>The new deal will not, on its own, solve global warming. At best, scientists who have analyzed it say, it will cut global greenhouse gas emissions by about half what is necessary to stave off an increase in atmospheric temperatures of 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit. That is the point at which scientific studies have concluded the world will be locked into a future of devastating consequences, including rising sea levels, severe droughts and flooding, widespread food and water shortages, and more destructive storms.
>But the agreement could be an inflection point in human history: the moment at which, because of a huge shift in global economic policy, the inexorable rise in planet-warming carbon emissions that started during the Industrial Revolution began to level out and eventually decline.
So, is this really cause for celebration? This last paragraph reads as though there's no agency here. We agreed to half of what's necessary. Not to mention VW-type sleights of hand that mean we're not doing what we've said we would do in the past, when things were less dire.
I'm willing to remain optimistic on this front, because even if nothing meaningful is accomplished with this specific accord, it does not rule out more in the future. Getting all of these nations on board to do something about climate change (even if that simply means acknowledging its presence and their contributions to it) is a step in the right direction toward solving the problem meaningfully. The wheels of international politics turn slowly without economic or military consequences to fuel them, and sometimes (unfortunately) as the lowly ones we have to take what we can get.
Reading it more closely, the nations are required to reconvene every 5 years to report on progress and discuss the next round of tightening. So it's a partial victory with a ratchet mechanism. The mechanism isn't guaranteed to work, but as the consequences of global warming become more impacting, urgency will increase.
Their engines released less CO2 and more NOx as a trade off. NOx is bad for humans and has slight cooling effect. CO2 is not dangerous and has heating effect.
"Less polluting" can mean several completely different things. People often don't get this.
It's cause for celebration as better than many expected to happen, but for sure many reasons to still be both skeptical about implementation and the results even if targets are hit. It's progress, at least.
A coherent, baseline platform that ratchets up in intensity every 5 years and forces the hand of domestic politics (rather than simply allowing them to block intnl agreements) seems like a positive, I'm not sure why everybody is so entirely cynical.
forces? Exactly what consequence will violators suffer (and who judges the violations)?
We've seen from Kyoto that promises, especially those not duly ratified, may not mean all that much. Most of these rulers have just pushed the issue beyond their tenure... or lifetimes.
> As a result, all language in the accord relating to the reduction of carbon emissions is essentially voluntary. The language assigns no concrete targets to any country for emissions reductions. Instead, each government has crafted a plan detailing how they would lower emissions at home, based on what each head of state believes is feasible given the country’s domestic political and economic situation.
I fail to see how this summit differs from previous summits without anything being legally binding.
I think it is time that we as a species faced a few hard truths:
1) Nothing short of a dark age will reduce human emissions to a non factor in climate shift
2) Climate shift was always inevitable. It has happened before; it will happen again. The only thing we have done is hasten it... maybe.
3) All global efforts in regards to climate shift should be pointed at adapting to the changes, safeguarding threatened species (or collecting the requisite genetic data to one day rebuild them), and ensuring our specie's evolutionary March into the future.
We shouldn't be designing green houses; we should be learning how to live underwater and underground. We should be planning for the Great Inland Migration. We should be hardening and burying all infrastructure. We should be decreasing energy and material waste for efficiency reasons, not feel-good reasons.
This nascent cataclysm is not a fire, it is a flood. The metaphorical waters will rise and recede over thousands of years. No one in the future will give a flying fuck about Priuses or carbon credits. They will either praise us for building the tools and protocols byvwhich they survive, or curse us for thinking we could fight the inevitable.
Our kind showed up at the end of an ice age. Let's not circle jerk ourselves to extinction in the face of another. Assessing past faults is pointless. We must adapt our collective civilizations to a dynamic future for which we are biologically and technologically I'll equipped.
Even if you buy the hypothesis that climate change can't be stopped, the sea level rises would be something like 1 or 2m / century. More a case of get your grandkids to build their houses a quarter mile inland than a mad panic. Funnily enough global sea levels rose about 90m over the last 10,000 years and people hardly even noticed. You used to be able to walk from England to France where the channel now is.
Actually first thing seems to be lots and lots of greenhouses.
Food production currently relies on relatively stable and predictable weather. The one certain thing climate change is going to do is make weather unpredictable. Bunker for you hardly matters, if you don't have anything to eat.
Climate Action Tracker [1] provides a summary of all pledges, and per-country assessments. They have a recent post regarding the Paris agreement [2].
> As the CAT has previously noted, the national mitigation contributions, now associated with the Paris Agreement, would lead to a median warming of around 2.7°C by 2100 (a full range of 2.2-3.4°C, which means there is a likely chance of holding warming below 3°C, temperature would continue to rise after 2100).
> Compared to the 3.6°C by 2100 warming that is projected to result from current policies, the climate pledges submitted in the INDCs lower warming by about 0.9°C – but only if all governments fully implement their pledges.
What is the shortest text available that takes raw data and first principles and deductively walks to the inevitable conclusion of anthropogenic global warming and its dire consequences? I absolutely need this to convince my conservative relatives. I would also be interested for my own edification since my current belief in global warming is mostly based on faith in the scientific community, and I'd rather understand it myself.
While I agree with you that following the money is best practice, there should only be a movement in price if the final agreement is significantly different to what was expected on Friday.
In regards oil the big producers are already flooding the market to try and kill alternatives. If something scares the likes of OPEC more than anything else it is cheap renewable energy. Wind and solar are getting very close to knocking out everything else at an oil price above $60 a barrel.
The value of oil and coal companies would not necessarily be that effected by say banning coal and oil 20 years out. The depreciation, depletion etc on their wells is typically less than that so they could pump their oil, not bother with new wells and maybe try moving to renewables. The oil price falling in the short term due to everyone pumping too much has a much larger effect. (disclosure, oil investor).
The stock market isn't magic, its traders will arrive at some sort of consensus position reflected in prices, through reading the global media like the rest of us, about how serious the intentions are around the deal, but that doesn't mean they know how the governments of, say, Brazil, the UK, Saudi Arabia, Poland, Indonesia, Spain, Ireland, or India are going to react to it over the next few years. A reality of concerted action could just as well emerge over five years as policies come into place. Following the money, i.e. stock prices of oil companies, will be an accurate way of judging how successful an agreement like this is in altering the global investment markets, but only after time. On Monday, you're not going to get much more than the immediate impression.
in local politics I hear about plans to buy out large polluters (here we have coal-powered electricity generation).
they're usually variations on:
1. a big pile of (typically public) money is given to the most polluting companies
2. in return those companies exit the industry
i don't think such policies are a great idea, but they might be an example of action that would (i) be actually progressive re: greenhouse emissions, and (ii) might make the share price of such a company go up, supposing the pay out were large enough.
this little thought experiment aside, the heuristic of following the change in the market is probably a reasonable one.
Nothing will change as long as Capitalism is the force leading the World. All these summits mean nothing when all that matters is the results for the next quarter then the next.
There's a big difference between Capitalism in general and completely free-market, unregulated Capitalism in particular. The market is an amazing instrument for technology development, if we had priced in the externalities of carbon twenty years ago, as originally planned at Kyoto, Capitalism would already be half way along to solving the problem in the same relentless way that it always pursues profit.
I'm gonna claim that nothing would change if we would get rid of capitalism, but politics remained the cesspool it is today. Politicians like power, money is just a form of power. Greed will find a way.
On the other hand, with responsible, smart politicians and capitalism, anything is possible.
What I'm saying is that the system is broken, but everybody is concentrating on the one part that actually does work.
No, this isn't a treaty see my comment above on why it was worded the way it was to avoid Congress ratification. Our country will now join the world to fight climate change, with or without the Senate. This is huge because more of Senate is deeply indebted/paid by Koch brothers.
This is a big deal. Is it perfect? No, far from it. Politics is -- as the famous saying goes -- the art of the possible. This is what was possible today. If you've been following closely, then you know we almost had no deal.
My hope is that the emissions targets (low by what the scientific community wants to see) are tough enough that they will mandate significant investments in new technology. When clean tech becomes profitable (optimistically cheaper via subsidies), then it may become easier to sell the world on ratcheting-up the targets before we run out of time.
As others have mentioned, I will be watching the market reactions with cautious optimism.
It's indeed just a spectacle, political theater, but it is based on a wide-ranging acknowledgment of man-made climate change, which is of great importance.
It says they die from burning wood or dung. When scientists say we need to move away from fossil fuels to renewables, they are not suggesting to move to wood and dung, so your argument is irrelevant.
It almost seems like the most practical solution at this point in time. Even though "green" energy has come a long way over the past few decades, it's not going to power the industries that cater to our comfy lives.
There are certainly downsides and problems with nuclear power, waste is coming to mind and safety seems to be the other. I think that if we built nuclear power plants today they will be a lot safer and cleaner than the ones we used to built in the 60's and 70's.
I ran numbers on your proposal and capital costs were surprisingly lower than what I thought. It looks like capital costs to replace all the plants would be on the order of $250B at current pricing. (obviously, if we tried such a quick replacement, fuel costs could spike up, meaning actual costs are a bit higher). I'm surprised this isn't brought up as an option more often.
I wish I could sit down with every person on this thread and devote as much time as required for me to hear out their position and me to make mine. But, since I can't and since the info is already out there, I'll just say, please, pleaseeeeee go educate yourself.
Humanity has just about built the infrastructure to lock in 2 degree temp increase. We are talking about a matter of years, not a decade. We are talking about locking in, not higher probability.
Yet, there is uninterrupted talk of growing our economies (but little talk of reducing the wealth gap). If our economies are to continue growing. If we continue to be an extraction oriented species. If we continue to spend tens of billions a year searching out new fossil fuel reserves when we can't use half of those we already know of without pushing the 4-6 degree threshold..?
Nature, will go on. Some portion of humanity, will go on. It's not the end of the world. Just the end of the world as we know it.
If today everyone ditched their cars and used public transit and bikes, we shut down the airlines, and became vegan we'd be most of the way there. Switch to organic farming and cradle-to-cradle manufacturing would almost surely get us the rest of the way there.
Yeah, I know, that's not going to happen and people don't want it to. My point is simply, the solution is not some black magic or future technology. The solution is simply a choice.
>If today everyone ditched their cars and used public transit and bikes, we shut down the airlines, and became vegan we'd be most of the way there.
One of these things is not like the others: shutting down airlines is an actual regulatory action. The others are lifestyle choices (and for what it's worth, I overwhelmingly just use public transit and my bike).
>Switch to organic farming and cradle-to-cradle manufacturing would almost surely get us the rest of the way there.
I'd like it if you could explain "cradle-to-cradle manufacturing", but I'm very skeptical that organic farming would actually help. Last I heard, even when you account for the subsidies paid to make industrial farming cheap, organic farming is still more resource-intensive than industrial farming.
Further, again, last I heard, lifestyle changes on the part of individuals have far less impact on resource usage than policy changes in major industries.
[+] [-] marcusgarvey|10 years ago|reply
>But the agreement could be an inflection point in human history: the moment at which, because of a huge shift in global economic policy, the inexorable rise in planet-warming carbon emissions that started during the Industrial Revolution began to level out and eventually decline.
So, is this really cause for celebration? This last paragraph reads as though there's no agency here. We agreed to half of what's necessary. Not to mention VW-type sleights of hand that mean we're not doing what we've said we would do in the past, when things were less dire.
[+] [-] adrtessier|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SapphireSun|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vlehto|10 years ago|reply
Their engines released less CO2 and more NOx as a trade off. NOx is bad for humans and has slight cooling effect. CO2 is not dangerous and has heating effect.
"Less polluting" can mean several completely different things. People often don't get this.
[+] [-] corin_|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HiLo|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DrScump|10 years ago|reply
We've seen from Kyoto that promises, especially those not duly ratified, may not mean all that much. Most of these rulers have just pushed the issue beyond their tenure... or lifetimes.
[+] [-] vram22|10 years ago|reply
Edit: s/to/too
[+] [-] xCathedra|10 years ago|reply
I fail to see how this summit differs from previous summits without anything being legally binding.
[+] [-] blondie9x|10 years ago|reply
Getting everyone on board is a huge win and setting targets of 1.5C (max 2C) will help humanity stand together against the threat of climate change.
[+] [-] agumonkey|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Systemic33|10 years ago|reply
That doesn't seem insignificant, and I think part of the thing about the deal is that it puts a public focus on green development -- WORLDWIDE.
[+] [-] classicsnoot|10 years ago|reply
1) Nothing short of a dark age will reduce human emissions to a non factor in climate shift
2) Climate shift was always inevitable. It has happened before; it will happen again. The only thing we have done is hasten it... maybe.
3) All global efforts in regards to climate shift should be pointed at adapting to the changes, safeguarding threatened species (or collecting the requisite genetic data to one day rebuild them), and ensuring our specie's evolutionary March into the future.
We shouldn't be designing green houses; we should be learning how to live underwater and underground. We should be planning for the Great Inland Migration. We should be hardening and burying all infrastructure. We should be decreasing energy and material waste for efficiency reasons, not feel-good reasons.
This nascent cataclysm is not a fire, it is a flood. The metaphorical waters will rise and recede over thousands of years. No one in the future will give a flying fuck about Priuses or carbon credits. They will either praise us for building the tools and protocols byvwhich they survive, or curse us for thinking we could fight the inevitable.
Our kind showed up at the end of an ice age. Let's not circle jerk ourselves to extinction in the face of another. Assessing past faults is pointless. We must adapt our collective civilizations to a dynamic future for which we are biologically and technologically I'll equipped.
[+] [-] tim333|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vlehto|10 years ago|reply
Food production currently relies on relatively stable and predictable weather. The one certain thing climate change is going to do is make weather unpredictable. Bunker for you hardly matters, if you don't have anything to eat.
[+] [-] shoo|10 years ago|reply
> As the CAT has previously noted, the national mitigation contributions, now associated with the Paris Agreement, would lead to a median warming of around 2.7°C by 2100 (a full range of 2.2-3.4°C, which means there is a likely chance of holding warming below 3°C, temperature would continue to rise after 2100).
> Compared to the 3.6°C by 2100 warming that is projected to result from current policies, the climate pledges submitted in the INDCs lower warming by about 0.9°C – but only if all governments fully implement their pledges.
[1] http://climateactiontracker.org/
[2] http://climateactiontracker.org/news/257/Paris-Agreement-sta...
[+] [-] goalieca|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] agumonkey|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RodericDay|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] clumsysmurf|10 years ago|reply
“The current text is weaker than the final agreement that came out of [the failed] Copenhagen [summit in 2009]”
http://www.thenation.com/article/scientists-warn-paris-clima...
"James Hansen, father of climate change awareness, calls Paris talks 'a fraud'" http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/dec/12/james-han...
[+] [-] colordrops|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phkamp|10 years ago|reply
If Oil/Coal companies tank: Yes
If not: No
Always follow the money.
[+] [-] danieltillett|10 years ago|reply
In regards oil the big producers are already flooding the market to try and kill alternatives. If something scares the likes of OPEC more than anything else it is cheap renewable energy. Wind and solar are getting very close to knocking out everything else at an oil price above $60 a barrel.
[+] [-] tim333|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tosseraccount|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Brakenshire|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shoo|10 years ago|reply
they're usually variations on:
1. a big pile of (typically public) money is given to the most polluting companies
2. in return those companies exit the industry
i don't think such policies are a great idea, but they might be an example of action that would (i) be actually progressive re: greenhouse emissions, and (ii) might make the share price of such a company go up, supposing the pay out were large enough.
this little thought experiment aside, the heuristic of following the change in the market is probably a reasonable one.
[+] [-] ArkyBeagle|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zouhair|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Brakenshire|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vlehto|10 years ago|reply
On the other hand, with responsible, smart politicians and capitalism, anything is possible.
What I'm saying is that the system is broken, but everybody is concentrating on the one part that actually does work.
[+] [-] sktrdie|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ArkyBeagle|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tosseraccount|10 years ago|reply
Should be an interesting, spirited debate.
[+] [-] blondie9x|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gdubs|10 years ago|reply
My hope is that the emissions targets (low by what the scientific community wants to see) are tough enough that they will mandate significant investments in new technology. When clean tech becomes profitable (optimistically cheaper via subsidies), then it may become easier to sell the world on ratcheting-up the targets before we run out of time.
As others have mentioned, I will be watching the market reactions with cautious optimism.
[+] [-] dan-silver|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nsns|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alphaBetaGamma|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SixSigma|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] hospes|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reitanqild|10 years ago|reply
At least also mention how many are hurt or killed by kerosene..
[+] [-] T3RMINATED|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] forrestthewoods|10 years ago|reply
I have a better plan. Here's how to reduce worldwide carbon emissions by 44% in 15-25 years.
Step 1) Replace all coal power plants with nuclear plants Step 2) There is no step 2
[+] [-] pan69|10 years ago|reply
There are certainly downsides and problems with nuclear power, waste is coming to mind and safety seems to be the other. I think that if we built nuclear power plants today they will be a lot safer and cleaner than the ones we used to built in the 60's and 70's.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EviEN0ScOwg
[+] [-] usaar333|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oneJob|10 years ago|reply
Humanity has just about built the infrastructure to lock in 2 degree temp increase. We are talking about a matter of years, not a decade. We are talking about locking in, not higher probability.
Yet, there is uninterrupted talk of growing our economies (but little talk of reducing the wealth gap). If our economies are to continue growing. If we continue to be an extraction oriented species. If we continue to spend tens of billions a year searching out new fossil fuel reserves when we can't use half of those we already know of without pushing the 4-6 degree threshold..?
Nature, will go on. Some portion of humanity, will go on. It's not the end of the world. Just the end of the world as we know it.
If today everyone ditched their cars and used public transit and bikes, we shut down the airlines, and became vegan we'd be most of the way there. Switch to organic farming and cradle-to-cradle manufacturing would almost surely get us the rest of the way there.
Yeah, I know, that's not going to happen and people don't want it to. My point is simply, the solution is not some black magic or future technology. The solution is simply a choice.
edit: for cradle-to-cradle, see... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cradle-to-cradle_design
[+] [-] eli_gottlieb|10 years ago|reply
One of these things is not like the others: shutting down airlines is an actual regulatory action. The others are lifestyle choices (and for what it's worth, I overwhelmingly just use public transit and my bike).
>Switch to organic farming and cradle-to-cradle manufacturing would almost surely get us the rest of the way there.
I'd like it if you could explain "cradle-to-cradle manufacturing", but I'm very skeptical that organic farming would actually help. Last I heard, even when you account for the subsidies paid to make industrial farming cheap, organic farming is still more resource-intensive than industrial farming.
Further, again, last I heard, lifestyle changes on the part of individuals have far less impact on resource usage than policy changes in major industries.