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Why the IPCC Report Has To Go
Sharon Astyk, Casaubon’s Book
… Right now, one of the great difficulties we face when addressing climate change is simply this – we’re not scared enough. Climate change commentators regularly observe this – generally speaking, the public gets terrified about something (avian flu, terrorism, etc…) and the experts are generally more moderate, particulary scientific experts. They’ve been taught to moderate their statements, been taught to include plenty of caveats. This is not the case in the subject of climate research – those who know most about it are far more frightened than the average American. They are worried about a world in which our ability to grow food, to live where we have been living, to sustain our population is radically undercut by climate change.
Even before the IPCC report came out, we knew that it suffered from a combination of scientific reticence, excessive consensus building and political manipulation by governments who didn’t want to be pushed too hard. And within months or weeks of its release, we knew that the IPCC report had not just understated what *might* happen sometime in the future – it had wildly understated what had happened already.
… The next IPCC report will not be released until 2013 – around the time we anticipate all the Arctic ice will be gone, and very close to the end of the narrow window of time that we have to perhaps – and at this point it is only perhaps – address climate change. Right now, the talks in Poland are struggling – again, we are locked in a global game of chicken, with poor nations refusing to consider making cuts until rich ones do, and every nation terrified of the economic consequences of making moves that address even the IPCC account.
I do not think we will break this impasse while the IPCC report offers a comforting, even if recognizably false narrative in which to leave one’s faith. As long as the largest portion of the population believes we have until 2050, that sea level rises will not be a problem in our grandkids’ lifetimes and a host of other misconceptions, and can find a document of authority to back them up, they will not be afraid enough.
(13 December 2008)
California adopts the most sweeping curbs on greenhouse gas emissions in U.S.
Margot Roosevelt, Los Angeles Times
The state air board orders a 15% cut in emissions over the next 12 years, bringing them down to 1990 levels.
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California regulators adopted the nation’s first comprehensive plan to slash greenhouse gases Thursday and characterized it as a model for President-elect Barack Obama, who has pledged an aggressive national and international effort to combat global warming.
The ambitious blueprint by the world’s eighth-largest economy would cut the state’s emissions by 15% from today’s level over the next 12 years, bringing them down to 1990 levels.
Approved by the state’s Air Resources Board in a unanimous vote, the 134-page plan lays out targets for virtually every sector of the economy, including automobiles, refineries, buildings and landfills. It would require a third of California’s electricity to come from solar energy, wind farms and other renewable sources — far more than any state currently requires.
(12 December 2008)
Related at SF Chronicle: State OKs tough plan to counter global warming.
Contraction & Convergence tabled at Poznan
BusinessGreen
Emerging giants and small islands crank up pressure at Poznan
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Developing economies have upped the pressure on the developed world to agree to deeper emission reduction targets at the UN’s climate change talks in Poznan, Poland this week, claiming that current proposals from both the EU and US president-elect Barack Obama do not go far enough.
Officials from the both the Chinese and Indian delegations, whose position on the long-running negotiations are widely held to be of critical importance, told Reuters yesterday that they wanted to see the US agree to deeper emission cuts than are currently being considered by Obama’s transition team.
Commenting on the president-elect’s proposals for a US cap-and-trade scheme that would see carbon emissions cut to 1990 levels by 2020 before falling 80 per cent by 2050, the Chinese delegation’s He Jiankun said that while it represented an improvement on the Bush administration’s proposals “it is not enough to achieve the urgent, long-term goal of greenhouse gas reductions”.
Similarly, Dinesh Patnaik, a director at the Indian Foreign Ministry, told the news agency that Obama’s plans are “not ambitious enough considering the Kyoto Protocol targets, but given the eight-year Bush administration it is progress”.
The comments are significant as both China and India have long maintained that they will only sign up to long-term emission reduction targets for their growing economies if developed nations such as the US agree to significantly deeper cuts, on the grounds it is these nations that are historically responsible for the vast majority of carbon emissions.
The US, meanwhile, has said it will not sign up to targets that could give the two emerging economic giants a competitive advantage unless they too agree to reasonable targets – a position observers claim is unlikely to change significantly under an Obama administration, despite the president-elect’s pledge to take a more constructive role in future climate talks than the Bush White House did.
The comments come as Brazil reportedly put the finishing touches to proposals apparently based on the contraction and convergence principle that would see countries agree to per-capita emission reduction targets.
Under the proposals, emission targets would be set on a per-head-of population basis, meaning that developing economies with low-carbon emissions per capita such as China would face less-demanding targets, while those countries with the highest level of emissions per person would have to deliver the deepest cuts.
The plan has secured tentative support from a number of developed economies as it is seen to offer a fair means of sharing out emission reductions. However, any per-capita scheme will most likely have to be adapted to take account of large countries with relatively small populations, such as Canada and Australia, which have high per-capita emissions as a result of high-carbon transport infrastructures.
(4 December 2008)
While the focus of the article is on Developing countries calling for stronger commitment by Annexe I Industrialized nations,(which is scarcely news) the news that Brazil, a major developing country, has tabled a framework for the allocation of national emission rights based on C&C is a very significant advance.
That this proposal “has secured tentative support from a number of developing countries” is potentially transformational in that it bridges the North-South divide.
This is the nearest that any Conference of the Parties (to the FCCC) has come so far to agreeing the requisite climate policy framework.
Further info on C&C from the originators at: www.gci.org.uk
