Slashdot Mirror
Paris Climate Deal Adopted
jones_supa writes: 195 countries have adopted the first global pact to fight climate change by reducing emissions. Countries will have to publish greenhouse gas reduction targets and revise them upward every 5 years, while striving to drive down their carbon output as soon as possible, under the ambitious climate-change pact announced Saturday morning at UN talks in Paris. The agreement commits countries to keeping global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius and hopes to limit it to 1.5 C, with the goal of a carbon-neutral world sometime after 2050. The 31-page text called the Paris Agreement (PDF) was distributed to countries for them to assess, then agreed to at a plenary session.
I hate to say it, but we're too late for 2 C. Even if we call a halt to CO2 emissions, the gas already in the atmosphere is likely to carry us up and over. To make matters worse, the carbon capture technologies coal plants were supposed to get don't work as well as advertised. Even if we do hold to 2 C, btw, we are going to have long term sea level rise.
Global warming at this point is inevitable. Even probably 5 C warming. Some are arguing 8 C by the end of the century. However, its not the end of the world. Just a radically different one.
(yeah I've been following this very closely for over a decade)
Amusingly, coccolithophores, the calcium shelled plankton, everyone has been really worried would be seriously impacted by the rise in carbon dioxide causing oceanic acidification actually grow MORE in raised CO2 environments.
Do you know why the road less traveled by is littered with the bones of the unwary?
el nino does that sometimes, I remember the last el nino year we didnt get any snow til late january
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Until I get the time to painstakingly go over the document and we see some real results across the board I'm just going to assume its all pillow talk. Besides the USA doing their own usual workarounds (changing locations for manufacturing), letting China and India do their own thing wont really pan out for this whole 2C thing. 2C is likely an unachievable fantasy at this point.
When you look at things like this in isolation you might think it does nothing, but this is the long fight. Similar to the anti-smoking movement, it took decades of incremental steps to finally get to a tipping point where not smoking became the default accepted point of view.
We are still a decade or two away from the desired result, but I believe this is continuing to shift the default position from "Climate Change is BS", to "it exists, but nothing we can do", to " We can solve this". These things can take a generation to infiltrate the public conscious enough that politicians are forced to act, so as long as we're moving in the right direction, we'll get there eventually.
Unless China stops building out their new coal plants right now, there is no way to stop this.
In fact, all nations really need to stop building new coal plants. These are the bane of the emissions.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
When you look at things like this in isolation you might think it does nothing, but this is the long fight. Similar to the anti-smoking movement, it took decades of incremental steps to finally get to a tipping point where not smoking became the default accepted point of view.
Because you managed to convince the smokers it was in their own interest to quit. And if not themselves then to save their family and friends the effect of second hand smoke. Your 1/7 billionth contribution to AGW? Ten bucks for your kid's college fund is probably going to change their life more. Sure those fractions add up but there's a million things you could do on the individual level that would matter more. And that I think will take priority.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Calm down cuz. Some of us here are qualified to understand climate data. The way you're talking you make it sound like there's a high church of Climatology and we have no choice but to believe what the high priests say.
That's not necessary. If Feynman could explain QED well enough that a layman could understand it, then laymen/women can also understand climate science, it's much simpler than QED. The difficult part IMNSHO is actually statistics: figuring out how to accurately average out all the temperature readings collected across the planet, etc.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Communism. Fascism is inherently a national movement, communism - or socialism in general - international. Furthermore, there's no clear charismatic leader but faceless bureaucracy associated with this deal, although I suppose that's also compatible with the Illuminati. Then there's the religious possibilities to consider - which you should had considered beyond a vague reference to "sky fairy" - perhaps the Vatican is trying to cause hardship in hopes people will seek salvation? Or you could simply blame this on lizard men from Regulus trying to de-industrialize the world in preparation for their occupation.
Seriously, put some effort into your conspiracy theories. Don't just post the first buzzword that comes to your mind. That's neither a good smokescreen nor entertaining.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.