First Impressions from Copenhagen
by Brooks B. Yeager
Executive Vice President for Policy,
Clean Air-Cool Planet
First impressions from COP-15: This isn’t a meeting or a conference; it’s more like a bizarre and diverse village, simultaneously hosting a festival, conducting a business meeting, and engaging in a political debate. There are street demonstrations at the metro stop, a carnival market of business displays, planning sessions in cafes. Young people in bright t-shirts with slogans mingle with third world delegates, scientists and techies give talks and exhibitions, and activists argue vociferously over coffee, all while the diplomatic veterans quietly go about their business in large conference halls. You wonder where it’s all going.
I’m here to help focus attention on the plight of the Arctic. Clean Air-Cool Planet and our partners at the Clean Air Task Force are convening a half-dozen side events on Arctic climate change, and on strategies for reducing short-lived climate forcers, such as methane and black carbon, that are accelerating the Arctic warming trend. We are working with folks who are concerned about the same issues in the Himalayas. We all see that reducing SLCFs now might buy some time for the world’s ice systems while we are addressing the underlying need to reduce CO2.
We can’t afford an ice-less planet. But what the Arctic is telling us is that we’ve already warmed more than enough. While political leaders struggle to find a path that will allow us to stabilize overall global warming at 2 degrees Celsius or less, the Arctic is already melting – at less than 1 degree of overall increase. The reality of what’s happening is nature’s answer to the ‘global warming skeptics’. While they manufacture controversy based on some politically-charged e-mail exchanges among a few climate scientists, sea ice continues to melt, walruses haul out on beaches by the thousands because they can no longer hunt from the missing ice, and the Greenland outlet glaciers accelerate the delivery of vast amounts of ice to the sea. We need a deal in Copenhagen.
Tags: arctic melting, arctic policy, black carbon, climate policy, Conference of the Parties, COP-15, copenhagen, glacial melting, global warming skeptics, methane, short lived climate forcers
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