Wither the climate, 10 years after?

Coral reefs might have a slightly better future ahead of them if the promises from 2015 in Paris bear fruit. Ten years on, it’s still hard to determine if that is the case. Photo from XL Catlin Seaview Survey via International Society for Reef Studies

Whenever I think about global climate change, I think of coral reefs. Because unless we radically change our behavior very soon, coral reefs will disappear from this planet before this century is done. Think about that for a moment.

In just two months it will be 10 years since the adoption of the Paris Agreement on 12^th December 2015. It was a momentous agreement, significant because virtually all countries had signed it, and because it was a legally binding agreement requiring each country to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions commensurate with preventing mean global temperature rising more than 2^oC above preindustrial levels, while working to keep the rise within 1.5^oC.

I remember the heady optimism at the time, and the sense that the world community had finally turned the corner and was committed to really addressing climate change. Here is what I said in a post on this site that December:

“It’s over!  The huge circus that is a climate conference has come to an end and the thousands of participants have made their way home.  Some of them will have dutifully paid to offset the carbon they used by attending. 

“As climate conferences go, this was a good one.  It went the anticipated day past its scheduled end, but an agreement was reached that all 196 participant nations could sign onto.  Canada performed well, although it still picked up a couple of Fossil of the Day awards.  Our performance was much closer to what I would always have expected of Canada, a refreshing change from past conferences.  And the agreement does have a few teeth.  I’ll summarize the good things that happened, but before doing that, I want to bring the hot air balloons back to earth and emphasize just how big a battle faces us all in the decades to come.”

Yes, I have always been good at pointing out the problems while everyone else is basking in the glow of the good stuff. Here’s what I said about the battle:

“Just how big is the challenge facing us?  By increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases (GHGs) in the atmosphere we have already raised the mean temperature of the planet by about 1^oC.  We are currently adding GHGs at the rate of about 36 GtCO₂ (Gigatonnes of CO₂) emitted to the atmosphere per year.  Every tonne emitted adds to the insulative properties of the atmosphere, and therefore it is possible to think in terms of a total budget of CO₂ emissions that can be used in the future while still keeping the global temperature increase to less than 2^oC.  In a recent article in Nature Geoscience, Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at University of Manchester has spelled things out clearly.  He draws on the IPCC numbers (from Section 2.1 of their AR5 Synthesis Report, 2014): no more than 1000 GtCO₂ [Gt = billion tonnes of CO₂] should be emitted between 2011 and 2100 if we want to keep temperature increase below 2^oC.  He points out that energy production and use and cement production together resulted in emission of about 140 GtCO₂ during 2011-2014.  This means that the 1000 Gt budget has already been reduced to 860 Gt.  He then provides plausible arguments for cement production between now and 2100 emitting about 150 Gt and deforestation over the same period costing a further 60 Gt.  That leaves a total of 650 GtCO₂ to be emitted due to energy use over the remainder of the century.  Given that our current energy policies are releasing 36 GtCO₂ each year, we have very little room to move. Anderson suggests the rate of emissions reduction will have to rachet up to about 10% a year by 2025.  (Bear in mind that until now the global rate of emissions has been growing every year – 2015 may have seen the first tiny reduction – so a 10% per year rate of reduction means enormous change from present practices.)

“The need for far more stringent reductions in emissions than have been announced in Paris is why people in the know are both praising the outcome of that conference and warning that it is not nearly enough to get the job done.  The need for really substantive reductions will begin to sink in, and really needs to sink in, among policy makers over the next few months.  Because if we do not make these really substantive cuts, we really are rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.”

But then I turned to the good stuff, the successes of COP21:

“So what did COP21 really achieve?  It is the first global agreement in which there is a tacit understanding that developing countries, as well as developed countries, have got to make efforts to restrain their emissions.  While the individually announced targets to 2030 are voluntary, with no enforcement mechanism (other than shaming) to ensure countries actually meet them, there is a mandatory reporting of progress by each country, every five years beginning in 2018.  There is also an expectation that at each reporting interval, countries will rachet up their commitments bringing total emissions reductions into line with what is needed to keep warming controlled.

“The agreement even includes language speaking of an immediate 2^oC goal and a long-term 1.5^oC goal, a victory for those who believe looking after the oceans might be important, and in my view an important step in the right direction.  Coral reef scientists were among those who lobbied hard for this language.

“One major deficiency in the agreement is the lack of any significant discussion on how to put a price on carbon.  If we had a global price on carbon emissions, or even a series of separate, but integrated, national prices, that would provide the financial incentive that is needed to get the problem of emissions strenuously attacked.  Paris made no progress on that one.  Another area where the agreement is particularly weak is in the area of finance.  There are nice words stating that developed countries should be contributing funds to help developing countries struggling to adapt to climate impacts, even a nominal annual amount of such funding ($100 billion by 2025), but no mechanisms to encourage such behavior or even to examine foreign aid contributions to see if money is simply being re-labeled as climate-related.  What is needed is a real influx of new foreign aid to help developing countries.  Canada might help India build nuclear and/or solar instead of coal-fired plants, for example.  Done right, such foreign aid often results in some economic gain for the developed country as well.”

Fast forward 10 years and it looks as if Paris in 2015 might have been the high-water mark in the battle to curb climate change. An initial sign of growing momentum was tamped down pretty quickly when President Trump withdrew the USA from the climate agreement shortly after being elected to his first term.

Then came covid. A pandemic which diverted attention from most everything else. Paradoxically, the economic collapse caused by the pandemic did some very good things for climate as skies cleared and CO₂ emissions declined.

Global CO₂ emissions have grown nearly every year since 1970. The global market downturn in 2008 and the covid pandemic are responsible for the only two reductions since 1980, each of one year’s duration – 2009 and 2020. Image from JRC-EDGAR report on emissions by all countries, 2025.

But there was only one year of decline before our growth in annual emissions continued. And with our eyes diverted, lots of corporations began backtracking on commitments they had made and many countries realized people were not paying as much attention to climate. Here in Canada, climate change was barely mentioned during the recent election; we were more worried about tariffs or annexation.

Among the biggest fossil fuel providers, Exxon, Shell, BP and Equinor have all scaled back their investments in alternative energy while increasing investment in production of gas and oil. It is now apparent that some of their earlier promotion of solar, wind and biofuels was greenwashing, and that the energy dislocations caused by the war in Ukraine have been convenient excuses to ramp up fossil production. Trump’s push to ‘drill, baby, drill’ will likely encourage expansion of oil and gas production in the USA, but markets will be more important than Presidential edicts.

The IEA now projects peak demand for oil, gas and coal to all occur by 2030, with slow decline after that. But Exxon, in its 2025 Global Outlook shows both oil and gas demand continuing to rise slowly through to 2050.

Exxon’s projection of continued high demand for oil and gas reveals a different future to that expected by IEA. Graph from Exxon 2025 Global Outlook.

Both of these projections will not be true, but the fossil fuel industry seems set on keeping demand for their products as high as they can. Needless to say, the behavior of the fossil fuel companies continues to be a brake on the global push to switch away from GHG-emitting fuels. And countries like the US seem to prefer the reliable economic growth claimed to result if we continue to use fossil fuels.

What does all this spell for climate change? It is not good. Carbon Action Tracker, in a late 2024 publication, projects warming of 2.7^oC by 2100 and further warming beyond that date. The overwhelming majority of countries have not yet put in place policies that will pull emissions down at the pace needed for even the 2.0^oC target. And any sense that we will continue to go on experiencing business as usual is a great effort at ignoring the real facts. Climate will continue to warm over the next several decades unless there are some dramatic changes in attitudes by policy makers around the world.

But there is a thin silver lining in all of this. Projections are not reality. They are guesstimates based on current conditions and wise use of data. While the projections by IEA and Exxon cannot both be correct, they could both be wrong. IEA has consistently underestimated the rapidity of the growth of solar, wind and other non-fossil energy sources, and the changing climate is now beginning to bite people in the developed world as well as in far away places. It remains possible that the world may move even more rapidly away from GHG-emitting fossil fuels than IEA is now projecting. The irony is that such an accelerated transition might have more to do with costs of energy and a growing desire of people to not do what the Trump administration is pushing. A lot of bitumen seems likely to remain buried in Alberta simply because it is already too expensive to dig up, process and sell.

And what about that coral reef in Samoa. The site of that photo, in shallow water close to the airport runway in American Samoa, was heavily bleached in 2015 and several times more during the intervening years. But I am told by reliable sources that while the vast field of staghorn coral has never come back, there is still coral there, and fish, and all the other creatures that make a reef a reef. It may yet remain more than a dead limestone bench. I hope so.

Search

Search