A study released by the U.N. Environment Program Sunday indicated that pledges by industrial countries and major emerging nations fall just short of the reductions of greenhouse gas emissions that scientists have said are needed.
"For those who claim a deal in Copenhagen is impossible, they are simply wrong," said U.N. Environment Program Director Achim Steiner, releasing the report compiled by British economist Lord Nicholas Stern and the Grantham Research Institute.
Environmentalists have warned that emissions commitments were dangerously short of what U.N. scientists have said were needed to keep average temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees C (3.6F).
But most of those warnings were based on pledges only from industrial countries. The U.N. report included pledges from China and other rapidly developing countries, which in turn were contingent on rich-country funding to help.
All countries together should emit no more than 44 billion tons of carbon dioxide by 2020 to avoid the worst consequences of a warming world, the report said.
Computing the high end of all commitments publicly announced so far, the report said emissions will total some 46 billion tons annually in 2020. Emissions today are about 47 billion tons.
"We are within a few gigatons of having a deal," Steiner said. "The gap has narrowed significantly."
06 December 2009
Just a Few Gigatonnes Short
It turns out that the world is very close to dealing with this whole climate change issue, says UNEP today, as reported in an AP article:
4 comments:
What is a few giga-tonnes, and a few giga-dollars among friends?
With unemployment the only thing rising as fast as the Federal deficit, I can't see any Copenhagen deal getting through Congress. Any attempt by the Administration to make such a deal will go over very badly.
This should be very interesting.
Those last few Gigatonnes should come from negawatts.
We're also going to have to forgive our fellow citizens for ignorance of tonnes vs. tons. I think we ought to re-designate the latter as a "crapload".
"U.N. scientists have said were needed to keep average temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees C (3.6F)."
It isn't really "science" to say the impacts of a 2 degrees rise are bad and should be avoided.
It is "science-i-ness" ( a la Colbert) to model what might happen with that degree rise and leave it to the politicians and public to figure out the trade-offs. "Science-i-ness" is basically a set of assumptions given quantitative form without empirical verification.
It is "science" to use a model which has been empirically tested to project the future (and has been found to do that) to project what might happen and then leave it to the politicians and the public to figure out the trade-offs of different policy options.
Scientists in this case have moved from the "what might happen" to "what should be done"- not the purview of science.
Sharon recalls the question of Ellsaesser as channeled through Thomas Knutson: “Should we trust models or observations?” In reply we note that if we had observations of the future, we obviously would trust them more than models, but unfortunately observations of the future are not available at this time.
Sorry Sharon, models of the future are why we need science. See the WG II and WG III reports and, oh yes, if you really want to know why we need to avoid a 3K change take a look at these two tables
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