Green Options

International politics and diplomacy has brought to where we are today. The United States is ready with a provisional emissions reduction target and so are the developing countries ready with their voluntary carbon intensity reduction targets. But as leaders from more than 190 countries prepare to meet at Copenhagen’s Bella Center to discuss the framework of the next climate treaty one wonders if the politics should give way to the climate science.

Never before have the United States and the developing countries proposed to reduce their carbon outputs. This has been a result of the concentrated diplomatic effort of the Obama administration which single handedly convinced the Chinese to volunteer for emission intensity reduction. China’s announcement was followed by similar announcements by other developing countries like India, South Africa and Brazil.

But the targets announced by almost all countries are not in sync with the IPCC recommendations. The IPCC report recommended that the global carbon emissions need to come down by 25-40 percent by 2020 from 1990 levels. Most of the developed countries are proposing emission cuts of less that 25 percent and some have changed the base year from 1990 to a value which suits their national interets.

A new study by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), released today, says that the effects of warming in the Arctic are “dire… far worse than previous projections.” Dr Martin Sommerkorn, senior climate change advisor for WWF’s Arctic program (who works on this stuff everyday) says: “What they found was a truly sobering picture.”

Fourty percent or more of the Amazon rainforest will be “decimated” by the middle of the next century even if we cut all CO2 emissions by 2050, said the UK Met Office. The finding was presented this past month in Copenhagen, which is preparing to host the UN Climate Change Conference in December.

In this satellite image of deforestation in Brazil, tropical rainforest appears bright red, while pale red and brown areas represent cleared land. Black and gray areas have probably been recently burned.