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Chapter 1 NOTES NOTES Chapter 1 1. Emphasis added, quoted from An Inconvenient Truth: A Global Warning, di- rected by David Guggenheim and released by Paramount Classics in 2006. This film was an official selection of the 2006 Sundance Film Festival and the Cannes Film Festival, and won the Academy Award in 2007 for Best Documentary. The printed companion is Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It (New York: Rodale, 2006). Al Gore shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for his leadership on global warming. 2. Bjorn Lomborg, e.g., emphasized the differences between Gore and the IPCC in “Ignore Gore—But Not His Nobel Friends,” The Sunday Telegraph (London) (11 November 2007), 24. On the scientific consensus in the United States, see Jane A. Leggett, Climate Change: Science and Policy Implications, CRS Report for Congress RL33849 (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Research Service, Updated 2 May 2007). On the scientific consensus in the international community, see the widely publi- cized assessments of the IPCC that are introduced below and summarized in later chapters. 3. The Framework Convention and related sources can be accessed at the Gate- way to the UN System’s Work on Climate Change, http://www.un.org/climatechange/ projects.shtml. 317 4. See the UNFCCC’s background information on the Kyoto Protocol, accessed 5 September 2007, at http://unfccc.int/kyoto_protocol/background/items/3145.php. See also Susan R. Fletcher and Larry Parker, Climate Change: The Kyoto Protocol and International Actions, CRS Report for Congress RL 33836 (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Research Service, Updated 8 June 2007). 5. David A. King, “Climate Change Science: Adapt, Mitigate, or Ignore?” Science 303 (9 January 2004), 176–177. At the time King was science advisor to her Majesty’s government in the United Kingdom. For details on the Kyoto Protocol, see http:// unfccc.int/kyoto_protocol/background.php. 6. The figures in the text were calculated from 2009 UNFCCC data on total greenhouse gas emissions including LULUCF, in Gg CO2 equivalent for the 1990 baseline year and 2006. (LULUCF refers to adjustments for Land Use, Land-Use Change, and Forestry.) The data were accessed in 2009 at http://unfccc.int/ghg_data/ ghg_data_unfccc/time_series _annex_i/items/3842.php. 7. For example, if the 1990 baselines reported by the UNFCCC in 2006 are used, total GHG emissions for 1990 to 2006 including LULUCF go up to 18.7% for the United States, to 11.9% for Annex I industrialized countries excluding those in transition to a market economy, and to +1.6% for all Annex I countries. For the figures reported in 2006, see the National Greenhouse Gas Inventory Data for the Period 1990–2004 and Status of Reporting, FCCC/SBI/2006/26 (19 October 2006), 13, Table 5. 8. However, some data are starting to be analyzed. Michael R. Raupach, Gregg Marland, Philippe Ciais, Corinne Le Quéré, Josep G. Canadell, Gernot Klepper, and Christopher B. Field, “Global and Regional Drivers of Accelerating CO2 Emis- sions,” Proc. National Academy of Sciences 104(24) (12 June 2007), 10,288–10,293 (DOI 10.1073/pnas.0700609104), “Together, the developing and least-developed economies (forming 80% of the world’s population) accounted for 73% of global emissions growth in 2004 but only 41% of global emissions and only 23% of global cumulative emissions since the mid-18th century.” 9. Joseph Kahn and Jim Yardley, “As China Roars, Pollution Reaches Deadly Extremes,” New York Times (26 August 2007), 1. 10. However, CO2 emissions per person were 19.4 tons in America and only 5.1 tons in China. Elisabeth Rosenthal, “Booming China Leads the World in Emissions of Carbon Dioxide, a Study Finds,” New York Times (14 June 2008), A5. 11. Recent analyses suggest that the peak and decline should happen earlier and at much lower concentrations than those estimated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its Fourth Assessment Report (2007). See the work by Malte Meinhausen and colleagues from Nature 458 (30 April 2009), 1158–1162, and Global Environmental Change 17 (May 2007), 260–280, the basis for the stabilization level presented here. Some researchers suggest that there is no level above current levels that can guarantee temperature increases of 2°C or less in this century. For example, Andrew Weaver and colleagues find that a 90% global emissions reductions, com- 318 Notes to Pages 3–4 bined with direct capture of already emitted greenhouse gases in the air, is required to meet this criterion. See Geophys. Res. Lett. 34 (October 2007), L19703. 12. IPCC, Working Group III, Summary for Policymakers in Climate Change 2007: Mitigation (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press), 3: “Between 1970 and 2004, global emissions of CO2, CH4, N2O, HFCs, PFCs and SF6, weighted by their global warming potential, have increased by 70% (24% between 1990 and 2004), from 28.7 to 49 Gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalents. The emissions of these gases have increased at different rates. CO2 emissions have grown between 1970 and 2004 by about 80% (28% between 1990 and 2004) and represented 77% of total anthropogenic GHG emissions in 2004.” 13. Carbon cycle researcher Rachel Law has noted that there has been “some speculation that [the higher- than-average growth rates] could indicate a declin- ing biospheric sink—but most likely it’s dominated by increasing CO2 emissions.” Michael Raupach and colleagues have documented this trend in “Global and Re- gional Drivers of Accelerating CO2 Emissions,” noting that “[f]or the recent period 2000–2005, the fraction of total anthropogenic CO2 emissions remaining in the atmosphere . was 0.48. This fraction has increased slowly with time . implying a slight weakening of sinks relative to emissions. However, the dominant factor ac- counting for the recent rapid growth in atmospheric CO2 (>2 ppm y–1) is high and rising emissions, mostly from fossil fuels.” 14. Stefan Rahmstorf, Anny Cazenave, John A. Church, James E. Hansen, Ralph F. Keeling, David E. Parker, and Richard C. J. Somerville, “Recent Climate Ob- servations Compared to Projections,” Science 316 (May 2007), 709, DOI: 10.1126/ science.1136843. 15. Martin Parry, Nigel Arnell, Mike Hulme, Robert Nicholls, and Matthew Liv- ermore, “Commentary: Adapting to the Inevitable,” Nature 393 (22 October 1998), 741; and Roger A. Pielke, Jr., “Rethinking the Role of Adaptation in Climate Policy,” Global Environmental Change 8 (1998), 159–170. 16. Munich Re Group, Topics 2000: Natural Catastrophes—the Current Position (Special Millenium Issue), 43. The category “great natural catastrophes” includes floods, windstorms, and earthquakes. See also Association of British Insurers,Fi- nancial Risks of Climate Change: Summary Report (June 2005), available at http:// www.abi.org.uk/climatechange. 17. Earth Policy Institute, Hurricane Damages Soar to New Levels (Update 58, 2006), accessed at www.earth-policy.org/Updates/2006/Update58. 18. This calculation excludes human losses from waves and surges including tsunamis, volcanos, slides, epidemics, and earthquakes. The source is 2005 Disas- ters in Numbers, available from EM-DAT: The OFDA/CRED International Disaster Database (www.em-dat.net) at the Universite catholiqué de Louvain in Brussels, Belgium. 19. IPCC, Working Group I, Summary for Policymakers, in Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press), notes in Notes to Pages 4–5 319 Table SPM.2, 8, that increases in heavy precipitation events and tropical cyclone intensity are “likely” to have been observed and “more likely than not” to be at- tributable to human activities in whole or part. But both the observations and the linkages to human activities remain an area of active investigation and debate. See, e.g., Judith A. Curry, Peter J. Webster, and Greg J. Holland, “Mixing Politics and Science in Testing the Hypothesis that Greenhouse Warming Is Causing a Global Increase in Hurricane Intensity,” Bull.Amer. Meteor. Soc. 87(8) (2006), 1025; Peter J. Webster, Greg J. Holland, Judith A. Curry, and Hai-Ru Chang, “Changes in Tropi- cal Cyclone Number, Duration, and Intensity in a Warming Environment,” Science 309 (2005), 1844–1846; Kerry Emmanuel, “Increasing Destructiveness of Tropical Cyclones Over the Past 30 Years,” Nature 436 (2005), 686–699; and James B. Elsner, James P. Kossin, and Thomas H. Jagger, “The Increasing Intensity of the Strongest Hurricanes,” Nature 455 (4 September 2008), 92–95. Scientists engaged in active de- bate on this topic signed a statement on the U.S. Hurricane Problem (25 July 2006), urging that the debate “should in no event detract from the main hurricane problem facing the United States: the ever-growing concentration of population and wealth in vulnerable coastal areas. These demographic trends are setting us up for rapidly increasing human and economic losses from hurricane disasters, especially in this era of heightened activity.” The statement is posted at http://wind.mit.edu/~emanuel/ Hurricane_threat.htm. 20. Judith A. Merkle, “Scientific Management,” in Jay M. Shafritz, Ed., Inter- national Encyclopedia of Public Policy and Administration (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998), 2036–2040 at 2040. Of course the term “scientific management” is sub- ject to various interpretations as it continues to evolve. See also James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998); and John Ralston Saul, Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West (New York, NY: Vintage, 1993). 21. Ronald D. Brunner, Toddi A. Steelman, Lindy Coe-Juell, Christina M. Crom- ley, Christine M. Edwards, and Donna W. Tucker, Adaptive Governance: Integrating Science, Policy, and Decision Making (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2005), p. 2. For more on scientific management, see also Ronald D.
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