Canada a blip on a warmer Earth
Self-serving humbug: Despite Trudeau’s posturing, Canada’s climate stance strictly for show
‘Canada is back, my good friends,” Justin Trudeau said at the end of his speech to the Paris climate summit, and then he did that thing he does, where he touches his heart with his hand.
For fans of self-serving humbug, this was the trifecta: the glib sloganeering, the false humility, the gaudy theatricality, and all in the service of — what? Beyond the suggestion, familiar from years past, that “Canada” equals “Liberal,” and the shower of applause in reply from his “good friends” at the conference, it’s hard to say.
Certainly in substantive terms it matters not a whit whether “Canada is back,” even supposing that meant anything and even supposing we were. As far as the future temperature of the Earth is concerned, Canada is irrelevant, being responsible for just 1.6 per cent of world emissions of carbon and other greenhouse gases. Any role we might play in Paris is strictly for show.
Which doesn’t mean we shouldn’t play it: as an example to others; as our contribution, however small, to the global effort to reduce these emissions. But the emissions targets set under the former Liberal government were unattainable, even had they tried. And the targets set by the former Conservative government were inadequate, even had they tried.
The long and the short of it is that, at roughly 700 megatonnes annually, we are nowhere near either our 2020 target, to which we committed at the 2009 climate summit in Copenhagen, of a 17 per cent reduction from 2005 levels, nor our 2030 target, agreed to earlier this year, of a 30 per cent reduction from 2005. Nor have we any serious plan to achieve either.
The current government has set no target beyond that, and has outlined no plan of its own, beyond a vague pledge to “put a price on carbon.” It has promised to meet the premiers in 90 days, having earlier said it would (much in the mould of the Conservative government) rely upon the provinces to take the lead. Each has accordingly adopted whatever policies it prefers in pursuit of whatever targets it thinks apt. Perhaps something more ambitious will come from those talks. Perhaps not.
But then, the same might be said of the global talks. Whatever emerges out of Paris, it is now clear, will not be legally binding, at least in any meaningful sense: it will be “legally binding,” that is, but only to the extent that it will require states to set targets for themselves: or as it is called in summitspeak, “Intended Nationally Determined Contributions” (INDC).
But there will be no system for monitoring performance, no penalties for non-compliance, no common benchmarks against which to measure progress or even consistent definitions. There can’t be, because there is no consensus on how much of the burden of reducing emissions each nation should assume, and no basis for reaching such consensus.
The developing countries insist the developed world should do most of the heavy lifting, since they account for so much of the emissions that have accumulated in the atmosphere to date; the richer countries reply that the poorer should do their part, since they will account for a growing share of the emissions to come.
The result is that China and India will commit to no reductions, or none that imply much effort, while the U.S. Congress will ratify no agreement without them (and probably not even with).
None of this will be allowed to impede the “success” of the summit, if by success you mean the rich countries (which have large environmental constituencies to keep happy) paying the poor (who do not) to pretend to agree to some sort of agreement ($100 billion annually is the figure being tossed around). Which is probably just as well, given the level of uncertainty that surrounds the whole exercise.
There is a scientific consensus that the observed warming in the Earth’s atmosphere, of a little under one degree Celsius since the pre-industrial age, is explained, at least in part, by rising levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. There is also a consensus that, past a certain point, global warming would have unpleasant or, in places, catastrophic effects. Beyond that all is in doubt.
We do not know how much the Earth is likely to warm by century’s end: estimates for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change range from 1.5 degrees to 4.5 degrees. We do not know how much would be too much: the “two degrees-above-preindustrial levels” number popularly thrown about as the tipping point turns out to have no actual scientific basis to it.
We can say with some certainty that, with atmospheric concentrations of emissions having already grown so large, it will require quite large reductions in the annual additions to the pile even to slow its growth, let alone reduce it: that’s a matter of arithmetic. We can project with rather less certainty what level of emissions will produce what amount of warming: that’s a matter of computer modelling. Existing models have tended to predict more warming than has actually occurred — which does not mean there is no causal relationship between the two, only that it is not easily modelled.
But so far as we can assess these things, we can say that the international emissions-reductions commitments made to date would at best slow the Earth’s warming: to 2.7 degrees Celsius by 2100, or only a little less than if we took no action.
If disaster is coming our way, we’d best learn to live with it.