Why the COP16 talks in Cancun Mexico starting tomorrow are relevant to You…
After the Copenhagen Accord where global leaders promised to have secured a global agreement to keep global warming below two degrees Celsius, their lie was exposed by scientists across the globe.
Because of this, the deal provoked immediate anger for failing to include concrete measures to reach that target, and scientists at the talks said it would set the world on a path from 3 to 5 º Celcius of planetary and atmospheric warming by 2100 if not sooner by 2050 based on the intensity of the feedback loops and network climate synchronization mechanisms.
BY 2055, climate change is likely to have warmed the world by a dangerous 4 °C or more, unless we stop pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere the way we do now. This is the startling conclusion of a study by the UK Meteorological Office, the longest holder of climate data in the world…
Why so soon? Because temperature rises caused by greenhouse gas emissions are expected to trigger dangerous feedback loops, which will release ever increasing amounts of greenhouse gases. The nature and scale of these feedback loops is a subject of vigorous debate among climate scientists, but warmer oceans, for instance, may liberate more dissolved CO2, and plants may decay faster in a warmer climate. The Met Office ran 17 different models with these feedbacks. All concluded a 4 °C world by 2055 was likely if emissions continue to rise. Even if we are lucky, we are still likely to hit 4 °C by 2070.
What will a 4 °C world look like? Brace yourself: the picture painted by the 130 climate researchers at the Oxford conference is not pretty. An average global increase of 4 °C translates to a rise of up to 15 °C at the North Pole. Summers in parts of the Arctic would be as balmy as California’s Napa valley.
Sea levels would rise by up to 1.4 metres, according to Stefan Rahmstorf at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Germany.
Even the less pessimistic estimate of a 0.65-metre rise by 2100 would put at least 190 million people a year at risk from floods, says Rahmstorf’s colleague Jochen Hinkel.
And now although the upcoming Cancun’s UNFCCC talks are a seen as a dead loser and a stillborn; there will probably be some steps made towards an overall agreement, albeit one at a geological speed.
Perhaps a small relevant agreement can be had on the management of funds to help poor nations adapt to climate change.
But maybe the highly contested REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries), an initiative to compensate countries that slow or halt deforestation can be defined fully and rightly to prevent deforestation. And this is for the Environmental Parliament the most important possible outcome of Mexico. And that is the reason why we are even here…
Because the living skin of the Earth is made up of the real first growth forests, it needs to be protected at any cost.
And it falls to us to meet this need to protect the living skin as an organ of Gaia, for the planet to survive.
We must perform an ecological triage and live up to the challenge. Plant trees and reforest the lands. That is the great new initiative of the Environmental Parliament to reforest once wooded and now barren Ireland. The presently completely deforested Ireland used to be the most forested country of Europe…
Hard to imagine that now when you travel around Ireland and see nary the sight of a single tree on this lush island.
Why do you think that the periodic boom and bust cycles of Ireland and the frequent famines aren’t related to the environment?
Just imagine any living being with 60% of it’s skin burned or removed…
The chances of survival of that organism are slim…
That is why the Environmental Parliament seeks not only to stop the rampant deforestation across the globe but we are working hard to reforest the lands previously given up as agricultural and/or fallow, degraded and destroyed soils. It is our biggest drive year after year after year.
Like burning fossil fuels, deforestation transfers carbon from trees and soil into the atmosphere, and stopping it is one of the cheapest ways to fight climate change. Everyone can be a winner with REDD. Rich nations find a cost-effective way of keeping carbon out of the atmosphere, with plenty of potential for “carbon offsets”: they can invest in forest conservation as a cheap alternative to reducing their own emissions. Poor forested nations in the tropics can rake in billions of dollars for committing to conservation. Conservationists, meanwhile, get new allies and new funds for saving rainforests and protecting biodiversity. But of course a deal will only come into effect if the wider agreement on a replacement for Kyoto is completed.
That would be something, but as the Environment Parliament pointed out this month at the UK’s Westminster House of Commons, All Party Parliamentary Committee on Climate Change, those current commitments are nowhere near enough to cap warming at 2 °C above pre-industrial levels, which many regard as the maximum “safe” warming.
Fearing the worst, leading climate scientists at a conference in Oxford, UK, last year warned that we could easily see 4 °C of warming as early as 2055, with likely effects including massive changes to rainfall patterns, the wholesale collapse of African farming and forced migration of hundreds of millions of people.
In the case of an almost certain Mexican diplomatic stalemate, our last resort may be geoengineering solutions like parasols in space or large-scale chemical carbon capture from the atmosphere. Researchers distressed by the failure of diplomacy are increasingly keen to explore such options as a planetary insurance policy, though a meeting of the UN Convention on Biodiversity in Japan recently sought to ban such efforts if they threatened species
The talks that are meant to fix the world’s climate resume on Monday for a two-week meeting in Cancun, Mexico’s top beach resort. Almost 200 national governments are participating, and their objective is to agree a successor to the 1997 Kyoto protocol, which limits emissions of greenhouse gases from most industrialised countries except the US, and runs out at the end of 2012. But no one thinks this will happen. Diplomats are still bruised after their high-profile failure to reach agreement last December in Copenhagen. While governments argue, however, time is running out.
Could there be a deal this time? Any deal?
Nope
Almost certainly not.
There will be no Cancun accord, nor Cancun agreement and No Cancun protocol. With confidence on the UN and it’s Byzantine processes, completely shattered after Copenhagen, the best hope is for a deal to free form at next year’s climate summit in Durban, South Africa in 2011. But that would be a perilous delay because investment in renewable energy and carbon-offset projects is already being cut back because nobody knows what the rules on emissions will be in the future especially after the expiration of the Kyoto protocol…
A further factor is the weakness of the US. President Barack Obama, who favours an ambitious deal, is much less powerful than he was a year ago. His much-vaunted climate legislation – aimed at cutting emissions by 17 per cent of 2005 levels by 2020 – is effectively dead, following Republican gains in Congress after the recent midterm elections.
With ”cap and trade” dead, an emboldened Republican party has set its sights on blocking what many environmentalists view as their last and best green hope: regulating greenhouse gas emissions through the Environmental Protection Agency.
On 2 January, the United States Environmental Protection Agency plans to begin regulating greenhouse gas emissions from large Power and Utility and Energy stationary industrial plants and major sources of CO2, such as power plants and oil refineries. However the incoming Republican Congressional majority, in it’s vast scientific ignorance, has vowed to stop this efforts and to do whatever it takes to stop the agency from exercising it’s powers stemming from the Nixon Republican days of the 1970′s…
But in the new days of legislative self interest, too many senators are listening to polluters instead of the American public and the congressmen are beholden to the capital flows of the fossil fuel companies that have been now unregulated to buy the Democracy with the blessing of the Supremes. Apparently now too many senators have learned nothing from the Gulf oil BP spill disaster and the high price we all pay when oil lobbyists dictate our energy laws and regulation. With a fucked oceanic water strata in the Gulf we are now going to solemnly fuck up the atmosphere too.
Your friendly BP and crew of five deadly sisters, plan a wholesale rape of the atmosphere too, without anyone’s consent.
Do you hear anyone screaming bloody murder?
Maybe yes eh?
Only it might be a tad too late to do anything about it.
And the rest of the world looks on a US being increasingly ungovernable, because of the irrational fear of governance and climate change efforts cultivated by ignoramus, pretending to be public leaders and demagogues or through a general material ignorance of science at the legislative level and the streets – the United States is the basket case of the climate wars and the first child victim of climate politics…
Undeniably without firm and believable US commitments, China, India, Africa and many other nations will probably sit on their hands too and fuel their runaway growth with coal and other fossil fuels.
That is the reason we are considering that the last chance to act on Climate Change will be lost for all of the world.
Finally, the economic recession has even doused the enthusiasm of the European Union for action, formerly the pioneer for firm action on climate change.
But hasn’t the economic slowdown bought us some time?
No.
Emissions last year were slightly lower than the year before, because of the economic downturn in the west, but they were still the second highest ever. Much of the slack was picked up by developing countries, many of which are still growing fast: China’s carbon dioxide emissions rose 8 per cent, for instance.
While carbon emissions dropped in much of the industrialized world due to faltering economies, they rose during 2009 in the developing world’s growing economies, such as China (up by 8%), India (up 6%), and South Korea (up 1%). Carbon intensity, which measures the amount of carbon emitted relative to global GDP, also did not improve as much as forecasters hoped. On average, carbon intensity has improved by 1.7% a year, however in 2009 it only improved by 0.7%.
EP climate science experts also predicted that this year, 2010, could become the new record holder for carbon emissions, despite the slow economic uptick from the recession.
Because a lot of technology and industry in developing countries makes inefficient use of energy, most such countries emit more carbon for every dollar of their GDP than industrialised nations, so improvements in the “carbon intensity” of the world economy are stalling.
The biggest effect of recession, however, may be to slow investment in the low-carbon energy technologies we desperately need and to stop flows of Climate Aid for Mitigation and Adaptation.
But hasn’t the warming stopped?
No. Depending on how you do the statistics, you could argue that it has slowed a bit in the past decade. Those who claim warming has stalled usually take as their start point the highly anomalous year of 1998: then, a strong El Niño – a weather pattern that always causes warmer-than-average years – gave the world a heat wave.
This year 2010, is on course to be in the top three hottest ever recorded, with 1998 and 2005 – even though some natural cycles have led to short-term cooling, including low solar activity and changes in the distribution of heat between the oceans and atmosphere.
Some researchers argue that this last effect has been moderating the warming caused by greenhouses gases for the past decade.
If so, we may soon see hyper-warming as human and natural effects come back into sync.
The bottom line is that whatever the natural fluctuations – the physics of how greenhouse gases like CO2 and methane trap heat is unassailable – we have continued to add to the atmosphere’s greenhouse load, without regard to the future of an overwarmed and ”naked” planet.
Yours,
Pano
However badly Cancun goes, nobody will declare the final failure of the talks until the South African Durban meeting next year.
But if the worst comes to the worst in Cancun, many countries may simply register with the United Nations commitments on emissions that they have already made.
For example. Europe has promised a 20 per cent cut by 2020, and China has agreed to reduce the carbon intensity of its economy by 40 to 45 per cent by 2020, regardless of any global deal.
This might be the future of voluntary carbon emissions and additionallity.
Yet as it all suggests the future is not only uncertain but really up to the sky above…
Keep planting trees and scale up the effort to create forests.
It’s out only hope and prayer to restore the living skin of this planet.
All the rest is a futile contest by comparison…
Work on getting the REDD defined properly to save the ancient forests.
Not to compensate the dismal grifters of various stripes – high and low – to cut the old growth forests and to remake them as plantations of palm oils and biofuels.
Be warned:
Never have so much been riding on the actions of so few.
Act as if your life depends upon it – for it actually does – See you
