A TIME FOR CHANGE HOW THE PARIS AGREEMENT COULD SHAPE THE FUTURE OF OUR CLIMATE
From 30th November to 12th December 2015, Paris, France, played host to the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference, otherwise known as COP 21. The conference saw the setting out of the Paris Agreement, which puts forward the ambitious goal of severely limiting global temperature rises, and therefore avoiding the more severe effects of climate change. The agreement follows 20 years of fraught and largely unsuccessful previous attempts to bind some 195 countries to a universal agreement such as has now been achieved.
However, the agreement still has to be ratifi ed, requiring nations responsible for more than 55% of emissions to formally sign up before the agreement can be made offi cial, and enshrined in international law.
Rachael Simpson
The agreement has been met with largely positive opinions, but there are those who feel that the agreement is overly ambitious, and cannot therefore be achieved. International Environmental
Technology Editor Rachael Simpson spoke recently to Professor Andrew Pitman, Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science, winner of the NSW Scientist of the Year Award, the Priestly Medal for Excellence in Atmospheric Science Research, and joint winner of the International Justice Prize for the Copenhagen Diagnosis (among many others), to fi nd out his thoughts on the Paris Agreement, and whether or not he thinks it is enough to avoid signifi cant climate change.
Q: For the sake of our readers, could you just give an introduction to your academic background, the fi elds that you specialise in, awards you’ve received and so on.
A: I’m a professor at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. I have been working in climate science since I fi nished my PhD in 1988. My particular speciality is modelling of the earth’s climate with a particular focus on terrestrial processes – energy, water and carbon cycling between the atmosphere and the land, but also I’m interested in the impacts of land cover change on climate and the impact of a whole variety of things on extremes. I have a particular interest in climate change and how land use change infl uences these climate and climate extremes.
I’ve got about 190 international publications, a couple of books, I’m a fellow of the American Meteorological Society, and I’ve won several wonderful Australian awards for climate science and such like. I was a lead author on the 3rd and 4th assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and a review editor on the 5th report.
Q: It was the COP21 talks back in December of 2015 – did you attend the talks?
A: No. Those talks are primarily very political – my area is in the hard-core science surrounding climate – working group 1 of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessments, so
IET January / February 2016
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my area of expertise is in that hard-core climate science – and I would run a mile from the opportunity to actually be at these talks!
Q: But as a climate scientist I’m sure you’ll have heard what the historic COP21 agreement entails.
A: Oh absolutely.
Q: The COP21 agreement aims to hold global temperature “to well below 2c above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5c above pre-industrial levels”. Can we still expect to see climate impacts as a result of this limited rise? And if so, what impacts?
A: We are already observing substantial changes in climate due to emissions to date. We’re seeing quite impressive changes in a range of climate extremes around the world, and that with global warming of 0.9 degrees celcius to date, so we are virtually doubling warming to date to get to 1.5. The thought that 1.5 is somehow safe is simply incompatible with the observations. However, 1.5 degrees is a shocking amount safer than 2 degrees, so what Paris did was set us on a trajectory. That was helpful, but it’s certainly by no means a solution and by no means the end of the story. If we warm by 2 degrees, and I’m willing to bet a case of very expensive champagne that we will, we are going to see amplifi cation of a whole range of extreme events. Whether we see any massive changes associated with tipping points is impossible to say with any certainty. The risks are already there, and as we go to our 1.5 or 2 degrees the risk of tipping is obviously amplifi ed substantially. Paris is a success story because it has been accepted that we should limit warming to 2 degrees and should ideally aim for 1.5 degrees. Unfortunately I think limiting warming to 1.5 is of very low probability, and perhaps has therefore identifi ed some naivety in the understanding of some of the science by decision makers.
Q: You were the lead author of The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment reports 3 and 4, and contributed to the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to the IPCC in 2007. The work also came under fi re for having some factual errors (such as the projected date of melting of Himalayan glaciers). Why do you think that research presented on climate change attracts such criticism from sceptics, as opposed to other areas of science?
A: Well I think there are actually a number of things that are picked on – go and look at some of the blogs on inoculating kids; that’s picked upon because there is a whole group people that think it’s a bad idea, and campaign online about how dangerous it is… There are a number of areas from genetically modifi ed foods through to nanoparticles in plastics that some groups get
terrifi cally worried about. Power lines, ultrasound coming from wind farms – none of this is evidence based. The attacks on climate science aren’t evidence based in the majority of cases, and I think that where it comes from is twofold.
One is that there are a suite of companies that recognise that the dominant issues surrounding climate change would destroy their current business model. I think some of them have to be inclined to transition to alternative business models where they have long-term viability. That happened around the Montreal Protocol and CFC’s – a number of major chemical companies denied the problems with the ozone hole for a very long time, surprisingly till they had an alternative and then they said “Look, it’s a real problem but hey – we have an alternative”. And so there are people who are profi ting from the case saying climate science is wrong as part of a well-defi ned strategy to buy time to allow a company to adjust. This is a pretty dangerous strategy – at least one major oil company is currently being investigated in the US around what it knew about climate change decades ago and whether they have been intentionally misleading the public.
There’s a second group of people who don’t like climate change because they perceive it to be an infringement upon their right to do whatever they personally want to do, irrespective of whether or not what they want to do will ultimately cause massive environmental challenges for the planet. As climate change has become a bigger and bigger issue it has attracted more and more groups out of the woodwork to attack the basic science. Not very well, on the whole, but they have done a stunningly good job of confusing the public. There is a fantastic book on all of this by Naomi Oreskes called Merchants of Doubt, and it’s a book I would highly recommend to anybody who wants to really understand that continuation from the denialist movement in the tobacco industry, through to the denialist movement saying DDT was good for you, through to the denialist movement saying there was no such thing as ozone depletion, through to the denialist movement on things like global warming.
Q: Looking at another of the IPCC reports, it was stated in the 2014 assessment report that the IPCC are “95 percent certain that humans are the main cause of current global warming” – why are humans causing such a problem with climate change and global warming?
A: So fi rst of all it’s really important to understand what that “95 percent” statement means. There is zero doubt that humans are a substantial cause, and the use of language “95 percent sure that humans are the main cause” represents this. In fact humans have caused somewhere between 80 – 120 per cent of the warming to date and that might sound a strange statement – how can it be more
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