Climate

DEC. 14, 2014

CORAL DAVENPORT

LIMA, Peru — Shortly before 2 a.m. on Sunday, after more than 36 straight hours of negotiations, top officials from nearly 200 nations agreed to the first deal committing every country in the world to reducing the fossil fuel emissions that cause global warming.

In its structure, the deal represents a breakthrough in the two-decade effort to forge a significant global pact to fight climate change. The Lima Accord, as it is known, is the first time that all nations — rich and poor — have agreed to cut back on the burning oil, gas and coal.

But the driving force behind the new deal was not the threat of sanctions or other legal consequences. It was global peer pressure. And over the coming months, it will start to become evident whether the scrutiny of the rest of the world is enough to pressure world leaders to push through new global warming laws from New Delhi to Moscow or if, as a political force, international reproach is impotent.

The strength of the accord — the fact that it includes pledges by every country to put forward a plan to reduce emissions at home — is also its greatest weakness. In order to get every country to agree to the deal, including the United States, the world’s largest historic carbon polluter, the Lima Accord does not include legally binding requirements that countries cut their emissions by any particular amount.

Instead, each nation will agree to enact domestic laws to reduce carbon emissions and put forth a plan by March 31 laying out how much each one will cut after 2020 and what domestic policies it will pass to achieve the cuts.

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03 November, 2014

Reuters in Copenhagen

France and the United States led a chorus of alarm yesterday after a major UN report on climate change warned that the earth was on track for potentially disastrous global warming.

France, which is hosting a UN conference in December 2015 that is supposed to seal cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions, said the report required “immediate, all-round mobilisation”.

“The message from this report is clear,” the foreign ministry and environment ministry said. “The 2015 Paris agreement has to provide a political response that is in line with the science.”

In Washington, US Secretary of State John Kerry said the report was a fresh warning – “another canary in the coal mine”.

“Those who choose to ignore or dispute the science clearly laid out in this report do so at great risk for all of us and for our kids and grandkids,” he said.

The report, published in Copenhagen, is the final chapter in an overview on global warming and its impacts by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The 40-page synthesis, summing up 5,000 pages of work by 800 scientists, said global warming was now causing more heat extremes, downpours, acidifying the oceans and pushing up sea levels.

“Science has spoken. There is no ambiguity in the message. Leaders must act, time is not on our side,” UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said in presenting the report, meant to guide global climate policymaking.

With fast action, climate change could be kept in check at manageable costs, he said, referring to a UN goal of limiting average temperature rises to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times. Temperatures are already up 0.85 C.

The study, approved by more than 120 governments, will be the main handbook for negotiators of a UN deal to combat global warming due at next year’s Paris summit.

To get a good chance of staying below 2 degrees, the report’s scenarios show that world emissions would have to fall by between 40 and 70 per cent by 2050 from current levels and to “near zero or below in 2100”.

Below zero would require extracting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere – for instance by planting forests that soak up carbon as they grow or by burying emissions from power plants that burn wood or other biomass.

To cut emissions, the report points to options including energy efficiency, renewable energies from wind to solar power, nuclear energy or coal-fired power plants where carbon dioxide is stripped from exhaust fumes and buried underground.

Without extra efforts to cut emissions, “warming by the end of the 21st century will bring high risks of severe, widespread, and irreversible impacts globally,” the IPCC said.

“Irreversible” could mean, for instance, a runaway melt of Greenland’s vast ice sheets that could swamp coastal regions and cities or disruptions to monsoons vital for growing food.

“The cost of inaction will be horrendously higher than the cost of action,” IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri said.

Environmental groups welcomed the report, including its focus on zero emissions.

“This is no longer about dividing up the pie. You need to get to zero. At some stage there is no pie left for anyone,” said Kaisa Kosonen of Greenpeace.

Additional reporting by Agence France-Presse

http://www.scmp.com/news/world/article/1630853/france-and-us-lead-calls-urgent-action-climate-change

The latest report (5AR) published by the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) created an uproar for all the wrong reasons. In the months leading to the report’s release, many climate observers began to speak of how the global mean temperatures have not been rising as drastically as predicted by climate change models that previous IPCC reports have written about.

This information was seized upon by skeptics of climate change, who then went on to proclaim that according to data, global temperatures have actually cooled and polar ice caps have increased in size. They once again accuse political agendas behind climate change, insisting that programs combating a ‘mythical’ global warming is spending millions for nothing and instead hurting jobs and the economy.

2013 Arctic Sea Ice Minimum. An increase in Arctic ice has led to proclamations of 'Arctic ice is growing' when it is, in fact, still on a long-term decline; this is the 6th lowest extent of Arctic ice on record. (NASA)

It does not help that both sides like to make snide remarks or personal jabs that distracts everyone concerned from the real debates. Nor that the IPCC allow ambiguities to slip into their reports or leaks about internal disagreements between members on their findings. These are the things that colour media reports to make attractive readings, distorting critical thinking on the issue at hand.

What should be made clear is that climate change is a difficult science – it is not a laboratory of tests and trials, it is about observations in the real world of unpredictable changes affecting hypotheses, and making proper scientific interpretations of the observations. Not only is it important that we take note of how skeptics of climate change like to interpret data based on their own theories, it would be prudent to move away from a basic error of conceiving science as some kind of ‘predictor’.

Science is not about making predictions. Observations contrary to predictions does not constitute evidence that the science is wrong - precisely because it is not fortune telling.

Good science seeks explanations of phenomena as close to the truth as possible, setting up controlled experiments to test for explanations, thinking about results and explanations within and beyond the current epistemic framework. A theory is not discarded just because observed data deviates from expected observations; rigorous thinking has to be done about its setup, unaccounted factors, even mistaken assumptions.

The science behind climate change has limited access to these conditions. It has to somehow extrapolate laboratory findings into the world and reap in non-laboratory data, making its theories difficult to test. This does not invalidate its theories, only that more work and time is needed for a more complete understanding to come into being.

Perhaps organizations like the IPCC is rightly criticized for not being rigorous enough with their work and findings. But skeptics of climate change would be foolish to point to data (especially data chopped to their liking) and claim that climate change is a hoax. Climate change is not meant to be a predictor; it is both understanding and warning of how our activities impact the environment.

Acquiring and burning fossil fuels, mining for minerals, deforestation, altering waterways, dumping waste – these activities, ferociously increased in activity in recent years, leave behind visible negative impacts; at the same time, the weather has been changing in such ways that lives, livelihoods and food production are seriously at stake. Current understanding, limited as it might be, could be utilized to make good sense of these significant events. One could also spectate this duel in the media arena between skeptics and scientists about who is politically motivated or who has gotten it right or wrong. But one should not see any reason in gambling against the likelihood that the climate could stabilize if we reduce our demands on the environment by limiting our activities.

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