14 DAY TRIAL // Even though many of the representatives who participated at the 2011 UN Climate Change Conference (COP17), in Durban, South Africa, would have you believe that the agreement reached yesterday, December 11, is valid and a step forward for humanity, this couldn't be farther from the truth.
What the meeting did succeed in obtaining was the promise from important polluters such as China, the United States, India and Brazil that they would respect an agreement to curb greenhouse gas emissions. The trick is that the future document will only enter effect in 2020, and that it has yet to be written.
In addition, the agreement signed on Sunday does not contain terms such as legally-binding. The European Union did agree to commit itself to a second phase of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, but it was not joined in doing so by other countries.
The coalition of states EU environment commissioner Connie Hedegaard put together – including poor nations in Asia and Africa, Brazil, European states, island nations and South Africa – managed to persuade the US and China to agree to respect targets to be set in 2020.
While this may look all well and good on paper, the agreement is strictly to do with politics, and was formulated with utter disregard for the scientific data underlying global warming and climate change.
It was absolutely necessary for an agreement to be reached as far back as 2008, maybe even early, but now that target has been pushed back at least 12 years, with no guarantees that countries will be any more willing to commit to reductions in 2020 than they are now.
In fact, it could be that the world may have already been set on a track to an average temperature increase of at least 3 degrees Celsius. This is a full degree above the 2 degree target scientists identified as the absolute maximum temperature increase is allowed to reach.
“This is the first time we have seen major economies, normally cautious, commit to take action demanded by the science,” said the Climate Change Secretary of the UK, Chris Huhne. But such a commitment is nothing if it does not rely on science, but on politics.
The Durban agreement also calls for nations to establish emission reduction targets by 2015, which will enter effect in 2020. If that objective is reached, it would mark a major breakthrough indeed, but one that comes at least a decade too late.
If politicians were in any way inclined to make a decision based on solid scientific facts, then they wouldn't have forgotten that this decade is absolutely essential – in terms of emissions – for determining how the climate will change over the course of the next century, New Scientist reports.
Achim Steiner, the director of the UN Environment Program left the summit before the conclusion was announced, saying that “I can't see anything in these negotiations that will prevent warming beyond 2ºC.”
“To do that will require the world's carbon dioxide emissions to peak by 2020, but it looks as if we may not even have an agreement in force until 2020,” the official said, hours before the agreement was announced and praised by officials.
It is important to see this agreement for what it actually is, and to understand that when politicians refer to it as a step forward, they are referring to talks between nations, and not the actual state of the climate.