Climate Scorecard

Yet another Climate Summit is about to occur, this time in Paris.   Thousands will jet from all over the world to attend.  Undoubtedly it will end with announcements of significant "commitments" by the participants.  To determine whether these are photo op announcements or something meaningful  keep an eye out on whether anyone makes an enforceable commitment on actual CO2 reductions and look at the timing.  An announcement that  X country will start making reductions in 2030 means nothing.

Climate change is not one of THC's top tier issues but if it is for you here is the basic data to keep in mind when assessing the success of the summit.  Do any of the announced agreements or commitments make a significant dent in the current emissions and emissions trends?  THC is using 1997 as the baseline since that is the year the Kyoto Protocol was signed.  Keep in mind that something in the range of a 50% reduction globally from 2005 levels by 2050 is required to have a meaningful impact on temperature if you accept the validity of the IPCC calculations.  Anything less is meaningless hand-waving.  The chart shows the top 4 CO2 emitters and the rest of the world.

	1997	2005	2010	2014
U.S.	5.6	5.9	5.5	5.3
E.U.	4.1	4.2	3.9	3.4
China	3.5	7.4	9.1	10.6
India	1.0	1.3	1.8	2.3
Rest of World	10.3	11.4	13.3	14.1
Total	24.5	30.2	33.6	35.7

Unit:  Billion Tons CO2

 Source:  Trends in Global CO2 Emissions: 2015 Report, Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency & European Commission Joint Research Centre

For more background on the data read this.