PARIS ACCORD : MAKE THAT NORTH KOREA AND MIT

Being  a  bona fide coal baron  whose estate is  paid a toll  for every ton of coal that crosses it, ex-economist writer, and  former Northern Rock  chairman, the  5th Viscount  Ridley  of  Blagdon  is  often  dismissed  as partisan, but he has his days, as when he asks:

THE PARIS CLIMATE TREATY IS WEAK, SO
WHY DO CLIMATE ACTIVISTS DEFEND IT?

MATT RIDLEY        The mis-selling of the Paris climate treaty

THE TIMES OF LONDON Tuesday, 09 May, 2017
President Trump will decide shortly whether to pull the US out of the Paris agreement on climate change. By all accounts, his instincts and his campaign promises encourage him to do so while his daughter Ivanka and his secretary of state Rex Tillerson want him not to. He has already started rolling back the “clean power plan”, which was Barack Obama’s way of meeting America’s commitment under the Paris agreement.

If he does pull out, or send the agreement to the Senate for ratification on the grounds that it is a “treaty” — something Obama took great pains to try to deny so that he would not have to send it to the Senate — there will be a fresh paroxysm of rage among his critics. Climate scepticism is high among reasons that the left hates Trump. By contrast, it is one of the few things on which I half agree with him.

I am not quite sure why his critics mind so much. Indeed, if I were one of those who thought climate change the biggest threat to humankind bar none, then I would be far more critical of the Paris agreement than I actually am. I would rail against the fact that it is a futile gesture, neither legally binding enough to be enforceable, nor of sufficient scale to make a difference to climate change. It’s those people who most worry about global warming who should be most critical of Paris...

“The Paris agreement must be an international legally binding agreement,” said the EU’s spokesman. The French foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, even rebuked John Kerry, the US secretary of state, for casting doubt on whether a legally binding treaty was possible. Mr Kerry was “confused”, he said.

A merry old soulj: Matt's father the 4th  Viscount

However, Mr Kerry was right, and during the Paris meeting it became clear that no such agreement was possible. Instead of admitting another failure, the envirocrats decided to change tack: they abandoned any pretence of a legally binding agreement, called for voluntary offers of emission reduction, but covered this all up with a full-volume declaration of victory. When I pointed out the volte-face in a speech in the House of Lords, I was told by my own front bench that only North Korea agreed with me. ..

WELL. NOT EXACTLY: MIT'S CLIMATE PROGRAM ISSUED THIS TWO YEARS AGO:
Expected Paris commitments insufficient to stabilize climate by century’s end           Mark Dwortzan | 

MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of 
Global Change 
           October 22, 2015

This December’s international climate negotiations in Paris are expected to yield reductions in manmade greenhouse gas emissions, but unless deeper cuts follow, the global temperature is likely to rise 3.1-5.2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by 2100, according to a report released this week by the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change. The projected temperature increase far exceeds the 2 C thresholdidentified by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change as necessary to avoid the most serious impacts of climate change, from rising sea levels to more severe precipitation patterns to increased wildfires.  

New pledges from countries responsible for the largest global share of greenhouse gas emissions, announced in advance of the UN Climate Change Conference in Paris, promise to make barely a dent in the Earth’s warming trend, says MIT Joint Program co-director John Reilly, a coauthor of the report, "2015 Energy and Climate Outlook."

“Those pledges shave 0.2 C of warming if they’re maintained through 2100, compared with what we assessed would have been the case by extending existing measures [due to expire in 2020] based on earlier international agreements in Copenhagen and Cancun,” Reilly observes. “We are making progress, but if 2 C stabilization is our goal, it’s not nearly enough.”

To determine the likely global impacts of extending existing measures beyond 2020 and implementing current pledges (known as intended national determined contributions, or INDCs) from the biggest emitters through the end of the century, "Outlook" researchers used the Joint Program’s Integrated Global Systems Model (IGSM), a linked set of computer models designed to simulate the global environmental changes that arise as a result of human causes.