Sunday, 11 December 2011

The UN Climate Talk agreement: Can the oceans be relieved from the acid test challenge?


Followed by the failures of the Kyoto Protocol to call upon a legally-binding agreement for countries to reduce carbon emissions, the UN Climate Talk this year finally ends with some results today. You can click here for the Guardian news link. 

Seventeenth session of the Conference of the Parties (COP 17) has been taken place since the 28th November at Durban, South Africa and finally comes to an end two days ago, with a commitment by all countries to accept binding emission cuts by 2020. A new climate fund is also agreed to be set up, carbon markets will be expanded and countries will be able to earn money by protecting forests. Hopefully, this deal will be able to force countries to cut their emissions enough to stay under a 2oC temperature increase, the threshold of ‘dangerous climate change’.

In no doubt, this climate talk is a great step forward towards a legally-binding joint action of all countries to cut their carbon emissions. By adopting a lower IPCC emission scenario, it might increase levels of certainty in future climate projections. Hopefully, the oceans will be able to absorb and buffer upon this lower and constant anthropogenic CO2 without dramatic changes in pH and marine ecosystems. Nevertheless, neutralisation and CO2 buffering in the ocean is a very long process, in a timescale of hundreds and thousands of years. The effects of this climate deal are therefore yet to be seen.  

2 comments:

  1. I was reading up on the Durban conference as well on the Guardian. It seems to me that while developed and developing countries have agreed to make agreements (to cut emissions) legally binding, it still seems rather wishy washy to me. And also, I think the agreements and the conference ended with countries preparing for a 4 degree celsius world, which I think in effect is pretty useless since a 4 degrees celsius rise in temperature still has a long reaching arm of destruction.

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/dec/12/durban-climate-deal-verdict

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  2. Hi Wei Rong,

    I haven't been following up the Durban news since last Sunday so thank you for your comment!The so-called new legally binding agreement does sound very wishy washy, and a 4 degree rise is certainly not a good thing!

    As the UNFCCC executive secretary, Christiana Figueres said, there are still lots of details to be hammered out for this new legal agreement. It is a very difficult challenge indeed to find a reasonable and fair emission limit for every single country. In no doubt, the developed world has to do a lot more to cut their own emissions based on their economic capibility, advanced technologies, and more importantly, moral and ethical reasons.

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