Paris Climate Conference Offers Signs of Hope for an International Response

It is official. Two U.S. government science agencies, NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA, pronounced “Noah”), have confirmed that 2015 surpassed 2014’s record-setting temperatures to become the hottest year. To emphasize the reality of global warming, Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, noted that 15 of the hottest 16 years on record have now occurred in this century.

The 21st Conference of Parties of the United Nations Climate Change Conference confronted these facts as representatives of 195 countries gathered in Paris in early December 2015 for two weeks of negotiations. “Recognizing that climate change represents an urgent and potentially, irreversible threat to human societies and to the planet,” began the basic framework document for these meetings, “[its solution] requires the widest possible cooperation by all countries, and their participation in an effective and appropriate international response, with a view to accelerating the reduction of global greenhouse gas emissions.”

U.S. President Barack Obama, speaking at the opening session, underscored the urgent importance of the conference noting that, “For all the challenges we face, the growing threat of climate change could define the contours of this century more dramatically than any other.” Acknowledging the pall cast over Paris by the vicious terrorist attacks on that city that claimed 130 lives, Obama saluted “the people of Paris for insisting that this event go on — an act of defiance that proves nothing will deter us from building the future we want for our children. What greater rejection of those who would tear down our world than marshaling our best efforts to save it?”

The intricate diplomacy of United Nations Climate Change Conferences began in 1995 with a series of preparatory conferences leading up to 1997’s Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change, an ambitious document designed to place legally binding obligations on developed countries to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. Kyoto, however, was an agreement before its time and met with eventual disengagement by the United States as well as reluctance from the European Union. It also faced claims from China and India that their rapidly developing economies would be denied the use of fossil fuels that had built the industrial revolution and calls from late-developing economies for large-scale financial assistance from the developed world to meet environmental goals.

What was needed to move the elaborately choreographed, but glacially slow, progress of environmental diplomacy forward in Paris was a renewed sense of urgency, a commitment to take the international politics of earth’s environment to a new level. That urgency emerged via the steady accumulation of evidence: rising temperatures, receding glaciers and disintegrating polar ice caps.

By moving away from some of the most controversial past proposals — notably the idea of mandatory emissions cuts for highly developed economies while not requiring similar cuts from large, rapidly developing economies like China and India — the Paris Conference produced a surprising degree of agreement among states with disparate interests. They were united by a single common concern — shaping an effective, timely response to the immediate realities and potential dangers of global warming. The event’s outcomes include:

Specific targets were set with states party to the agreement aiming to hold temperatures “well below 2 C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 C above pre-industrial levels.”

States developed and accepted a specific mechanism by which they will determine and submit their national commitment to reduce carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions by a credible amount by 2030. These commitments are called Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs).

The agreement establishes a formal review process termed a global stocktake, beginning in 2023 and then held at five-year intervals where states will be required to revisit, update and enhance their national goals as set by their prior INDC commitments.

The agreement not only encourages the research and technological development necessary for developed states to move from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources, but also provides funding to help late-developing countries leapfrog the fossil fuel age that has been the engine of economic development.

The Paris Agreement will become legally binding when joined by at least 55 countries, which together represent at least 55 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

For all the success of the Paris Conference and the promise of the Paris Agreement, there are major problems ahead. Even if fully enacted and adopted by every nation-state in the world, it is still not enough to avoid dangerous climate change. Estimates are that the projected INDCs submitted in advance of the conference will, at best, not hold global warming below 3 C. The Paris Agreement now moves to ratification by the individual states that accepted these proposals. There is sure to be resistance from national legislatures and major energy lobbies.

Like much of international law, there are no enforcement mechanisms in the Paris Agreement. Fulfillment of the Paris Agreement depends upon voluntary compliance backed up by what can be hoped will be a substantial degree of peer pressure. The global stocktaking approach, based on review conferences every five years, seems a hollow mechanism, at best a theatrical public relations exercise and at worst a toothless substitute for any real enforcement. It is worth recalling the similar review process in the 1975 Helsinki Accords that eased Cold War tensions brought about by a series of review conferences that became a clarion call for human rights and a sounding trumpet that helped to bring down the Berlin Wall and saw the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Returning to the recent data confirming that 2015 was the hottest year on record to date, the seriousness of climate change and the enormous challenge facing the Paris Agreement becomes immediately apparent. “A lot of times, when you break a record, you break it by a few hundredths of a degree,” observes Thomas Karl, director of NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information. “But this record we smashed. It was over a quarter of a degree Fahrenheit, and that’s a lot for the global temperature.”

Recall that the Paris Agreement, about which there has been genuine excitement, says that the planet should not be allowed to warm more than 2 C (3.6 F) above pre-industrial temperatures. It was agreed in Paris that global warming should be limited to 1.5 C (2.7 F). According to NOAA, 2015 was 0.9 C (1.62 F) above the 20th century average. Though there’s always a great deal of room for annual average temperature variance, NOAA’s data suggests that we are already halfway to the temperature ceiling just set as a goal by the Paris Agreement. That 2 C ceiling is the goal set for 2030, and even the global stocktake review process envisioned by the Paris Agreement does not begin until 2023.

No telling irony should ever be wasted. So just in case global warming cannot be slowed, or even reversed, perhaps NOAA (“Noah”) should start urgent planning for a new global infrastructure project, a modern-day equivalent of the ark?