The text above is a snapshot of part of a leaked confidential U.N. analysis suggesting that even if a major agreement is reached in Copenhagen it will not be up to the task of preventing “dangerous interference” with the climate system.
Not surprisingly, this has triggered cognitive dissonance among some climate activists, who seem to think that if magical solutions for limiting carbon emissions haven’t worked yet, the solution is even more magic. More about that in a bit, but first…
According to the leaked U.N. analysis, the proposals now being considered in Copenhagen could lead to carbon concentrations of 550 parts per million and an ultimate temperature rise of at least 3 degrees Celsius. That’s 100 ppm and 1 degree C above the stated goal of international policy — and enough, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fourth Assessment Report, to raise very serious risks of dangerous climate impacts, such as widespread deglaciation and dramatic sea level rise.
Andrew Revkin has reported on the document at Dot Earth, as have others. But here’s a little background on the issue:
The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, signed by 192 nations in 1992, calls on the countries of the world to avoid “dangerous interference with the climate system.” But what exactly is the threshold of danger?
The IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report, published in 2007, concluded with high confidence that an increase in the global mean temperature of more than 2 degrees C above the 1900 to 2000 average would lead to widespread losses in biodiversity, declining productivity of agriculture globally, and a “commitment” to widespread de-glaciation of Greenland’s ice sheets (and thus a significant rise in sea level). With medium confidence, the report concluded that such a temperature increase would lead to de-glaciation of West Antarctica’s ice sheets as well.
Based on this, 16 developed and developing nations that account for about 80 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions agreed at the 2009 G8 Summit, in July 2009 that an increase in the global mean temperature of more than 2 degrees C above the 1900 to 2000 average would put the world at substantial risk of dangerous climate change.
To avoid that unhappy outcome, the stated goal of policy negotiations at Copenhagen has been to keep CO2 concentrations from rising above 450 parts per million, which is considered necessary for limiting global warming to no more than 2 degrees C.
The leaked document, if it’s real (and I have no reason to suspect it’s not; I’m just being cautious), suggests that negotiators at Copenhagen know full well that what they’re debating — as contentious as it has already been – is simply not sufficient.
Actually, the idea that the proposals on the table aren’t sufficient to meet the stated goal isn’t exactly new. The Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, chaired by Nicholas Stern, along with the United Nations Environment Program and other institutions, released a statement in Copenhagen on Dec. 9 to the same effect:
To have a reasonable chance of limiting global warming to 2°C, or lower,, action at the high-end of current proposals and beyond will be required. This means that the global deal needs a clear commitment to go significantly above the most ambitious targets currently under discussion, and hence stretch above those in the next ten days negotiations.
So what are we left with? Negotiators frantically trying to reach an agreement that likely will not come close to achieving the stated goal. And even worse, there’s no clear sign yet that they will even succeed at reaching that inadequate agreement.
A reasonable person might look at this situation and wonder whether it would be prudent to consider a different approach. But at least one climate activist, Joe Romm, seems to believe that we’re seeing progress. Here’s what he had to say at his blog, Climateprogress:
. . . the major developed countries, including China or India, haven’t yet agreed to cap their emissions, let alone to ultimately reduce them. Until that happens, no model of global commitments is going to keep us anywhere near 2°C (3.6F). But that doesn’t mean they won’t agree to a treaty that sets the 2°C target. As modeler Andrew Jones said of a similarly misleading story, the headline could read:
“New Analysis Shows Growing Commitment to a Global Deal Will Help Stabilize Climate.”
Someone please help me with this. Negotiators are about to fail to enact an agreement that would not have prevented dangerous climate change, and this is somehow good news because it shows a growing commitment that will help stabilize the climate?
In a column published by Yale Environment 360 last July, my colleague Roger Pielke, Jr. warned about “magical solutions” — policies that are all about symbolism but which have “little or no impact on real-world outcomes.”
Copenhagen is about to end. Abracadabra?
One Comment
First, “Objection, assumes facts not in evidence.” The only way to get to +3C is with positive feedback in the model. Lindzen and Choi just showed that the ERBE data demonstrates negative feedback not positive. If you look at the stability analysis (which Lindzen does), a positive feedback model is extremely sensitive to small perturbations, but that’s the model not the data. The models have tipping points, the data directly contradicts the assumptions in the models that cause them.
Second, why would we expect sending $100B/year to the kleptocracies of the third world would be any more effective than sending aid has been historically? At least when you send AIDS drugs, mosquito nets, and drill wells for people, they aren’t easily converted into hard currencies in numbered bank accounts.
Which brings me to my third point, what is the opportunity cost of spending all this money on a potential future risk? Isn’t there anything else we should be doing to heal the world? Aren’t their poor to feed, ignorant to educate, human rights to defend, rivers to clean, biodiversity to protect, or soil to conserve?