The Centennial Celebration of the Paris Agreement Arrives 99 Years Early

Early in 2016, shortly after the United Nations-sponsored meeting that culminated in the Paris Climate Agreement of 2015, this writer posted a fable characterizing a fictional centennial commemoration of the 2015 Agreement in a scenario in which use of fossil fuels had continued unabated during that 100-year interval.  The fable is reproduced below:

The Centennial Commemoration of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement

A Fable

It was December 2115, the hundredth anniversary of the agreement to a climate treaty reached among all the members of the United Nations, in Paris.  The members of the Petrex extended family gathered to mark the occasion.  By that time, three to four generations after the event, the clan had grown considerably, and had established for itself a fully self-sufficient environment inside its terradome.  For the occasion the space was opulently fitted out with an artificial lake in which were moored several model oil rigs.  The pipe linking the rigs to shore ended in an internally illuminated fountain gurgling champagne.  Scattered about the artificially-turfed land areas were several working model oil wells erected in mud fields of black caviar, pumping dark chocolate and coffee liqueurs, and other reminders of the black gold that had started the Petrex fortune, more than one hundred years earlier.

Back then, the clan founder, Malvolio Petrex, chairman and chief executive officer of the largest oil company at the time, had come to realize the inconsistencies of his, and his company’s, position.  They were, at one and the same time, using all their financial power and political influence to perpetuate, indeed to expand, the use of the oil they extracted from the ground, while correctly realizing that their exploitative activities were worsening the global warming already well under way.  After all, the Paris agreement itself was reached in response to expert scientific findings, reported for at least the preceding twenty years, that burning oil and other fossil fuels, such as those his company and others were pulling from the ground, added irreversibly to the atmospheric burden of carbon dioxide, a powerful greenhouse gas.

Malvolio Petrex knew that global warming was going to get much worse in the coming years, because his company and others were continuing to produce fossil fuels at ever-increasing rates of growth, year after year.  After all, more and more energy was needed to fuel the demands of economies all over the world, being used to expand their economies and raise the poorest peoples of the world out of poverty. 

He wasn’t too worried about his own welfare, though.  Thanks to his immeasurable wealth, he already had peppered several secure estates around the world, in various climatic and ecological settings.  But as any other dynastic figure that we may encounter throughout history, he was concerned about the wellbeing of his progeny.  He knew that the travesties his business activities were creating would worsen after he was gone, impacting the lives and indeed the safety of his scions.  He understood that worsening warming would lead to economic and political unrest among the impoverished and others less well off than he because they would be suffering the harmful effects of warming: flooding in some regions; droughts, wildfires and famine in others; and inexorable sea level rise driving millions around the world from their traditional homes and livelihoods.

And so he embarked on a program to develop self-contained environments for himself and his family.  The environments would insulate his family from the unpleasantness of dealing with the effects of climate change by keeping the open atmosphere out, and the family’s living quarters and areas for amusing themselves in.  The first models were installed on the grounds of his existing estates, and were relatively modest. 

Now, one hundred years later, after many rounds of development and improvement, this Petrex estate was enveloped in its own protective terradome.  It was a large, fully enclosed environment covering almost one square mile, incorporating the estate’s mansion, its recreational areas, and fields producing much of its food needs.  The terradome insulated the estate from the worst “weird” climate and weather events brought on by the extreme warming that the world had attained by then, as well as keeping a portion of the sun’s warming light from penetrating to the land within it.  The Petrex family had practically no need to travel outside the terradome; it was almost entirely self-sufficient.

As a result, they were insulated as well from the harms and damages induced by the warmer climate that most of the peoples of the world were suffering.  Or maybe they knew and, just like Malvolio Petrex a hundred years earlier, chose to ignore it.  The population at large was subjected to far worse conditions than Petrex’s world had experienced one hundred years earlier: debilitating heat waves and droughts, intense storms bringing on severe flooding, encroaching oceans because of the severe degree of sea level rise, all brought on by the excess global warming that burning fossil fuels induced. 

By the time of the centennial anniversary the opportunity for effective action to combat global warming had long passed.

 

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The fabled centennial celebration of the Paris Agreement has already arrived, 99 years early.  The newly elected U. S. President, Donald Trump, is a man whose wealth could well serve as a model for the patriarch Malvolio Petrex.  He shows his wealth at least partly by erecting palatial residences and developing exclusive golf courses around the globe. 

Mr. Trump has called global warming a hoax.  Now as president he is implementing policies and appointing people to important cabinet positions who share his sentiment.  From the outset, he is reversing important initiatives undertaken by his predecessor, who had set in motion important policies that curb emissions of greenhouse gases.   

Here is a partial list of President Trump’s actions and policy positions:

·        He appointed Scott Pruitt to be Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Instead of having an interest in protecting the environment, Mr. Pruitt is eliminating rules that preserve our natural world.  In his previous position as the Attorney General of Oklahoma, he repeatedly sued the EPA seeking to overturn its regulations that protect aspects of our environment, including emissions of greenhouse gases. Now he is the Administrator of that selfsame agency.  The Los Angeles Times writes “The Republican dogma of unrestrained economic exploitation drives the president and his EPA chief. As a result, climate science has become a heretical activity.”

·        Among fossil fuels coal emits the most carbon dioxide (per amount of heat obtained) when burned.  So its use should be limited as much as possible in order to reduce emissions.  But Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke ordered that a ban on mining coal on federal lands, put in place by former President Obama, be rescinded.  The order followed through on President Trump’s overall goal of increasing American energy independence.

·        PresidentTrump ordered a review of all policies deemed to interfere with enhancing America’s energy independence.  This includes directing Administrator Pruitt to reconsider the Clean Power Plan, an EPA regulation issued under President Obama that would produce significant reductions in carbon dioxide emissions from the electric power industry.

·        President Trump issued an order to review the program, issued by EPA and the Department of Transportation under President Obama, significantly increasing automobile Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards by 2025.  The review may lead to weakening the requirements or slowing the timeline for the CAFE regulation.

·        The budget proposal that President Trump outlined for Fiscal Year 2018 seriously cuts scientific research in many agencies of the U.S. government.  Concerning  activities related to curbing global warming, the proposal completely eliminates the Department of Energy’s Advance Research Projects Agency-Energy unit, reduces research support for the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration by 52%, and cuts EPA research by 48% and National Aeronautics and Space Administration earth science research by 6%.  These agencies engage in essential research on the state of the planet’s climate and provide seed or venture funding for development of new technologies that lower greenhouse gas emissions.

President Trump, could easily serve as a model for Malvolio Petrex, since he can insulate himself from the ravages of intensified global warming.  His policies, to be implemented 99 years before the centennial of the Paris Climate Agreement, will have major immediate effects and indirect ramifications that worsen greenhouse gas emissions and lead to more severe harmful consequences of warming.  Yet we may imagine that, with the vast resources he controls, his children, grandchildren and further progeny can create environments for themselves that will protect them from harms and damages that global warming brings.  The same can be said for those he selected to implement his policies. 

But the peoples of the earth, considered at large, are not so lucky.  They can’t easily shield themselves from climatic harm.  They could well be defenseless victims of President Trump’s policies.  The climate framework that Mr. Trump is overthrowing, begun under President Obama and implemented worldwide with his leadership, could make significant progress to minimizing those risks. 

It’s not too late for the Trump Administration to reconsider, and rejoin the compact of the world’s nations to lower greenhouse gas emissions. 

      © 2017 Henry Auer

Attribution of Extreme Events to Global Warming

The public, when contemplating global warming, includes those who question whether warming underlies the occurrence of extreme weather and climate events.  The U.S. National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine recently issued a report, “Attribution of Extreme Weather Events in the Context of Climate Change”.  It emphasizes that the appropriate format for questions concerning this issue can be phrased in terms such as “Are events of this severity becoming more or less likely because of climate change?” 

The report emphasizes that because of rapid advances in data analysis and climate modeling the severity of many extreme events can be attributed to contributing factors arising from warming.  It includes a schematic image, shown here, characterizing how the increasing degree of understanding of various types of events leads to increasing confidence in the degree to which we can attribute severity to contributions from global warming.

This post concludes with a selection of examples from the climate literature where such analyses have been made, leading to affirmative statements of attribution such as considered here.

Recently weather news has reported on extreme events in many regions of the world. 

• The American states of Texas and Louisiana, and their neighbors, had intense rain for over a week in early 2016, triggering record-breaking flooding in the area.    

• The American West has suffered severe drought conditions for four years, straining water supplies and lowering yields of important crops. 

• Over the past winter England and Wales have had prolonged bouts of heavy rain and flooding, including hundreds of flood alerts and warnings, more than 30 of which were labeled severe.  

• Perth, Australia had a heat wave four days long with temperatures over 40ºC (104ºF) in February 2016, and has had seven days over this temperature this season.  

• Pakistan has had increasing numbers of serious flooding events over the last century, including 40 events in the last 15 years.  Most of these are accompanied by loss of life and social dislocation, and significant damage to structures and agricultural lands.

These few anecdotes are potentially significant indicators of the effect that global warming is having at regional and local levels around the world.  Indeed, increased rates of occurrence of such phenomena are predicted with high confidence in recent global warming reports.  But in discussing the role of warming at the scale of such geographically small areas it is important to evaluate whether each one in fact is related to warming.  For example, if few or none are, climate science would be hard pressed to persuade policymakers and the public to undertake efforts to minimize further warming and adapt to its effects.  On the other hand, if it can be shown that there is indeed a contribution from warming, then climate science is justified in actively pursuing appropriate policies such as those agreed to at the United Nations conference in Paris in December 2015.

Here we discuss the question of whether, and how, extreme events can be attributed to global warming.

The U. S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine issued the report “Attribution of Extreme Weather Events in the Context of Climate Change” (2016); Washington, DC: The National Academies Press (the Report) on March 10, 2016.  The Report emphasizes that extreme events, just as all our weather every day, results from the interactions of many atmospheric forces and processes.  For this reason, it makes the very important point that we can not justifiably ask a question such as “Was this extreme event caused by [man-made] climate change, yes or no?”  Such a simplified black-or-white question overlooks the complexity in climate and weather. 

Rather the Report offers different questions phrased as “Are events of this severity becoming more or less likely because of climate change?”; or, for single events such as local storms, the question could be “To what extent was the storm intensified, or its precipitation increased, because of climate change?”  Note that the questions deemed appropriate seek expressions of likelihood, rather than the certainty demanded by the yes-or-no question.  To any viewer of a televised weather forecast this should hardly be surprising.  After all, these daily predictions always provide likelihoods for sunshine (clear, partly cloudy, mostly cloudy, etc.) as well as percent probabilities of rain, sleet or snow.  In the same way, and for the same reasons, the Report concludes that statements of attribution should be phrased in terms of the probability or likelihood that global warming was a climatic factor contributing to the occurrence of the extreme event.

The Report summarizes its detailed deliberations about attribution of events to known or understandable contributing factors with a simplified conceptual diagram, shown here

 

Schematic diagram showing how our confidence (vertical axis) in attributing different kinds of extreme events to man-made climate change depends on our understanding of the extent to which climate change affects the particular type of event (horizontal axis).  Different types of extreme events are shown by the differently colored labeled circles.  The dashed line represents where a particular type of extreme event would fall if we had an ideal ability to attribute how climate change affects it.  In reality all the circles fall below the dashed line because our ability to attribute the specific events to man-made climate change is less than perfect.  Note that the understanding/attribution level is high for temperature events (upper right), and that these become lower as we pass through extreme rainfall (near the center) to severe convective storms (e.g., thunderstorms and tornadoes; lower left).

Source: U. S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine,  “Attribution of Extreme Weather Events in the Context of Climate Change” (2016); Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/21852.

 

 

The Report identifies two ways to label an event as “extreme”.  We have to be able to distinguish a supposed extreme event, potentially caused in part by the effects of global warming, from normal behavior.  First, data characterizing the event could be shown to differ from comparable data for a reference period extending over a sufficiently long period of time, with a high level of statistical significance.  Alternatively, data characterizing the event could be successfully modeled in a climate model that includes man-made global warming factors, whereas it could not be modeled by a similar model run excluding those factors, again, with a high level of statistical significance.  An event that fulfils either of these conditions can then be labeled as an event to which global warming contributes to its extreme character.
 

Extreme events had already been attributed to global warming before this Report. 

 

• Analysis of data over the 49 year period from 1951-1999 shows that global warming is responsible for extremes of rainfall over the Northern Hemisphere.  Min and coworkers (Nature, 2011, Vol. 470, pp. 378-381, doi:10.1038/nature09763) showed that “human-induced increases in greenhouse gases have contributed to the observed intensification of heavy precipitation events found over approximately two-thirds of … Northern Hemisphere land areas.”  This work is significant because it covers a period of time in which greenhouse gas levels, and global average temperatures, were much lower than at present.

 

• Extreme rainfall and catastrophic flooding in England and Wales in 2000 was very likely due to human-induced global warming.  Pall and coworkers carried out a probabilistic analysis of weather patterns and likelihood of flooding in the region (Nature, 2011, Vol. 470, pp. 382-385, doi:10.1038/nature09762). During October and November 2000 England and Wales had the heaviest rainfall since records began in 1766, leading to severe flooding. The authors concluded “it is very likely that global [human-induced] greenhouse gas emissions [occurring during the twentieth century] substantially increased the risk of flood occurrence…in autumn 2000.”

 

• Kelley and coworkers (Proc. Natl Acad. Sci., published online before print March 2, 2015) report on the worst drought in recorded history in Syria and neighboring countries just prior to the “Arab Spring”.  The drought was serious enough that large numbers of farmers left their villages and migrated to Syria’s cities.  This caused major social and political turmoil and is considered to be a contributing factor to Syria’s ongoing civil war.  The authors found that human-derived greenhouse gases contributed to the drought.

 

• Moore and Lobell (Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci., vol. 112 no. 9, pp. 2670–2675, 2015) analyzed changes in crop yields and climate change across Europe between 1989 and 2009.  Large scale decreases in yields were found in many localized regions, which correlated with increased temperatures and decreased precipitation over the 20 year period studied.

 

• Diffenbaugh and coworkers (Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci., published online before print March 2, 2015) examined the drought in California from December 2012 to September 2014, likely the worst in 1000 years.  By simulating the region’s climate in model calculations the authors found that the extra amount of greenhouse gases added by human activity likely resulted in higher temperatures and reduced precipitation in the region.  This factor also contributes to a high risk of continued severe droughts.

 

• Williams and coworkers also conducted detailed analyses of climate-related data for California, from 1901 to 2014 (Geophys. Res. Let. 2015; DOI: 10.1002/2015GL064924).  From rigorous statistical analysis the authors estimated that global warming was responsible for 8-27% of the observed excess drought conditions for 2012-2014, and for 5-18% for 2014 alone.  These findings indicate that although drought conditions may originate from various climatic factors operating cyclically over many years, its full extreme extent in the current drought has been worsened by global warming, producing the current record conditions.

 

• Cook and coworkers (Sci. Adv. 1, e1400082 (2015); published electronically 12 February 2015) assessed drought conditions in the American Southwest and Central Plains.  Assuming that unrestrained emission of greenhouse gases would continue, the risk of severe droughts in these regions is projected to be extremely high, by various measures between about 69% and 97% in the second half of this century.

 

Conclusion

 

The Report by the National Academies makes clear that climate science has advanced remarkably in the last decade, so that attributions of global warming as a contributing factor to extreme events can reliably be made after appropriate analysis.  This depends on use of one or both of the methods, either data based or model based, mentioned above.  The progress making this possible includes the availability of far more observational data, on the one hand, and constant improvements in climate models on the other.  As a result statements of attribution, when merited based on analysis, now authoritatively support the role of man-made global warming, due to humanity’s continued and increasing use of fossil fuels, in the increasing severity of various types of extreme climate and weather events.  We all, as citizens of countries around the world, must marshal our efforts to reduce emissions as aggressively as possible.  The goal should be achieving near zero annual emission rates within a few decades, say by mid-century.

 

© 2016 Henry Auer

The Centennial Commemoration of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement. II.

A Fable

Paris is sparing no extravagance for the centennial celebration of the 2015 climate agreement, themed “Paris 2115”.  The Eiffel Tower is decked out with the newest efficient lighting fixtures, highlighting the sky blue of the United Nations flag, intermingled with the Tricouleur, the red, white and blue of the French flag.  Laser light shows projecting these colors playfully pierce the air around its spire.

The Étoile and Arc de Triomphe are adorned with exotic vegetation brought from far reaches of the planet, symbols of the preservation of the environment resulting from one hundred years of sustainable climate policies resulting from the agreement.

The most striking aspect of the celebration is that several hundred thousand people from all around the world have descended on The City of Light, to mark the centennial of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) agreement limiting emissions of greenhouse gases.  The 2015 agreement enshrined the goal of keeping the increase in global average temperature to under 2ºC (3.6ºF) above the preindustrial temperature, i.e., the temperature before humans began burning fossil fuels.  The agreement also included the more stringent goal of keeping the rise below 1.5ºC as a more ambitious option. 

Just under 200 nations, all the U.N.’s members, joined the agreement.  Now the member nations are celebrating, for they had in fact summoned their resources and achieved the more stringent goal.  This required that restraint and discipline be applied by each nation, each independently of, but in concert with, the constraints developed by every other nation.  The 2015 agreement made these constraints voluntary, nation by nation.  It is remarkable that the member nations all accepted the responsibility of fulfilling their pledges, with records and validation open for all to see.  Indeed, since the original 2015 pledges were deemed inadequate to attain this goal, the nations repeatedly reconvened every five years, and intensified their efforts by developing ever more stringent reduction pledges.  The centennial we are now celebrating honors these pledge extensions.  Without these extra efforts we could not have kept the global temperature from increasing as little as it has today.

How did this come about?  After all, the energy needed for industrialization and raising living standards in developing countries, obtained almost entirely from burning fossil fuels, had underpinned their headlong rush to economic growth for more than a century.  The fossil fuel industry was a significant fraction of the world economy, and the fuel companies exerted their considerable political power to maintain the status quo, extracting ever more fossil fuels each year.  This path, called “business-as-usual”, would have brought the world to an average temperature rise of about 4ºC, a truly devastating result.

Governments the world over, working in collaboration with the fossil fuel companies and other segments of the economy, transformed the world’s energy sector.  Governments and company managements, realizing the dangers of continuing along a business-as-usual path, transformed their political frameworks and business models.  The companies came to realize that there was profit to be gained by developing and deploying renewable energy sources, and redirected their development budgets accordingly.  New research and great economies of scale made solar and wind energy, for example, economical yet highly profitable.  Energy storage was optimized with new battery compositions and physical storage modes.  People began to see new beauty in renewable energy installations.  In the meanwhile, biotechnology researchers developed genetically modified crop plants that withstand the stresses of heat and drought more effectively than the old wild strains.  Research ingenuity also optimized yields of biofuels to provide all the needs of the growing airline industry.

Our land transportation has also been revolutionized.  Self-driving vehicles now navigate e-highways, minimizing the need for extra weight to protect us from crashes.  They are powered by newly developed highly efficient renewable energy sources.

Sadly, several small island nations that signed on to the agreement in 2015 no longer exist, because their islands were swallowed up by rising seas over the intervening one hundred years.  Already by 2015 sea level had been rising because, averaged over the seasons of the year, more ice melted from polar ice masses into the ocean than was deposited by fresh snow and ice.  Rising seas were already locked in by then.  Indeed, by 2015 ice loss had been accelerating because temperatures over the ice masses were rising rapidly.  Now as we fete the centennial, many coastal regions around the world have been lost to ocean inundation.

Pingali, Richard and Hailong met each other last night at the Korean pavilion.  Paris 2115 is organized around these centers, representing each nation of the UNFCCC agreement, all around the city.  Each one displays highlights of the environmental and sustainability contributions they have made in the past hundred years that brought us to this week’s celebration.  The three new friends are circulating among the pavilions, trying to take in as many as they can, from countries large and small. 

The celebration reaches its peak tomorrow, as major personalities from the UNFCCC and various nations speak about the significance of this occasion, and the way forward.  Of course these speeches will be streamed live as holographic displays in all the pavilions, so that all the celebrants can experience the immediacy of the presentations.

 

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The Paris Agreement reached in December 2015 represents major progress on the path to controlling worldwide emissions of greenhouse gases.  All 197 U. N. member nations agreed to its terms.  This accomplishment is due in large part to departure from earlier attempts at negotiating a treaty involving imposing predetermined limits on emissions from each nation.  Instead the Paris Agreement solicits voluntary pledges from each which, once filed, are subject to review and verification by the U. N. 

Prior to the convening of the Paris meeting almost all nations had already submitted their pledges.  A scientific evaluation shows that those pledges are insufficiently ambitious to achieve the goal of keeping the global average temperature increase less than 2ºC during this century.  Climate model calculations by  Fawcett and coworkers (Science, 2015, Vol. 350, pp. 1168-1169) show that the current voluntary pledges will keep the annual

 

Actual (up to 2010) and projected annual rates of emission of CO₂ from energy and major industrial sources from 1990 to 2100.  The heavy lines are summary representations for four emissions scenarios.  Top to bottom these are the reference case of no emissions reduction policy in place; no reduction policy up to 2030, then a 2% per year reduction in emissions; implementation of only the current voluntary pledges through 2030, continued unchanged to 2100 (curve labeled INDCs); and the current voluntary pledges to 2030, then further reduction by at least 5% per year to 2100.  The individual thin lines are actual modeling runs repeated many times.  IPCC, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; AR5, Fifth Assessment Report issued 2013-4.

Source: Fawcett and coworkers, Science, 2015, Vol. 350, pp. 1168-1169; http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/350/6265/1168.full.pdf .

 

rate of CO₂ emissions level at their present rates up to 2100 (curve labeled INDCs in the graphic above).  Since these are annual rates, the emissions will continue to raise the total accumulated CO₂ level throughout this period, leading to a steady rise in global average temperature to 2100.  Only the lowest heavy blue curve shows a decreased rate of annual emissions after 2030, accomplished in the model by imposing a stringent reduction in annual emissions rate of 5% per year.  The accumulation of CO₂ in the atmosphere continues, admittedly at lower rates, throughout this period.  As a result the global average temperature will still continue rising from its present (unprecedented high) value at a slow but measurable pace.

The Paris negotiators recognized this deficiency, and included the intention in the Agreement to reconvene in five years to assess progress and to encourage updated pledges including more ambitious emission reductions from the member nations.  It also mentions explicitly the more stringent goal that reductions should in fact be ambitious enough to keep the increase in global average temperature below 1.5ºC.

Some nations and provinces around the world have already undertaken efforts to lower greenhouse gas emissions. China’s pledge lays out increasing annual emissions until 2030, mainly from burning coal, then a reduction in that rate.  But the recent economic slowdown in that country appears already to be leading to lower emissions than anticipated.  As part of its pledge, China intends to expand pilot cap-and-trade limits on emissions in some of its cities to the nation as a whole.

Australia imposed a carbon pricing scheme in 2012, but it was repealed in 2014.  In addition Australia is now severely cutting back its spending on its respected government scientific research organization, including its climate science section.  This impedes the country’s and the world’s ability to track its greenhouse gases and temperatures.

The European Commission announced a plan in 2010 to reduce emissions by 80% below 1990 levels by 2050.  Europe implemented a cap-and-trade Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) a decade ago as part of its participation in the Kyoto Protocol, the UNFCCC agreement preceding the Paris Agreement.  The ETS has had difficulties that are preventing it from achieving its full potential.

The U.S. federal government has been unable to enact laws to limit emissions because the majority party in one or both of the Congress’s chambers does not admit the need to address man-made global warming.  But President Obama has undertaken executive steps that will double fuel efficiency of the nation’s vehicles, and will increase the efficiency of electricity generation in electricity generation.  Independently, California and some other states have policies limiting emissions similar to the reduction intended by the European Commission.

In Canada, the province of British Columbia has had a revenue-neutral carbon tax in place since 2008.  Revenues collected from the tax are used to lower tax rates in other categories.  Use of fossil fuels has dropped with no effect on the province’s economy.

 

Conclusion

 

Implementation of the Paris Agreement of 2015 promises to turn our world from a warming disaster to a manageable, but palpably warmer, global environment.  But there are powerful political and commercial interests opposing the changes needed to stabilize the global climate.  Business models of large multinational energy companies need to change, such that they recognize that profits can be derived from producing renewable energy.  Deep-rooted psychological barriers also exist that resist our need to change our ways.  With good will and ambitious planning the fable represented by Paris 2115 may come to pass.
 © 2015 Henry Auer

The Centennial Commemoration of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement

A Fable

It was December 2115, the hundredth anniversary of the agreement to a climate treaty reached among all the members of the United Nations, in Paris.  The members of the Petrex extended family gathered to mark the occasion.  By that time, three to four generations after the event, the clan had grown considerably, and had established for itself a fully self-sufficient environment inside its terradome.  For the occasion the space was opulently fitted out with an artificial lake in which were moored several model oil rigs.  The pipe linking the rigs to shore ended in an internally illuminated fountain gurgling champagne.  Scattered about the artificially-turfed land areas were several working model oil wells erected in mud fields of black caviar, pumping dark chocolate and coffee liqueurs, and other reminders of the black gold that had started the Petrex fortune, more than one hundred years earlier.

Back then, the clan founder, Malvolio Petrex, chairman and chief executive officer of the largest oil company at the time, had come to realize the inconsistencies of his, and his company’s, position.  They were, at one and the same time, using all their financial power and political influence to perpetuate, indeed to expand, the use of the oil they extracted from the ground, while correctly realizing that their exploitative activities were worsening the global warming already well under way.  After all, the Paris agreement itself was reached in response to expert scientific findings, reported for at least the preceding twenty years, that burning oil and other fossil fuels, such as those his company and others were pulling from the ground, added irreversibly to the atmospheric burden of carbon dioxide, a powerful greenhouse gas.

Malvolio Petrex knew that global warming was going to get much worse in the coming years, because his company and others were continuing to produce fossil fuels at ever-increasing rates of growth, year after year.  After all, more and more energy was needed to fuel the demands of economies all over the world, being used to expand their economies and raise the poorest peoples of the world out of poverty. 

He wasn’t too worried about his own welfare, though.  Thanks to his immeasurable wealth, he already had peppered several secure estates around the world, in various climatic and ecological settings.  But as any other dynastic figure that we may encounter throughout history, he was concerned about the wellbeing of his progeny.  He knew that the travesties his business activities were creating would worsen after he was gone, impacting the lives and indeed the safety of his scions.  He understood that worsening warming would lead to economic and political unrest among the impoverished and others less well off than he because they would be suffering the harmful effects of warming: flooding in some regions; droughts, wildfires and famine in others; and inexorable sea level rise driving millions around the world from their traditional homes and livelihoods.

And so he embarked on a program to develop self-contained environments for himself and his family.  The environments would insulate his family from the unpleasantness of dealing with the effects of climate change by keeping the open atmosphere out, and the family’s living quarters and areas for amusing themselves in.  The first models were installed on the grounds of his existing estates, and were relatively modest. 

Now, one hundred years later, after many rounds of development and improvement, this Petrex estate was enveloped in its own protective terradome.  It was a large, fully enclosed environment covering almost one square mile, incorporating the estate’s mansion, its recreational areas, and fields producing much of its food needs.  The terradome insulated the estate from the worst “weird” climate and weather events brought on by the extreme warming that the world had attained by then, as well as keeping a portion of the sun’s warming light from penetrating to the land within it.  The Petrex family had practically no need to travel outside the terradome; it was almost entirely self-sufficient.

As a result, they were insulated as well from the harms and damages induced by the warmer climate that most of the peoples of the world were suffering.  Or maybe they knew and, just like Malvolio Petrex a hundred years earlier, chose to ignore it.  The population at large was subjected to far worse conditions than Petrex’s world had experienced one hundred years earlier: debilitating heat waves and droughts, intense storms bringing on severe flooding, encroaching oceans because of the severe degree of sea level rise, all brought on by the excess global warming that burning fossil fuels induced. 

By the time of the centennial anniversary the opportunity for effective action to combat global warming had long passed.

 

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President Obama delivered an annual State of the Union speech on January 28, 2014, as reported by this writer earlier.  He stated what is probably the most profound and basic motivation for attacking the problem of global warming:   

“Climate change is a fact.  And when our children’s children look us in the eye and ask if we did all we could to leave them a safer, more stable world, with new sources of energy, I want us to be able to say yes, we did.”  

Importantly, we know with practically complete certainty that the excess warming of the planet is due to humanity’s burning of fossil fuels to power our economies.  The President’s statement illuminates the core of our attitudes and behavior about global warming, namely, the strong desire we all feel to pass on to our children and further progeny a secure world not threatened by the consequences of our present environmental actions. 

Moral basis for climate action. President Obama laid down a forceful imperative, that of working to abate global warming for the welfare of our children and their children, and by inference, our future progeny whom we will never know. We can consider this the most powerful, fundamental driver for action against global warming. It is a principal motivation for the faithful, who consider that we are stewards of God’s creation, responsible for preserving its bounties for ourselves and our progeny. It is an important guiding principle for others as well who direct their actions to the betterment of the world and the lives of their fellow humans.

The effects of global warming pervade the entire earth.  Once fossil fuels are burned, the carbon dioxide they produce is distributed worldwide throughout the atmosphere.  The stronger greenhouse effect that results leads to unprecedented warming of the earth system, its air, water and land.  Indeed, heating is occurring about sixty to one hundred times faster than during any earlier warming or cooling interval uncovered in the geological record going back almost one million years.  The greenhouse effect warms the atmosphere, but over 90% of the excess heat enters the oceans.  It is stored there long-term and recirculates back to the atmosphere as ocean currents change. 

Warming affects all inhabitants of our planet, poor and rich, weak and powerful alike.  It is folly to think that those having wealth and exerting power can be insulated from its effects.  The Paris agreement opened the way, for the first time, for all peoples to make concerted efforts to minimize further warming of the planet.  We all must ensure that the agreement is implemented, and extended in the way it calls for.

 

© 2015 Henry Auer

A Global Agreement on Reduction of Greenhouse Gas Emissions

The member nations of the U.N. gathered in Paris in December 2015, and concluded a dramatic new agreement to reduce worldwide greenhouse gas emissions.  The agreement differs from earlier failed attempts to negotiate a climate treaty.  First, all member nations are covered by its terms, rather than being segregated into two groups only one of which is to be bound.  And second, each member nation generates its own voluntary pledge for mitigation based on its domestic situation and its view of the seriousness of global warming.

In the time leading up to the Paris meeting, extremes of global weather and climate had been felt all around the world.  Many of these have been recognized to be causative factors in climate disasters.   Recognition of these events likely contributed to the successful negotiation of the agreement. A month after the meeting scientists announced that global average temperatures in 2015 broke all historical records for the hottest year. The world is now on a path to limiting the rise in global temperatures and its consequences.

 

We have been experiencing a variety of unusual climate effects and extreme weather events in recent years.  2015 was the warmest year on record, using temperatures measured over the entire year on both land and ocean surfaces .  The high temperatures averaged worldwide have produced large numbers of extreme weather events, especially heat waves, over the last five years; they have been “influenced by climate change”, the World Meteorological Organization reports .

Extreme events.  Climate extremes due to, or made worse by, global warming have contributed to the vast political and social unrest in Syria, leading to a major refugee crisis extending as far as Europe; agricultural losses in regions of Europe; and the extreme drought in California and the American Southwest, as examples.   Record rainfall and severe flooding afflicted England and Wales leading up to Christmas 2015.  In the summer of 2015 extremely intense rainfall during the monsoon season caused hundreds of deaths and displaced millions of people in India, Bangla Desh, Pakistan and Myanmar.  In Myanmar, the World Food Program Director, Dom Scalpelli, said "…people have lost homes, livelihoods, crops and existing food and seed stocks. Food security will be seriously affected."  

The total accumulated level of greenhouse gases (GHGs) in the air determines the extent of global warming.  Carbon dioxide (CO₂) is a long-lived GHG; it remains in the atmosphere for centuries once it emerges into the air.  Mankind’s burning of fossil fuels generates the excess CO₂ that has led to the global warming of the past century or more as the concentration of this gas has increased from about 280 parts per million (ppm; volumes of CO₂ per million volumes of air) to about 400 ppm at the present.  There is currently no known technology available to remove CO₂ from the atmosphere on the industrial scale needed to compensate for our industrialized modes of burning fossil fuels for energy.  The global average temperature is directly related to the total GHG content of the atmosphere.  Continued emission of CO₂ serves only to increase the atmospheric burden of this GHG, leading to a stronger greenhouse effect and higher worldwide average temperatures. 

These are facts which cannot be altered or dismissed.  They underlie the stark conclusions first, that even if humanity were to cease burning all fossil fuels “today” we could not realistically lower the CO₂ concentration in the atmosphere.  And second, that we can not return to a lower average temperature that prevailed in earlier decades.  At best, we can only strive to keep further warming as low as possible by limiting further GHG emissions as stringently as we can.  Ambitious decarbonization of the global energy economy is needed to accomplish this goal.  The anecdotes in the opening section provide excellent examples of why the people of the world need to act.

The December 2015 Paris Agreement of the United Nations member states is a major advance toward reducing worldwide emissions.  The earlier treaty, the Kyoto Protocol (KP) of 1997 divided the negotiating nations into two groups, developed (already industrialized) nations and developing countries.  Only the developed countries were included under its terms.  KP also imposed binding goals for emission reductions, assigned to each covered nation.  The U.S. Senate opposed KP so that the U.S. was never constrained by its terms.  KP expired in 2012. 

The Paris Climate Agreement.  The agreement negotiated in Paris in December 2015 codified a radically different approach than that provided by KP.  First, all 193 subscribing U.N. member nations are to be uniformly constrained by its terms, eliminating the division of nations into two groups.  And second, rather than imposing numerical emission rate reductions assigned from within the United Nations framework, each nation voluntarily submits its own domestically-generated emission reduction goals to the U.N.  Mechanisms for measuring, reporting and validating each nation’s emission rates are to be developed under the treaty.  Other aspects of the Agreement deal with finance, and land use change and reforestation.

Recognizing that initial pledges may be inadequate (see Analysis) the Agreement further suggests that nations submit updated, more robust goals for reductions of emission rates in future years.  It includes the objective from 2009 of seeking to keep the increase in the global average temperature above preindustrial times to 2ºC (3.6ºF), but for the first time further encourages striving toward the more ambitious goal of keeping the temperature rise below 1.5ºC (2.7ºF).

Analysis

The U. N. Paris climate agreement covers all 193 member nations of the organization.  It is a highly significant accord, for it excuses no member from coverage under its terms, and because no numerical goals for emissions reduction were imposed on members by the negotiators.

Most nations submitted their pledges of voluntary reductions in GHG emissions before the Paris conference convened.  Climate scientists evaluated the pledges right away, and it became clear that the anticipated reductions in GHG emissions were too small to put the world on the path toward limiting the rise in global temperatures to less than 2ºC. 

The International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook warns that plans currently being discussed for limiting emission rates may be too slow.  Another report discloses that China’s accounting of its historical use of coal, and thus its emissions as well, may have underestimated the actual amount by 17%.  Yet another account discusses the difficulties that India will face as it seeks to reduce emission rates while still accommodating the needs of its growing population, expected to reach 1.5 billion by 2030.

In an additional example (Fawcett and coworkers, Science, 2015, Vol. 350, pp. 1168-1169) climate model calculations show that the current voluntary pledges will keep the annual

 

Actual (up to 2010) and projected annual rates of emission of CO₂ from energy and major industrial sources from 1990 to 2100.  The heavy lines are summary representations for four emissions scenarios.  Top to bottom these are the reference case of no emissions mitigation policy in place; no mitigation policy up to 2030, then a 2% per year reduction in emissions; implementation of only the current voluntary pledges through 2030, continued unchanged to 2100 (curve labeled INDCs); and the current voluntary pledges to 2030, then mitigation by at least 5% per year to 2100.  The individual thin lines are actual modeling runs repeated many times.
Source: Fawcett and coworkers, Science, 2015, Vol. 350, pp. 1168-1169; http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/350/6265/1168.full.pdf .

 

 

rate of CO₂ emissions level at their present rates, about 40 gigatons CO₂/year, up to 2100 (curve labeled INDCs in the graphic above).  Since these are annual rates, the emissions will continue to raise the total accumulated CO₂ level throughout this period leading to a steady rise in global average temperature to 2100.  Only the lowest heavy blue curve shows a decreased rate of annual emissions after 2030, reaching about 7 gigatons/year by 2100, accomplished in the model by imposing a stringent reduction in annual emissions rate of 5% per year.  The accumulation of CO₂ in the atmosphere continues, admittedly at lower rates, throughout this period, so that the global average temperature will still rise from its present (unprecedented high) value at a slow but measurable pace.

The Paris Agreement is highly significant because it is the first time that negotiators from all over the world have come together and approved a treaty that applies to them all.  This is a truly dramatic shift because, for example, China and India only a few years ago refused to consider adopting mitigation policies of any kind to address global warming.  Recently though, many cities in China and other Asian countries have been struggling with the threats to public health from unprecedented levels of smog, much of which originates from the burning of fossil fuels.  Domestic pressures arising from the smog problem may have contributed to the policy change in these, and other, nations.

Each member nation now considers the agreement for approval or ratification according to its own domestic procedures.  Importantly, public opinion in 39 of 40 countries surveyed, except Pakistan, agrees that global GHG emissions need to be reduced, according to a poll by the Pew Research Center.  About 70% of polled people in the U.S. and China supported this view. 

The U.S. historically has never enacted a national policy on global warming by legislative procedures.  The Senate refused to consider KP because it was argued that the distinction between developed and developing countries puts the U.S. at a competitive disadvantage on the world economic stage.  Now, with the Paris Agreement, this argument is no longer valid.  All nations of the world agree to the same terms, bound by the same requirements.  Voluntary pledges toward reduction of emissions make it more acceptable to conform.  Most, if not all, other major emitting countries have undertaken to reduce emission rates in coming decades.  Now is the time for the U.S. to enact meaningful mitigation legislation that places the country on equal footing with other nations of the world, both those already advanced economically and those developing their economies. 

© 2015 Henry Auer