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

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

[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: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.

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: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.