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          1. New Global Climate Deal
            1. 2009: the Year the World Decides

Understanding climate change:

Copenhagen 09: Decision Time!

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Climate blog

The United Nations Climate Change Conference will take place at the in Copenhagen, Denmark, between December 7 and December 18, 2009.

The Copenhagen conference is the most important international arena where world leaders will have the chance to set the foundations of how we will face climate change as a united global community.

In this political meeting, we need our leaders to agree on a new, strong, legally binding deal that will replace the Kyoto Protocol and boldly address the challenges caused by climate change.

Copenhagen has to do better than Kyoto.

The world is hotter today, climate change greater, and global emissions of greenhouse gases 25% higher than in 1990.

Thanks to a decade of science and 2 more IPCC reports, we also know with greater certainty (and alarm) the dangers we face if we do not act.

Most nations agree on the need to keep warming below 2°C. And they agree, in theory at least, that the world needs to establish an emissions trajectory for the coming decades to ensure stabilized concentrations of greenhouse gases in the air at a level low enough to achieve that.

No more ad hoc deals: Copenhagen must be based on a rigorous scientific assessment of what needs to be done to prevent climatic disaster.
The global community will meet in Copenhagen, Denmark in December 2009 to agree on a new global climate deal aimed at protecting the future of our planet.

Vote Earth!




What needs to happen there

Current climate science suggests that we should not emit more than about 1,400 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent between 2000 and 2050 if we are to give the world a chance of staying below 2ºC of global warming.

That will require reducing global emissions to at least 80% below 1990 levels by 2050.

Global emissions will need to peak around 2015 and then to start FALLING sharply.

Even so, we will almost certainly require negative emissions after 2050 to get atmospheric CO2 concentrations down to acceptable levels. That is, we will need to suck CO2 out of the air – by planting forests or by other technological means.

We live on an island and frequently witness nature’s fury with cyclones, storms and tidal surges. The sea washes away our houses, land and cattle. When it retreats, our land is highly saline and useless for cultivating crops. Things are changing fast. I have already lost two homes and now I fear for my third. We are completely helpless due to lack of advance warning. We can’t even collect our belongings and move to safer places.

Intaz Sah, coastal India

The targets for 2050 must involve all industrialized countries. But they will also need to involve all other major emitters.

Certainly, the highest-emitting countries that collectively produce 80% of the world’s emissions need to be involved as soon as possible. By then, however, we should expect the world to be embracing a future of zero carbon emissions using clean energy technologies out of choice rather than “burden sharing”.

We will have kicked the carbon habit in the same way that 20th century industrialized countries decided to banish killer coal smogs.

Action must be taken in industrialized countries (and the USA needs to rejoin a global climate framework) and should also involve newly industrialized countries like Malaysia, the Republic of Korea, Saudi Arabia and Singapore, and emerging economies such as China, Brazil, Indonesia, India, South Africa and Mexico.

So how do we ensure that global emissions peak and then decline within the next decade?

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