Environment & Energy

Eugene

(61,859 posts) Fri Oct 2, 2015, 05:19 PM Oct 2015

51 countries just released their climate plans — and they’re still not strong enough

Source: Washington Post

51 countries just released their climate plans — and they’re still not strong enough

By Steven Mufson October 2 at 8:43 AM

When it comes to slowing climate change, it takes more than a village.

On Wednesday and Thursday, 51 countries filed their climate action plans with the United Nations, a key step toward reaching an international accord at the Paris climate summit in December. Altogether, more than 130 nations accounting for about 85 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions have filed plans.

But are they enough to keep global warming from exceeding the international target of 2 degrees Celsius by 2050? Not yet.

A group called Climate Action Tracker said that while the new global commitments would slow climate change, global warming would still grow by 2.7 degrees Celsius by 2050 and roughly 3.6 degrees by the end of the century. Other forecasts are even more dire.

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Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/10/02/51-countries-just-released-their-climate-plans-and-theyre-still-not-enough/

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51 countries just released their climate plans — and they’re still not strong enough (Original Post) Eugene Oct 2015 OP

The findings of that study are being overstated kristopher Oct 2015 #1

kristopher

(29,798 posts)

1. The findings of that study are being overstated

Reply to Eugene (Original post)

Fri Oct 2, 2015, 06:21 PM

Oct 2015

Last edited Fri Oct 2, 2015, 11:50 PM - Edit history (1)

It is a snapshot of an ongoing process of change, not a final report on the decarbonization effort. A well known feature of how change occurs tells us that there is a very real and significant snowball effect.

It works like this:

Policies are crafted that set goals for change.

Those policies are often couched incrementally, either by partial goals or by staged implementation.

Contrary to intuitive thinking, what happens is that affected entities tend to 'see the writing on the wall and react more to the policy as evidence of the inevitability of the ultimate change than as a statement of what is the minimum effort to just get by.

The competitive world presses them to look for ways to benefit from the changes that are coming.

This, in turn, prompts them to become early adopters of complete change.

So even though the goals looked at in the study are viewed as low, the ultimate significance just establishing these global goals is, without doubt, far greater than the numbers in the goals indicate.

All of that said, it is still important to take these snapshots, monitor progress, and push for higher goals.

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