Justin Gillis's news story from Berlin on the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — the one on the world's options for limiting global warming — tells you all you need to know about the familiar contents. The chart of trending news in the United States above tells you all you need to know about how much people are tuning in. (Click to learn more about how Newsmap works.)
The core panel conclusion, of course, is that rich and developing nations are way behind on what would need to be done to avoid substantial and largely irreversible (on meaningful time scales) warming of the climate. His story, "U.N. Climate Panel Warns Speedier Action Is Needed to Avert Disaster," is succinct and spot on, so please read it and return.
[Insert, 3:52 p.m. | Eric Holthaus has posted an excellent summary of the economic points made in the report at Slate.]
There's an important back story — on how the final two days of negotiations between the report authors and government officials reflect global divisions that will only intensify as the world's rich and developing countries wrangle over a new climate treaty that is supposed to emerge in late 2015.
Under rules created when the climate panel was established in 1988, governments have to approve the final summary for policy makers word by word and unanimously. The detailed and voluminous underlying reports are not touched. What this means is that the summaries — in what remains and what is lost — indicate what you can foresee in the parallel treaty process.
Gillis's story gets at this here:
[T]he divisions between wealthy countries and poorer countries that are making such a treaty difficult, and have long bedeviled international climate talks, were on display yet again in Berlin.
Some developing countries insisted on stripping charts from the report's executive summary that could be read as requiring greater effort from them, while rich countries — including the United States — struck out language implying that they needed to write big checks to the developing countries.
An illuminating piece from Associated Press reporter Karl Ritter on Saturday dug in helpfully on this process:
In Berlin, the politics showed through in a dispute over how to categorize countries in graphs showing the world's carbon emissions, which are currently growing the fastest in China and other developing countries. Like many scientific studies, the IPCC draft used a breakdown of emissions from low, lower-middle, upper-middle and high income countries.
Some developing countries objected and wanted the graphs to follow the example of U.N. climate talks and use just two categories – developed and developing – according to three participants who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because the IPCC session was closed to the public.
In earlier submitted comments obtained by AP, the U.S. suggested footnotes indicating where readers could "view specific countries listed in each category in addition to the income brackets."
That reflects a nagging dispute in the U.N. talks, which are supposed to produce a global climate agreement next year. The U.S. and other industrialized nations want to scrap the binary rich-poor division, saying large emerging economies such as China, Brazil and India must adopt more stringent emissions cuts than poorer countries. The developing countries are worried it's a way for rich countries to shirk their own responsibilities to cut emissions.
The deadlock over the graphs appeared to have ended early Saturday after 20 hours of backroom negotiations led by IPCC vice chairman Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, a Belgian.
"I offered some Belgian Easter chocolate eggs to the participants of the Contact group at midnight: they helped!" van Ypersele wrote on Twitter early Saturday.
Another snag: oil-rich Saudi Arabia objected to text saying emissions need to go down by 40 percent to 70 percent by 2050 for the world to stay below 2 degrees C (3.6 F) of warming, participants told AP. One participant said the Saudis were concerned that putting down such a range was "policy-prescriptive," even though it reflects what the science says.
If you want more, I encourage you to track Ritter's output on Twitter.
When you put this news in the context of climate treaty negotiations, it bodes poorly for a climatically meaningful treaty emerging in Paris late next year. Re-read "Climate Talks Make Way for a Design Show" and the warnings from a top Chinese climate change strategist for more.
To get a sense of underlying carbon dioxide emissions realities, here are some points from the report's summary for policy makers that nicely describe the coal boom through 2010 that is a prime driver:
About half of cumulative anthropogenic CO2 emissions between 1750 and 2010 have occurred in the last 40 years (high confidence)….
Globally, economic and population growth continue to be the most important drivers of increases in CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion. The contribution of population growth between 2000 and 2010 remained roughly identical to the previous three decades, while the contribution of economic growth has risen sharply (high confidence). Between 2000 and 2010, both drivers outpaced emission reductions from improvements in energy intensity. Increased use of coal relative to other energy sources has reversed the long‐standing trend of gradual decarbonization of the world's energy supply….
Without additional efforts to reduce [greenhouse gas] emissions beyond those in place today, emissions growth is expected to persist driven by growth in global population and economic activities.
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