The name says it all – both the “intergovernmental panel” part, and the “climate change” part.
The U.S. administration calls the report useful — but sees no use in talking about carbon emissions (the subject of the Kyodo Protocol, which the U.S. refuses to sign on to. The main point of the Kyodo Protocol, trading carbon emissions on some kind of wierd international commodities market is unfathomable, but seems to be profitable. The Kyodo protocol is an add-on to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which came out of the UN’s Earth Summit in Brazil — and the U.S. has signed the main UN Framework Convention on Climate Change…)
The UN Framework Convention’s website says: “A major accomplishment of the Convention, which is general and flexible in character, is that it recognizes that there is a problem. That was no small thing in 1994, when the treaty took effect and less scientific evidence was available…The Convention recognizes that it is a ‘framework‘ document — something to be amended or augmented over time so that efforts to deal with global warming and climate change can be focused and made more effective. The first addition to the treaty, the Kyoto Protocol, was adopted in 1997…
* The Convention places the heaviest burden for fighting climate change on industrialized nations, since they are the source of most past and current greenhouse gas emissions. These countries are asked to do the most to cut what comes out of smokestacks and tailpipes, and to provide most of the money for efforts elsewhere. For the most part, these developed nations, called ‘Annex I’ countries because they are listed in the first annex to the treaty, belong to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
* These advanced nations, as well as 12 “economies in transition” (countries in Central and Eastern Europe, including some states formerly belonging to the Soviet Union) were expected by the year 2000 to reduce emissions to 1990 levels. As a group, they succeeded.
* Industrialized nations agree under the Convention to support climate-change activities in developing countries by providing financial support above and beyond any financial assistance they already provide to these countries. A system of grants and loans has been set up through the Convention and is managed by the Global Environment Facility (see “Bodies of the Convention and allied agencies”). Industrialized countries also agree to share technology with less-advanced nations.
* Because economic development is vital for the world’s poorer countries — and because such progress is difficult to achieve even without the complications added by climate change — the Convention accepts that the share of greenhouse gas emissions produced by developing nations will grow in the coming years. It nonetheless seeks to help such countries limit emissions in ways that will not hinder their economic progress.
* The Convention acknowledges the vulnerability of developing countries to climate change and calls for special efforts to ease the consequences”.
http://unfccc.int/essential_background/feeling_the_heat/items/2914.php
The first, preambular, words of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change acknowledges “that change in the Earth’s climate and its adverse effects are a common concern of humankind”, and expresses concern “that human activities have been substantially increasing the atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, that these increases enhance the natural greenhouse effect, and that this will result on average in an additional warming of the Earth’s surface and atmosphere and may adversely affect natural ecosystems and humankind”.
So, there really doesn’t seem to be much that’s really new in the report issued last Friday in Paris.
But it does give everybody a chance to speak about what nearly everybody already realizes is a fact: “it looks like bad news for the home team, i.e., the entire human race. Things are going to get hotter, coastlines are going to go under, deserts are going to get wider, and millions if not billions of people are going to be on the move. In need, in conflict, in increasingly desperate straits – and it’s all our own fault…George W. Bush has finally, grudgingly, acknowledged that there might be a little problem with oceans boiling and cities submerging after all. So the tack has been a sudden flip-flop: from denying that global warming is a reality to claiming that he is actually leading the fight against this atmospheric terrorism. Thus, after spending months trying (and partially succeeding) in watering down the IPCC report, the Bush-appointed US delegation to the conference signed off on the document in the end…The IPCC report on global warming is, ironically, most chilling. Thanks to the many years of obstruction by the well-funded apologists for corporate power, it is now too late to arrest the process. The effects, not only on weather patterns and sea levels but also on the food chain that sustains life on the planet, will be – are already – dire and profound. The only thing we can do now is to take urgent action to begin to mitigate the worst effects, to prepare for and soften the unavoidable economic, political and social upheaval that is coming. The struggle against the effects of global warming is one that could actually unite the human race in a common effort against a common danger. Still, it is a danger that threatens not only the present inhabitants of our common home, but also those ‘future generations’ which we all profess to be so concerned about. The scientific consensus is clear; finding a political consensus on mitigation will be immensely harder, perhaps impossible. But surely it is worth the effort.” http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/020307C.shtml
The only consolation is that many things are likely to happen that we cannot possibly anticipate at this point — so, the situation might get better. However, it might also get worse.