Effects of Climate Change Much Worse Since Kyoto Protocol

The Kyoto Protocol was a full dozen years ago, and since then, well, to put it bluntly: things have gotten much, much worse. Worse, even, than most experts predicted at the time. The global outlook on climate change, reports the Associated Press, is far grimmer than it was back in 1997. Climate change has both sped up and intensified since the treaty was signed: Greenland and Antarctica have lost trillions of tons of ice. The oceans have risen over an inch and a half. Half the water from the Colorado River reservoirs is gone. It goes on and on. Global warming since Kyoto has been, in a word, disastrous.

From the AP:

“ "Since an agreement to reduce greenhouse gas pollution was signed in Kyoto, Japan, in December 1997, the level of carbon dioxide in the air has increased 6.5 percent...From 1997 to 2008, world carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels have increased 31 percent; U.S. emissions of this greenhouse gas rose 3.7 percent. Emissions from China, now the biggest producer of this pollution, have more than doubled in that time period. When the U.S. Senate balked at the accord and President George W. Bush withdrew from it, that meant that the top three carbon polluters — the U.S., China and India — were not part of the pact's emission reductions. Developing countries were not covered by the Kyoto Protocol and that is a major issue in Copenhagen." ”

Though it seems arbitrary (or obvious) to mark the period of time since the Kyoto Protocol was signed, I think the point here is that Kyoto was a flawed treaty, and this is why climate change has ravaged the globe so much since then. This means, really, that the Copenhagen Conference, or at least any agreement stemming from the groundwork laid at the Conference, must be extremely specific in how climate change is going to be mitigated, and all the major nations must agree to binding terms. Because it's pretty clear that Kyoto's policies and lack of participation has made a global climate (no pun intended) that is in much more trouble than it was when many nations agreed to fix the problem.

So come Copenhagen's meetings next month, we have to hope that, at the very least, a framework can be agreed upon that will commit all the nations present to creating binding terms as soon as possible. As we can see, even a dozen years can have an absolutely terrible effect on the world.

photo credit: spleeney's flickr photostream/Creative Commons