Copenhagen's Goal Likely to Fail, New Studies Show

By Craig Simons

The verdict on Copenhagen is in: guilty of failure. Every serious study of commitments made at the environmental summit shows it will fall short of its goal to cut carbon emissions sharply enough to hold off a 2-degree-Celsius rise in global temperatures. After the conference, the United Nations Environment Program found that the world had locked in less than half of the greenhouse-gas reductions needed to provide a 50-50 chance of preventing the temperature increase by 2050. A second study by MIT, Ventana Systems, and the U.S.-based Sustainability Institute calculated that Copenhagen's proposals will likely leave the world 3.9 degrees warmer by 2100. A third report from Germany's Potsdam Institute found that even if every Copenhagen proposal is fully funded, average global temperatures will be 3.2 degrees higher by century's end.

The final tallies differed slightly since scientists made different assumptions about how quickly emissions will grow, or fall, in each nation. But "independent groups looking at this from different angles reached the same conclusions," said Michiel Schaeffer, the senior scientist of Climate Analytics, a research firm that worked with the Potsdam Institute. As all three groups pointed out, if the world delays action by even a few years--as now seems inevitable--emissions cuts will have to be considerably larger to stay within the 2-degree range. "It becomes increasingly difficult to achieve reduction and increasingly costly if you wait," said Nick Nuttall, the UNEP's chief spokesman.

So what will the warming do to the world? An average temperature rise of 2 to 4 degrees is expected to cause much of the Amazon rainforest to dry out and then burn, dumping millions of tons of additional carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Greenland's ice would eventually melt, causing sea level to rise by as much as seven meters. Agricultural yields could fall across most of the globe. Glaciers and snowpack would recede, with potentially devastating consequences for billions of people who rely on them for water. And this assumes that governments take at least the actions they are promising. The most recent assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggests that a business-as-usual approach could push temperatures up by more than 6 degrees Celsius by 2100.

There's still time to stall the global temperature rise. But that will require a truly global commitment to deeper cuts. China and other developing nations will have to agree to binding reductions, something Beijing has stridently resisted. The U.S.--which has emitted more greenhouse gases than any other nation--will have to ensure much deeper cuts than those President Obama offered in Copenhagen. The good news is that world leaders are talking, providing hope that progress could be made when they meet again next December. The bad news is that the Copenhagen failure reveals deep global divisions--and each year we wait, the solutions become harder to attain.