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

2 C is a fantasy

[anzha]

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.

Re:2 C is a fantasy

[XXongo]

You are seeing the victory of idiocy over common sense. The contribution of CO2, Methane and nitrogen

Nitrogen? Who the fuck mentioned nitrogen? Nitrogen is not a greenhouse gas, and nobody ever claimed it was a greenhouse gas.

Basically, I stopped reading here, because this shows that you're one more clueless anonymous coward.

Re:2 C is a fantasy

[danbob999]

Even if it's too late for 2 C, it doesn't mean we shouldn't try reducing CO2. 5 C is better than 8 C.

Re:2 C is a fantasy

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Doesn't matter. The best thing for humanity is to continue advancing technology rapidly. We can less predict the state of life 100 years from now than 1900 could today.

I will happily take higher seas and the very occasional extra hurricane and China and India with the economic societies of the West over slowing their growth (and hampering the west) with idiotic command-and-control solutions.

Year 2100 powered by 6 billion living as the billion in the west do should be pretty amazing.

Re:2 C is a fantasy

[BlackPignouf]

https://xkcd.com/1379/

Re:Global Warming is Awesome!

[ganjadude]

el nino does that sometimes, I remember the last el nino year we didnt get any snow til late january

Pillow talk

[burtosis]

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.

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

[Jack Griffin]

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.

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.

Re:Mostly a photo-op

[Kjella]

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.

Re:Conspicuously missing from TFA...

[Kjella]

Conspicuously missing from TFA... a list of the countries that have signed it.

Oh, it'll probably be most but it is roughly as harmless as signing the UN declaration on human rights. There's no mandatory national goals, no incentives or penalties. It "notes" on point 17 that they're not going to actually reach the global goal of the agreement. It's a pot luck lunch agreement, each country sets their own goals and how they want to reach them and the only harm if they don't set very ambitious goals or fail to reach them is a bit of political egg on their face. The environmentalists of course tout this as a massive victory, but it's really just taking existing national initiatives and calling it a global effort.

This was not very surprising, after Kyoto I and II it was clear they wouldn't get anything with binding targets from the US, China, India or any of the other big polluting nations - only Europe and Australia have binding goals now. So instead of aiming for an agreement that would fail, create a toothless agreement and call it a victory. It's certainly working in the local press here in Norway, now they're talking like we've committed to saving the world. Truth is, nobody got committed to anything and that's why it's going to pass.

Re:In Before

[fustakrakich]

Yes, well, I will hijack this post to say that this is a political/ceremonial agreement, not a scientific one. The good news is that oil is loosing its sheen, down below $40 a barrel. Yes, we have past peak oil, in a much better fashion than anticipated.

this will be a joke

[WindBourne]

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.

Re:Global Warming is Awesome!

[gaiageek]

Germany is not, on the average, 15C warmer than it was 35 years ago (that would be 60 Fahrenheit degrees!)

No, 15C is NOT 60F. More like 27F.

It seems you're both pretty terrible at communicating this clearly.

15C is 59F.
0C is 32F.
A change (+/-) of 15C equates to a change (+/-) of 27F.

Re:Meanwhile, still no global warming in last 19yr

[LynnwoodRooster]

Since the last big El Nino (1997) RSS shows a slight decline in temperature. So maybe not forever - but definitely for the last 18 years. And curiously enough, if you look at the RSS data prior to that big El Nino you see basically a flat line, too. We don't have the "continual rise" in temperature so often modeled and predicted as we have, it appears, flat (or actual declining) temperatures with occasional big events that cause a shift in the baseline. Something none of the current models used for the COP21 talks even considers.

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?

Re:OMFG, the level of stupidity in threads like th

[phantomfive]

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.

Re: TFA...

[ultranova]

They are trying to legitimize a form of global fascism with another sky fairy tale.

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.