After the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Conference, it was apparent that a number of countries had made pledges that needed backing up at home in the form of laws. The U.S. is one such example. Our House of Representatives passed a climate and energy bill back in June. Similar legislation has yet to come up for any votes at all in the Senate.
On the flip side of the coin, Brazil is an example of a country that made a pledge and now can point to a law backing up that pledge. The law requires CO2 emissions to be reduced by 39% by 2020. I haven’t found the baseline year they’re measuring against – i.e. 2005 emissions or 1990 emissions. The 1990 emissions would obviously be more restrictive, so my initial gut feeling is they’re using their 2005 emissions as a benchmark.
To be fair, Brazil isn’t the textbook case of a country which has always done things in an environmentally conscious way. But they are closer to action than we are.
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.
This year’s climate summit is being held in Copenhagen, Denmark. The summit is scheduled to last through the end of next week. In the run-up to the conference, a large number of analyses and news tidbits have come out. Since little will be decided in the first few days of the summit, I wanted to collect and share some of them.
Within the past couple of weeks, President Obama announced he was prepared to offer a goal of the United States reducing emissions to 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 and 83 percent (baseline?) by 2050. It’s a target, which is frankly all I can say for it. Given the state of the climate, the 2020 goal falls far short of what needs to happen. In contrast, European nations who signed the Kyoto Protocol have already reduced their emissions by 8% of 1990 levels, which were obviously much lower than 2005 levels. The stranglehold that climate change deniers have on U.S. policy has got to end.
The best summary of what to expect can be found at Climate Progress.
Saudi Arabia desperately searches for any reason to prevent any forward progress at the summit. I hope I’m not the only one who sees parallels between the Saudi’s childish behavior and Con Senator’s childish behavior. The Cons would love living in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is the country which wants compensation for oil they won’t sell when the world switches to renewables (WTF?!).
Speaking of Hacker-gate, a crime was committed. Is it any wonder the corporate stenographic media is concentrating on what the deniers want them to concentrate on? I didn’t think so. Hacking is a crime. Scientists communicating with each other is not.
