Legislating temperature limits to 2°C will surely be more effective than legislating alcohol. Right?
Developing Nations Rebuff G-8 on Curbing Pollutants
L’AQUILA, Italy — The world’s major industrial nations and newly emerging powers failed to agree Wednesday on specific cuts in heat-trapping gases by 2050, undercutting an effort to build a global consensus to fight climate change, according to people following the talks.
As President Obama arrived for three days of meetings, negotiators for the world’s 17 leading polluters dropped a proposal to cut global greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent by mid-century, and emissions from the most advanced economies by 80 percent. But both the G-8 and the developing countries agreed to set a goal of stopping world temperatures from rising by more than 2 degrees Celsius from pre-industrial levels.
The discussion of climate change was among the top priorities of world leaders as they gathered here for the annual summit meeting of the Group of 8 powers. Mr. Obama invited counterparts from China, India, Brazil, South Africa, Mexico and others to join the G-8 here on Thursday for a parallel “Major Economies Forum” representing the producers of 80 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases. But since President Hu Jintao of China abruptly left Italy to deal with unrest at home, the chances of making further progress seemed to evaporate.
The G-8 leaders were also grappling with the sagging global economy, development in Africa, turmoil in Iran, nuclear nonproliferation and other challenging issues. On Friday, Mr. Obama planned to unveil a $15 billion food security initiative by the G-8 to provide emergency and development aid to poor nations.
The failure to establish specific targets on climate change underscored the difficulty in bridging longstanding divisions between the most developed countries like the United States and developing nations like China and India. In the end, people close to the talks said, the emerging powers refused to agree to the specific emissions limits because they wanted industrial countries to commit to midterm goals in 2020, and to follow through on promises of financial and technological help.
“They’re saying, ‘We just don’t trust you guys,’ ” said Alden Meyer of the Union of Concerned Scientists, an advocacy group based in the United States. “It’s the same gridlock we had last year when Bush was president.”
Read the entire article at the New York Times here
G8 summit participants demonstrating our future:
Electric cars without doors?
http://news.yahoo.com/nphotos/slideshow/photo//090709/ids_photos_wl/r3356552547.jpg/#photoViewer=/090709/481/c44414fbd1984b11b80dc1cbf53bfd73
@ur momisugly Ron de Haan (15:01:56) :
Yes, your’s is one hypothesis. I will submit another:
The phrase “pre-industrial includes the entire earth and climate history before about 1850 A.D.
Which means it includes the agglomeration phase of the earth with molten surface at ~+500 degC. I don’t think their goal is to allow +501.99 degC surface temperature, as that temperature costs voters, they must neccessarily believe in a far shorter climate history. Namely one that was more comfortable for humans.
For example the last 6000 years. As that is the time-frame cited by Young Earth Creationists, my hypothesis is that our dear leaders MUST be secretly YECs. 🙂
KLA (16:08:12) :
@ur momisugly Ron de Haan (15:01:56) :
Yes, your’s is one hypothesis. I will submit another:
The phrase “pre-industrial includes the entire earth and climate history before about 1850 A.D.
Which means it includes the agglomeration phase of the earth with molten surface at ~+500 degC. I don’t think their goal is to allow +501.99 degC surface temperature, as that temperature costs voters, they must neccessarily believe in a far shorter climate history. Namely one that was more comfortable for humans.
For example the last 6000 years. As that is the time-frame cited by Young Earth Creationists, my hypothesis is that our dear leaders MUST be secretly YECs. 🙂
KLA,
Very funny, but my comment is NOT based on a hypothesis, it’s real.
http://www.un.org/esa/dsd/agenda21/
http://green-agenda.com
This plan will save or create 2 degrees Celsius.
Whats 2 degrees when you are the Messiah?
2 degrees from what?
Actually, great question. The NY Times said today (could be wrong, have to consider the source) that the 2 degrees C is an increase not from pre-industrial levels, but from 1990.
This means that it is almost 2 1/2 degrees from pre-industrial (say, 1860).
That is a lot of temperature increase. Especially when temps have been down the last 7 years. So it will be a long, long time until we close in on this amount of temperature increase….probably.
It does begin to look like they are declaring victory and leaving the field, unless we are all shocked by far higher temperature increases than we expect.
It appears Rudd is Obama’s poster child in the fight against climate change.
http://www.smh.com.au/environment/global-warming/rudd-shares-centre-stage-with-obama-20090710-dezt.html
Roll on 2010, I’ll be able to vote in the Australian election then.
KLA and Ron De Haan
Kla said something very interesting here which reflects my comments on another thread.
“The phrase “pre-industrial includes the entire earth and climate history before about 1850 A.D.”
Are we in effect saying that anything prior to 1850 (before Hansens/Hadley global temperature records) are anecdotal (Romans, Vikings etc) unless reconstructed by modern scientists (such as Michael Mann and his bristlecones)
Anything from 1850 of course will show a very sharp temperature recovery as it was the end of the LIA. Even if records were taken from 1730 the modern recovery is much less striking as that was a very warm interlude in the LIA. The recovery from the MWP is even smaller as we all know now that ‘the MWP is an outdated concept.’
Tonyb
My local paper in Nova Scotia, Canada refers to them as “smog targets”.
http://thechronicleherald.ca/Front/1131643.html
Well “smog” (As “smog” today is not the same as it was say in London in the 1950’s, with almost all home heating being coal fires) today is the air emissions we should be concerned with, CO2 being the least of a problem, but the easiest to “police” (Or tax by proxy).
G8, err, G7 ban ice ages and order a global economic collapse
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The leaders of several G8 countries suffer from a psychiatric disorder. They have commanded the Earth and the waters to keep their temperature within two degrees. Moreover, the CO2 output of most countries should drop by 80 percent or more – by a factor of five or more – by 2050. Yes, it is hysterical.
Well, this is actually not an agreement of G8, at most by G7 because the newest eighth member, Russia, finds this talk unacceptable and will reject it.
The rest of the BRIC group, i.e. Brazil, China, India, only views the climate talks as a method to get some additional money from the richer countries (redistribution is what the left-wing activists actually expect from such policies, anyway!) and to get to their level faster – either by getting richer or by making others poorer. They won’t agree with any genuine reductions on their territories, either.
What does the “plan” actually mean?
First of all, the two points of the plan are pretty much unrelated. What will happen with the emissions is pretty much uncorrelated with the temperature change in any time frame that we can talk about. The correlation is small because a substantial part of the global mean temperature change – and probably a very large majority – has always been determined by natural sources and it is likely to remain so. So let us talk about the two issues separately.
The temperature change is almost certainly going to be less than 2 degrees Celsius in one of the two directions during the following 40 years. The typical change of the global mean temperature in 40 years has always been something like 0.3 °C. So far, it doesn’t look like the mankind has changed anything about it. So getting to 2 °C is nearly a 10-sigma effect, a statistically impossible thing.
The global mean temperature naturally dropped by 1.3 °C or so between 1000 and 1600. The reconstructions are by Moberg (alarmist, up) and Loehle (skeptic, down) but you can see that there’s no substantial difference here.
On the other hand, the global mean temperature certainly does change by 2 °C during longer periods of time. The Earth has seen 2 °C natural temperature changes in 500-year intervals many times. See the graphs above to understand that even in the last millenium, we were not far from such changes. But such changes become mundane if you look at longer intervals. The ice ages that alternate with interglacials after many (or dozens of) thousands of years change the temperature by 10 °C or so, sometimes squeezed into a 10-degree cooling in 3000 years (e.g. 130,000 years ago). Have those folks heard about them in the elementary school or did they skip the classes?
I suppose that for many teenagers, it has been always a better option to drink, smoke, and take drugs outside the school and be sure that you can still become a president of a country even if you are an uneducated … person. And it turns out that they were right. Unfortunately, the list of fundamentally uneducated politicians includes people like Silvio Berlusconi, too. The political representations of many countries are flooded with people who lack basic science education.
Now, the reductions.
The global 80-percent reduction of CO2 by 2050 may contribute by 0.05-0.30 °C of cooling before 2050 (our man-made warming with the current CO2 emission rates adds between 0.25 °C and 1.5 °C per century and we’re talking about 20 years worth of erased CO2 emissions here) – depending on the feedbacks that reduce or amplify the bare greenhouse effect.
And this change will be clearly indistinguishable from other effects and noise (the achieved cooling is smaller than the effect of one El Nino or one volcano eruption), certainly for those people who don’t have very accurate thermometers or who can’t perform very accurate calculations, involving the averaging over time and over the whole Earth. So it makes basically no impact on the climate. Does it impact the economy? You bet.
Whether or not such a goal is achievable depends on the future technological breakthroughs.
If the people manage to invent a new technology or efficiently switch all of their industries to electricity produced by nuclear power plants or something like that, the goal is attainable and it may even become a formality. If they won’t, and no one can be really sure whether such a massive replacement of fossil fuels will occur (it hasn’t really occurred for 250 years so far!), the goal will be approximately equivalent to an 80-percent reduction of the GDP. The real problem is not that the plan is “certainly” impossible but it is that someone is promising something that he cannot possibly know whether it is possible.
Because one may get something like a 1-percent increase of the carbon efficiency (GDP divided by CO2 emissions) a year by “non-radical” technological improvements, these improvements may accumulate to the reduction of the CO2 output by a factor of 1.01^41 = 1.5 by 2050. So the situation is not quite as bad: the desired reduction of CO2 by a factor of 5 may be equivalent to the GDP reduction by a factor of 5/1.5 = 3 or so.
Nevertheless, a net GDP that drops to 1/3 of the present value is still pretty terrifying – especially if you realize that because the population may jump by a factor of 1.5, we’re back to the five-fold reduction of the GDP per capita. It could make the world look like a world that was just decimated by a pretty large global war, one that may dwarf the World War II: see the picture above for an idea. Instead, most of us used to imagine that the people in 2050 would be richer. Recall that we’re still talking about sacrifices motivated by a desired statistical cooling by 0.05-0.30 °C (relatively to the business-as-usual scenario) which some people consider a good thing for reasons that are not clear to anyone outside the AGW sect.
By the way, the fact that Russia as a member of G8 won’t join this madness is not just a “perturbation” in the calculation of the CO2 budget in 2050. Instead, Russia plans to increase the CO2 output – a measure of its strength – by 30 percent by 2020. That’s a 3-percent increase per year which, if extrapolated, gives you the increase by a factor of 1.03^41 = 3.35 by 2050. And if the industries will have to be moving from countries plagued by mad, CO2-hating policies (and politicians) to Russia (or elsewhere), be sure that Russia can see much more than a 3-percent increase a year. With such brutally different pro-growth vs anti-growth policies, be sure that all negative things that you (or “we”) often associate with the Russian nation would become economically inconsequential in comparison.
Because the other G8 i.e. G7 members plan to lower their CO2 output by 80 percent by 2050, it is not hard to see that if the plans of all G8 members are realized, Russia’s CO2 output in 2050 will exceed the rest of the G8 countries combined. Are we supposed to believe that the voters in the West will be happily watching how their previously prosperous countries are decimated and fully superseded by someone else? Or is it more likely that they will declare their politicians to be legitimate targets of daily assassinations and stop this lunacy within days or weeks? I surely guess that the latter would be more likely. In fact, the worst radicals are already becoming legitimate targets of assassinations today because the stakes are just getting too high.
These calculations of the future are silly childish games so someone must be making unreasonable assumptions about the future 41 years. I bet it is not Medvedev’s aides in Russia.
What this agreement, if ever fully accepted, would actually mean will depend on the detailed implementation. If the only plan remains a “carbon-free dream” for 2050, nothing will happen until 2045 and the politicians in 2045 (or earlier) suddenly realize that the 2009 plan made no sense and throw it into the garbage bin where it will have effectively been, anyway. However, if someone will try to divide the 40-year plan into annual plans or the traditional communist 5-year plans, such plans can bring a destruction of the national economies that we can actually experience soon. Recessions would become the new standard.
http://motls.blogspot.com/2009/07/g8-err-g7-ban-ice-ages-and-order-global.html
Patrick
I certainly agree with you. But that wasn’t the point of the headline, I’m sure.
We have already had disbelief that the scientists were talking about global cooling back in the seventies and unfortunately many of the articles about it from that time have never made it into the internet age.
Consequently I suggest someone take copies of all the alarmist articles that go along the lines of ‘climate change is irreversible’ OR ‘With all the emissions we have already put out it will take at least forty years before the atmosphere will respond to savage cuts’. When temperatures naturally go down and co2 levels possibly decline with them they will be claiming credit for something they were not responsible for.
Tonyb
It gets better, WRT the G8 presentations. Allianz and WWS presented this gem as a scorecard for G8 CO2 reduction and policy performance.
http://www.scienceblogs.de/primaklima/G8_Scorecards_2009.pdf
One notable alteration of the data is explained in the document.
“WWF does not consider nuclear power to be a viable policy option. The indicators “emissions per capita”, “emissions per GDP” and “CO2 per kWh electricity” for all countries have therefore been adjusted as if the generation of electricity from nuclear power had produced 350 gCO2/kWh (emission factor for natural gas). Without the adjustment, the original indicators for France would have been much lower, e.g. 86 gCO2/kWh.”
So basically what they are saying is: “we reject the use of Nuclear as a CO2 reduction scheme and have recalculated all your nasty nuke power as if they were Nat Gas power.”
This policy analysis is not only unfair to nuclear generators, it exposes an underlying habit of certain political entities of simply changing the numbers to influence policy. This needs the widest exposure possible. Whether you approve of nuclear power or not, this kind of methodology MUST NOT be allowed to influence policy. Write your congressman and demand that the NGO “WWS” be censured and insist that any reference to Allianz/WWS data be removed from policy analysis.
Will London be flooded?
“Renewables are a waste of time, says James Lovelock”: Britain should abandon its “vain” attempts to stop climate change by increasing its reliance on renewable energy and concentrate on flood defences, the environmental pioneer James Lovelock has said.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/5820038/Renewables-are-a-waste-of-time-says-James-Lovelock.html
Is Mr. Lovelock a realist, or is he just speaking for the nuclear lobby?