OBAMA MAKES SAD FIRST STOP IN PARIS
Leaders gather in Paris,18 years after last global warming deal was struck
Paris — At another time, it would have been a glorious tour of Paris by night. But for the saddest of destinations.
President Barack Obama landed in Paris just before midnight Sunday and his motorcade took an unexpected route along the Seine. He rode past the Eiffel Tower, the French Assembly building, the Bastille. Then, he arrived at the Bataclan.
The American president strode purposefully toward the shuttered French concert hall where terrorists wrought so much horror two weeks ago.
Paris — This time, it’s a hotter, waterier, wilder Earth that world leaders are trying to save.
The last time that the nations of the world struck a binding agreement to fight global warming was 1997, in Kyoto, Japan. As leaders gather for a conference in Paris today to try to do more, it’s clear things have changed dramatically over the past 18 years.
Some differences can be measured: degrees on a thermometer, trillions of tons of melting ice, a rise in sea level of a couple of inches. Epic weather disasters, including punishing droughts, killer heat waves and monster storms, have plagued Earth.
As a result, climate change is seen as a more urgent and concrete problem than it was last time.
“At the time of Kyoto, if someone talked about climate change, they were talking about something that was abstract in the future,” said Marcia McNutt, the former U.S. Geological Survey director who was picked to run the National Academies of Sciences. “Now, we’re talking about changing climate, something that’s happening now. You can point to event after event that is happening in the here and now that is a direct result of changing climate.”
Other, nonphysical changes since 1997 have made many experts more optimistic than in previous climate negotiations.
For one, improved technology is pointing to the possibility of a world weaned from fossil fuels, which emit heat-trapping gases. Businesses and countries are more serious about doing something, in the face of evidence that some of science’s worstcase scenarios are coming to pass.
“I am quite stunned by how much the Earth has changed since 1997,” Princeton University Environmental Institute’s Bill Anderegg said in an email. “In many cases (e.g. Arctic sea ice loss, forest die-off due to drought), the speed of climate change is proceeding even faster than we thought it would two decades ago.”
By the numbers
Some of the cold numbers on global warming since 1997:
The West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets have lost 5.5 trillion tons of ice, or 5 trillion metric tons, according to Andrew Shepherd at the University of Leeds, who analyzed NASA and European satellite data.
The five-year average surface global temperature for January to October has risen by nearly two-thirds of a degree Fahrenheit, or 0.36 degrees Celsius, between 199397 and 2011-15, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. In 1997, Earth set a record for the hottest year, but it didn’t last. Records were set in 1998, 2005, 2010 and 2014, and it is sure to happen again in 2015 when the results are in from the year, according to NOAA.
The average glacier has lost about 39 feet, or 12 meters, of ice thickness since 1997, according to Samuel Nussbaumer at the World Glacier Monitoring Service in Switzerland.
With 1.2 billion more people in the world, carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels climbed nearly 50 percent between 1997 and 2013, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. The world is spewing more than 100 million tons of carbon dioxide a day now.
The seas have risen nearly 2½ inches, or 6.2 centimeters, on average since 1997, according to calculations by the University of Colorado.
At its low point during the summer, the Arctic sea ice is on average 820,000 square miles smaller than it was 18 years ago, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center. That’s a loss equal in area to Texas, California, Montana, New Mexico and Arizona combined.
The five deadliest heat waves of the past century — in Europe in 2003, Russia in 2010, India and Pakistan this year, Western Europe in 2006 and southern Asia in 1998 — have come in the past 18 years, according to the International Disaster Database run by the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disaster in Belgium.
The number of weather and climate disasters worldwide has increased 42 percent, though deaths are down 58 percent. From 1993 to 1997, the world averaged 221 weather disasters that killed 3,248 people a year. From 2010 to 2014, the yearly average of weather disasters was up to 313, while deaths dropped to 1,364, according to the disaster database.
Eighteen years ago, the discussion was far more about average temperatures, not the freakish extremes. Now, scientists and others realize it is in the more frequent extremes that people are truly experiencing climate change.
“I am quite stunned by how much the Earth has changed since 1997. In many cases, the speed of climate change is proceeding even faster than we thought it would two decades ago.” BILL ANDEREGG PRINCETON UNIVERSITY ENVIRONMENTAL INSTITUTE