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India and Climate Change [senior non-govt American endorses C&C for Copenhagen]
William Antholis, MD, Brookings Institute, Wall Street Journal
India’s prime minister Singh has become the spokesperson for “equity” in emissions reductions. Mr. Singh has acknowledged that climate change is a problem and has said that India will do its part. Like all developing country leaders, however, he points to the fact that industrial countries have contributed a century’s worth of emissions to the global atmosphere while developing countries have only started to use, in his phrase, their “share of the global atmosphere.” He has pledged that India will never exceed the per capita emissions of industrialized nations. He also said that India will only consider signing on to a climate pact when a common global per capita emissions target has been established.
(20 July 2009)
Suggested by EB contributor billhook, who writes:
Antholis is the most senior non govt US figure so far to publish his de facto support for Contraction & Convergence as the framework upon which to build agreement at Copenhagen.
As an insider, his job is of course to hedge that support in public with a spread of concerns, with some, such as the level of per capita emissions at 2050 being more substantial than others, such as the need for a cut-off date for populations on which to base nations’ eventual per capita emission rights – in fact, Global Commons Institute informed all parties of the need to agree that as far back as ’92, as he knows full well. Whether or not the White House wants to be asked to discuss the C&C parameters, recent advances in C&C’s profile make this seem likely before long.
The Folly of ‘Magical Solutions’ For Targeting Carbon Emissions
Roger a. Pielke, jr., Yale 360
Fifty years ago, political scientist Harold Lasswell explained that some policies are all about symbolism, with little or no impact on real-world outcomes. He called such actions “magical solutions,” explaining that “political symbolization has its catharsis functions.” Climate policy is going through exactly such a phase, in which a focus on magical solutions leaves little room for the practical.
Evidence for this claim can be found in the global reaction to the commitment made by the Japanese government last month to reduce emissions by 15 percent below 2005 levels by 2020. The announcement was met with derision. For instance, Yvo de Boer, head of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, expressed shock at Japan’s lack of ambition, stating, “I think for the first time in two-and-a-half years in this job, I don’t know what to say.” Sir David King, Britain’s former chief scientist and now director of the Smith School of Enterprise and Environment at Oxford University, singled out Japan as a country that was blocking progress toward an international deal on climate change.
…What is missing from the debate over targets and timetables is any conception of the realism of such proposals. If a proposal is not realistic, it is not really a policy proposal but an exercise in symbolism, a “magical solution.” Symbolism is of course an essential part of politics, but when it becomes detached from reality — or even worse, used to exclude consideration of realistic proposals — the inevitable outcome is that policies will likely fail to achieve the promised ends. This outcome is highly problematic for those who actually care about the substance of climate policy proposals.
…Climate policy is in the midst of a dynamic very similar to that in budget policy in the 1980s and 1990s. Policies such as the Kyoto Protocol, the U.K. Climate Change Act, and the U.S. cap-and-trade (Waxman-Markey) bill are each “magical solutions” with considerable symbolic heft but precious little effect (actual or potential) on emissions. The poor actual or expected performance of these policies is presently rationalized in terms of the need to take the first tentative steps to put in place institutions that can eventually be focused more directly on the problem.
(29 July 2009)
Sent in by EB contributor Kevin Dennehy. There is a lively set of comments that follow the article. -KS.
World will warm faster than predicted in next five years, study warns
Duncan Clark, The Guardian
The world faces record-breaking temperatures as the sun’s activity increases, leading the planet to heat up significantly faster than scientists had predicted for the next five years, according to a study.
The hottest year on record was 1998, and the relatively cool years since have led to some global warming sceptics claiming that temperatures have levelled off or started to decline. But new research firmly rejects that argument.
The research, to be published in Geophysical Research Letters, was carried out by Judith Lean, of the US Naval Research Laboratory, and David Rind, of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
The work is the first to assess the combined impact on global temperature of four factors: human influences such as CO2 and aerosol emissions; heating from the sun; volcanic activity and the El Niño southern oscillation, the phenomenon by which the Pacific Ocean flips between warmer and cooler states every few years.
…The study comes within days of announcements from climatologists that the world is entering a new El Niño warm spell. This suggests that temperature rises in the next year could be even more marked than Lean and Rind’s paper suggests. A particularly hot autumn and winter could add to the pressure on policy makers to reach a meaningful deal at December’s climate-change negotiations in Copenhagen.
Bob Henson, of the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, said: “To claim that global temperatures have cooled since 1998 and therefore that man-made climate change isn’t happening is a bit like saying spring has gone away when you have a mild week after a scorching Easter.”
(27 July 2009)
