The Conference of the Parties - 21, COP21, is over. I hope that some of you followed the students on Facebook and Twitter. ( @ClimateBlue on Twitter , http://www.facebook.com/ClimateBlue ).
This is my discussion and analysis of what came out of COP21. There has been a wide range of analyses published in virtually every media outlet we have going (Revkin, Climate Path Ahead, Harvey, Paris climate change agreement: the world's greatest diplomatic success, ExxonMobil on the U.N. Climate Talks ). There is also, at least for today, a large effort at outreach from both governmental and non-governmental organizations. This morning (December 14), I attended a telecon sponsored by the White House and this afternoon, I will attend another one. The White House has prepared a fact sheet that summarizes the outcomes as well as touting U.S. leadership U.S. Leadership and the Historic Paris Agreement to Combat Climate Change.
Here is a link to Adoption of the Paris Agreement, and on page 21 of this document is the Paris Agreement. In a number of places, I have seen it said that if you don’t want to read it all then all you need to know is Article 2. Quoted below:
This Agreement, in enhancing the implementation of the Convention, including its objective, aims to strengthen the global response to the threat of climate change, in the context of sustainable development and efforts to eradicate poverty, including by:
(a) Holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels, recognizing that this would significantly reduce the risks and impacts of climate change;
(b) Increasing the ability to adapt to the adverse impacts of climate change and foster climate resilience and low greenhouse gas emissions development, in a manner that does not threaten food production;
(c) Making finance flows consistent with a pathway towards low greenhouse gas emissions and climate-resilient development.
2. This Agreement will be implemented to reflect equity and the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities, in the light of different national circumstances.
With reference to my previous blog, the final language chosen was the “well below 2 degree Celsius” option, and strives for 1.5 degrees Celsius. This is more ambitious than the 2-degree target, which was the long-standing target going into the Paris meeting. Many, including me, would argue that the 2-degree was already lost. Therefore, an even more ambitious target is, well, a challenge to reason. That said, if you read the whole Paris document, you will see that the writers of the document realize the challenge that they are proposing.
It is interesting that the draft language quoted in the previous blog, “while recognizing that in some regions and vulnerable ecosystems high risks are projected even for warming above 1.5 °C, ” morphed into “recognizing that this would significantly reduce the risks and impacts of climate change.” The document does recognize that “dangerous” climate change does occur below the 2-degree mark. This is an important statement and recognition, because I know some who work in the fields of climate change and sustainability who have taken solace that “danger” was some time off, and that we had time to avert the danger.
The document reads like a proclamation that is read in the village square. The United Nations is cumbersome and contentious. Nevertheless, the U.N. appears more functional than the U.S. Congress. The document cannot and does not set out details. It does, however, set out a complex series of meetings and events to support an ever-increasing reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. It builds upon 186 Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDC), which are non-binding goals that the nations had committed to prior to arrival in Paris.
The Paris Agreement relies upon intentions and volunteerism, and, ultimately, the sustained realization and internalization that we, all countries, are already seeing harmful disruptions of climate change – directly and/or indirectly. Climate change is not a problem two or three generations in the future. The Agreement is vulnerable because of its voluntary nature. However, if it were more in the spirit of binding targets, regulations, and financial obligations, it would not exist. Plus I am not convinced that it would be any more powerful agreement. This idea of national self-determination is critical, because most countries are only going to embrace legislation by an international “government” when it aligns with their self-interest.
I list the headings in the Adoption of the Paris Agreement, from the section “Decisions to Give Effect to the Agreement”
Mitigation
Adaptation
Loss and Damage
Finance
Technology Development and Transfer
Capacity-Building
Transparency of Action and Support
Global Stocktake (appraising progress in terms of accomplishments and goals)
Facilitating Implementation and Compliance
Final Clauses
There are an enormous number of action items to take on prior to 2020. My point, here, a complex and difficult process has been started. There is the full realization that the Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDC) do not assure, in any way, that we are on the path to the 2-degree goal, much less the 1.5-degree goal. Paris is like an intervention, it is a moment of recognition that we have a problem and we have to deal with it. It is an intervention where we recognize that we have a problem, but really don’t want to talk about the problem – fossil fuels and carbon dioxide are not mentioned in the document.
The Paris Agreement requires us to reduce emissions to near zero and to take carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The students in our delegation told me that there was some talk about carbon capture and storage, see also, Carbon Capture and Storage Association. As best as I can tell, the trees are the primary carbon dioxide removal mechanism. It is my opinion, analysis, that direct removal mechanisms will be required to achieve any goal of 2 degrees or less. If we don’t get a handle on emissions soon, we will require removal for, even, 3 or 4 degrees.
So with regard to controlling emissions, we are still in the same place we were last month. We need the technology and economics to support renewable and carbon free energy. We need energy distribution and transmission systems. Given the rapid growth, globally, in energy production and use, I don’t see how we can get away from needing nuclear energy and, indeed, carbon capture and sequestration for electrical generation – not just coal, but gas (and oil) as well.
After many major accomplishments in my life, someone has said to me, “now the real work begins.” For many in my line of work, the Paris Agreement is hugely positive. We acknowledge the problem. In many ways, we know that it is a problem that we can solve. The science and technology are the easy parts. All that is left is that “ We have met the enemy and he is us.”
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Figure 1: (following Pogo) from OtegoNY.com
| Dr. Rood, Thank you for the free education. You removed the shroud of ignorance that was blinding me. I learned so much from your blogs and your followers. You are a true leader. |
24. JohnLonergan
10:58 PM GMT on December 15, 2015
Quoting 11. Xandra: …and Then There's Physics has just commented on the paper here. |
23. ColoradoBob1
10:49 PM GMT on December 15, 2015|
California’s stranded sea lions suffering from brain damage caused by algae blooms SAN JOSE, Calif. Scientists have gleaned fresh insight into the havoc wreaked by a microscopic culprit that has disrupted marine life this year along the Pacific Coast, not only tainting Northern California’s delicious supply of Dungeness crab but also sickening or killing hundreds of sea lions. It’s long been known that a tiny toxin called domoic acid, produced by marine algae known as pseudo-nitzschia, kills brain cells. But new research by a University of California, Santa Cruz, team illuminates the relationship between damage to the brain and sea lions’ profound loss of memory and navigational skills. In recent years, biologists have increasingly observed a high number of California sea lions struggle onto beaches, weak, confused and trembling. Link |
22. JohnLonergan
10:39 PM GMT on December 15, 2015|
James Hansen Calls Out 'Baloney' on COP21 Climate Progress Citing climate 'emergency,' the scientist-turned activist is unimpressed with COP21 outcome, opts for nuclear – but not carbon capture and sequestration – in 'all hands on deck' approach. ...Hansen’s preferred solution is a carbon fee-and-dividend, with all collected fees (taxes) distributed back on an equal per capita basis. Such a system has been backed also by groups such as the Citizens Climate Lobby. |
21. Xandra
10:38 PM GMT on December 15, 2015|
From Climate Central: Arctic Gets Check-Up: Temperature Highest on Record SAN FRANCISCO — The Arctic has just received its yearly checkup from a group of international scientists, and the patient isn’t looking well.  October 2014-September 2015 average air temperatures across the Arctic compared to the 1981-2010 average and history of Arctic temperatures compared to the global average. Credit: NOAA Climate.gov The region continues to be one of the fastest warming on the planet. From October 2014 to September 2015, it had the warmest average temperature on record going back to 1900, as the planet heads toward its warmest year on record. That accelerated warming has repercussions in the form of downward-spiraling sea ice coverage, melting of the massive Greenland Ice Sheet, and reduced summer snow cover. All that change is having impacts on Arctic ecosystems and key species, and could lead to more shipping traffic and oil exploration in the region, as well as to impacts outside of the Arctic. “The impacts of the persistent warming trend of over 30 years are clearly evident in land and ocean environments,” Kit Kovacs, a program leader of biodiversity research at the Norwegian Polar Institute and a co-author of the 2015 Arctic Report Card, said. She spoke here Tuesday during a presentation of the major findings of the report at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union. Given the projections of further warming over the rest of the century, the world can expect to see “continued, widespread” change in the Arctic, Kovacs said. Read more >> |
20. ColoradoBob1
10:21 PM GMT on December 15, 2015|
Pacific Ocean may be having disastrous consequences for whales that use the waters off California as a migratory super-highway “This time of year, the whales would be offshore but with the blob of warm water, they’re right off the beach. They’re right where the crabs are,” said Jim Anderson, a crabber who’s helping to mobilize the state’s 562 licensed Dungeness crab fishermen. “You go talk to a guy who’s been fishing for 40 or 50 years and he’s never seen anything like it.” Whales that have rope stuck in their mouths or wrapped tightly around their fins or tail will eventually die if they can’t free themselves. Highly trained volunteer rescue teams are only able to disentangle a small percentage despite tracking devices that allow them to follow the hobbled animals for miles. Many swim away and their fate is never known. Link |
19. ColoradoBob1
10:03 PM GMT on December 15, 2015|
Fish Stocks Are Declining Worldwide, And Climate Change Is On The Hook For anyone paying attention, it's no secret there's a lot of weird stuff going on in the oceans right now. We've got a monster El Nino looming in the Pacific. Ocean acidification is prompting hand wringing among oyster lovers. Migrating fish populations have caused tensions between countries over fishing rights. And fishermen say they're seeing unusual patterns in fish stocks they haven't seen before. Researchers now have more grim news to add to the mix. An analysis published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences finds that the ability of fish populations to reproduce and replenish themselves is declining across the globe. Link |
18. tlawson48
9:33 PM GMT on December 15, 2015| Pretty sure that this "winter" in the Eastern United States is going to freak a lot of people out. February is a wild card, but December is going down warm and snowless, its so warm that even the northern most ski resorts have been very limited on the snow they can make. January is looking to be very warm as well. I would love to be wrong, but a lot of people who rely on winter to make money are probably going to lose their shirt by the time March rolls around. |
17. ScottLincoln
8:01 PM GMT on December 15, 2015|
Looks like we're just waiting on NOAA now. Both GISS and JMA both are on track for warmest global temperature on record for 2015, and perhaps breaking the previous record by the largest margin on record. I'm still a bit surprised that the satellite-derived lower troposphere estimates have not started to shoot up rapidly yet, but I'd assume it's practically imminent. |
13. JohnLonergan
12:43 PM GMT on December 15, 2015
November GISS down by only 0.01° on record October. from Nick Stokes:As reader David Sanger noted November GISS global average is out, at 1.05°C anomaly. That would be the hottest in the record, if they had not increased October to 1.06°C. The late rise in Oct is not unexpected, since as Olof noted, Brazil and Greenland came in late and relatively warm. TempLS Oct went up too.  More ... |
11. Xandra
9:33 AM GMT on December 15, 2015|
Bad news. Climate sensitivity may be higher than we thought. New paper by Dr. Kate Marvel, Dr. Gavin A. Schmidt et al. on why climate sensitivity from transient obs are biased low: Implications for climate sensitivity from the response to individual forcings Climate sensitivity to doubled CO2 is a widely used metric for the large-scale response to external forcing. Climate models predict a wide range for two commonly used definitions: the transient climate response (TCR: the warming after 70 years of CO2 concentrations that rise at 1% per year), and the equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS: the equilibrium temperature change following a doubling of CO2 concentrations). Many observational data sets have been used to constrain these values, including temperature trends over the recent past1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, inferences from palaeoclimate7, 8 and process-based constraints from the modern satellite era9, 10. However, as the IPCC recently reported11, different classes of observational constraints produce somewhat incongruent ranges. Here we show that climate sensitivity estimates derived from recent observations must account for the efficacy of each forcing active during the historical period. When we use single-forcing experiments to estimate these efficacies and calculate climate sensitivity from the observed twentieth-century warming, our estimates of both TCR and ECS are revised upwards compared to previous studies, improving the consistency with independent constraints. |
10. Xandra
8:47 AM GMT on December 15, 2015|
Limiting climate change to 1.5 C. Some simple arithmetic By Robert Wilson I am an old fashioned scientist more interested in numbers than in diplomatic agreements or parsing diplomatic language. So I have no real view of whether the Paris climate change agreement is a historical triumph or a fraud. But as a long time observer, and sometime contributor, to debates over whether we can limit temperature rises to 2 C above pre-industrial levels, I am rather perplexed by the unexpected inclusion in the agreement of the aspiration to keep temperature rises to 1.5 C. Here is what the agreement says: Emphasizing with serious concern the urgent need to address the significant gap between the aggregate effect of Parties’ mitigation pledges in terms of global annual emissions of greenhouse gases by 2020 and aggregate emission pathways consistent with holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 °C. [my emphasis] Let me state some simple facts that show this is an act of cynicism, wishful thinking, or delusion. Each year existing fossil fuel infrastructure emits approximately 36 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide. This is what is now happening, but what will obviously need to change to get anywhere close to 1.5 C. Now, some undiluted fantasy. Let’s imagine that tomorrow we stopped building any new fossil fuel infrastructure and simply retired the existing stuff when we expected to. How much CO2 would it emit? Fortunately, this has already been estimated by the important work of Steve Davis and others. In a paper in Science in 2010 they calculated that future fossil fuel emissions from existing infrastructure would increase atmospheric CO2 levels to 430 ppm and would increase temperatures by 1.3 C above pre-industrial levels. That paper was published 5 years ago. Since then atmospheric CO2 levels have gone up by around 10 ppm, and the rapid construction of long lasting coal power plants in China means we have actually increased the level of “committed” CO2 from existing infrastructure. So, existing fossil fuel infrastructure has more or less locked us into 1.5 C. And as Glen Peters points out we will probably eat up a 1.5 C carbon budget by 2020. That’s the fantasy. What is the reality? Here are some more simple facts: Fossil fuels continue to dominate new energy infrastructure. Maersk is not unveiling solar powered container ships. Boeing and Airbus appear content with the age of kerosene. Steel makers are sticking with coal. 20 million new cars are added to China’s roads each year. Electric cars remain marginal everywhere: in Germany, where they wanted 1 million of them on the roads by 2020 and in America where Obama spoke of 1 million being on the roads by 2015. Despite what you may read, China is still opening roughly one new coal power plant each week. India plans to double its coal production by 2020. Green Germany just opened a new coal power plant last month. Britain announced a phaseout of coal power plants, but plans to build a new fleet of gas power plants. Despite what most EU policy-makers believed we now appear to be entering an era of cheap oil and natural gas. I can go on. This leaves us with an obvious conclusion. The 1.5 C barrier will be breached, regardless of what the countries of the world ostensibly aspire towards. With one deus ex machina: we figure out a way to suck billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere each year. That’s what simple arithmetic tells us will be needed. And that is not something any of the world’s leaders appear to want to discuss. |
7. Some1Has2BtheRookie
4:24 AM GMT on December 15, 2015|
Ricky, I believe that this a very good assessment of the COP21, "Paris is like an intervention, it is a moment of recognition that we have a problem and we have to deal with it." Recognizing that there is a problem is the first step towards solving the problem. I think that James Hansen is correct when he says that the COP21 is a fraud. We all know this while we still recognize that more came from this meeting than from all of the prior meetings. We also know that the political climate is not quite what we need to face the changing global climate and therefore this is likely the best that could have been obtained at COP21. This is sad, really. It is actually the political climate that we need to change and then the global climate becomes less of a challenge for us. We have, at last, and at least, a recognition of the problem. This is sad that it took this long to finally come to a recognition. Then we also know all of the misinformation, deception, distractions and lies we had to face just to get this much accomplished. I will guess that you noticed Exxon's response. Exxon may as well have said, "It's OK. We've got this. This is what we want done and so shall it be. Now go away. You are bothering us." |
5. JohnLonergan
2:40 AM GMT on December 15, 2015|
From HotWhopper: Watching the global thermometer - year to date GISTemp with a very hot November 2015 Worth noting: Hottest November on Record by 0.25 �C 2015 is by far the hottest year on record so far.  Data Source: NASA GISS - GHCN-v3 1880-09/2015 SST: ERSST v4 1880-09/2015  Data Source: NASA GISS - GHCN-v3 1880-09/2015 SST: ERSST v4 1880-09/2015 Full blog |
4. Xyrus2000
1:41 AM GMT on December 15, 2015|
The point I was trying to make in regards to the previous blog, and is
mentioned again here (trees and carbon removal) is that you can't swap
one ecological disaster for another. We have to stop thinking of
band-aids and coming with real workable solutions that don't cause more
problems than they solve. I was in a rush this morning so didn't get a chance to elaborate. One of the proposals for reducing carbon is to to use biological sequestration. Like many geoengineering solutions, it sounds good at first. And out of all the proposed methods it's the one that is most practical. But it isn't without serious consequences of it's own. You can't mess with one aspect of nature and not have it impact another, and changing large swaths of land in an effort to create artificial carbon sinks is no better than claiming we can just move our whole agricultural infrastructure north when the climate changes. Worse, there isn't any guarantee that an area that's developed into a wetland or forest over the next 10 years will still be capable of being a wetland or forest in 20 years. Climate change is accelerating, and it doesn't take much to change regions by drastic amounts. It also doesn't take into account how these areas would deal with projected climate changes, invasive species, diseases, so on and so forth. Or we could take all the money and resources we'd invest in trying to replace one ecological disaster with another and actually do something GUARANTEED about the problem itself. If we really wanted to (and we don't yet), we could eliminate almost all our emissions within about 20-30 years by using a mixture of nuclear and renewable energy sources. They only things we can't really replace with purely electric alternatives (yet) are high energy/long haul vehicles (jets, big rigs, etc.). For regular everyday activities electric vehicles are more than adequate now and will get more so in the future. For nuclear, we have designs that have been sitting on shelf that are meltdown proof. We have breeder reactor technology that takes nuclear waste and turns it into more fuel. Nuclear has a much smaller and much more manageable wastes than trying to figure out how to deal with 30 gigatonnes of CO2 every year. and actually a good portion of that waste could be used to power RTGs on probes and other spacecraft. But since the words "nuclear" and "radiation" inspire ludicrous amounts on unfounded fears in people, it probably won't ever happen. Regardless, all this will do is stop making the problem worse. We still have to deal with 150 years of built up emissions, and there's nothing we can realistically do to prevent the consequences of that. For that, we have to turn to adaptation and mitigation strategies. And maybe after a couple of centuries and the development of fusion power we can finally take all those fossil forests we decided to throw into the atmosphere and put them back in the ground where they belong. |
3. LowerCal
1:04 AM GMT on December 15, 2015
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2. LowerCal
12:47 AM GMT on December 15, 2015|
Uruguay makes dramatic shift to nearly 95% electricity from clean energy | Environment | The Guardian (For the full article click the link above. Below are excerpts.) ....(snip) |
1. Patrap
10:56 PM GMT on December 14, 2015
Into the future we go, and at 22 million BBLS of crude a day here in the good ol USA. |
29. Newbeliever
3:12 AM GMT on December 16, 2015