Tag Archives: Paris Agreement

U.S. formally exits global climate pact amid election uncertainty

By Valerie Volcovici and Kate Abnett

WASHINGTON/BRUSSELS (Reuters) – The United States formally exited the Paris Agreement on Wednesday, fulfilling an old promise by President Donald Trump to withdraw the world’s second-largest greenhouse gas emitter from the global pact to fight climate change.

But the outcome of the tight U.S. election contest will determine for how long. Trump’s Democratic rival, Joe Biden, has promised to rejoin the agreement if elected.

“The U.S. withdrawal will leave a gap in our regime, and the global efforts to achieve the goals and ambitions of the Paris Agreement,” Patricia Espinosa, executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), told Reuters.

The United States still remains a party to the UNFCCC. Espinosa said the body will be “ready to assist the U.S. in any effort in order to rejoin the Paris Agreement”.

Trump first announced his intention to withdraw the United States from the pact in June 2017, arguing it would undermine the U.S. economy. The administration formally served notice to the United Nations one year ago on Nov. 4, 2019.

The departure makes the United States the only country of 197 signatories to have withdrawn from the agreement struck in 2015.

“If climate deniers keep control of the White House and Congress, delivering a climate-safe planet will be more challenging,” said Laurence Tubiana, a former French diplomat instrumental in brokering the Paris accord, who now heads the non-profit European Climate Foundation.

Calling the withdrawal a “lost opportunity”, Tanguy Gahouma-Bekale, chair of the African Group of Negotiators in global climate talks, said it would also create a shortfall in global climate finances. He pointed to an Obama-era pledge to contribute $3 billion to a fund to help vulnerable countries tackle climate change, of which only $1 billion was delivered.

UNIVERSAL SUPPORT

Other major emitters have pressed on with climate action, even without guarantees the U.S. will follow suit.

A spokeswoman for the European Union’s executive Commission said the Paris accord has the “universal support” of the rest of the international community.

China, Japan and South Korea have all followed the EU in pledging to become carbon neutral. The challenge now is to translate these long-term targets for 2050 – or, in China’s case, for 2060 – into policies to slash emissions this decade.

A strong emissions-cutting pledge from the world’s largest economy “would give a big shot of momentum” to those efforts, said Pete Betts, a former climate negotiator for the EU and Britain, who is now an associate fellow at London-based think-tank Chatham House.

“The U.S. would put its diplomatic heft in efforts to persuade other major economies to raise their efforts,” he said.

Countries representing 51% of the world’s emissions have pledged to reduce their carbon emissions to net zero – with some going further and committing to zero out all greenhouse gases, research coalition Climate Action Tracker said.

A net zero pledge from the United States – which Biden says he would make, if elected – would see 63% of global emissions covered by such commitments.

Despite the lack of encouragement from the current White House, many U.S. states and businesses have nonetheless moved to cut emissions, while climate change has risen up the global investor agenda, including on Wall Street.

Groups representing New York-based BlackRock Inc, the world’s largest asset manager, and other asset managers in the United States, Europe, Asia, Australia and New Zealand, who manage trillions of dollars in assets between them, issued a joint statement urging the United States to quickly rejoin the accord.

If Biden were to win, he could rejoin the Paris accord through a process that would take 30 days.

A Trump win, however, would “seal the fate of the United States – at least at the federal level – as a country that was isolated from the rest of the world: powerless to shape the international dialogue or direction on climate,” said Nat Keohane, senior vice president for climate at the non-profit Environmental Defense Fund.

(Reporting by Valerie Volcovici, Kate Abnett; additional reporting by Matthew Green in London; Editing by Richard Valdmanis, David Gregorio, Raju Gopalakrishnan, Kirsten Donovan)

New research suggests 20th century sea levels rose at quickest pace since 800 B.C.

Climate scientists studying the Earth’s sea levels have determined that it was “extremely likely” those waters rose more rapidly in the 20th century than any other century in nearly 3,000 years.

Human-induced climate change contributed to the increase, the scientists wrote in Monday’s edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

The research team found sea levels rose 14 centimeters (5.5 inches) in the 20th century, and its models suggest those numbers may have been different without the effects of climate change.

Without it, the team wrote it was “very likely” that seas would have seen a change that ranged from a 3 centimeter (a little more than an inch) drop to a 7 centimeter (2.75 inch) increase.

The study’s lead author was Bob Kopp, a climate scientist from Rutgers University.

In a message on his website, Kopp wrote that he and his colleagues concluded “with 95 percent probability” that the levels rose more rapidly last century than any other century since 800 B.C.

The study’s cutoff, which stretches back 28 centuries, “is not because the rate of global sea-level rise was probably faster before then,” Kopp wrote on his website, “but simply that the reconstruction quality isn’t good enough before then to have the same level of confidence.”

NASA says the global average sea level has risen another 6 centimeters since January 2000 and is currently rising at a rate of .4 millimeters every year. The agency says the increases are “a direct result of a changing climate,” as melting ice sheets and glaciers fuel the expansion.

Kopp wrote last century wasn’t the only time when global temperatures and sea levels moved together, pointing to a 400-year stretch from the 11th to 15th centuries. Temperatures fell about .2 degrees Celsius during that stretch, while sea levels dipped approximately 8 centimeters.

But the study found it was “very likely” that global sea levels have risen “over every 40-year interval since 1860,” as societies became more industrialized.

In December, 195 countries agreed to a landmark climate change pact that aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and prevent temperatures from reaching 2 degrees Celsius above their pre-industrial averages, a long-feared threshold.

But Kopp’s team warned that even with “extremely strong emissions abatement,” their models suggest seas could rise another 24 to 61 centimeters (9 to 24 inches) during the 21st century.

If emissions were to continue at “business-as-usual” levels this century, the research team said that sea levels could potentially rise between 52 and 131 centimeters (20 to 51 inches).