Environmental Outlook: Durban

This morning on the Diane Rehm radio program their environmental outlook series focused on the Climate talks in Durban. Given the relative lack of mainstream coverage of the issue in the American media, it's worth a listen.

It is a pretty good intro into the talks and especially the U.S. position on the talk even though there is the usual tangential drivel about the science being "unsettled".  

NGO's call for greater US involvement

On Tuesday the over a dozen environmental organizations sent an open letter to the US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton calling out the Obama administration for not living up to what he promised prior to taking office. Despite the economic free-fall since moving into the White House, President Obama has been criticized openly since the Copenhagen talks for not being aggressive enough in pushing for an international solution as well as not using the bully pulpit of the presidency to offer more leadership even if US commitments are restricted by what Congress will tolerate.

An excerpt from the letter states:

In November, 2008, President-elect Obama gave an inspiring video address to the Bi-Partisan Governors Global Climate Summit in Los Angeles, California. He said that "Few challenges facing America – and the world – are more urgent than combating climate change,” and pledged that “once I take office, you can be sure that the United States will once again engage vigorously in these negotiations, and help lead the world toward a new era of global cooperation on climate change."

Three years later, America risks being viewed not as a global leader on climate change, but as a major obstacle to progress. U.S. positions on two major issues – the mandate for future negotiations and climate finance – threaten to impede in Durban the global cooperation so desperately needed to address the threat of climate change.

The Politics of Climate

There are few concepts in science that I can think of that are more politically polarizing than climate. The story behind why this has occurred in some places (the US and the UK) and why it has never been the same kind of political issue in others (the rest of the world) is complicated. Most science focusing on the environment, in has some type of public policy element to it because people have an enormous impact (collectively and individually) on the world around us.

Climate is different. It has been elevated to the same level of political partisanship as the theory of evolution during the monkey trial of 1925. Though most scientists cringe at the notion that anything as complicated as a changing climate should be distilled down to simple binaries, it is nevertheless interesting to see how perceptions among Americans change over time. The Pew Research Center has been survey populations about the issue for years and their latest polling (released Dec. 1) shows some interesting results.

Path Dependency

In comments today, the US negotiator in Durban Jonathan Pershing clearly illustrated the American strategy and why so many other countries are so frustrated with us. Last year in Mexico, there was a target adopted by the conference of limiting warming to 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F). While a great number of small and poor countries are trying to convince others to lower this target to 1.5 degrees C, most developed countries are debating how this target should best be reached. Responding to a question about whether the current commitments made by the US are sufficient to reach to the 2 degrees C target Pershing stated "...one has to marry a politically pragmatic outcome with a scientifically important conclusion. If you demand more than the politics can deliver, you don't succeed."

White noise

One of the things I remember as so striking when I lived abroad was the realization of just how insular the U.S. really is. Despite the fact that we are constantly inundated with news stories twenty-four hours a day and there are few respites from some sort of media, most Americans know shockingly little about the rest of the world. When we do happen to pay attention to international issues, you can be sure that there is some reason that can be traced back to how it affects us. Wars in the middle east, financial crises in Europe, Arab spring, we know about them to the extent that they affect us. It would be easy to dismiss this because every nation does the same thing. Maybe to a certain extent that is right but it seems fair to say that here in the U.S. we live in our own little bubble and are further removed from international engagement than other nations can afford to be.

Kicking the Can

In the Opening Plenary of the latest round of climate negotiations in Durban, South Africa, South Africa's president Jacob Zuma reiterated an increasingly ineffectual plea:

"For most people in the developing countries and Africa, climate change is a matter of life and death."

While few who understand the problem doubt the truth of this statement, the power it has to motivate political action has ebbed significantly in the years since Copenhagen. For many delegations the sense of urgency has all but disappeared. For both the European Union and the United States, success in Durban will be primarily defined by setting into motion some of the agreements made in principle last year in Cancun. In effect, this is settling on wallpaper before the house is built.

What can we expect from Durban?

Where did Hope and Ambition go?... not the middle way

COP17 opens today in Durban: it's amazing to see how quickly expectations for serious progress through the UN process have fallen - from the precipice of an ambitious treaty to being drowned in the bathtub. Two years ago in Copenhagen there was a strong sense that world political leadership would have to see the writing on the wall, step up to the plate and agree to a treaty; certainly (it was thought) that these leaders would not arrive to simply preside over failure. In hindsight, it's clear that they were there to deliver eulogies.

By last year's meeting in Cancun, some hopes lingered that talks might be rescued, but now even those with the rosiest tints in their glasses are depressed and the cynics seem vindicated. What happened?

The US role is central, and the path President Obama has taken is indicative of the failings. Back in Copenhagen, Obama was still fairly fresh from winning election by promising Hope and Change, and was optimistic that Congress would support greenhouse gas legislation. He arrived sporting the Nobel Peace Prize from the previous week; surely, we had emerged from decades of stalemate and quagmire!? Flash forward to 2011 - after innumerable drone attacks and with military spending rising as inexorably as CO2 levels - the title "Nobel Peace Laureate" is rarely applied if not forgotten, a symbol of misguided hope. Obama's pursuit of a 'sensible' and practical middle way on all other fronts has led to similar ends: lame reforms of the health insurance system, hollow Wall Street reforms, brinksmanship over debt ceilings...in other words, Washington business as usual.

Water in the 21st century US

One major reason that it is difficult to achieve consensus about acting to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is the difficulty in grasping the magnitude of the climatic changes they will produce. The significance of a number like 3 degrees Celsius global warming over the next century is lost on most people: for one, many places experience that amount of temperature variation everyday, and much more than that every season. The fact that it is a global average also makes it a nebulous, if not irrelevant figure. Translating these abstract climate estimates to real world experience is a crucial step toward convincing decision-makers and the public about the need to tackle the problem.

Mike and I recently wrote a paper based on that premise: an attempt to help people in the U.S. visualize the local and regional scale environmental changes that are likely to happen over the coming decades. And rather than use temperature &/or precipitation, the two basic variables of climate, we used the availability of water as a means to synthesize their inter-linked significance. This linkage is seen, for instance, in the fact that if precipitation stays about the same over time, but it gets hotter, less water is found in streams or available for crops, because more evaporates. You can find the details and full article here, but the basic idea is to compare the patterns observed for the 20th century with those modeled for the end of the current century (around 2090) - thus changes that many of us are likely to at least begin to witness during our lifetimes.