Copenhagen Climate Change Summit: Good, Bad, Ugly

With the Copenhagen Summit on climate change ("COP15") well underway and the December 18 finale only days away, a person in my position is supposed to be feeling gung ho.  I'm not.  At best, I'm ambivalent.  My hope is for a binding international agreement to at least begin curbing greenhouse gas emissions.  After all, for the first time we have China, India, Brazil and the U.S. making commitments of some sort (or merely "pledges"?) -- a necessary and positive step.

But when many miles need to be traveled, and yesterday, it's hard to get excited by excruciating baby steps.  At the moment at least, China and India merely are pledging to reduce the "carbon intensity" of their respective economies.  It's a fancy and not entirely honest way of saying they will continue to pursue low-hanging energy efficiency measures already on the drawing board while watching their cumulative greenhouse gas emissions continue to soar.  As for the U.S., President Obama is crossing his fingers that his noticeably modest commitment, of 17 percent reductions in greenhouse gas emissions from 2005 levels by 2020, will make it past the woeful U.S. Senate.  Meanwhile, opposing blocs of underdeveloped and developed nations continue to point fingers at one another.

In the face of an unprecedented global crisis, baby steps are a form of soft denial.  Sort of like mumbling.


Miles above this lackluster performance, carbon dioxide concentrations in Earth's atmosphere have risen to approximately 390 ppm and are plausibly climbing toward 450 ppm, exacerbating the greenhouse effect already underway.  And according to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS),  even if the world brought its carbon dioxide levels back to pre-industrial times, which it won't, it would take "1,000" years or longer for the climate changes already underway to be reversed.  This is largely thanks to the long life of carbon dioxide in the world's oceans.


Here are several excellent sources for tracking ongoing developments at COP15.  Some of these sites also give you the opportunity to participate in chat groups, Twitter, etc.:

• Oneclimate.net
• Realclimate.org -- emphasis on climate change science
• Climate Progress -- possibly the best climate change site, period.  Highly esteemed Dr. Joseph Romm serves as editor in collaboration with the Center for American Progress.
• Climate central 
• Project Groundswell
• New York Times
• Various national environmental organizations, such as Environmental Defense Fund

Al Gore Advocates for Electric Vehicles and Against Ethanol

Nobel Peace Prize winner and former Vice President Al Gore is on tour to promote his new book, Our Choice, which more or less begins where An Inconvenient Truth ended.  While touching on the latest science of global climate change, the book nonetheless focuses on U.S. energy policies, sources and uses and on policy solutions to the climate crisis (a term used not only by this author but also in a consistent manner by Gore).

Opening his November 9 remarks at San Rafael's Dominican University with his trademark self-deprecating humor -- "I'm Al Gore, I used to be the next president of the United States" -- the relaxed and good-humored Tennessean immediately had his audience laughing and applauding.  To be sure, for Gore, speaking to an ideologically compatible and politically sophisticated San Francisco Bay Area audience about global climate change, the only thing missing from the love would be flowers and kisses.

The Arctic in Crisis -- Global Warming Reverses Long-Term Cooling Trend

A recent study published in the September 4 issue of Science magazine is yet another indicator that the Arctic is in crisis.  A team of scientists found that temperatures in the Earth’s vast northernmost region – which includes the Arctic Ocean and parts of Alaska, Canada, Russia, Greenland, and the Scandinavian countries in Northern Europe – have reversed a long-term cooling trend and are now the warmest they’ve been in at least 2,000 years.

The study’s authors include the renowned Darrell S. Kaufman, of the School of Earth Sciences and Environmental Sustainability at Northern Arizona University, and David Schneider of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado.

The Arctic cooling period had lasted for 2,000 years and was reversed during the 20th century, with four of the five warmest decades in the region occurring between 1950 and 2000.

Federal Agencies Roll Out Greenhouse Gas Regulations, Initiatives

The 1990s was a lost decade on the climate change issue in the U.S., mostly thanks to the hidebound U.S. Senate.  In 1993 it defeated President Clinton’s BTU tax proposal, in 1997 it repudiated the Kyoto Protocol (which at that time still technically was only a draft, not a final accord) with its 95-0 vote in favor of the Byrd-Hagel Resolution, and in 1998 it defeated  “America’s Climate Security Act of 2007,” also known as the Lieberman-Warner bill. 

EPA Administrator Carol Browner, in choosing to be MIA, also served as an obstacle, albeit a quiet and passive one.  So President Clinton and Vice President Gore essentially limited the administration’s remaining climate change efforts to signing up corporate partners to its voluntary Climate Change Action Plan, supporting research, and launching an earnest but low-level public awareness effort that made a point to avoid the media, in which this writer participated.  Of course, the U.S. and the world community then lost another precious eight years under Dubyah and his administration, no need to elaborate. 

Today, 16 years after the U.S. Government should have started mobilizing the country to address global warming, we finally have a White House, an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and a Department of Energy (DOE) moving forward with meaningful measures to curb U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. 

National Academy of Sciences Sounds Alarm Bells with New Projections of Climate Change Impacts

At present, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are roughly 390 parts per million (ppm). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), as reported earlier this year in the Los Angeles Times, stated that even if the nations of the world could bring carbon dioxide levels back to those of the pre-industrial era -- a fantasy miracle we aren't going to see -- it would still take 1,000 years or longer for the climate changes already triggered to be reversed. According to the NAS, this is primarily due to the long-term impact of carbon dioxide on oceans. The NAS further reported that in the nearer future the world will experience greater melting of the polar ice caps than previously estimated and droughts in some regions, including southwestern U.S., comparable to the 1930s U.S. Dustbowl.