Global Warming And The Paris Agreement - 1924 Words

Introduction After two decades of deliberations (Obergassel et al. 2016: 3), the international community has finally created an accord in which every state will play a role in trying to accomplish the major environmental goal of our time, preventing dangerous levels of global warming. On December 12, 2015, at the 21st Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, 195 nations decided to adopt the Paris Agreement (Obergassel et al. 2016: 7). Upon being signed, the Paris Agreement has been widely hailed as a historic diplomatic success (Harvey, Fiona 2015). It aims to prevent the climate from warming to dangerous levels, with dangerous being quantified as the specific goal of â€Å"holding the increase in†¦show more content†¦Second, I will examine how the Paris Agreement’s method of letting each country choose its own emissions limitation targets has resulted in a trajectory where even the already too dangerous 2  ºC threshold is currentl y far out of reach (Clà ©menà §on 2016: 13). And finally, I will demonstrate how even if individual countries ultimately revise and improve their targets so that they would be able to meet the 2  ºC threshold, the non-binding nature of the Paris Agreement will likely result in some countries choosing not to take the efforts necessary to attain their targets (Obergassel et al. 2016: 44). When combined with the fact that the world is already seeing dangerous effects from climate change (Knutti et al. 2015: 5), these points suggest that the goal of preventing dangerous levels of climate change from occurring are unobtainable. Defining â€Å"Dangerous† Since 2009’s COP15 in Copenhagen, the international community has come to a consensus that global warming at or higher than 2  ºC above the pre-industrial average is too dangerous (Lau, Lee and Mohamed 2012: 3). This arbitrary temperature increase threshold is not based on scientific consensus of what is safe, but rather a political consensus based on what was believed to be â€Å"both realistically achievable and tolerable† (Knutti et al. 2015: 1). Although limiting the global temperature increase to 2  ºC above the pre-industrial average is certainly safer than not limiting it at all (Clà ©menà §on 2016: 18), even a 2  ºC increase