29 November 2015, Aljazeera, Inside the bubble with Obama in Paris. As US president heads to French capital for UN climate summit, his 2008 promise to heal the planet is sure to be broken. As I write this, US President Barack Obama has just taken off for Paris and the UN Climate summit. I beat him here – after all he doesn’t have to go through customs or anything so he travels faster than I do. This is a very big deal to Obama. Getting an overarching worldwide agreement on climate change has been a central theme of his administration since he took office. Remember the talk of calming seas when he became the Democratic nominee? Small problem – he’s not going to keep that promise. A recent study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that if all of the countries live up to their pledges to reduce greenhouse gases, the Earth will still warm 3.5 degrees Celsius by 2100. Without any action, the planet is expected to warm by 4.5C. These scientists say the combined actions will in essence reduce the temperature by 1C. That will not stave off the worst consequences of climate change. It’s also an open question as to whether the countries will live up to their commitments. Hurdles ahead. The Obama administration has been working hard to avoid this agreement being called a treaty. If it is a treaty, he would have to get two-thirds of the US Senate to agree to the terms. He wouldn’t be able to make that happen. Read More here
Category Archives: PLEA Network
27 November 2015, The Conversation, Out of step: marching for climate justice versus taking action. This weekend, tens of thousands (perhaps hundreds of thousands) of people in cities around the world will take to the streets to protest against governments’ inaction on climate change. Past experience suggests media coverage will be largely sympathetic, if cursory, and (many) politicians will say that they hope the Paris climate summit that begins immediately afterwards represents a turning point. We have been here before. Quite often. There have been demonstrations at international climate meetings since at least 1990. However, “sympathy” marches in places far removed from the climate talks – such as those planned this weekend – are less frequent. So, can they make a difference? Read More here
25 November 2015, Renew Economy, Australia can meet its Kyoto target – but “real emissions” will not fall to -5% by 2020. In line with our earlier update, Environment Minister Greg Hunt will today announce that Australia’s greenhouse gas abatement task to meet its 2020 emissions reduction target has fallen “below zero”, meaning that Australia will meet its 2020 target. While we will officially meet our Kyoto target, Australian emissions will not fall to -5 per cent on 2000 levels by 2020. Australian emissions are projected to grow from today (currently -2 per cent on 2000 levels) through to 2020, increasing 6 per cent to be plus 4 per cent on 2000 levels by 2020, well short of the -5 per cent target. Below, we summarise how Australia’s Kyoto target can be met, despite emissions continuing to grow. What is an “abatement task” and how is it derived? Read more here
25 November 2015, New Matilda, Halting Climate Change Means More Than Cutting Carbon. With the Paris climate talks just around the corner a focus on carbon dioxide is not enough. Geoff Russell explains. With yet another in the seemingly infinite sequence of climate summit conferences looming it’s time to take stock of what’s been happening over the past 25 years. But I’ll be taking stock properly, which means not being CO2 centric. Focusing exclusively on CO2 is rather like focusing on protein when thinking about nutrition: it’s simply silly. It’s been seven years since Barry Brook and I wrote an article about the misleading nature of the so-called “carbon dioxide equivalence” factor used to aggregate methane emissions in Greenhouse Inventories. This isn’t a priority claim; many understood the problem before us. Among the first was Kirk Smith of the University of California, Berkeley. Smith is an expert in air quality, among other things, and was the first to measure and understand the impact of indoor cooking smoke on health in India. Globally, it kills people, mainly women and children, by the hundreds of thousands every year. He’s also been tackling the problem in a practical way by spinning off students and companies designing and building cleaner cookers. Smith’s latest work, with main author Manish Desai, calculates a metric called the International Natural Debt (IND) which is a better than average measure who is responsible for our climate woes. Their study uses national emission inventories and greenhouse gas equations to calculate precisely the impact of emissions on radiative forcing (that’s just jargon for warming). In effect, while they don’t include all the components of a full climate model, they do at least account for the full impact of methane on warming. Their estimate, based on the best inventory data is that anthropogenic methane, on its own, contributes about half of our net warming influence on the climate. In technical language methane is about ~850 mW/m2 of the net ~1600 mW/m2 of anthropogenic radiative forcing. That makes methane a big deal. Even more importantly, reductions in methane have an almost immediate cooling impact. Read More here