Image: USAID_IMAGES/Flickr
UNITED NATIONS -- The U.N. Security Council will debate climate change for the second time in four years, its current chair announced yesterday.
The July 20 discussion, led by the German government, will be a repeat of a 2007 attempt by the United Kingdom to put climate change on the council's agenda. That earlier move garnered sharp criticism from many developing country leaders, who accused the 15-member panel of attempting to strip power from other U.N. groups.
This time, however, Germany has the full backing of several developing countries, most notably an alliance of small island nations that feel threatened by rising sea levels. That group also wants the Security Council to regularly debate climate change and to appoint a special adviser to investigate the risks to national sovereignty that global warming may pose.
"We undertook the initiative to put this on the agenda on the 20th within the framework of an open debate," said Peter Wittig, Germany's ambassador to the United Nations. "We're going to focus on security issues of climate change. We don't want to replicate all of the various fora in which climate change is being discussed."
Attitudes toward bringing up climate change at the Security Council have changed dramatically in the past few years, and advocates of council action say the tide has turned from strong opposition to possible action on the matter.
Initially, opponents to the U.K.-hosted deliberations charged that the council was pressing into a topic that was a matter for the General Assembly and the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) alone. Others felt that it was odd to add to the Security Council's workload. Coalitions representing more than 100 developing countries sent formal letters of complaint. The debate was held regardless, but the sharp criticisms shut down the possibility of a follow-up meeting.
Two years later, the General Assembly adopted a resolution asking all U.N. organs to examine the implications of rising global temperatures in a way that fit their various operating mandates.
Germany now says the Security Council is following up on this request. Wittig took pains to stress that the council will only discuss the "security implications" of climate change, with a special focus on the possible threat faced by small island states and coastal states due to rising sea levels. The council is also slated to discuss food security implications.
Discussions will hopefully be narrowly focused on "the existential threat, especially to small island states and coastal states, by sea level rise" as well as "the effects that climate change has on food sec and the risk that it entails for the maintenance of peace and security," Wittig said.
Small island governments want the Security Council to go even further.
John Silk, foreign minister of the Marshall Islands, said his and other governments will press to have the Security Council appoint a special adviser on climate and security. Such an adviser, he said, should be charged with investigating where and how territory may be lost as a result of a rise in global sea levels.
Scientists say that ocean warming and ice cap melting will make a rise in ocean levels of 1 to 2 meters by 2100 inevitable.
The Marshall Islands minister also said small island governments want the council to discuss climate change on a regular basis, ideally once every month. By placing the issue permanently on the agenda, advocates of climate action said they hope a general sense of urgency will grow stronger and perhaps propel international climate negotiations toward a successful conclusion.
Reprinted from Climatewire with permission from Environment & Energy Publishing, LLC. www.eenews.net, 202-628-6500
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10 Comments
Add Comment"This play at the UN is a play for power and funds pure and simple."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this-Where's your proof?
"1. nothing can be done to stop worldwide CO2 levels from continuing to increase
for at least several decades"
I've been biking to work for over a year now and I try not to by cheap crap from China that I don't need. You can't say that if millions of people did the same thing, that CO2 emissions wouldn't go down. Or I guess you could but you'd be lying. Besides, U.S. CO2 emissions are down around 6% over the last few years and it's not ALL due to the recession:
http://epa.gov/climatechange/emissions/downloads11/US-GHG-Inventory-2011-Executive-Summary.pdfNo disagreement with #2However, in #3,aren't adaptation costs inversely correlated with CO2 emissions? Meaning that each ton of CO2 emittied has an incremental adaptation cost associated with it?"4. Developing nations are primarily looking for money from currently developed nations."
Again, where's your proof for this statement?
"The CO2 released to date has certainly done far more good for humanity overall than harm"
I'll agree that using fossil sunshine to provide useful energy instead of less than 1-year-old solar energy (plants) has helped us do many impressive things. However, it was the ENERGY that enabled our advances since 1750 or so, NOT the CO2. That's just like saying the wrapper of a Powerbar allowed you to run a marathon. It just doesn't make sense.
We have the ability to provide clean, renewable energy forever. Solar, wind, geothermal, ocean and biomass energy are all falling in cost while fossil fuels are finite, being depleted rapidly and their costs are perpetually headed upwards in the long term. This "bottled sunshine" will enevitably run out. We might as well move towards the energy sources that our grandkids will eventually HAVE to use and spare ourselves the economic uncertainty, the climate disruption, the pollution and geopolitical instability that we will suffer in postponing the inevitable.
CAN ANYBODY DO ANYTHING !! There are things to fix climate change right now. I have a gadget we invented and put it on an SUV. We went from 12 mpg to 20 mpg. 60% increase.Checked on dynamometer. We put it on a natural gas furnace and saved 30% in fuel.Same 30% on a large turbine at an industrial facility. It works on oil, gasoline, diesel,natural and propane gas. Will have same results on trucking, shipping and planes. Patented and tested BUT GUESS WHAT ? We can't find the money anywhere to get it going. Tried car companies that said they get too much oil money, banks.. no collateral, gov't runaround with great lip service. This produce also reduces carbon and greenhouse gas emissions by 30%. The problem is not fixing global warming but changing the status quo and taking some money out of a lot of large business pocketbooks. They are ruining this planet and stopping any attempts to lessen their quarterly P/L statements. northcowboy@msn.com
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this4. The CO2 released to date has done far more good for humanity overall than harm in the form of food production, access to medical care, etc.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBy chance perhaps, and only for some of the emissions, and only to this point.
The advances from CO2 nearly did and may yet lead to nuclear holocaust or similar catastrophe.
The CO2 that provides basic needs has done more good than harm. But an ever-increasing proportion goes towards luxuries that do little to enhance our wellbeing.
Extrapolation from past to future is invalid because today we have good alternatives to fossil fuels in the form of renewables. Tipping points may also begin to come into play.
Has anyone identified the small island nations and/or published the numbers regarding the amount of sea level rise experienced to date? It seems to me, weather cannot be accurately predicted for longer than a week. What data is allowing climate scientists predictive capability for sea level rise to 2100?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe sea expands a bit as it gets warmer, but bigger changes are threatened by melting ice sheets.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www.skepticalscience.com/sea-level-rise.htm
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Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisRe: http://www.skepticalscience.com/sea-level-rise.htm
"Sea level bounces up and down slightly from year to year so it's possible to cherry-pick data falsely suggesting the overall trend is flat, falling or linear."
The admission of a slightly variable sea level would not seem to me to produce the smooth graph displayed.
The claim of accuracy of 1 mm/year from satellite data raises the question (for me), Where is the peer review of the satellite data?
The following sentence would seem to have summed up the tenor of the presentation quite well:
"The IPCC synthesis reports offer conservative projections of sea level increase based on assumptions about future behavior of ice sheets and glaciers, leading to estimates of sea level roughly following a linear upward trend mimicking that of recent decades."
Assumptions that lead to estimates does not seem to me to provide the basis for a high level of confidence in the assertions. Where, in this presentation, is the answer to my question in comment 5?
if it gets warmer, then sea levels will rise for the reasons mentioned. So your question seems to be, where is the predictive capability for warming.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe laws of physics tell us that adding co2 to the atmosphere will increase temperatures - the major disagreement being by how much.
pokerplyer#1
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe CO2 released to date has certainly done far more good for humanity overall than harm in the form of food production, access to medical care, etc.
Please provide evidence of benefit for your claim: 'CO2 released to date has certainly done far more good for humanity overall'
CO2 has been an incidental and unfortunate by-product of energy generation. While the energy has enabled us to create a modern technically advanced civilisation, it has not been planned or without environmental costs.
But these could have been achieved with considerably less CO2 emission. Furthermore, if it were not for vested interests deliberately spreading propaganda and funding political obstruction, we could be generating energy with much lower CO2 emissions that currently are the case.
Apart from the global warming potential of the CO2, it is acidifying the oceans. Which is not beneficial.
If your device works as you claim and it's reasonably priced, you need to approach a venture capitalist. You will need to have a fully costed business plan. If you can self-fund a production run, then this would greatly assist investment. Otherwise you will need to provide evidence that your device works.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou can expect to have to sacrifice a portion of your business to any investor.
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Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHere's one presentation on global warming based on increased CO2 level:
"...[O]ne of the reasons paleontologists today believe one of the reasons dinosaurs grew so large, was that they weren’t cold-blooded like today’s lizards; they were lukewarm-blooded....But another reason for their size may have been the sweltering oxygen-rich environment that came to dominate the dinosaur era; an environment triggered by volcanism....It was global warming gone wild; CO2 levels increased over 500 percent and temperatures soared. In the greenhouse conditions this created, huge tropical forests spread over many of the continents....Many scientists believe that evolving for millions of years, in this warm, oxygen-rich world, allowed the lukewarm-blooded dinosaurs to reach their enormous sizes. Huge dinosaurs may have been a biological response to a volcanically over-active planet....65 million years ago. The planet was lush. Vegetation was thick on the surface. Living things were prospering like never before."
[2007 DVD. How the Earth was Made. London: Pioneer Productions for the History Channel, 55 min., ff.]