Climate Progress: An insider's view of climate science, politics, and solutions

Climate migration will be one way in which humans adapt to global warming and it has numerous humanitarian, security, and legal implications that present an opportunity and mandate to handle climate migrants with a sustainable security framework, write Michael Werz and Kari Manlove in this guest post from CAP.

Fast forward to the year 2050. The world’s population will be up to 9 billion people according to the United Nations—an increase of one-third. More than 90 percent of this growth will take place in developing countries. Estimates also predict that 200 million people will be newly mobilized as climate migrants by 2050 due to global warming’s effects. This increased migration will very likely affect global security, which makes it imperative for the United States and other nations to begin formulating responses to climate migration now.

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Here’s some flavor of Copenhagen — a repost from Tommaso Boggia of Campus Progress.

(sorry for my bad performance in this first video, I’m still getting used to being in front of a camera!)

I got to Copenhagen on December 4th and will be hanging out here at the United Nations international climate negotiation until the 20th. In this time, delegates from all nations in the world and many world leaders will swing by to either try to move the process forward or put roadblocks to climate action.

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CAP roving correspondent Brad Johnson has his first dispatch from Copenhagen.  Brad arrived after a red-eye through Reykjavik, to cover the United Nations Climate Change Conference in person. Follow the Center for American Progress Copenhagen Twitter feed here.

Copenhagen — the Venice of Scandinavia — is overrun with attendees of the conference and related activities, and festooned with climate-related advertisements. Oceana’s ads argues that shellfish and coral reefs will be gone by 2050 unless a target of 350 ppm is set for carbon dioxide concentrations — less than today’s 387 ppm. The global activist campaign Tcktcktck portrays the world’s leaders of today, in 2020, their aged faces next to expressions of regret that they failed to halt catastrophic climate change. Meanwhile, other ads portray various energy companies as green superstars — a theme familiar to any rider of the Washington D.C. metro. At the Bella Center, southeast of the center city, the conference has begun.

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Copenhagen, where the United Nations international climate change summit convenes this week.  This piece by CAP’s Rebecca Lefton, Andrew Light, Kari Manlove, and Daniel J. Weiss with first published here.

You can watch live webcasts from Copenhagen here.

The ingredients for a successful outcome at Copenhagen are all there. We are on track to set the architecture for a legally binding agreement in 2010 by following a two-step Danish proposal supported by President Barack Obama and finalizing an interim agreement at the meeting. Here’s how actions by the Obama administration and international community have moved us toward establishing an international agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and why doing so will help every nation.

The United States has laid the groundwork for negotiations

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In October, Brazil’s President announced, “I foresee that by 2020 we will be able to reduce deforestation by 80 percent; in other words, we will emit some 4.8 billion fewer tons of carbon dioxide gas.”

Now, a new article in the December 4 issue of Science, “The End of Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon,” (subs. req’d, abstract below), explains just how modest is the funding needed to beat that goal — “$7 to $18 billion beyond Brazil’s current budget outlays.”  And that could mean “the end of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon, which could result in a 2 to 5% reduction in global carbon emissions.”

As the news release from the Woods Hole Research Center explains, Brazil has already made significant reductions in deforestation in that last few years:

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Again, anyone who thinks there’s not going to be a bipartisan climate bill in the spring or an international deal coming out of Copenhagen isn’t paying attention:

Citing progress on many issues, the White House said Friday that President Obama had shifted the date he would appear at the United Nations climate change conference in Copenhagen to Dec. 18, the last scheduled day.

That’s the NY Times lede on the following remarkable announcement from the White House:

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The Climate Scoreboard is a new, easily accessible tool for understanding and tracking the global climate change negotiations in real time.

This new online resource — an embeddable widget, a short video, and a set of graphs and a table —  reports, on a daily basis, the long-term climate implications of proposals to the United Nations negotiations in Copenhagen.

The Scoreboard team will follow the negotiations in Copenhagen from day to day, and continue tracking progress in the months following the conference, addressing the question: if current proposals for emissions reductions were implemented how much future warming would be avoided?

My friend Drew Jones will be at Copenhagen tracking the commitments with his new widget.  Drew is coauthor of this guest blog post describing his work (”Only the most ambitious emissions reductions under discussion within UNFCCC can achieve climate goals“).  The widget and his explanation are from his blog.

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Here’s a useful online tool for converting a major country’s 2020 emissions reduction target from one baseline year to another.

This is an interview with Tzeporah Berman, Executive Director and co-founders of PowerUp Canada.  If you don’t think the U.S. is doing enough, you’ll love what our northern neighbors are (not) doing:

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President Obama and other world leaders will gather in Copenhagen next week to discuss climate change. Though this is a global issue, it’s also a profoundly local one. For this reason, the Op-Ed editors asked writers from four different continents to report on the climate changes they’ve experienced close to home. Here are their dispatches.

Here are snippets of the four stories that ran in the NYT this weekend, along with their illustrations:

South Africa’s Fire Kingdom
In Cape Town, a rise in unpredictable and more ferocious fires are destroying the ecosystem.

… “When we were young,” the old man in Greenmarket Square observed, “seasons came and went in a predictable rhythm. Now seasons have gone amok.”

The Penquins of Brazil
In Rio de Janeiro, shifiting ocean currents and water temperatures have changed bird migration patterns.

… In the years that followed, dozens and then hundreds of gray-and-white Magellanic penguins appeared on our coasts, coming all the way from Patagonia and the Straits of Magellan.

In Japan, Concerns Blossom
In Tokyo, it no longer snows in winter.

… In place of the snow that used to fall in winter, the dry, cold blasts of wind come back, followed almost immediately by the unbearable heat of summer….

Because of climate change, the weather always betrays our expectations, making us wonder if the earth isn’t in its last days.

Since the climate conference is in Copenhagen, here’s the entire essay on Denmark:

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In December 2009, twenty thousand people, including about 40 heads of state, will converge in Copenhagen to decide how the world responds to escalating climate change over the next half century.

If successful, the meeting of 192 member countries of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) will send a clear signal to business and industry, governments and citizens around the world. Commitments made and mechanisms agreed will signal that the future belongs to a low-carbon economy and that tomorrow’s winners will be those that invest in clean energy solutions. It will also set in motion swift support for the most vulnerable in adapting to a warming world.

Copenhagen starts next week, and Climate Progress will be doing double duty covering the conference and continuing to blog on climate science, solutions, and politics.  And that means I’m getting a lot of help.  The Center for American progress will have a team of bloggers there, including me.  But I’ll also be running lots of guest posts.

For instance, a good backgrounder on the conference was just put out by the World Resources Institute, “Foundation for a Low Carbon Future: Essential Elements of a Copenhagen Agreement,” quoted above.

WRI has a very good overview figure on “A Two Step Process: Completing A New Legal Climate Agreement,” which I reprint below (click to enlarge)

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China promised to slow its carbon emissions, saying it would nearly halve the ratio of pollution to GDP over the next decade — a major move by the world’s largest emitter, whose cooperation is crucial to any deal as a global climate summit approaches.Beijing’s voluntary pledge Thursday came a day after President Barack Obama promised the U.S. would lay out plans at the summit to substantially cut its own greenhouse gas emissions. Together, the announcements are building momentum for next month’s meeting in Copenhagen.

“Governments from all over the world are delivering before the climate conference,” Denmark’s Climate Minister Connie Hedegaard said. “U.S. and China have come forward. All across the globe, things are moving. This is good news.”

If China did nothing and its economy doubles in size as expected in coming years, its emissions would likely double as well. Thursday’s pledge means emissions would only increase by 50 percent in such a scenario.

Environmental groups and leaders largely welcomed China’s move.

“Before Copenhagen, we desperately need this good news,” said Yu Jie, head of policy and research programs for The Climate Group China, a non-governmental group. She described China’s 45 percent target as “quite aggressive.”

… Yvo de Boer, the United Nations climate chief, said the pledges by China and the U.S. pave the way for a deal.”The U.S. commitment to specific, midterm emission cut targets and China’s commitment to specific action on energy efficiency can unlock two of the last doors to a comprehensive agreement,” he said.

That’s from the conservative Washington Times (subs. req’d) story “China vows to dramatically slow emissions growth.”

Is this a big deal?  Is this a game-changer, is this a “possible breakthrough in Denmark next month in the long-stalled climate negotiations” as the Washington Post put it Friday?  Yes and no.  This isn’t really a game changer because it has been so long in the making — see my May post, “Exclusive: Have China and the U.S. been holding secret talks aimed at a climate deal this fall?“  The game changing on the Chinese side came two months ago (see “Are Chinese emissions pledges a game changer for Senate action?“):

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We’ve seen that the “New U.S.-India Green Partnership improves prospects for global climate deal.”  But Treehugger has more on the world’s most populous democracy (and the photo is B Balaji via flickr). First,”It’s Finally Official – India’s National Solar Mission Aims for 20 Gigawatts Solar Power by 2022“:

Rumors and draft reports have been circulating about India’s National Solar Mission plan since early summer, but the program has finally been officially announced. Approved just in time for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s visit with President Obama, the plan aims for 20 gigawatts on solar power capacity by 2022:

Greenpeace has already done some quick calculations (probably had them done months ago, truth be told) and estimates that the NSM, part of National Action Plan on Climate Change, could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 12-18%, with annual reductions of 434 million tons of CO2 avoided annually through 2050, provided that the solar power actually displaced fossil fuel-generated electricity.

Siddharth Pathak, Climate and Energy Policy officer for Greenpeace India praised the announcement,

“With the release of the NSM, the Indian Government has categorically shown that is is acting on climate change and moving away from a carbon-intensive, business-as-usual scenario. This puts pressure on the developed countries to commit and put their GHG emission reduction targets at Copenhagen.”

I’d note that the U.S. may end up doing 20 GW of solar by 2020 — but we’ll need to pass the bipartisan climate and clean energy bill and probably need two terms of Obama, and it’d be mostly concentrated solar power (see World’s largest solar plant with thermal storage to be built in Arizona — total of 8500 MW of this core climate solution planned for 2014 in U.S. alone).

Treehugger’s second post on India is more intriguing, albeit more speculative, “Is India Set To Announce Emissions Targets?”

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This guest post is by Julian L. Wong, senior policy analyst at the Center for American Progress

Yesterday, the chances improved for meaningful progress at Copenhagen, the UN conference on climate change that is less than two weeks away.

President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh have signed a series of cooperation agreements in the launch of a U.S.-India “Green Partnership” on energy security, climate change and food security.  These agreements come just a week after the United States and China have entered into a similarly impressive range of agreements (see previous guest posts “U.S. and China announce “positive, cooperative and comprehensive” plan for collaboration on clean energy and climate change” and “Announcements of U.S.-China cooperation create a path to Copenhagen success”).

There are three features of the U.S.-India announcements that are compelling:

1. Commitment to a strong outcome in Copenhagen, grounded in “full transparency”

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White House hits back on climate critics

That’s the banner headline at the Politico, which reports:

“It would be a mistake to conclude that the international community’s failure to reach a final treaty in Copenhagen is due to a lack of domestic legislation in the United States,” said a senior White House official, who briefed reporters on the condition of anonymity.

The United States, said officials, plans to propose a near-term emissions reduction target as part of a “meaningful submission” the country will present at the talks.

The BBC’s story is even more specific on the proposed target (though I think a little off):

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U.S. President Barack Obama tours the Great Wall in Badaling, China on Wednesday, November 18.  This is a CAP repost by Julian L. Wong and Andrew Light.

The United States and China announced on Tuesday a package of cooperative agreements on clean energy and climate change that are remarkable in both breadth and ambition. The cluster of seven initiatives, partnerships, action plans, and research centers covers a range of low-carbon energy strategies from electric cars to energy efficiency technologies.

These agreements follow on the heels of last Sunday’s announcement at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting that the United States has embraced the Danish proposal for finalizing an interim international climate agreement in Copenhagen in December. The U.S.-China summit help further signal a positive shift in expectations for Copenhagen between the two countries responsible for 40 percent of the planet’s anthropogenic carbon emissions.

Perhaps the most important, and most overlooked, achievement at this week’s summit was the commitment to promote greater transparency on efforts to reduce emissions. This should increase confidence for the prospects of creating a robust international agreement on climate change.

Transparency, accountability, and verification

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