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I suppose I should address the outcome of the Durban climate conference, but I don’t really know what to say. The countries assembled made an agreement to make an agreement. Seeing that they couldn’t make the agreement while all of them gathered in Durban, I don’t know why anyone believes they will make an agreement in 2015, which would not take effect until 2020. For the time being, the world will operate under the auspices of the Kyoto protocol, which only covered industrialized nations, and to which the United States, one of the world’s biggest emitters, is not a signatory. And Kyoto, a 1997 agreement without updated climate modeling, simply isn’t sufficient even if the US signed on.
Calling this a modest agreement is an insult to modest agreements. Considering that global emissions would have to peak by 2020 for the world to hold any hope of avoiding a more than 2 °C increase in global temperature, and that even the best-case scenario here would commence binding greenhouse gas targets in 2020, I think this agreement throws in the towel rather than forges ahead.
The climate fund was at least a tangible goal met at the talks, and it makes sense. If the world is blowing off the warnings of climate scientists, they will have to fund the consequences. It appears to be more of an adaptation fund than a transformational one, with the problem being that nobody seems to no where the money will come from.
The delegates also agreed on the creation of a fund to help poor countries adapt to climate change — though the precise sources of the money have yet to be determined — and to measures involving the preservation of tropical forests and the development of clean-energy technology. The reserve, called the Green Climate Fund, would help mobilize a promised $100 billion a year in public and private financing by 2020 to assist developing countries in adapting to climate change and converting to clean energy sources [...]
“While governments avoided disaster in Durban, they by no means responded adequately to the mounting threat of climate change,” said Alden Meyer, director of policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “The decisions adopted here fall well short of what is needed.”
Europe wanted the binding targets, and in the end, they accepting something far less than that, an agreement to maybe agree to agree later. China and India, among other developing nations, along with the United States (hiding behind “equity” while compromised by disagreement among themselves), backed the Europeans down.
Brad Johnson argues that even the negotiators at Durban recognized the UN process has failed:
Recognizing that climate change represents an urgent and potentially irreversible threat to human societies and the planet and thus requires to be urgently addressed by all Parties, and acknowledging that the global nature of climate change calls for the widest possible cooperation by all countries and their participation in an effective and appropriate international response, with a view to accelerating the reduction of global greenhouse gas emissions,
Noting with grave concern the significant gap between the aggregate effect of Parties’ mitigation pledges in terms of global annual emissions of greenhouse gases by 2020 and aggregate emission pathways consistent with having a likely chance of holding the increase in global average temperature below 2 °C or 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels.
In other words, a “significant gap” exists between what has been agreed to and what is needed. And I don’t see any reason for optimism that the gap will get narrowed in the years ahead. Adaptation and mitigation seems to be the next course.
UPDATE: Dave Roberts has a somewhat cheerier take, even while acknowledging the ham-handedness of the agreement, which probably doesn’t even have much binding power behind it. Roberts argues that the lesser-developed countries turning on emerging markets like China and India represents an important shift.
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the world’s animals and plants, do not have the option to adapt and mitigate.
If we think we can get by without the normally functioning ecosystem, we are in for a shock.
good luck with that strategy.
Rage, rage, rage!
Most of those “little countries” often act on behalf of all us “little people”. But that’s when they aren’t constrained by the requirement of unanimity (which all too often benefits Guess Who). Here’s what they did in the case of those made-in-hell cluster bombs, for example:
U.S. defeated in bid to avoid cluster bomb ban
“A U.S.-led push to regulate, rather than ban, cluster munitions failed on Friday after 50 countries objected, following humanitarian campaigners’ claims that anything less than a outright ban would be an unprecedented reversal of human rights law.
“While the United States, China and Russia want rules about the manufacture and use of cluster bombs, activists say such regulations would legitimise the munitions, backtracking from the Oslo Convention, an international treaty that seeks a worldwide ban.
‘”Against all odds it looks like we’re going to have success this evening,” Steve Goose, head of the arms division at Human Rights Watch, told a press conference in Geneva.”
.LINK
Canada withdrawing from Kyoto, says official
LINK.
Later. That’s when I’ll take out the garbage, dear.
Thanks for the update. I have just posted my thoughts to Peter Kent, the goverment crook in canada.
I understand that you Peter Kent are too old to care about Global warming . As you will be dead from old age when it really gets bad. Don’t think we canadians don’t understand that this “withdraw” is due to the oil sands and the pollution it causes. We will vote out Harper and you to protect our planet. Make sure to fill your pockets with payoffs before you go.
Here is “peter’s” email contact to send your thoughts – http://www.peterkent.ca/contact
A disgrace to humanity, that’s what the United States is. Thanks, Bush. Thanks, Obama. Thanks, all you scumbags in DC. Please feel me in the spirit of the holidays when I say to y’all: GO FUCK YOURSELVES. As for you, Obama, you know better. And I hope your daughters and their children curse you for what you have done to their world.
Something about this feels like the 1% vs. 99% in reverse. If I can approximate the populations of the island nations and the African desert nations as 1% if the planet. The rest of the planet is fine with everything turning to shit, especially the one with the most guns and money.
Climate change has been a disastrous detour for the left. It’s devoured so much time and energy, and the careers of so many talented people, it’s a shame. Meanwhile, millions die quietly from particulate pollution and many fewer people devote themselves to the issue because it’s less sexy than climate change. 30,000 die every year from car accidents, yet the left isn’t demanding that the government fund the development of self-driving cars that are virtually already road ready today.
Any issue can be boiled down to what are its effects on human welfare. A global warming equivalent to say 3.0 Celsius over the next century, which is well in line with middle range IPCC estimates, would undoubtedly impinge upon living standards. But in reality, mass mortality as a result of climate is only going to occur in the very poorest nations. Which only emphasizes that the more basic issue, which solving would go a long way to addressing the effects of global warming and almost any issue you can name, is the fact that there are very poor nations and peoples to begin with.
Millions will not die prematurely in industrialized nations as a result of climate change. This is simply because, if food prices increase or if water resources are under stress, more of the abundant resources of these societies will be devoted towards these priorities, which will just mean less money spent on consumer goods, big houses, travel, and entertainment. Thousands died in Europe from a heat wave only because they did not have air conditioning. With increased living standards, people do enjoy air conditioning and clean potable water and a plentiful supply of food, and will not die en masse from climate changes within the ranges predicted by the IPCC for the 21st century.
David, thanks for including the update, because without it, you’re story is totally inaccurate. The Durban conference was not inconsequential, the gauntlet is down in two new ways to the U.S., the gauntlet is now down to the BASIC countries for the first time, and we have a new clock ticking which should stop all the fucked up cynicism and dry out a lot of mouths. I just wish it did so in places like this, but it doesn’t.
1) Now that the BASIC are going to have to comply at developed country levels, two things change: They are going to have to do something real (so maybe we see something done about the Asian Brown Cloud), and the U.S. loses its excuse for not signing protocols (that was the U.S. reason for not doing Kyoto).
2) In case people weren’t following, there was new data released at Durban about sea level change, both historic and present day. The present day is that there has been a hollowing out of the Antarctic ice, and at some point within the next decade or two, it will collapse, releasing so much water into the oceans that the sea level will jerk upward by close to 20 feet over periods like perhaps as little as a year or two. For low lying metropoli like Mumbai, the effects will be catastrophic. The historical data is that this is always how climate change changes the sea level, they didn’t think to investigate this historically until they saw the Antarctic data.
So stuff it with the cynical shit about the conference being meaningless. The output of the conference was that the major polluters are all on the hook for the next agreement so no excuses from everyone, and all the low lying cities are up shit crick without a paddle until they formulate emergency plans for many millions of people.
This is the U.N. business model on everything. We will bring together the ruling elite from numerous countries and hold a “round of talks” on whatever the hell the topic is. We will meet for two weeks or two months. During the meetings numerous well paid important people from places you will never travel to are telling us that agreement must be reached to avoid the coming train wreck. At the scheduled end of the round of talks, there are major unresolved issues. Most everyone agrees on some basic principles. Whether the topic is sea turtles becoming entangled in plastic beer packaging or a Persian theocracy plotting to vaporize it’s neighbor, America is the problem. And thus, America should pay for the solution. Oh, one other thing that all U.N. talks reach agreement about. We should meet again very soon for the next special round of talks, where we will party like college kids and spend another $26 million. $17 million of which will come from the Good Ole U.S. of A.
The u.n. is all about good intentions and piss-poor results, all ventured upon with money borrowed by the U.S. Gubment, from China, and paid back by you and I.
Thanks for using the time and effort to write something so interesting.
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