Limiting the increase in global temperature to less than 2°C : it’s too late !
Posted on the 07.11.2011 by Alain Hubert
Since a few years that I give speeches all over, I do not stop saying that we the people and the countries of the world will not be able to limit the increase in global earth temperature to less than 2°C like the agrement reached at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Conference in Cancun 2010 had foreseen. In a article published last October the famous scientific magazine Nature says the same...
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A global Treaty
The Next UNFCCC (United Nations Frameword Convention on Climate Change) will be held in Durban, South Africa, between 28 November and 09 December 2011.
Recap : In 1992 (Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro), countries joined an international treaty, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, to cooperatively consider what they could do to limit average global temperature increases and the resulting climate change, and to cope with whatever impacts were, by then, inevitable. By 1995, countries realized that emission reductions provisions in the Convention were inadequate. They launched negotiations to strengthen the global response to climate change, and, two years later, adopted the Kyoto Protocol. The Kyoto Protocol legally binds developed countries to emission reduction targets. The Protocol’s first commitment period started in 2008 and ends in 2012.
What happens beyond 2012 is one of the key issues governments of the 195 Parties to the Convention are currently negotiating. Climate change is a complex problem, which, although environmental in nature, has consequences for all spheres of existence on our planet. It either impacts on -or is impacted by- global issues, including poverty, economic development, population growth, sustainable development and resource management. It is not surprising, then, that solutions come from all disciplines and fields of research and development.
I has been said -and recognized- that at the very heart of the response to climate change lies the need to reduce emissions. In 2010 in Cancun Conference, all governments agreed that emissions need to be reduced so that global temperature increases are limited to below 2 degrees Celsius.
Below 2°C : it's too late !
In all the speeches I give all around Europe, I do not stop saying that due do the fact that the CO2 emissions will carry on raising despite all the awareness campaigns launched here and there on our planet, we have to concentrate on what I call the 'Energetic Equation'. Our interest to keep the economic and social development going in the right way is to reexamine deeply the way we build our houses and buildings, the way we heat them ; in the same strategy, we have also to reconsider all the urban and interurban transportations. And last but not least, we have also to reanalyse the way we use electricty.
In fact, these three domains (construction, transport and energy) form the very heart of the employment of our developed countries if we accept to rebuild and rethink a new global economy.
In its October Issue (23 October 2011), the famous scientific magazine Nature was not too far away from what I think. Excerpts : "... If this (limit the increase in global average temperature to less than 2 °C) is to be achieved, policymakers need robust information about the amounts of future greenhouse-gas emissions that are consistent with such temperature limit°C) s. This, in turn, requires an understanding of both the technical and economic implications of reducing emissions and the processes that link emissions to temperature. Here we consider both of these aspects by reanalysing a large set of published emission scenarios from integrated assessment models in a risk-based climate modelling framework. We find that in the set of scenarios with a ‘likely’ (greater than 66%) chance of staying below 2 °C, emissions peak between 2010 and 2020 and fall to a median level of 44 Gt of CO2 equivalent in 2020 (compared with estimated median emissions across the scenario set of 48 Gt of CO2 equivalent in 2010). Our analysis confirms that if the mechanisms needed to enable an early peak in global emissions followed by steep reductions are not put in place, there is a significant risk that the 2 °C target will not be achieved. ..."
See the site of the Durban Conference
See a recap of all the international meetings
Since 1979 the nations of the world get together regularly to analyse what the roads should be to reduce the CO2 emissions
© United Nations press bureau
