Preparing for COP20

On December 1st, the 20th Conference of the Parties (COP20) will meet in Lima, Peru to continue the long-running attempts to draft an international treaty on climate change. A successful agreement would have aggressive commitments to mitigate the causes of climate change (reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and a dramatically decreased rate of rainforest destruction) and would include a comprehensive global blueprint (and funding) for adapting to the changes resulting from planetary warming and climate disruption.

COP20 marks the 20th anniversary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) – an agreement that emerged from the Rio Earth Summit. It has been 25 years since the international community called for action on greenhouse gases, 26 since James Hansen testified to U.S. congressional committees about global warming. When the UNFCCC was drafted in 1992, negotiators borrowed language from the Montreal Protocol (an agreement to address the destruction of the ozone layer): that member states would “act in the interests of human safety even in the face of scientific uncertainty”. In the time since that draft, the scientific uncertainty about climate change and its causes has been greatly reduced as evidenced in the thousands of peer-reviewed papers published each year and the high confidence level (over 95%) expressed by experts in the most recent report (AR5) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that climate change is indeed human-caused.

This will be the 6th COP that Moravian College has sent a delegation to after being accredited as an official observer in 2009. We use this blog to report on the issues that we learn about at these international gatherings in an effort to increase awareness of this complex 21st century challenge and to hopefully generate discourse about how to address climate change.

There are a number of factors that make this COP particularly important, including some of the memorable events over the past year in terms of climate change history.

• COP21 in Paris in 2015 has been identified as the target year for adopting an ambitious, multilateral, legally-binding treaty that will significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions and make major progress on a myriad of issues related to building resilient communities, managing risks of extreme weather events and disasters, and assisting developing countries in adapting to the impacts of climate change already being experienced. That means that the main negotiations on targets and language will have to be developed at this conference. In order to “galvanize and catalyze climate action” in advance of COP20 and 21, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon invited world leaders to a Climate Summit in September of this year; over 100 world leaders gathered at the United Nations for this event. Perhaps even more importantly, two days before the summit, the largest climate march in history took place with 2646 events in 162 countries. More than 300,000 people marched in the streets of New York City alone.
• Preceding this summit, over the past year, the United Nations hosted 13 Open Working Group sessions as part of the effort to develop the post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Global climate change was at the forefront of these discussions, and combating climate change emerged this summer as one of the 17 proposed SDGs. Debate was not over whether climate change should or shouldn’t be a goal, but whether it should be a stand-alone goal or a component of all SDGs.
• According to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the globally averaged temperatures over land and ocean surfaces for both June and September 2014 were the highest since record keeping began in 1880. September marked the 355th consecutive month (29.6 years) with a global temperature above the 20th century average. The last below-average global temperature for June was in 1976 and the last below-average global temperature for any month was in February 1985. In the U.S., the October national average temperature was 3.0°F above average and 2014 is on track to be the warmest year on record globally. Welcome to the new normal.
• Slower to the warming party due to the physical and chemical properties of water, our oceans are now demonstrating the anticipated changes. The September 2014 global sea surface temperature was the highest on record for any month. Did these warming waters have any impact on Typhoon Nuri – the recent storm that hit Alaska? We can’t know for sure. Not only was this the strongest storm to hit this region, meteorologists believe that it may have been one of the deepest extra-tropical low pressure systems on record in the North Pacific.
• This spring, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels surpassed the 400 ppm mark. Unlike the stock market, rising values is not what the public should be hoping for. According to an October 2009 paper in the highly respected journal Science, you have to go back 15 million years to find atmospheric conditions like that in our atmosphere – long before Homo sapiens were around. According to UCLA professor Aradhna Tripati, the lead author on that paper, "The last time carbon dioxide levels were apparently as high as they are today — and were sustained at those levels — global temperatures were 5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit higher than they are today, the sea level was approximately 75 to 120 feet higher than today, there was no permanent sea ice cap in the Arctic and very little ice on Antarctica and Greenland." The atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide today represent a 44% increase since the historical pre-industrial levels of 278 ppm which were relatively constant for about 800,000 years.
• The November election results in the U.S. will bring to Washington a Republican-controlled House and Senate. Party leaders have already vowed to revoke regulations aimed at tackling carbon pollution in this country and are trying to push through approval of the controversial Keystone pipeline project in this lame-duck session. Given these developments and the fact that the U.S. has long been viewed as a major obstacle in the international climate negotiations, I was assuming that COP20 would be another fruitless endeavor. And then, out of the blue this week, came the announcement of a historic climate-related agreement between the U.S. and China. These are the two nations with the largest carbon footprints and the two most recalcitrant parties at the COP meetings. The proposed targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions of these two countries are not sufficient to “fix” the problem of global climate change, but the agreement is a crucial first step for both countries. No doubt this will lead to a showdown in Washington, but the agreement could really provide the spark needed to ignite progress at the international negotiation table.

Stay tuned! 2014 still has several more weeks to add even more chapters into the climate history book.

References:

http://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/

http://www.un.org/climatechange/summit/ 

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/ 

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091008152242.htm



The best argument can’t always win the fight.

But does arguing at least get us somewhere? To test this a group of students at Lehigh University staged an information stake-out in the center of the campus on Friday night with an objective: invite their peers to the Largest Climate March in History: The Peoples Climate March.  Via a couple of projectors, a sound system and two huge walls at the University Center, they were able to make people pause for a moment and think about the Climate March and the Climate Summit.  

Finding yourself in need to catch-up on the debate?  You can learn more about the summit itself and why it matters by checking out this special brief ‘The People’s Climate March: Everything you need to know to change everything.

But ask yourself why you aren’t aware of the Call to Action for the Climate March? Light projections using the viral Disruption video and the People’s Climate March Graphics attempted to encourage a response from students on Lehigh’s Campus. But the argument in support of Climate Change moved no one. The real question had been inadvertently raised: How are students at Lehigh living the spirit of the Climate March?  Are they invested?

 

The answer is, the students at Lehigh University aren’t aware of it at all.  Everyone stopped because they were attracted to the Light from the videos.  Yet, no one knew what the videos were about. Instead of an information exchange and debate the organizers expected, they received confused expressions and low-interest in an event that will shape everyone’s future. 

What became obvious in the outreach session was the disconnect plaguing climate change action.  When buses will be traveling to the Climate Summit this Sunday in droves from all places across America, what could possibly be missing from student opinion in a small town that is only 2 hours outside of NYC? What are Lehigh Students missing?

Emotional response.   

“This non-reaction from students is a larger warning to Universities that they aren’t doing enough to engage youth on Climate Change.”  --

Gerardo Calderon, a Lehigh Student and community organizer.

The evening was a harsh reality-check of what their peers knew about the Climate Summit this week at the UN. It was clear that engagement on the campus about climate change was staggeringly low.  And that individual connection to climate change was even lower.  What gives? Can factual Statistics prove and help us understand apathy?

A poll conducted by Gallup this year found that while 69 percent of Americans believe climate change is caused by human activity, only half are personally worried about it. “We’ve won the argument but we haven’t done anything on it,” Bill McKibben of 350.org is noted for saying. “We haven’t been able to overcome the power of the status quo enough to make real change, so that we’re losing the fight.”  McKibben is completely on-point.

Its not a fight of factual evidence, its an emotional one.

Those words are echoed by a study from Yale University which supports the idea that emotions act as drivers to connect people to Climate Change Action. "The Role of Emotion in Global Warming Policy Support and Opposition" speaks to what we already know. Looking at how research points to the “affect (feelings of good or bad) and affective imagery (associations) strongly influence public support for global warming.”  What happens to the style of argument when we voice the issue of climate change as if specific emotions, like fear, anger, worry, guilt that are programmed into our discourse and communication?

Through this graphic the paper further shows how specific emotions were stronger predictors of global warming policy than supported cultural world-views. 

Egalitarianism, individualism, negative affects, top of mind associations, or socio-demographic variables, including political party and ideology DIDN’T MATTER. The findings go further to say that,

“50% of the variance in public support for global warming policies was explained by the emotion measures alone. In particular, worry, interest, and hope were strongly associated with increased policy support.”

What does that mean for people communicating climate change? The results contribute to how human beings process information and suggest that emotions play a significant role in public support for climate change policy.  So what are the implications for climate change communication then if we are only hardwired to act when we feel guilty or worried?

Enter a local climate change advocate in the Lehigh Valley, Dan Poresky, has spoken about the role of human emotion in the efforts to reach a larger audience to discuss engagement with Climate Change.  His proposal for Climate Action provides a step-by-step action guide for organizers to place more emphasis on people than the planet. Put simply, it’s his call, a local citizen’s call, to action.

By emphasizing, “How is climate change going to affect me?” Poresky argues that only when people feel secure in the vision of their future will they push governments to act.  That security needs to be based in emotional response like entitlement, fear, anger, and a sense of loss of what you cannot regain. This type of proposal is what is needed from citizen groups.  At the junction of climate change communication efforts from Light Shows to step-by-step guides is the answer to the lack of emotional engagement.

“People will more readily accept the adaptations necessitated by climate change when they can envision living comfortably in a society with reduced carbon emissions is the norm. Its all about public attitude” said Poresky.

One thing is for certain the People’s Climate March will be an emotional tour through Manhattan on September 21. Over 400,000 are expected to show up and walk together. This preempts the week leaders are coming to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s Climate Summit to discuss ambitious goals to reduce global warming pollution. That bit is incredibly important.

The People’s Climate March will take place BEFORE a UN meeting on climate change attended by delegates from 168 countries from all over the world on the path to COP20 in Lima, Peru this year. The message is clear: the pressure is on.  

Who could argue with that?

If this People’s Climate March doesn’t make people feel something?  What will?

Hope to see you all there in a few hours, physically and emotionally invested.

     

--Sarabeth Brockley @sara_brockley