THE DISCOVERY OF GLOBAL WARMING

thelivyjr
Site Admin
Posts: 73424
Joined: Thu Aug 30, 2018 1:40 p

Re: THE DISCOVERY OF GLOBAL WARMING

Post by thelivyjr »

The difficulties overwhelmed the next major international Conference of the Parties, held at The Hague in late 2000.

Representatives from 170 countries assembled to write the specific rules that might force reductions in greenhouse gases as promised at Kyoto.

The proceedings were haunted by the third report of the IPCC (officially issued in 2001).

Although the report was not yet completed, its main conclusions had been leaked to the delegates.


Again scientists had gathered in groups to sort through and debate a wide range of new scientific results, some not yet published.

In the negotiations that crafted the IPCC's third report, a consensus of scientists coelesced under the chairmanship of environmental scientist Robert Watson, a frank advocate of policies to reduce greenhouse emissions.

Answering all the objections posed by skeptics and industry lobbyists, the report bluntly concluded that the world was rapidly getting warmer.

Further, strong new evidence showed that "most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations."


[I have italicized the crucial little words that discussion focused upon.]

Above all, computer modeling had improved to the point where the panel could confidently conclude that future warming would be much greater still.

Indeed the rate of warming was "very likely to be without precedent during at least the last 10,000 years."

To meet criticism of earlier reports, whose ambiguous language had been only too politically convenient, after lengthy deliberation the panel explained what they meant when they said the warming was "very likely" unprecedented.

They said it meant they believed there was a 90-99% chance that this was true.


The worst-case scenario supposed that global emissions of CO2 might rise faster than previous reports had considered.

If that happened, the range of warming that the IPCC predicted for the late 21st century ran from 1.4°C up to a shocking 5.8°C (10°F).

This range was not for the traditional doubled CO2 level, which was now expected to arrive around midcentury, but for the still higher levels that would come after 2070 unless the world took action.

As one prominent scientist explained, "China's rapid industrialization has led to upward revision of predictions..."

"While previously we thought in terms of doubling the strength of the CO2 content of the preindustrial atmosphere, current thought is moving toward a tripling."

Eventually the level would move higher still, if not halted by self-restraint or catastrophe.

TO BE CONTINUED ...
thelivyjr
Site Admin
Posts: 73424
Joined: Thu Aug 30, 2018 1:40 p

Re: THE DISCOVERY OF GLOBAL WARMING

Post by thelivyjr »

The IPCC delegates could not agree on a precise statement about the probability that warming would truly fall within the range 1.4-5.8°C.

But they did say it was "likely" that the warming during the next few decades would be 0.1 to 0.2°C per decade.

They defined "likely" as a 66-90% chance of being true.


One approach to defining the meaning of such statements was to make a wide variety of computer model runs, and see what fraction fell within the announced limits.

Later findings suggested a probable upper limit even higher than the IPCC's.

Two decades of effort had not narrowed the range of uncertainty.

That was partly because the geophysics of clouds and oceans and so forth was truly intractable,with complexities and uncertainties that stubbornly refused to allow precise numerical conclusions.


Experts emphasized that they could not rule out climate "surprises" outside the range of their predictions.

They also pointed out that whether we would get small temperature increases or huge ones depended most of all on future social and economic trends — it would depend on population growth, the regulation of soot from smokestacks, and so forth.

Climate researchers had finally reached a point where the biggest uncertainty about the future climate did not lie in their science, but in what humans would choose to do.

At the conference in The Hague, continental European representatives placated their powerful Green parties by insisting on a strict regime of regulation.

That approach found no effective political backing in the United States and a few other nations, which insisted on market-friendly mechanisms.

That would be a system of licenses to permit a company to emit some amount of CO2 in exchange for removing an equivalent amount of emissions elsewhere, for example by saving a forest from destruction.

Europeans exclaimed that it would be unfair for the world's biggest emitters to wriggle out of actual cutbacks.

Nor could the parties agree on how to calculate an equivalence, when scientists had little solid knowledge of how forests and soils emitted or absorbed greenhouse gases.

The negotiations collapsed amid acrimony.


TO BE CONTINUED ...
thelivyjr
Site Admin
Posts: 73424
Joined: Thu Aug 30, 2018 1:40 p

Re: THE DISCOVERY OF GLOBAL WARMING

Post by thelivyjr »

Hopes for strong measures in the near future were entirely crushed in March 2001.

The newly installed American President, George W.Bush, had campaigned with promises to address global warming.

But he rejected any kind of regulation of the nation's CO2 emissions, publicly renouncing the Kyoto Protocol.

Moreover, the U.S. administration, suspecting that Watson's environmentalism had biased the panel's reports, insisted that he be denied another term as chair of the IPCC.

Watson's hard-driving, forthright ways had ruffled many feathers, leaving him vulnerable.

The majority of delegates, particularly from developing countries, voted for Rajendra Pachauri, a mild-mannered economist from India who would presumably be less outspoken than Watson.


Yet whatever happened to the IPCC, many responsible government officials and business leaders saw that they could not avoid the issue.

In 2000 the Economist magazine, a free-market champion, reported, "Three years ago, most business groups were rubbishing the science of global warming..."

"Now, even business has come to realize that global warming is a problem..."

"Rather than cheering the collapse of the negotiations in the Hague, most business lobbies chastised ministers for not concluding a deal."

Corporations needed "clear ground-rules for the green energy projects, clean-development schemes and emissions-trading initiatives on which they have been placing big bets."

Most of the world's governments remained committed to taking some kind of action.

At an international meeting held in Bonn in July 2001, 178 governments negotiated a compromise agreement for implementing the Kyoto Protocol.

What made this breakthrough possible was at the same time the agreement's greatest flaw, the absence of the U.S. government from the entire process.

The stated goal of the remaining nations was to return greenhouse gas emissions to roughly the 1990 rate within a decade.

Scarcely anyone believed the world would really achieve that.

And if somehow it did happen, at the 1990 rate of emissions the greenhouse gas level in the atmosphere would still continue to rise.

The Kyoto Protocol was evidently only a bare beginning for yet more difficult and far-reaching negotiations.

TO BE CONTINUED ...
thelivyjr
Site Admin
Posts: 73424
Joined: Thu Aug 30, 2018 1:40 p

Re: THE DISCOVERY OF GLOBAL WARMING

Post by thelivyjr »

Global warming might require the international system to forge entirely new mechanisms of cooperation.

Some questioned whether humanity could rise to the challenge.

Most officials and many business leaders nevertheless felt it worthwhile to keep on developing regulation and monitoring mechanisms.

The experience would be essential if the day came when dire need forced the world into a true commitment to halt global warming.

Attempts to Restrict Emissions

To put the Kyoto Protocol into effect required ratification by nations that made 55% of the world's CO2 emissions, and with the United States refusing to join, only Russia could put the treaty into effect.

After a long internal debate (in which some scientist-bureaucrats denied that their frigid country needed to worry about global warming), in October 2004 the government did ratify the treaty under pressure from Western Europe, and the treaty formally went into effect the following year.

Because of the post-Soviet crash of industrial production, Russia was still well below the emissions limits the protocol required.

Russian companies hoped to sell unused emissions "credits" to polluters, who might find that buying credits was cheaper than reducing their own emissions.

In 2003 the nations of the European Union had struck an agreement to roll back their emissions.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair in particular gave personal priority to rousing the international community to take action against global warming.

Meanwhile the world's second-largest reinsurance corporation, Swiss Re, voiced concern that companies could be vulnerable to lawsuits if they didn't take action to anticipate Kyoto-Protocol restrictions on emissions.

In 2004 the company warned that within a decade, insurance companies could face tens of billions of dollars a year in extra costs due to climate change accelerated by human intervention.

All these European initiatives attracted scant attention in the United States.

In December 2004 a United Nations conference on climate change gathered in Buenos Aires.

Once again it was the United States government that blocked efforts to begin substantive discussions on further steps to limit greenhouse emissions.

The conference, which lasted weeks and involved many nations (but was scarcely noticed in the American press), ended with only a weak agreement for limited and informal talks.

The Bush Administration's adamant hostility to the Kyoto Protocol, and its general rejection of any restraint on industry, was one of the first and most persistent causes of a serious rift between the United States and its European allies.

The divergence on climate policy also raised strains with Japan and vulnerable developing countries, both on the governmental level and in international public opinion.

By 2006, polls were showing that the climate issue aroused world-wide hostility against the United States.

In February 2005 the Kyoto Protocol went into effect with 141 signatory nations.

Everyone agreed that there were many problems with the treaty, which was only a first step that would do little by itself to forestall global warming.

The aim was to get people started on working out systems for monitoring and controlling emissions and trading emissions credits, and to stimulate the invention and development of energy-saving devices and practices.

This experience would be needed for the next round of negotiations, with a new treaty anticipated when the Kyoto Protocol reached its end in 2012.

Stronger measures might then be called for, if it seemed at that time that global warming would have severe consequences.

TO BE CONTINUED ...
thelivyjr
Site Admin
Posts: 73424
Joined: Thu Aug 30, 2018 1:40 p

Re: THE DISCOVERY OF GLOBAL WARMING

Post by thelivyjr »

Milestone

The evidence for that was stronger every year.

In June 2005, the science academies of the world's leading industrial and developing countries signed an unprecedented joint statement, declaring that "the threat of climate change is real and increasing," and calling on all nations to take "prompt action."

The Bush White House (together with its appointees in U.S. agencies) was now almost the only major government entity denying the problem.

At a major international meeting convened in Montreal that December to discuss how to advance beyond the Kyoto Protocol, the American representatives angered everyone by refusing to cooperate, and walked out at the eleventh hour.

Coaxed back, they would agree only to participate in discussions that would require no commitment.

Nearly all the other nations settled down to serious work.

They hammered out details of emissions trading mechanisms, and planned negotiations for what steps to take after the Kyoto agreement expired in 2012.

In January 2005 Europeans adopted a "cap-and-trade" scheme that required permits for carbon emissions and set up a market for trading the permits.

The system was so badly designed that the price of the permits soared to about 30 euros ($40) per ton of carbon and then abruptly crashed to almost nil.


Permits for emissions after 2007, when the regime was expected to tighten, recovered and climbed past 20.

A parallel, non-obligatory carbon exchange in the United States set the price at about $4 per ton — and by 2012 European permits had again fallen to nearly that level, for the supply of permits kept climbing as countries issued generous carbon credits to their industries.

The complex system proved to be vulnerable not only to political pressures but many other kinds of gaming.

In a perverse way these anomalies were exactly what the Kyoto negotiators had wanted, that is, experiments to find how particular policies worked in practice.

Over the next decade a movement developed to attack the climate problem with a plain tax on emissions, as recommended by most economists.

That proved politically difficult, but there were hopes the tax could be made palatable if the revenue was used either to reduce taxes that were even more unpopular, or paid out directly to citizens (“tax-and-dividend”).

TO BE CONTINUED ...
thelivyjr
Site Admin
Posts: 73424
Joined: Thu Aug 30, 2018 1:40 p

Re: THE DISCOVERY OF GLOBAL WARMING

Post by thelivyjr »

The 2007 IPCC Report and the World's Response

In the first months of 2007, the IPCC issued its Fourth Assessment Report (FAR).

Most of the world's climate scientists had taken a hand in shaping the conclusions.

In two rounds of review, what one of the participants called “a painstaking process of self-interrogation,” the editors had individually considered more than 30,000 comments.

The effort meant serious sacrifices.

Scientists had to set aside their chosen profession of pushing into the unknown, in order to work out what they could agree was known.

“It drives you absolutely crazy,” one of them said.

“You fly to distant places; you stay up all night negotiating; you listen to hundreds of sometimes silly interventions."

"You go through so many mundane things to produce the big picture.”


Computer modellers in particular had devoted much of their work for half a dozen years to producing results specifically tailored for the IPCC report.

Different models still gave somewhat different results, for much remained unknown about complex processes such as the effects of aerosols in forming clouds.

But the biggest source of uncertainty was human: what economic and political scenario would the world adopt for increasing or restraining its greenhouse gas emissions?

Teams ran their models through a set of scenarios that described a range of future world emission rates — just one of the areas where the research effort was increasingly structured by the IPCC process itself.

Pachauri, the American government's choice for IPCC chair, had become as worried about global warming as the scientists, and his shy manner concealed a passionate energy.

Under his skillful chairmanship the panel reached a consensus that was tighter and more dire than ever.

The range of temperatures the modelers predicted for the end of the century had not changed much since the 2001 report.

Their best guess was still roughly 3°C of warming.

They had grown more certain that we were very unlikely to get away with a rise of less than 1.5°C.

The computer models did not agree so well on the upper limit — there was a small but all too real possibility that global temperature could soar to a disastrous 6°C or even higher.

Indeed that would be a big possibility if, contrary to the IPCC's baseline assumption, the world continued with business as usual instead of severely restraining its emissions.

And whatever happened in the 21st century, the following century would be warmer still.


TO BE CONTINUED ...
thelivyjr
Site Admin
Posts: 73424
Joined: Thu Aug 30, 2018 1:40 p

Re: THE DISCOVERY OF GLOBAL WARMING

Post by thelivyjr »

Scientists at IPCC meeting

Scientists did feel much more certain about a couple of things.

First, serious effects of global warming were now plainly evident.

Around the world they were seeing greater heat waves, more stormy rains and droughts, melting of ice and thawing of permafrost, and changes in the ranges of countless animal and plant species.

And second, it was nearly certain that human emissions were partly responsible for these ever worse changes.

Ominous though that was, observers increasingly remarked that the statements could have been even stronger.

The IPCC process by its very nature muffled the experts, whether a minority or even a majority, who worried about eventualities that were uncertain but potentially catastrophic.

For example, plausible speculations that ice sheets could surge rapidly into the oceans were omitted from the official conclusions about sea-level rise.

Indeed since 1990 the climb in both sea level and temperature had been at about the upper limit of what previous IPCC reports had seen as likely.

Conventionally one would say the IPCC had been soberly conservative by refusing to emphasize the more extreme possible changes.

But if being "conservative" means concentrating on the most serious risks (as people do, for example, when budgeting for military forces), a band of projections that was overall too low had been the reverse of conservative.

What if the world warmed up even more than 6°C?

After all,the IPCC was not entirely confident that it could not, even under the baseline scenario of gradually imposed controls on emissions.

Or what if, as some experts warned, even a 3°C rise could leave us with a radically "different planet"?

As one geophysicist wrote in an open letter to his colleagues, "Up until now many scientists may have consciously or unconsciously downplayed the more extreme possiblilities at the high end of the uncertainty range, in an attempt to appear moderate and 'responsible' (that is, to avoid scaring people)."

"However, true responsibility is to provide evidence of what must be avoided."(69a)

Alarming statements were still more repressed in the grueling plenary session where political appointees revised the crucial "Summary Report for Policymakers" until they all could endorse it.

Journalists reported that the delegation from the United States, while conservative in the conventional sense, played a more constructive role than in previous IPCC meetings.

The most strenuous obstruction came as usual from the Saudi Arabians, who now as in the past represented the interests of all who wished to sell fossil fuels without restraint, and from the Chinese, representing nations that hoped to burn ever more fuel as their industries grew.

An example was a long debate over a statement that humanity was causing the observed warming: how certain was that?

The British delegation, supported by many scientists, insisted that it was "extremely likely" — to be precise, at least 99% certain — that humans were responsible.

But in the end the delegates could only agree to report that this was "very likely," that is, between 90% and 99% certain.


(Most media reported this as "90%" or "at least 90%" certain, understating the degree of certainty.)

TO BE CONTINUED ...
thelivyjr
Site Admin
Posts: 73424
Joined: Thu Aug 30, 2018 1:40 p

Re: THE DISCOVERY OF GLOBAL WARMING

Post by thelivyjr »

The wrangling did not mean much for the making of policy.

Everyone, or at least everyone who was not wedded to an opinion formed decades earlier, now understood that only human action could avoid a solid risk that warming would rise to intolerable levels.


The IPCC leaders made this entirely clear in November when they published a "Synthesis" of the 2007 reports.

The panel was now better known and better respected for sharing a Nobel Peace Prize with Gore, and the authors ventured to describe the risks plainly.

With CO2 in the atmosphere rising a percent each year at an accelerating rate, we were likely, for example, to put a quarter of the world's species at risk of extinction.

Still more likely would be, for example, "disruption of...societies" by storm floods.

Less certain but no less important, there could be "abrupt or irreversible" impacts.

For example,"sea-level rise on century time scales cannot be excluded."

If greenhouse gas levels kept rising unrestrained, well beyond twice the pre-industrial level, we were likely to see a radical impoverishment of many of the ecosystems that sustain our civilization.

Meanwhile, additional IPCC reports by economists and social scientists explained that action to forestall all this was feasible with current or easily developed technologies.

In fact the world's governments were spending about half a trillion dollars a year to subsidize fossil fuels.

Indirect subsidies, like the cost of sickness caused by coal pollution, amounted to five trillion a year.

Switching those funds to climate control would bring many benefits.

But governments were stingy even for the relatively cheap work of climate research and development of sustainable technology.

Note that these essays do not cover the complex history of debates over the economics of climate change and policies to address it.

In the now familiar cycle, the world's governments were obliged to respond to the IPCC's findings.

Convening at Bali in December 2007, delegates once again argued heatedly over equity between developing and developed nations and so forth.

Emotions ran high amid threats of trade sanctions and boycotts.

As the long and acrimonious sessions neared their deadline, the head of the conference dissolved in tears and had to be led away.

A last-minute obstruction by the U.S. delegation provoked booing and hissing.

The delegate for Papua New Guinea raised cheers when he told the U.S., "If for some reason you are not willing to lead, leave it to the rest of us."

"Please — get out of the way."

In a striking demonstration of the power of public opinion and the pull of consensus for democracies, the U.S. did get out of the way.

The final Bali agreement was, inevitably, weak and ambiguous.


But it sketched out a path for future negotiations that could, with enough will, yield serious results.

The 2007 report had barely been issued when a few experts began to warn that global warming was arriving at a faster and more dangerous pace than the panel anticipated — as usual, the IPCC had leaned toward the conservative side.

Within two years the majority of experts had come to agree.

The 2007 report had been based on evidence published in peer-reviewed journals through about 2005, and as it happened, most of the science published in the next few years was discouraging.

The IPCC had been constitutionally obliged to settle "conservatively" on statements that even the most optimistic parties would not oppose, rather than focus on less likely but more dangerous risks.

The world's CO2 emissions were rising at about the upper limit of what the IPCC had thought likely; new data and better theories showed that tropical forests and oceans were rapidly becoming less able to take some of the CO2 out of the atmosphere; emissions of other greenhouse gases like methane were becoming as dangerous as CO2 itself; newly-discovered feedback mechanisms mostly worked in the wrong direction; and on and on.

Actual harms that could probably be traced to climate change were showing up around the world with increasing frequency.

Greenland and Antarctica were melting more quickly than most experts had believed possible.

From prolonged droughts and heat waves to catastrophic floods to the disappearance of entire species, much appeared to be happening sooner than expected.


In March 2009 an international consortium of eleven universities brought more than 2,000 experts to Copenhagen to evaluate what had been learned since the IPCC panels crafted their reports.

The scientists' overall conclusion: "The worst-case IPCC projections, or even worse, are being realized."

TO BE CONTINUED ...
thelivyjr
Site Admin
Posts: 73424
Joined: Thu Aug 30, 2018 1:40 p

Re: THE DISCOVERY OF GLOBAL WARMING

Post by thelivyjr »

The next major Conference of the Parties (that is, signatories of the FCCC, now numbering more than 190 nations), was scheduled for Copenhagen in December 2009.

Its goal was to forge a binding treaty to replace the Kyoto accord on its expiration in 2012.


Negotiations leading up to the conference were called the most complex and difficult problem that diplomats had ever attempted.

Most developing nations continued to insist that the industrialized nations should take all responsibility for solving the problem, and meanwhile pay the world's poor enormous sums to mitigate the prospective damage from climate change.

After all, as India pointed out, the United States was responsible for the lion's share of the greenhouse gases now in the atmosphere, and the average American continued to add twenty times as much every year as the average Indian.

Americans replied: why should we restrict our emissions, if others did not?

After all, China had passed the United States as the world's biggest emitter and was building a new coal-fired power plant every week or so.

But the United States delegation could not exert strong leadership, for the U.S. Senate had barely begun to consider the nation's target for its own future emissions, and if it ever did set rules they would surely be weaker than other nations were demanding.

When more than 120 heads of state descended on Copenhagen in the last days of the Conference, they found that the weary negotiators had resolved few of the issues.

With chaotic demonstrations on the frozen streets outside and angry shouts on the convention floor, the process was lurching toward ignominious collapse.

Late on the last day, the new U.S. President, Barack Obama, barged into a room where the Chinese had privately invited leaders from Brazil, India and South Africa to work out a joint position against any strong agreement.

They had no choice but to welcome Obama, and the five nations negotiated a vaguely worded accord that kept the door open for future negotiations.

The prospects for a legally binding treaty were more distant than ever.


The only party to the talks that expressed complete satisfaction with the outcome was Saudi Arabia.

After the debacle, most negotiators gave up hope of keeping the rise of global temperature above the pre-industrial level to less than 2°C — a number that had been adopted in 2010, somewhat arbitrarily, as the target for avoiding "dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system."

(Computer studies tended to show that serious effects would begin to appear above 1.5°C. "Pre-industrial" had no accepted definition. Most published measures of mean global temperature described it in terms of the rise above the average for the period 1951-1980, but that was already 0.5-0.75 degrees warmer than global temperature before the industrial revolution. By this measure the rise already exceeded 1.5 degrees.)

TO BE CONTINUED ...
thelivyjr
Site Admin
Posts: 73424
Joined: Thu Aug 30, 2018 1:40 p

Re: THE DISCOVERY OF GLOBAL WARMING

Post by thelivyjr »

To be sure, most nations followed the conference with pledges to reduce emissions, in harmony with the hastily negotiated "Copenhagen accord."

But even if all the pledges were honored, it would not suffice to avert dangerous warming.

Nobody proposed to give up.

The negotiations stumbled forward like an injured mountaineer who will not turn back.

For example, at a Conference of the Parties (the 17th) in Durban in December 2011, tempestuous debates over what should follow resulted in an agreement to ... keep negotiating.

At a 2013 Conference of the Parties in Doha, the Kyoto agreement was extended to 2020.

The protocol now covered only a minor fraction of the world's economies (mainly in the European Union), but it did keep alive the experiment with market-based mechanisms for managing emissions.

In practical terms, Kyoto was a failure.

Although some nations lived up to their commitments, with Europe in particular substantially cutting its emissions, the result scarcely slowed the global rise of greenhouse gases.

The developing nations that had been omitted from obligations, notably China, continued to build coal-fired plants at a breakneck pace — partly to produce goods that were exported to Europe and other developed regions.

Far from decreasing, world CO2 emissions had accelerated, and were now climbing more than 2% a year.

Toward a Policy Consensus

For its next report the IPCC revised its procedures, stung by criticism from people who denied any prospect of dangerous climate change.

The critics had fastened on one sentence in the 3000-page set of 2007 reports (not the main report of the physical sciences panel, but a volume on impacts).

This sentence had claimed, incorrectly, that Himalayan glaciers were likely to disappear by 2035.


The critics spoke as if this one minor error invalidated everything the IPCC had done.

Resolved to be more careful and more transparent, the panel allowed almost anyone who claimed any expertise in the field to register as a reviewer.

The IPCC's fifth Assessment Report (known as AR5), issued in 2013, took only small steps beyond the 2007 report.

"Evidence for human influence has grown," the panel noted.

"It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century."

Estimates for future sea-level rise were increased, but otherwise the predictions remained about as before.

None of this made much of an impact on anyone not already concerned.

TO BE CONTINUED ...
Post Reply