UN report on climate gets green signal

A United Nations report that aims at rolling back carbon emissions from greenhouse gases received a green signal from the government representatives after six days of rigourous discussions.

The report under the name, Summary for Policymakers, will be unveiled in Berlin on Sunday. It will provide options to mitigate heat-trapping emissions from fossil fuels and agriculture.

According to the sources close to the development, they hammered out the summary of the report on choices to check the source of climate change.

The report was compiled by more than 200 scientists after over four years of in-depth research. The report is the third piece in an overview by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

According to a draft of the report, most scenarios for meeting the 2 degrees Celsius target entail a “tripling to nearly a quadrupling” in the share of energy from renewable energy, nuclear and also fossil sources whose emissions are captured and stored,

Last September, the IPCC has published its first volume in the series to update scientific evidence of global warming. The second volume, issued on 31 March in Yokohama, Japan, dwelt on the likely impacts. It warned that the risk of conflict, hunger, floods and mass displacement increased with every upward creep of the mercury.

The panel will issue a resume of all three reports in Copenhagen in October.

Doc Climate

We need to start dramatically phasing out fossil fuels within the next few years or face what scientists are now warning will be “catastrophic” climate change, and a revenue-neutral carbon tax suggested in your editorial is our best option. The Salt Lake area’s water problems are just the beginning of much worse to come due to climate change.

Eight Nobel Prize-wining economists and the Harvard economist who a co-author of the latest IPCC report advocate a consumer-friendly carbon tax to transition us efficiently to clean energy without economic pain. A steadily increasing carbon pollution tax that’s rebated directly to consumers, a “tax swap,” will let the market make the switch to renewables as carbon fuels get increasingly more expensive than solar and wind. Revenue- neutral and no government regulations. As they scale up, solar and wind get cheaper. Their prices are already dropping exponentially and storage/battery problems have been solved.

We should also cut fossil fuels’ massive and unnecessary subsidies too. See the Citizens Climate Lobby website for details and get involved, or at least contact Congress. All we need is the political will to do this, but time is running out.