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.

Comments

Conspicuously missing from TFA...

[Chris Mattern]

...a list of the countries that have signed it.

Mostly a photo-op

[pesho]

James Hansen is highly skeptical that this agreement will lead to anything tangible. Mostly because it consists of promises without any enforceable mechanisms. I am inclined to agree with him. It looks like large dog and pony show mostly aimed at reducing public pressure without committing to anything.

Re:Mostly a photo-op

[pesho]

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.

You analogy is wrong on so many levels.

1. Smoking hurts mostly you and to somewhat lesser degree people that live close to you, in contrast global warming impacts everyone who lives on the planed right now as well as several generations down the line.

2. Stopping smoking has immediate effect. Stopping green house gas emissions even if done completely and abruptly will have delayed impact on global warming as the gases currently in the atmosphere will need time to recede. In addition, the green house effect has a self feeding loop, by increasing water vapor, reducing ice cover, etc. Comparing it to smoking is like comparing hitting the brake on a kids bicycle to hitting the break on a freight train at full speed on a downward slope. (Hint : it will take a lot of time before the train stops).

Your suggestion that we can stop global warming by waiting for the reality to trickle down through the brains of the population of planet earth and take gradual measures is simply ridiculous. By the time this happens it will be too late. I have given up on any hope that effective measures against global warming will be taken in time to preserve the climate to anything resembling the current climate. What we can hope is to prevent a complete catastrophe and adapt to the new climate. Rich countries in high latitudes will fare better. I would really hate to be living around the tropics, especially in arid places like the middle east.

OMFG, the level of stupidity in threads like this

[kheldan]

Know what? All sides of any thread on the subject of the Earth's climate and what may or may not be happening to it, and who/what may or may not be responsible for it? And I mean all sides of it, is full of utter stupidity masquerading as 'opinion' and 'fact'.

You want 'facts'? You want 'informed opinions'? You're not going to find it here. Why? Because nobody here is a scientist specializing in climatology, and while it's possible, I find it highly unlikely that anyone who posts here, myself included, is academically qualified enough to interpret what climate data has been collected, if you could even find such analysis to be scientifically valid in any significant way. All I see in any discussion thread like this one? Beliefs, plain and simple; you're expressing your belief in this-or-that theory (which you have neither the credentials nor the background to explore and prove/disprove yourself using the scientific method), or belief in one scientist or the other (which is about as useless as the above mentioned belief-in-a-theory), or (my 'personal favorite', said with sarcastic overtones) belief in the words some non-scientific pundit or other's 'belief' one way or the other. All the above may as well be someone saying 'God says it's one-way-or-the-other', or just roll a six-sided die, 1-2-3 means 'no global warming', 4-5-6 means 'there is global warming'.

Face the truth: Nobody is deciding anything about Earth's climate, one way or the other here. All everyone is doing is venting a bunch of hot air, using it as an excuse to fling around personal insults against anyone who doesn't agree with your 'opinion' on the subject, and generally wasting theirs and everyone else's time accomplishing absolutely nothing.

You want to actually do something of real substance with regards to investigating possible long-term changes in the Earth's climate, and what may or may not be affecting it? Go get a real education in the sciences, with a focus on climatology (and whatever other subjects are useful in this case) whether you get degree(s) in them or not, go collect your own data (or at least investigate, in a scientific manner, the validity of the data collected thusfar) do your own experiments, and come to real science-based conclusions, publish your findings, and face the judgement of the world scientific community, just like with any other scientific research. Otherwise you're just 'armchair quarterbacking' to no effect.

**********

Don't like what I had to say here? Tough for you. Deal with it.

Re:In Before

[unixisc]

..the old libertarian geezers of Slashdot who whine about conspiracy theories on every climate-related post here.

Whatever happened to global warming?