise in sea levels by the year 2100, the IPCC has progressively whittled down that projection by nearly half to 38.5 centimetres now. Should the world be worried by the potential rise of the oceans by 38.5 centimetres within the next 100 years? You bet. We need to slow down such a rise. But if a rise of 38.5 centimetres does occur, will it mean catastrophe? Not really.

If the world didn’t even notice a nearly 20-centimetre rise of sea levels in the past century, a slow 38.5-centimetre ascent of the oceans cannot be worse than the tsunami that struck the Indian Ocean region in late 2004. Yet the climate-change scaremongering has picked up steam — "the Maldives would be wiped out," "the Netherlands would be under water," "millions would have to flee Shanghai."

Politicising technical data only distorts reality. It also makes it harder to work out a realistic response to a serious challenge. This is especially so as the world has swung from one extreme to the other over global warming: from indifference, if not neglect, to such unease among some that conjuring up worst-case scenarios has become a rage. Even as such dire predictions proliferate, the IPCC’s own 2007 estimates of the likely temperature increases and heat waves owing to climate change have changed little from its previous calculations in 2001.

Yet another facet of the current politics is that the term, climate change, is being stretched to embrace environmental degradation unrelated to the effects of the build-up of greenhouse gases and aerosol concentrations in the atmosphere. What has climate change to do with reckless land use, overgrazing, contamination of water resources, overuse of groundwater, inefficient or environmentally unsustainable irrigation systems, waste mismanagement or the destruction of forests, mangroves and other natural habitats? Some of these actions, of course, may contribute to climate variation but they do not arise from global warming.

Climate change is being turned into a convenient, blame-all phenomenon. As if to exculpate governments for reckless development and feign helplessness, all environmental degradation is being expediently hitched to climate change.

There is danger that like the once-fashionable concept of human security, climate change could become too diffused in its meaning and thereby deflect international focus from tackling growing fossil-fuel combustion, the main source of man-made greenhouse gases. Just as Britain is now pushing the climate-change issue, Canada put human security on the Security Council agenda during its Council presidency in February 1999. But by the time that concept was fleshed out by the UNDP, Human Security Commission and UN Secretary-General in succession, human security had become so broad and inclusive as to lose its focus.

There is need for greater clarity not only on the human causation of climate change, but also on what we mean by "green." There are countries that environmentally protect their national territories in a good way, only to treat the atmosphere as a municipal dump. In fact, states that boast of high environmental standards, sadly, tend also to be high per-capita emitters of greenhouse gases. Environmental-protection standards have to include respect for the atmosphere.

Jumping on the green bandwagon may be becoming politically chic, but often it entails little more than lip service to climate security. Even the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), set up under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, has accomplished little more than providing a greener reputation to some states and their greenhouse gases-spewing enterprises.

Under this mechanism, rich countries install climate-friendly technology in poor countries in return for securing carbon credits to exceed their own emission targets. Such credits are traded in an open cross-border secondary market where polluting industries can buy them to offset their emission levels or sell them when prices move up. The result has been the emergence of a network transferring to rich countries the emission rights of poor states in a system of carbon colonialism.

Environmental grandstanding in the form of "cap and trade" only belittles the grim challenge of climate change. What is needed is not a CDM-style re-jiggering of emission rights, but an across-the-board global reduction in carbon-dioxide emissions. If counteraction, however, is turned into a burden-sharing drill among states, we will fail because distributing "burden" is a doomed exercise. Neither citizens in rich states are going to lower their living standards by cutting energy use, nor will poor nations sacrifice economic growth, especially because their per-capita CO² emissions are still just one-fifth the level of the developed world.

Instead of expending political capital to securitise climate change, we need to find ways to address the energy dilemma. Given that global warming is a natural corollary to how we produce or use energy, climate change is actually the wrong end of the problem to look at. About 80 per cent of the world’s energy still comes from fossil fuels.

What is needed is a new political dynamic that is not about burden-sharing but about opportunity centred on radically different energy policies. This means not only a focus on renewable energy and greater efficiency, but also a more-urgent programme of research and development on alternative fuels and carbon-sequestration technologies. Technology may offer salvation.