France's Hollande Says Risk Climate Talks Could Fail

Reuters

French President Francois Hollande warned on Monday that climate change talks in Paris later this year could fail especially if the issue of financing for emerging nations was not resolved.
The United Nations said on Sept. 4 that talks were on track for the Nov. 30-Dec. 11 summit after a week of negotiations in Bonn made progress in clarifying options about everything from cuts in greenhouse gas emissions to raising aid to developing nations.
"Good intentions are there, but we are still far away from a legally binding agreement and financing that is up to the levels needed," Hollande told a news conference. "There is even a risk of failure."
Almost 200 governments agreed in 2010 that a 2 degree Celsius rise was the maximum allowable to avert the heaviest impact of climate change, including floods, droughts and rising sea levels. About 100 developing nations favour a tougher ceiling of 1.5 degrees.
The plans submitted so far to the United Nations by about 60 nations represent 70 percent of world emissions and are deemed too weak to keep temperatures below the agreed ceiling of 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times needed to avoid the worst effects of warming.
Some emerging nations do not want to commit themselves until they are assured that developing nations will receive $100 billion per year from 2020 to adapt to the impact of climate change.
Hollande said France would focus over the next three months on firming up assurances on this sum.
"It is the key. There has to be a pre-accord on the question of financing so that leaders come to Paris knowing there is certainty we will be able to conclude," Hollande said.
"If we don't conclude, and there are no substantial measures to ensure the transition, it won't be hundreds of thousands of refugees in the next 20 years, it will be millions."
Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, who hosted some 60 countries in the French capital on Monday to add impetus to the negotiations, said he would convene a larger ministerial meeting by mid-November to ensure that much of the work was completed before the Paris summit.

Climate Change: Refugee Crisis

The Guardian - Craig Bennett

Failure to act on climate change means an even bigger refugee crisis. Global warming does not cause the conflicts that have caused mass movement of people, but it would be wrong to say it does not contribute.

Refugees and migrants wait to pass the borders from the northern Greek village of Idomeni, to southern Macedonia, on 7 September 2015. Photograph: Giannis Papanikos/AP

As I looked in on my own children sleeping safely last Thursday night before I went to bed, I did so with added poignancy as I reflected that this was something Abdullah Kurdi was not able to do. I’m sure millions of parents of young children right across Europe have felt similar emotions these last few days.
We’re all human, and so it’s perhaps not surprising that it takes a single photograph and an individual’s story to shake a society, all too belatedly, into glimpsing at one horrific aspect of Europe’s refugee crisis and demanding action.
But if we really want to reduce the future suffering of millions of refugees, and politicians want to avoid more shameful paralysis in the years ahead, we also need to look at the bigger picture.
Armed conflict will always be a risk in a world with oppressive dictators, terrorist groups, ideological extremism, the militarisation of sensitive regions by world powers, and an arms trade on the constant look out for new business. All of these factors, and more, are behind the appalling conflict in Syria, and the reason Europe is now struggling to cope with tens of thousands of refugees.

Global warming contributed to Syria's 2011 uprising, scientists claim

But it would seem that one of the key triggers for the 2011 Syrian uprising was the 2006 to 2010 drought, the most severe on record in this fertile region, itself probably caused or exacerbated by climate change.
As the abstract of an academic paper published this March in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences puts it: “There is evidence that the 2007−2010 drought contributed to the conflict in Syria. It was the worst drought in the instrumental record, causing widespread crop failure and a mass migration of farming families to urban centres.
“Century-long observed trends … strongly suggest that anthropogenic forcing has increased the probability of severe and persistent droughts in this region. We conclude that human influences on the climate system are implicated in the current Syrian conflict”.
Scientists have similarly suggested that climate change may have played a role in the drought in north Africa that fuelled food price rises ahead of the Arab Spring, while back in 2007, a UN report concluded that climate change and environmental degradation was a key trigger in the conflict in Darfur a few years earlier.
To be clear; there will always be a multitude of drivers behind of social unrest and armed conflict. It would be wrong to say climate change “caused” these conflicts, but equally the evidence suggests it would be wrong to say it didn’t play a contributing role. And, if this is what is possible when average global temperatures have risen less than 1C, then goodness help future generations if/when it reaches 2C, 4C or even 6C.
In these circumstances, mass migration will be occurring in many regions of the world, with or without armed conflict. In 2014, the World Bank reported that climate change is going to lead to far more heat-waves and drought, particularly in the Middle East and North Africa, exacerbating crop failure, food and water shortages, conflict and dislocation of people. Right now, Baghdad has eight extreme heat days a year. With 2C global warming they say there will be 90 extreme heat days. With 4C warming, over 115. It is a similar story for Amman, Damascus, Beirut, Riyadh.

Friends of the Earth CEO Craig Bennett: 'Now is the time to listen to ordinary people again'

The failure of the global community, and principally the rich countries, to tackle climate change means we are still on trajectory to these sort of temperatures.
This is why climate adaptation – action to reduce the vulnerability of ecological, social and economic systems to adverse effects of climate change – is now such a hot topic in the international climate talks. This is also why the countries that will suffer the worst impacts of climate change (predominantly the poorer countries) are quite rightly demanding at least $200bn a year in new and additional public finance from richer countries to help adapt.
But with or without climate adaption schemes, it would be naïve in the extreme to assume millions of people suffering the worst effects of climate change aren’t going to want to move, and morally bankrupt to deny them this possibility if they’ve contributed next to nothing to the causes. Throw armed conflict back into the mix, and the problems currently being experienced in Budapest or Calais are far from the full extent of the problem.
There are no simple solutions, but rich countries should be providing the financing and other assistance right now to help vulnerable countries and communities adapt to climate change while doing much more to cut greenhouse emissions, by investing in energy efficiency and clean energy, and leaving fossil fuels in the ground.

The nine green policies killed off by the Tory government

Sadly, in the past few months, the UK government has moved in the wrong direction as it’s torn up a long list of climate policies that have been put in place over many years, while at the same time championing brand new fossil fuel infrastructure in the form of fracking.
People from across the political spectrum have come together in the last week to demand a much stronger response from David Cameron to the refugee crisis, and rightly so.
But if the government continues to move backwards on climate change, then we should get ready for a much bigger refugee crisis before very long.

Climate Criminal Tony Abbott Is The Best Marketing Possible For My New Book: Naomi Klein

New Matilda - Thom Mitchell

Canadian writer, activist, and film-maker, Naomi Klein has called out the Abbott government’s response to climate change as perhaps the worst in the world, describing the nation’s carbon reduction targets as “egregious” and our Prime Minister as the “best marketing” possible for her new book, ‘This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs The Climate’.

Environmentalist Dr Naomi Klein, pictured at the 2015 Festival Of Dangerous Ideas in Sydney.

Klein sat down with New Matilda at the Sydney Opera House this week ahead of her talk at The Festival of Dangerous Ideas yesterday. In the lead-up to the event, Klein described Abbott as 2015's 'hottest climate criminal'. She argues that Australia is a perfect example of the confluence of free market fundamentalism’s insatiable appetite for growth, and the realistic costs of tackling the “civilisational threat” posed by climate change.
Klein’s book is predicated on the argument that having failed to take any meaningful action for two full decades, the solutions to climate change must now involve a radical restructuring of global economies to provide the cash needed to cut out carbon, but it is couched in a vision of the climate crisis also acting as a catalyst for the progressive redistribution of wealth.
“The argument I make in the book is that the ideology, the world-view, that Joseph Stiglitz has called 'market fundamentalism' simply cannot accommodate what human beings need to do in the face of the climate crisis,” she said.
“This is an ideology that wages war on the regulation of corporations, wages war on the idea of collective action, is constantly trying to liberate corporations from the burden of taxation and that is just not compatible with what we need to do in the face of a civilisational crisis like climate change.”
She said that as neoliberalism grabbed hold of governments around the world through the 80s and onwards, at the same time our awareness of climate change began to grow, a fundamental conflict also emerged “between what our planet needs in order to continue to be a hospitable host to human life, and what our current economic system needs, which is short-term growth and putting profits above all else”.
“And talking about Tony Abbott, Australia seemed [a good place to bring the book’s message] because this is a government that shows perhaps more than any other government on earth what that conflict looks like, and what the costs of that conflict actually are."
Klein advocates a return to more mixed economies, “because of course, we do need to regulate corporations, we need to plan and manage our economies much more actively than we do now if we are going to get off fossil fuels, which are the basis of modern capitalism”.
“It takes money to do that [and] it has to come from somewhere: We have to tax those with the most in order to pay for this transition and what we see in Australia is the exact opposite.”
Instead of that, Klein said, “we see carbon taxes being repealed, we see mining taxes being repealed, we see essential services that are key to this transition being privatised, and we see a tax on the regulatory structure that is inadequate to this task and still is being rolled back to make way for more fossil fuel infrastructure.”
Since the Prime Minister declared that “coal is good for humanity” the Abbott government has become an even stronger advocate for an unfettered coal industry. And on the international stage it is widely seen, to quote former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, as an embarrassing “climate free-rider”.
The Abbott government recently announced at the Paris climate talks later this year Australia will commit to shaving 26 per cent off the nation’s carbon emissions by 2030. It’s around half of what the government’s independent advisory body, The Climate Change Authority, has recommended for the same timeframe.
The Climate Institute has compiled a list of comparable economies — including Klein’s native Canada, New Zealand, the United States and the European Union — and found that while they will reduce their emissions each year at an averaged rate of -2.5 per cent, Australia lingers firmly at the back of the pack with its commitment to reducing emissions by -1.6 per cent a year.


Klein, who is also a board member of climate advocacy group 350.org, said that developed nations need to be slashing carbon pollution by 8 to 10 per cent year on year to keep within the two degree rise in average global temperatures the governments of the world have agreed is ‘dangerous’.
While the movements pushing for stronger action on climate change are winning, Klein said, “the problem is this [movement] is also on a firm and unyielding, science-based, deadline” and even the most ambitious targets countries have announced fall short of the pace of change science tells us is needed.
“I just don’t really see how we could be further behind,” Klein said. “I come to this starting from the premise that we have been trying to respond to climate change without rocking the boat for 20 years and the record is abysmal, right?
“The whole record is one of market-based solutions, consumer solutions, green growth solutions, and emissions are up by more than 60 per cent.
“I mean, when I was on a TV show here debating a conservative, you know, he was saying ‘well your solutions are radical’. Right, and the truth is doing nothing is radical,” she said.
For better or worse, Klein argues, global warming will change everything.
Klein said the broader economic agenda of the Abbott government - which has promoted the regressive concentration of wealth into the coffers of the nation’s richest or foreign mining moguls like Gautam Adani, the Indian billionaire attempting to develop the nation’s largest ever coal mine - is driven by the same neoliberal ideology that shackles climate action.
“What the book is arguing is we don’t just need climate action, we need climate justice; we need to take action on climate change in ways that simultaneously fights inequality and improves quality of life for the vast majority of people,” Klein said.
“Some people are going to have to sacrifice because some people have way too much — I would include myself in that category. But the fact is that most people are going to have a better life than they have right now if we do this right, if we transition right.
“I feel like in many ways I owe Tony Abbott a debt of thanks because he is this book’s best marketer,” Klein said, but she added that the solutions would not be found by waiting on parliaments to affect change of their own accord.

Instead, the anti-corporatisation campaigner who rose to global prominence after the publication of her first book in 2000, No Logo, promotes divestment, popular protest, non-violent direct action and a return to the collectivism capitalism forsook, including through taking back ownership of energy grids.
“The way I put it is that we will not solve this problem, we will not rise to this challenge, unless there is a massive ideological shift,” she said.
Klein argues that when leaders declare a crisis, as we saw during the Global Financial Crisis in 2008, we see that radical action is possible - the massive stimulus package of the Rudd government seems an apt example - but climate change had not received the ‘shock treatment’ that galvanises leaders to drop everything and act.
In Klein’s view, what is needed is a ‘people’s shock’ to force that action on leaders who are not serving the public interest but rather a zealous commitment to an unfair ideology characterised by the sorts of free trade agreements and ‘small government’ that are the hallmark of Abbott’s administration.
“The people [we’re] talking about are part of an ideological movement that shifted the values of our respective cultures really dramatically, and it was really a deliberate process," Klein said.
“As Margaret Thatcher said, the economics is the tool but the goal is to change hearts and minds; they set out to move from societies that had a real sense of the importance of the collective sphere to ones that valued individualism above all else.
“…People say ‘well that’s impossible’, but it isn’t impossible. They did it.
“They changed the cultures of our countries so successfully that even when they’re out of power, our opposition parties generally subscribe to versions of the same ideology."

5 Trillion Tons of Ice Lost Since 2002

Slate - Phil Plait

I’ve been writing about what global warming means to our planet and to us for a long time now. A critical concern for this is the loss of land ice in Antarctica and Greenland, for many reasons. One is that it's a bellwether for our poles, a preview of what it means as we turn up the global thermostat. Another is that it contributes to sea level rise, which has been moving upward for quite some time now.
But land ice loss is perhaps most important as a political trigger; the sheer amount of land ice being lost every year is immediate, here, now. And the numbers are staggering: Using data from the GRACE satellites launched in 2002, scientists measured that the Antarctic ice sheet is losing 134 billion metric tons per year, and Greenland is losing 287 billion tons per year.

Land ice lost from Greenland and Antarctica since 2002. The zero point is the average over 2002–2015.Graphs by NASA

I’m an astronomer. I deal with numbers this large all the time. But internalizing them is another issue altogether; after a while they just become, well, numbers.
Perhaps a change in perspective is called for. Those rates quoted are horrific, but what do they mean for the total ice lost from those two regions?
On Wednesday, NASA posted the graphs above on its climate change website, and that hammered home just what 420 billion tons of ice melting annually means when looking back into the recent past.
From 2002 to mid-November 2014—less than 13 years—the combined land ice loss from Antarctica and Greenland is more than 5 trillion tons.
Five. Trillion. Tons.
That’s beyond staggering; that’s almost incomprehensible. It’s a volume of about 5,700 cubic kilometers, a cube of ice nearly 18 kilometers—more than 11 miles—on a side. Place that cube on the ground, and the top of it would be above 90 percent of the Earth’s atmosphere, reaching twice the height of Mount Everest.


Just to give you an idea. Photo illustration by Lisa Larson-Walker. Photos by Daniel Prudek/Thinkstock and StudioZ/Shutterstock.

Five trillion tons. Remember that the next time some climate change denier starts spouting the usual nonsense about sea ice increasing. That claim is very close to a bald-faced lie. First, arctic sea ice is declining rapidly. Second, arctic sea ice loss is so huge that it easily overwhelms any temporary gains in Antarctic sea ice. And third, sea ice is very different than land ice. Land ice loss isn’t getting replaced anywhere near the rate it’s being lost. Once it slides into the sea, it’s gone.
Except it isn’t really. It’s gone as ice. It’s still there as fresh water, making sea levels rise and potentially altering the currents of warm and cold water that further regulate our climate.
Whenever I make a post like this, I get emails, tweets, and comments from people who deny global warming is happening, and they point to fatally flawed “evidence”—cherry-picking data (like looking at small regions instead of global data), ignoring trends to look for small spikes in time, distracting people by using misleading examples of cooling or ice growth. It’s the same tired garbage all the time.
The reality is we’re warming up. The reality is we’re losing ice at both poles at tremendous rates. The reality is our climate is changing, our weather is changing, our lives are changing.
We need to recognize that, and we need our politicians to recognize that. The deniers rely on bad science and pathological interpretations. Despite recent baloney about it (is Rick Santorum ever right about anything?), in fact the overwhelming majority of climate scientists agree: Global warming is real and it’s our fault.
We need to elect politicians who understand that, and are willing to take action about it. Or else in the not too distant future, 5 trillions tons is going to seem like a drop in the bucket.

NASA: Sea Levels Rise By 3 Inches (8cm) Since 1992

NASA

Global sea level has risen about 3 millimeters (0.1 inch) a year since Topex/Poseidon began its precise measurement of sea surface height in 1993 and was followed by Jason-1 in 2001. Credit: University of Colorado

Seas around the world have risen an average of nearly 3 inches (8 centimeters) since 1992, with some locations rising more than 9 inches (25 centimeters) due to natural variation, according to the latest satellite measurements from NASA and its partners. An intensive research effort now underway, aided by NASA observations and analysis, points to an unavoidable rise of several feet in the future.
The question scientists are grappling with is how quickly will seas rise?
"Given what we know now about how the ocean expands as it warms and how ice sheets and glaciers are adding water to the seas, it's pretty certain we are locked into at least 3 feet [0.9 meter] of sea level rise, and probably more," said Steve Nerem of the University of Colorado, Boulder, and lead of the Sea Level Change Team. "But we don't know whether it will happen within a century or somewhat longer."



Team scientists will discuss a new visualization based on 23 years of sea level data — the entire record of available satellite data — which reveals changes are anything but uniform around the globe. The record is based on data from three consecutive satellite missions; the first a collaboration between NASA and the French space agency, Centre National d'Études Spatiales (CNES), launched in 1992. The fourth in the series will be Jason-3, led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) with participation by NASA, CNES and the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT).
In 2013, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued an assessment based on a consensus of international researchers that stated global sea levels would likely rise from 1 to 3 feet (0.3 to 0.9 meter) by the end of the century. According to Nerem, new research available since this report suggests the higher end of that range is more likely, and the question remains how that range might shift upward.



The data reveal the height of the sea surface is not rising uniformly everywhere. Regional differences in sea level rise are dominated by the effects of ocean currents and natural cycles such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. But, as these natural cycles wax and wane, they can have major impacts on local coastlines.
"Sea level along the west coast of the United States has actually fallen over the past 20 years because long-term natural cycles there are hiding the impact of global warming," said Josh Willis, an oceanographer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "However, there are signs this pattern is changing. We can expect accelerated rates of sea level rise along this coast over the next decade as the region recovers from its temporary sea level 'deficit.'"
Scientists estimate that about one-third of sea level rise is caused by expansion of warmer ocean water, one-third is due to ice loss from the massive Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets and the remaining third results from melting mountain glaciers. But the fate of the polar ice sheets could change that ratio and produce more rapid increases in the coming decades.



The Greenland ice sheet, covering 660,000 square miles (1.7 million square kilometers) — nearly the area of Alaska — shed an average of 303 gigatons of ice a year over the past decade, according to satellite measurements. The Antarctic ice sheet, covering 5.4 million square miles (14 million square kilometers) — larger than the United States and India combined — has lost an average of 118 gigatons a year.
"We've seen from the paleoclimate record that sea level rise of as much as 10 feet [3 meters] in a century or two is possible, if the ice sheets fall apart rapidly," said Tom Wagner, the cryosphere program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "We're seeing evidence that the ice sheets are waking up, but we need to understand them better before we can say we're in a new era of rapid ice loss."
Although Antarctica's contribution to sea level rise currently is much smaller than that of Greenland, recent research indicates this could change in the upcoming century. In 2014, two West Antarctica studies focused on the acceleration of the glaciers in the Amundsen Sea sector showed its collapse is underway.
East Antarctica's massive ice sheet remains the primary unknown in sea level rise projections. Though it appears to be stable, a recent study found under a major glacier two deep troughs that could draw warm ocean water to the base of the glacier, causing it to melt.
"The prevailing view among specialists has been that East Antarctica is stable, but we don't really know," said glaciologist Eric Rignot of the University of California Irvine and JPL. "Some of the signs we see in the satellite data right now are red flags that these glaciers might not be as stable as we once thought. There's always a lot of attention on the changes we see now, but as scientists our priority needs to be on what the changes could be tomorrow."
One of the keys to understanding future rates of ice loss is determining the role ocean currents and ocean temperatures play in melting the ice sheets from below their edges. A new, six-year NASA field campaign took to the waters around Greenland this summer to probe how warming ocean waters are triggering Greenland glacier degradation. The Oceans Melting Greenland (OMG) project is taking coastal ocean temperature measurements, observing glacial thinning at the ice's edge, and producing the first high-resolution maps of the seafloor, fjords and canyons in the continental shelf surrounding Greenland.

Related Stories

August 28, 2015 NASA's summer research on sea level rise in Greenland

August 28, 2015 Greenland campaign takes flight to measure ice sheet

August 28, 2015 NASA to study Arctic climate change ecosystem impacts

August 26, 2015 OMG mission maps Greenland's coastline

AMA: Climate Change Already Affecting Health

ABC

DAVID MARK: The Australian Medical Association (AMA) says human health in Australia is already being affected by climate change. It says it's taking into account the most recent scientific evidence. The AMA's president, Professor Brian Owler, is urging the Government to show leadership on the issue at the UN Conference on Climate Change in Paris in December. Lucy Carter reports.

LUCY CARTER: The Australian Medical Association has revised its official position on climate change for the first time since 2008. AMA president Brian Owler says the potential impacts on the health of Australians are dire.

BRIAN OWLER: There will be consequences from changing climate particularly in relation to the distribution patterns of diseases, particularly those tropical diseases which are likely to start to appear more and more in the southern areas of Australia as the climate warms. And, this not only has effects on humans, particularly with respect to borne diseases, that is diseases carried by mosquitoes but other diseases that affect food including animals.

LUCY CARTER: Are we seeing health impacts on Australians from climate change now?

BRIAN OWLER: Well, we know that climate change is associated with extreme weather events as well, and we've had very severe heat waves over recent summers and those are often associated with significant numbers of deaths and, in fact, a few years ago in Victoria we saw quite a number of people lose their lives associated with heat waves. And so these climate, although they're extremes, the frequency and pattern of those events is likely to increase and the suspicion is that is what we were already starting to see.

LUCY CARTER: How does this new position statement differ from the statement put out by the AMA in 2008?

BRIAN OWLER: Well, I think this position statement basically reaffirms the AMA's commitment, particularly around the health effects of climate change, and I think it's important ahead of the Paris summit later this year, does call on the Government to show leadership, particularly in relation to policies and programs that not only mitigate against climate change, but makes sure that the Australian population are going to well prepared if these sorts of changes, well, when they actually are occurring. We also talk about the importance of looking at renewable energies and I think also acknowledge the effects that decarbonisation of an economy can have particularly on people's employment and that can have significant health consequences as well.

LUCY CARTER: In a statement, a spokesman for the Environment Minister Greg Hunt, says that "only the Coalition is committed to taking serious action to tackle climate change without hurting Australian families and businesses in the process with a painful carbon tax". He says that "as part of our commitment to tackling climate change, the Government will be pursuing a 26 to 28 per cent reduction in greenhouse gases by 2030 from 2005 levels. "This is the target that the Government will be taking to Paris later this year." Professor Brian Owler says he won't comment on the Government's exact emissions reduction percentage targets, but says it's a good change to hear the Government acknowledge that climate change is real.

BRIAN OWLER: We've seen a number of comments around climate change and whether or not people are actually accepting that there is climate change and whether or not that humans have had a factor in that and certainly there's been some scepticism from the Government in relation to that, so we're pleased at least to see the statements of the Minister that they are now taking this seriously and that they are committed to doing something about it. But of course, we'll all wait to see exactly how that commitment translates into the actions and what the outcomes of those policies are going to be in terms of reducing emissions and hopefully mitigating against climate change.

LUCY CARTER: Professor Owler says it was powerful to see the US president Barack Obama this week declare that any world leader unwilling to take the problem seriously is "not fit to lead".

BRIAN OWLER: There is overwhelming scientific evidence and agreement, consensus amongst scientists, that climate change is real and that there is a human element to it and that there is a need to have the right policies in place. So I think some of the scepticism that has been there in relation to climate change has not been, I think, what many people would like to see from the Government in terms of showing leadership on the issue. And I think you can contrasting compare that with some of the statements that have been made here in Australia compared to the statements of the US president.

DAVID MARK: The AMA's president, Professor Brian Owler, ending that report from Lucy Carter.

International Efforts to Cut Carbon Pollution Won't Be Enough

BloombergBusiness

Pledges from dozens of nations to rein in carbon emissions aren’t enough so far to avoid catastrophic climate change, according to four European research centers.
Plans submitted by China, the U.S., the European Union and other top polluters won’t limit global warming to the 2-degree Celsius (3.6-degree Fahrenheit) threshold that scientists have recommended, the Climate Action Tracker coalition said in a report Wednesday.
Diplomats are meeting in Bonn this week to continue working on the landmark climate-change deal that more than 190 nations expect to complete in Paris this December. At the heart of the pact are plans from individual nations to control their own greenhouse-gas pollution. Those efforts won’t be nearly enough, the researchers said, in one of the first major analyses of the pledges submitted to date. Hitting a lower, 1.5-degree Celsius target, as some scientists have urged, looks even less likely.
“It is clear that if the Paris meeting locks in present climate commitments for 2030, holding warming below 2 degrees Celsius could essentially become infeasible, and 1.5 degrees Celsius beyond reach,” Bill Hare, chief executive officer of Potsdam, Germany-based Climate Analytics, one of the four research centers, said in a statement. The national pledges “need to be considerably strengthened.”

Deeper Cuts
Nations must either ramp up their emissions promises before Paris or reach an agreement that ensures countries will be required to come back with deeper cuts in the future, the researchers said. Participants in the UN talks have acknowledged the Paris pledges won’t be enough on their own. A major goal of the talks, they say, is to come up with a system that requires countries to make deeper contributions over time.
So far, countries accounting for about two-thirds of greenhouse pollution have filed plans with the United Nations. China, the world’s biggest greenhouse-gas source, has pledged to peak its emissions by about 2030, while the U.S. is aiming for a 28 percent reduction by 2025. The 28-member EU is planning to curb emissions by at least 40 percent by 2030.
The shortfall is partly due to “inadequate” plans from Russia and Canada, two of the top 10 emitters, according to Louise Jeffery of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. Ten other nations accounting for almost a fifth of global emissions, led by India, Brazil, Iran and Indonesia, have yet to submit their proposals.
“In most cases” the countries that have submitted proposals, officially known as Intended Nationally Determined Contributions, don’t have policies in place to reach their goals, the researchers said. The exceptions are the EU and China.
“Most governments that have already submitted an INDC need to review their targets in light of the global goal and, in most cases, will need to strengthen them,” said Niklas Hoehne of the NewClimate Institute. “Those still working on their targets need to ensure they aim as high as possible.”