Introduction to Climate Change Conferences

Climate Change is the single most deciding factor in present global politics. Regarding climate change science you may have heard quite a lot from your courses or science news, but not much comprehensive help is out there to tell us what exactly are those climate change conferences known more popularly as COP (Conference of Parties) organized annually under UNFCCC. So time for a quick story telling.

In 1992, a very big event took place which made the world come together to discuss and solve global environment and development proceedings. It was known as Earth Summit. One of the many major outcomes of it was Framework Convention on Climate Change, one of the important legally binding agreements which led to the birth of Kyoto Protocol.

Now Kyoto Protocol is a treaty which, if I may say in plain simple words, aims to protect the planet from carbon emissions from human activities by bringing few restrictions and conventions. It divided the countries into three groups:

Annex 1: Developed economies or industrialized countries

Annex 2: Developed countries which may provide financial and/or technical support to developing countries to mitigate climate change/carbon emission while helping them to grow economically.

Non annex countries: The low income developing countries who may join Annex 1 groups once they are sufficiently developed.

Now The first two groups are given some restrictions to follow on their carbon emissions. They are sufficiently developed which can be contributed to the fact of their past industrially heavy activities which contributed to greater carbon emission per capita and hence the burden to set things right. Their less developed counterparts as per now develop not much heavy restrictions.

So United Nations Climate Change Conferences are held every year to update this very progress and have been held annually since 1995. The UNFCCC was passed officially on 1994 you see and Kyoto Protocol was introduced in 1997 at COP 3.

The Kyoto Protocol states that the countries need to reduce their emissions by 5% with 1990 as base years (This number may vary differently for different countries but let us talk on average number and keep the details for another day). But it was not ratified until 55 countries with combined contribution of 55% as per 1990 standards signed the protocol, and hence it was not till 2005 at COP 11, Montreal, that Kyoto Protocol came into force, when finally Russia agreed to give its support.

So there were some countries, developed, who did not want to slow down their economic activities and hence carbon emissions, like US, Australia, and some who points out that the lesser developing countries are enjoying far more freedom of emissions. And eventually over the years negotiations happen over the fate of planet due to the carbon emissions by anthropogenic activities.

 

Prehistoric Account of Climate Change: Mankind initiates.

The year was 2007. Bali Climate Change Conference, otherwise known as COP 13. The Secretary-General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-Moon addressed the conference with these lines, “The science is clear. Climate change is happening. The impact is real. The time to act is now.” So the world is threatened. There’s an urgency to act and avoid the consequences. Every nation is engaged in constant dialogue to address this very phenomenon. But a curious mind may wonder what happened to the world all of a sudden. Why is there such a rush all of a sudden? Did they have their eyes closed all these years when the toxins were spreading in the thin air to haunt the coming times?

I heard the terms “climate change”, “global warming” and “Kyoto Protocol” when I was in grade 8 preparing for a quiz, making me feel like hitting a jackpot of secrets. There’s this huge phenomenon called climate change which was happening, affecting the entire planet, and my father was still unheard of it, why? Because it has just started, a brand new discovery by science, or so I thought until I read how it all started…

 

The Very Early Beginning

The history of climate change can be stretched back to the beginning of 18^th century when the English ironmonger Thomas Newcomen put together the ideas of British Thomas Savery and French Denis Papin to create the first working steam engine in 1712, paving the golden path for the Industrial Revolution. Fifty one years later in 1763 a Scottish instrument maker, named James Watt, was hired to repair a model Newcomen engine in the University of Glasgow and discovered how inefficient the engine was. He started working on his ideas and in 1775 he came up with his own engine. Despite the huge fuel efficiency offered by James Watt’s engine, Newcomen’ engine continued to be popular, except at places where coal was expensive. The facts that Watt engine had a higher efficiency by factor of 5 and saves the fuel costs 4 times were not enough for the industrialists to switch from Newcomen’s engines, which were cheaper and simpler to build, for decades to come. So that was the beginning of the man’s greed journey.

Coining “Greenhouse Effect”

Years later in the 1820s, French mathematician Joseph Fourier came up with some wonderful theories unrelated to the industrial revolution. He mathematically concluded that a planet as big and as far from the sun as earth should have a colder atmospheric temperature. This meant there were other sources which were heating up the planet like interstellar radiation and/or the earth was trapping a part of its surface emitted infrared radiation in the atmosphere just like the air in the glass box. This led to the birth of the term “Greenhouse Effect.”

The story remained pretty same for a few decades. The global industrialization was expanding and the rapid development soon led to the beginning of Second Industrial Revolution. It was during this time, in 1950s, when British physicist John Tyndall proved the Greenhouse Effect to be real by showing that gases were not really ‘transparent’ and certain ones, like water vapour, absorbs infrared radiation. Nobody had the slight idea of correlating both the events. And why would they? They had no clue you see.

Connecting the Dots

In 1896, the Swedish Noble laureate became the first man to correlate earth’s surface temperature and levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere based on the theory of greenhouse effect. He made few interesting predictions:
1: The global warming then was largely fed by the carbon dioxide emissions made by the burning of fossil fuels.
2: He greatly praised this human emission of carbon dioxide since he believed this has prevented the planet from entering an ice age and was a good sign for the future expanding world population.
3: He estimated that halving the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere then would lower the global temperature by 4-5 degrees Celsius and doubling the amount can increase it by 5-6 degrees.
4: At the rate of emissions then from the industrial activities, he estimated that it would take 3000 years for the atmospheric carbon dioxide to double up and hence believed the earth was very much safe.
These predictions were major guidelines for the world. He had given a path breaking relation for sure, complete with easy mathematics to convince the world.

In the years to follow, it was reported that the carbon emission had reached 1 billion tonnes per year mark. Three years later, in 1930, the human race has successfully doubled its number what was 130 years back, to hit the 2 billion mark. And climate science was on a pretty fast acceleration.

Progress in Climate Science

In 1938 British steam engineer, Guy Stewart Callendar shows that the earth is warming up. He came up with different conclusions to reason this, including increased solar radiation in the then recent past and the levels of atmospheric dusts from volcanoes, rejecting all of them to finally conclude that carbon dioxide emissions from human activities were the cause. In 1953, a John Hopkins University researcher, Gilbert Plass took Callendar’s studies further and reported to Time Magazine, convincing the world climatologists with his calculations that carbon dioxide could indeed affect the climate and the earth will continue to grow warmer if industrial growth is not checked.

In the subsequent years the researchers came up with a bunch of predictions and discussions surrounding the ocean-atmospheric carbon cycle. Scientists believe that the oceans would be their savior from the rising carbon levels taking away the rising atmospheric carbon. Until 1957 when the American scientists Roger Revelle and Hans Suess came with the theory that the oceans would not absorb atmospheric carbon dioxide beyond a certain limit due to chemical reasons and hence any further human emissions would stay in the atmosphere to aid in altering the world climate.

Then in 1960 American scientist Dave Keeling detects an annual rise in the atmospheric carbon dioxide making the horror real. So the damage was done. Everything was on a rise. The same year humans had added another billion of their kind to the world population to hit the 3 billion mark. The industrialization was continuing to boom. It looked like every nation was or would be burning down the fossil fuels until there’s no more to burn. The theories of science around climate change were getting louder amongst all the chaos and it was during the 1960s when for the first time climate change and greenhouse effect entered into the world of politics and policy.

Not for reproduction without permission. And the further story shall be continued in my forthcoming blogpost due 20th May 2013.