WHY FIGHT AGAINST CLIMATE CHANGE IS FAILING


Climate Change is two words commonly used together. It means a change in climate. But it is not an ordinary change in climate. It is a change of global proportion that may lead to obliteration of our civilization. Climate is a long-term prevalent weather of an area, determined by latitude, altitude etc. Weather is the day to day meteorological conditions, especially temperature, cloudiness, and rainfall affecting a specific place. Change is to make different; alter. Those are definitions from Collin’s English Dictionary. Putting the two together in simple terms, it means the climate is becoming different from what it should be or the climate is undergoing an alteration. The climate is suffering an imbalance.

Technically, Climate Change is the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere with consequent adverse changes in the environment. Gases such as: carbon dioxide (CO₂), methane (CH₄), nitrous oxide (N₂O), perfluorocarbons (PFCѕ), hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), and sulphur hexafluoride (SF₆). These gases actually raise the global average temperature.

The adverse effect of climate change on the environment is disturbing. Sea level is rising. Drought is on the increase. Sea ice is melting. There are frequent floods. The long term effect of these phenomena is extinction of species on planet Earth.

Because of the global dimension of the phenomena, there was the need to raise supranational framework to reverse gaseous imbalance in the atmosphere to a stable and balanced state. The United Nations Environment Programme and World Meteorological Organization of the United Nations establish the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to look into the matter in 1988.

The findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change triggered the formation of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and as a follow up, the Kyoto Protocol. These became the main basic global tools for reducing and stabilizing greenhouse gases (GHG) in the atmosphere. The Convention was adopted in May, 1992, and came into force in March, 1994, and the Kyoto Protocol was adopted in December, 1997 and came into force in February, 2005. As of June, 2007 191 countries have ratified the UNFCCC. Countries agreed that they need to work to stay below two degrees in temperature rise.

Despite such a great initiative, and time and efforts put into it, implementation of the convention and protocol is not yielding the desired results. There are reasons for the failures as follows:

INADEQUACIES OF CONVENTION AND PROTOCOL

The creation of another treaty, Kyoto Protocol, as an extension to the UNFCCC in itself is an indication of the inadequacy of the UNFCCC. The Kyoto Protocol itself will be reviewed in 2015 and replaced with a new one to be enforced in 2020. The Kyoto Protocol built upon and enhanced some of the commitments in the UNFCCC. To help industrialized countries to meet their commitments, and developing countries, sustainable development, the Kyoto Protocol adopted three new tools- the clean development mechanism, joint implementation and emissions trading. The Kyoto Protocol created an electronic database to monitor transactions. The Protocol set a compliance committee with mandate to decide and apply consequences for non-compliance. Emission reduction targets were not enough to reduce concentration levels of greenhouse gases.

COMMITMENT

Countries like Japan, New Zealand and Russia did not take on new targets in Kyoto Protocol in the second commitment period which started in 2012. Canada withdrew from the Kyoto Protocol in 2012. The United States has not ratified the Protocol at all. Kazakhstan, Belarus and Ukraine said they may withdraw from the Protocol, or not implement the second round targets. As of July, 2015 only 36 countries have accepted the Doha Amendment which requires 144 countries to accept before it could be enforced. India, China and United States of America, leading emitters of greenhouse gases (GHG), have indicated they will not ratify any treaty that will bind them to legally reduce carbon dioxide emissions. The UNFCCC (Article 4.2) initially expected industrialized countries to stabilize emissions at 1990 levels by 2000, but key industrialized countries failed to do so.    

LEADING EMMITERS NOT BOUND BY THE TREATIES

China, India and the United States of America are not bound by the treaties. The United States senate did not ratify the Kyoto Protocol.  The position of the Bush administration was that Protocol did not cover eighty percent of the people of the world including China and India, and that ratifying the Protocol will harm the US economy. However, it was supposed that the position was taken to protect the oil and coal industries in the US.

DENIAL

There are some who do not believe climate change is caused by human activities. Their position is that it is caused by the sun, and that it is cyclical. The cycles in the Sun affect climate on Earth, for medium and long term. It is argued that the flow of carbon dioxide, between the atmosphere, plants, ocean and so forth, are chemical reactions whose rates are subject to temperature. Since almost all heat coming to Earth comes from the Sun, when there is variation in the Sun automatically a change occurs in the climate. Consequently, a change occurs in quantum of human activities. So, if you are getting this clearly, it starts with variation in the Sun, which has bearing on the climate (a change), which in turn affects human activities. Logically, from the foregoing, it is rather climate change which causes change in human activities and not the other way round! Another position is that temperature change precipitates CO₂ change.

APATHY

Impact of climate change occurs at the North Pole, where glaciers and ice melt. People do not live at the North Pole so people outside of the North Pole will have a hard time grasping what climate change is. Some people live under conditions such that they hardly feel the heat created by climate change. Such a person lives in an air conditioned house, from the house he rides in an air conditioned car to an air conditioned office. He shops in an air conditioned mall. How can climate change be meaningful to such a person? The technicalities and vocabulary used in United Nations literature is not understood by the many persons. How then could such people (who are the many) relate appropriately to the climate change menace? Take mass extinctions for example. The sixth one said to be ongoing is supposed to be caused by human activities- emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Extinctions take millions of years to happen- in some cases hundreds of millions of years. The passive attitude will arise from the feeling that it is not going to happen in our lifetime.   

POSITION OF TRANSNATIONAL CORPORATION


“With alarm bells suddenly ringing, Exxon started financing efforts to amplify doubt about the state of climate science.

Exxon helped to found and lead the Global Climate Coalition, an alliance of some of the world's largest companies seeking to halt government efforts to curb fossil fuel emissions. Exxon used the American Petroleum Institute, right-wing think tanks, campaign contributions and its own lobbying to push a narrative that climate science was too uncertain to necessitate cuts in fossil fuel emissions.

As the international community moved in 1997 to take a first step in curbing emissions with the Kyoto Protocol, Exxon's chairman and CEO Lee Raymond argued to stop it”.

The initiative to conceive, engineer and craft a framework to deal with the issue of climate change is a step in the right direction, that is if the causative premise is right, but the task is enormous and requires a lot more effort to deal with the issue. Though overwhelming majority of experts is of the opinion that climate change is driven by human activities, there is not a hundred percent certainty in that thinking.



Reference:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyoto_Protocol

britannica.com/event/Kyoto-Protocol

http://cyclesresearchinstitute.wordpress.com/2012/09/17/human-activity-is-not-the-cause-of-climate-change-it-is-the-result/

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