Will Paris yield a decisive climate deal?
- By OP Rana
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E-mail China Daily, August 5, 2015
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A climate change campaigner holds an anti-fracking placard during a rally outside the Houses of Parliament in central London, Britain June 17, 2015. [Photo/Agencies] |
The UN climate change conference in Paris in December is expected by many to deliver a decisive plan to curb global warming, more precisely to prevent global temperatures from rising 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) above the pre-industrial levels. Keeping temperatures below that level is what climate scientists have been fighting for since the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where the world vowed to avoid undefined "dangerous" human interference with the climate system.
Alas, 20 years later when Rio de Janeiro hosted the UN Convention on Sustainable Development, the world hadn't done much to keep temperatures from rising above the 2C level this century. The world has not acted as an integrated community since the threat of the depleting ozone subsided after the Montreal Protocol to the Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer came into force in 1985.
The world doesn't function on the principle of one for all and all for one. Instead, it follows the principle of making the most of the available resources and exploring further to exploit potential resources.
No wonder, many climate and social scientists fear that Paris could spell the doom for the 2C target, not least because greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions have reached record highs in recent years. Their fear is not unfounded, as floods, droughts and storms have been wreaking havoc across the globe, summers are getting hotter and winters colder, and sea levels have been constantly rising because of melting glaciers and disappearing Arctic and Antarctic ice sheets.
What's really worrying is that the proposed reductions in carbon emissions promised by governments - with pledges of deepening them further - are not enough to keep temperatures from rising above 2C this century. Added to that is governments' fear of incurring huge economic "losses" because of the shift from fossil fuels.
