Global warming has become perhaps the most complicated issue facing world leaders. Warnings from the scientific community are becoming louder, as an increasing body of science points to rising dangers from the ongoing buildup of human-related greenhouse gases — produced mainly by the burning of fossil fuels and forests.
Global emissions of carbon dioxide jumped by the largest amount on record in 2010, upending the notion that the brief decline during the recession might persist through the recovery. Emissions rose 5.9 percent in 2010, according to the Global Carbon Project, an international collaboration of scientists. The increase solidified a trend of ever-rising emissions that scientists fear will make it difficult, if not impossible, to forestall severe climate change in coming decades.
However, the technological, economic and political issues that have to be resolved before a concerted worldwide effort to reduce emissions can begin have gotten no simpler, particularly in the face of a global economic slowdown.
For almost two decades, the United Nations has sponsored annual global talks, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, an international treaty signed by 194 countries to cooperatively discuss global climate change and its impact. The conferences operate on the principle of consensus, meaning that any of the participating nations can hold up an agreement.
The conflicts and controversies discussed are monotonously familiar: the differing obligations of industrialized and developing nations, the question of who will pay to help poor nations adapt, the urgency of protecting tropical forests and the need to rapidly develop and deploy clean energy technology.
But the meetings have often ended in disillusionment, with incremental political progress but little real impact on the climate. The negotiating process itself has come under fire from some quarters, including the poorest nations who believe their needs are being neglected in the fight among the major economic powers. Criticism has also come from a small but vocal band of climate-change skeptics, many of them members of the United States Congress, who doubt the existence of human influence on the climate and ridicule international efforts to deal with it.
A Global Initiative Led by the U.S.
In mid-February 2012, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was expected to announce a new international effort focused on reducing emissions of common pollutants that contribute to rapid climate change and widespread health problems.
Impatient with the slow pace of international negotiations, the United States and a small group of countries — Bangladesh, Canada, Ghana, Mexico and Sweden as well as the United Nations Environment Program — are starting a program that will address short-lived pollutants like soot (also referred to as black carbon), methane and hydrofluorocarbons that have an outsize influence on global warming, accounting for 30 to 40 percent of global warming. Soot from diesel exhausts and the burning of wood, agricultural waste and dung for heating and cooking causes an estimated two million premature deaths a year, particularly in the poorest countries
Scientists say that concerted action on these substances can reduce global temperatures by 0.5 degrees Celsius by 2050 and prevent millions of cases of lung and heart disease by 2030.
The United States intends to contribute $12 million and Canada $3 million over two years to get the program off the ground and to help recruit other countries to participate. The United Nations Environment Program will run the project.
Officials hope that by tackling these fast-acting, climate-changing agents they can get results quicker than through the laborious and highly political negotiations conducted under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
2011 Global Talks in Durban
At the 2011 conference delegates from about 200 nations gathered together in Durban, South Africa. One of the issues left unresolved was the future of the Kyoto Protocol, the 1997 agreement that requires major industrialized nations to meet targets on emissions reduction but imposes no mandates on developing countries, including emerging economic powers and sources of global greenhouse gas emissions like China, India, Brazil and South Africa.
The United States is not a party to the protocol, having refused to even consider ratifying it because of those asymmetrical obligations. Some major countries, including Canada, Japan and Russia, have said they will not agree to an extension of the protocol next year unless the unbalanced requirements of developing and developed countries are changed. That is similar to the United States’ position, which is that any successor treaty must apply equally to all major economies.
Expectations for the meeting were low, and it ended with modest accomplishments: the promise to work toward a new global treaty in coming years and the establishment of a new climate fund.
The deal on a future treaty renewed the Kyoto Protocol for several more years. But it also began a process for replacing the protocol with something that treats all countries — including the economic powerhouses China, India and Brazil — equally. The future treaty deal was the most highly contested element of a package of agreements that emerged from the extended talks among the nations here.
The expiration date of the protocol — 2017 or 2020 — and the terms of any agreement that replaces it will be negotiated at future sessions.
The delegates also agreed on the creation of a fund to help poor countries adapt to climate change — though the precise sources of the money have yet to be determined — and to measures involving the preservation of tropical forests and the development of clean-energy technology. The reserve, called the Green Climate Fund, would help mobilize a promised $100 billion a year in public and private financing by 2020 to assist developing countries in adapting to climate change and converting to clean energy sources.
2010 Global Talks in Cancún
The United Nations conference on climate change in Cancún, Mexico, produced only modest achievements but ended with the toughest issues unresolved. The package that was approved, known as the Cancún Agreements, set up a new fund to help poor countries adapt to climate changes, created new mechanisms for transfer of clean energy technology, provided compensation for the preservation of tropical forests and strengthened the emissions reductions pledges that came out of the U.N. climate change meeting in Copenhagen in 2009.
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