More than 100 Nations Pledge to Reduce their CO2 Emissions to 350, But...

[amborin]

.....Most striking of all has been the movement's success at putting a key demand--reducing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million (ppm)--squarely on the public agenda.

The turning point came a day before the December 12 demonstrations, when the thirty-nine nations of the Alliance of Small Island States offered a draft treaty that explicitly embraced the 350 target. Within days, according to Jamie Henn of the activist group 350.org, the 350 target was endorsed by more than 100 countries, nearly all of them ranking among the poor and island nations that are already suffering from sea-level rise, drought and other intensifying impacts of climate change.

Reducing atmospheric CO2 concentrations to 350 ppm is, in turn, aimed at limiting the earth's eventual global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. "The idea," Mohamed Nasheed, the first democratically elected president of Maldives, the low-lying island nation in the Indian Ocean, told me, "is that people will agree not to murder others. Anything above 1.5C, and we have had it.

However:

The document was drafted by the UN secretariat running the Copenhagen summit and is dated 11pm on Tuesday night. It is marked "do not distribute" and "initial draft". It shows a gap of up to 4.2 gigatonnes of carbon emissions between the present pledges and the required 2020 level of 44Gt, which is required to stay below a 2C rise. No higher offers have since been made.

"Unless the remaining gap of around 1.9-4.2Gt is closed and Annexe 1 parties commit themselves to strong action before and after 2020, global emissions will remain on an unsustainable pathway that could lead to concentrations equal or above 550 parts per million, with the related temperature rise around 3C," it says. It does not specify a time when 3C would be reached but it is likely to be 2050.

from Daily Kos <http://www.dailykos.com/>

[amborin]

1. the latest version from Copenhagen:

Here:

<http://media.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/climate-change/copenhagen-accord-4.30pm.pdf>



"Even an Obama administration official conceded, “It is not sufficient to combat the threat of climate change, but it’s an important first step.”

“No country is entirely satisfied with each element,” the administration’s statement said, “but this is a meaningful and historic step forward and a foundation from which to make further progress.”

The accord drops the expected goal of concluding a binding international treaty by the end of 2010, which leaves the implementation of its provisions uncertain. It is likely to undergo many months, perhaps years, of additional negotiation before it emerges in any internationally enforceable form....."

snip

"The accord drops the expected goal of concluding a binding international treaty by the end of 2010, which leaves the implementation of its provisions uncertain. It is likely to undergo many months, perhaps years, of additional negotiation before it emerges in any internationally enforceable form. "

snip

<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/19/science/earth/19climate.html?_r=2&hp>