President Barack Obama scored a major victory in the final hours of the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Conference, getting a number of nations to agree on a path toward climate action moving forward. Buttressing the victory was getting China and India to agree to international consultations and analysis of their efforts to curb pollution. Such a condition is one thing that Senate Cons were supposedly waiting for in order for the U.S. to finally do something meaningful about climate change. Whether that concern holds true now that the condition has been met by the Obama administration remains to be seen, of course. In fact, I fully expect the Cons to claim that no such condition was really met or that a new excuse will crop up.
So what about Senate Dems? How do they view the upcoming climate/energy legislation that Sens. Kerry and Boxer have worked on all year? Most importantly, how do the same Senate CorporateDems who are responsible for gutting the Senate’s health care legislation (turning it into a health insurance giveaway) view the climate/energy legislation? Well, if Politico is to be believed (a stretch, I know), some of those same CorporateDems who gave everything to the insurance corporations that they could have been releasing statements saying climate and energy should be put off until after the 2010 elections!
I obviously haven’t posted anything about the Copenhagen Conference for a few days. Not for lack of desire, but for a lack of time. So before more time slips away and I lose track of what happened in Copenhagen, here are where things stand, as best as I can determine.
The Copenhagen Climate Conference of 2009 wasn’t an abject failure, as too many people continue to profess. Did the Conference result in the most aggressive actions by every country that the most optimistic could have hoped for? Of course not. Anybody who thought that would happen set themselves up for severe disappointment. Is it the final step in climate action internationally? Again, of course it isn’t. What I think happened is a solid step in the general right direction was taken. The results were actually better than the total gridlock that appeared 1-3 days days prior to the end led observers to believe they would be. The agent who made the recorded progress available? The Obama administration.
By a twist of chance, I somehow missed the much talked about UN draft text yesterday afternoon, so I’m a little late to this. A number of bloggers have referred to it as a secret UN analysis. Most folks are completely up in arms about it. Until more information comes out from the end of the Copenhagen Conference, I’m going to exercise caution and not jump to conclusions. I’ll share what details I understand and provide my analysis of what’s gone on.
What is everybody freaking out about? Supposedly, a “leaked UN report” contained info on cuts offered at Copenhagen and what those cuts would mean for total GHG pollution amounts and associated warming. It shows a gap of up to 4.2 gigatonnes of carbon emissions below the required 2020 level of 44Gt, that is , the level currently thought to be required to stay below a global 2C rise. That 2C rise has been cited as being critical to keeping catastrophic climate change at bay. Below that rise, we should be “okay”; above it, we will face severe climatic consequences.
China and the U.S. continue to have a moderate level of disagreement on issues related to verification, namely “measurable, reportable, and verifiable” or MRV as the parlance has developed. China says it isn’t opposed to MRV for actions that receive international financing, technology or capacity building support, which is actually a good thing. International monies and projects should be fully transparent and accountable. The U.S. disagreement stems from the fact that China has already implemented climate change actions since 2005 that are internally funded. If text currently being debated is put in place, those projects wouldn’t be subject to international scrutiny, which I agree would be a bad thing. National sovereignty is one aspect of this struggle, but so is international dependencies. Some nations will literally be swallowed by the seas soon. Those nations rightfully want to ensure that every other nation is doing what they say they’re doing (and legally bound to do by treaty).
As of Monday, poorer nations (the G77) continued to stall talks at Copenhagen. Despite pressure from rich, developed, polluting nations, the group of developing countries have stood firm in their resolve to get 350ppm (concentration CO2) as a stated goal of the Copenhagen Summit. 350ppm has been identified by climatologists as the likely value that can exist without sending the climate system into either a more chaotic state or a stable state which consists of a much warmer and acidified world. Current concentrations have reached 387ppm. Good for the poorer nations. I sincerely hope they maintain their stance and force real action.
China, which last month for the first time publicly announced a target for reducing the rate of growth of its greenhouse gas emissions, is refusing to accept any kind of international monitoring of its emissions levels, according to negotiators and observers here. The United States is insisting that without stringent verification of China’s actions, it cannot support any deal.
The first official draft on a climate deal has been written and issued. The expectation is the details won’t be worked out for another 6 months or so, which was what a lot of people were thinking going into this Summit. Keep in mind that George Bush’s crew did everything they could for 8 years to make sure the climate crisis was worse when they left than when they took power. President Obama’s administration has had only 10 months so far to undo those 8 years of damage. That little fact will be very handy when the Cons start screaming that the Summit and the U.S. President are failures. Gotta love those patriots! Back to the draft:
A key working group under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) came up with a six-page text Friday. The draft may form the core of a new global agreement to combat climate change beyond 2012, when the present framework, the Kyoto Protocol, expires. However, most figures in the text are shown in brackets – meaning that there is not yet agreement on these specifics. Most importantly, the draft states that emissions should be halved worldwide by 2050 compared to 1990 levels, but it also suggests 80 percent and 95 percent reductions by that year as possible alternative options.
Those two emphasized statements are at the root of a lot of disagreement between parties, as I cover below.
There was an important development at yesterday’s Climate Summit in Copenhagen that should have gotten more attention in the media. There was also a data update that provides additional context for the importance of that development.
The island nation of Tuvalu wanted legally binding language to be written establishing limits in global atmospheric CO2 concentrations to 350 parts per million and global temperature rise to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. For clarity, our current global CO2 concentrations, according to observations, is 387ppm. So we’re already above the limit that scientists have identified as being a threshold we should not be above if we don’t want global temperatures much higher than they are today. Tuvalu was asking, therefore, for nations to agree to reduce emissions drastically so that the atmospheric concentrations begin decreasing. Why would they want legally binding language for such an audacious goal? Because Tuvalu is a set of four reef islands and five atolls whose maximum elevation is 15ft. They are extremely susceptible to any future potential sea level rise. Larger, richer countries (like Saudi Arabia and China) would hear none of it. They want to keep burning dirty fossil fuels and expand their economies like other developed nations did for the past 150 years. Tuvalu and a group consisting of other island countries and poorer nations can’t afford to wait until China decides they’re ready to switch to 100% renewable energy at some point in the future. They’re at risk today from climate change that is already occurring. The issue was suspended for the time being. Expect it to arise again before the end of next week (not that a solution will be found in that time frame, unfortunately).
Which brings me to the bad news of the day. I’ve written for months now that the 2007 IPCC AR4 report was good for its time, but it left significant questions unanswered (I haven’t been the only one). It was good, but didn’t go far enough. Major drawbacks resulting from a far too conservative approach, an approach that didn’t examine extremes as likely enough to spend much time on. Since the collection of papers for the 2007 AR4 release, scientists across the world have worked very hard to try to begin finding answers for the toughest questions remaining. How sensitive is the climate to GHG emissions? How responsive are temperatures to those emissions? When will glaciers and ice sheets melt? What kind of sea level rise can be expected? Another paper was put together to try to answer that last question. As with other facets of the research effort, conditions could very well be much worse than what the 2007 Report may have led people to think:
Sea level rise could occur 3 times faster than previously estimated. Everybody should be able to click on the link and look at the pdf if they want. Here’s the high-level message: based on our current emissions profile, which is as high as the worst-case scenario the IPCC examined, sea levels could rise by 6 feet (~2m) by 2100. The rate at which sea levels have been rising has increased in the past 20 and 10 years. Scientists’ predictions of sea level rise have been too low, contrary to the denialists’ hopes otherwise. Natural causes alone have not and cannot explain the rise observed. Like I wrote above, Tuvalu and many other countries are under immediate threat. They have no more time to wait while rich countries throw tantrums like spoiled children. This situation is likely to get worse before it gets better.
Lots of activity in Copenhagen happened during the past two days. As expected, results in the form of agreements or pacts haven’t come yet – that will happen next week. So here are some more climate-related news items to digest while negotiators do their job. I’ll add them throughout the day as they come out.
The 2000′s will be the hottest decade on record. Read that again: the 2000′s will be the hottest decade on record. Both the World Meteorological Organization and NOAA have come out with separate but agreeing analyses on this topic. Expect NASA to say the same thing when they release their update in the next week. We’ll have to wait until a little while into 2010 to get additional confirmation, but climate change is occurring today, period, end of story. What’s left to debate and decide? How fast and how much we act in the next 5 years. After that, it becomes how do we react, because a great deal of change will have been locked into the climate system.
170 countries meeting for climate negotiations haven’t resulted in any headway on central issues: fixing mandatory emission reduction targets for industrial countries, setting objectives for developing countries to rein in their own rapidly expanding emissions, and raising some $100 billion a year to help poor countries adjust to changing climate conditions. There’s nothing surprising in that sentence: it’s not like those countries are in any way held accountable to their citizens if they don’t make progress. Still, their negotiators keep at it, which is saying something. Interestingly, in response to the jammed negotiations, President Obama is duplicating an effort that Bush tried: have the 17 largest economies meet together since that’s where the primary problems are arising.
The first meeting is scheduled for April 27-28 in Washington, with more leading up to a July summit in Italy. Among those invited are the swiftly developing economies of China, India, Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia and South Africa. Korea and Japan join the U.S., Russia and several European countries from the industrial world, as well as representatives of the European Union. Denmark won an invitation as host of the decisive Copenhagen meeting.
Will the supposedly more focused set of meeting make more of a difference? I doubt it. Although, having President Obama’s people in place for a longer period of time might help spur things along. Unfortunately, they seem to be adopting the Bush attitude that the U.S. won’t be the primary responsible party to get climate action underway.
President Obama seems to recognize that delay is no longer an option. I hope that attitude translates to real action and an aggressive course of action to come out of the Copenhagen, Denmark talks later this year. Otherwise, some of the costs we face, like those outlined in this table from the NRDC (based on somewhat conservative estimates), will come to fruition. Anything we do now will be cheaper.
