Author: Eric Jensen

Indy and Dakota have done a great job of summarizing the current situation in their latest post, so I encourage you to read that.  Now that I’m back at home, I just wanted to add my voice in welcoming our Swarthmore colleagues Prof. Ayse Kaya, Anita Desai, Stephen O’Hanlon, and Nathaniel Graf, who are arriving in France this weekend.  I look forward to their news and insights over the coming week.

And this week promises to be exciting.  To use the phrase that I heard several times in the past few days, this week “the ministers arrive,” the higher-level officials with more power to make meaningful concessions and hammer out the final agreement.

I’ve really appreciated the chance to share my experiences with you this past week, and I may yet have a post or two to share as I continue to reflect and take in the events of this coming week.  I remain optimistic about the outcome.   I had the good fortune of hearing former Vice President Al Gore speak on Friday, and he expressed his optimism with a quote from one of my favorite poets.  It really resonated with me, so I’ll let Wallace Stevens have the last word:

After the final no there comes a yes
And on that yes the future world depends.

We’ve talked about “the negotiations” a lot, but what are the negotiators actually doing during those hours that they spend behind closed doors?  They’re talking about language.  I got a chance to see that first-hand (albeit at a slight remove) today.  I was in a hallway in the building where most of the negotiations are taking place, and one of the video monitors in the hallway was showing a feed from one of the rooms.  Mostly the video was of individual country delegates speaking, but briefly it showed the image above, display the section of the agreement text that presumably was the subject of current discussion.

At first glance, it looks pretty dull—most of us have edited texts before, and sometimes argued over wording details.   But if you look closely at the paragraphs above (which are on page 28 of the new draft text released this morning), and think about how things differ if one option vs. the other is chosen, some of these things really make a difference in outcomes.  Text in brackets indicates different possible wordings (per the U.N. editorial conventions), so if you look at Option 1, there’s a big difference between choosing “Decides” (it will really happen) vs. “Invites the President of the COP” (might or might not happen, depending on what the President does).  And either of those is pretty different from Option 2, where it’s certain that nothing will happen before 2020.

And what’s happening (or possibly not happening) here is “stock-taking”, getting together to assess progress, and possibly increase effort, toward the goal of decreasing future warming.  And what precisely is that goal (“referred to Article 3, paragraph 1”)?  It is—you guessed it—still being negotiated, but it reads in part (after referring to yet a different article and paragraph):

“Hold the increase in the global average temperature [below 1.5 °C [or] [well] below 2 °C] above pre- industrial levels by ensuring deep cuts in global greenhouse gas [net] emissions;”

Clearly there is [work still to be done] [progress still to be made] [drama ahead]—stay tuned.

 

“The pace has been slow and we have many issues that remain unresolved.”

“…progress was too slow.”

“We need a change in the mode of work.”

“The parties have engaged actively… but the pace, in my view, is nowhere near fast enough.”

“The parties have expressed clearly… support for transparency.  Like others, the pace is not good enough.  We will continue to work tonight.”

One after another, thus went the summary statements about the negotiations from the facilitators of the various groups.  This was part of an update last night on the progress of the negotiations so far.  It was attended by the lead negotiators of the various countries, as well as the COP President.  As you can see, there was a consensus that not enough progress is being made toward the goal of having an agreed-upon text by noon on Saturday.

After the updates from the facilitators, the chair of the meeting opened the floor to the individual country representatives who were present.  At that point, the tone and focus changed dramatically.  The ambassador from South Africa, speaking on behalf of the G77 (a coalition of developing countries) and China, expressed “some concerns with the process.”  She spoke of the proliferation of spinoff and informal discussions, sometimes on the same issue and taking place simultaneously.  She also noted that sometimes these were announced at the last minute, and asked for better advance notification of schedules.

In addition to concerns about scheduling, she made some specific requests on behalf of the countries for which she was speaking.  One concrete request was for the UNFCCC to compile the various edits that had been produce so far in the various negotiating groups, and to produce a new master (but still provisional) text that would be made available to all parties in the morning.  I assume that the goal of this was to allow them (and everyone else) to get a better sense of where things stand, since issues being discussed in one part of the text will have impact on other parts of the text.  (The chair of the session later agreed to this request, and the new text is out this morning.)

After South Africa spoke, the representative from Malaysia spoke, saying that he was speaking on behalf of like-minded developing countries.  He said that he supported everything in the previous statement, adding that the pace of the negotiations was “punishing.”  As an example, he cited three parallel processes on mitigation taking place in three difference rooms.  He said, “We cannot sacrifice a durable agreement at the altar of expediency,” saying that some of the countries were beginning to feel left out.

Apparently this is a perennial problem at the COPs.  The smaller and/or less-developed countries have smaller delegations, and thus it is harder for them to have a presence at multiple sessions taking place simultaneously, and to keep up long negotiations that can stretch well into the evening hours.  In fact, some of the observers who are here come to COP specifically to help smaller states navigate the process, so that they have extra bodies to track what is going on in various parallel sessions (though observers have much less access than party delegates do).

I don’t have the experience to gauge whether these concerns are worse at this particular COP, given the urgency and the relatively short deadline of trying to agree on a provisional text by Saturday, and how much this is viewed as part of the process.  But having read about this before the COP, it was interesting to see it playing out in real time.

After these statements, several other countries were given the floor to make statements.  One interesting bit of procedure that I noted: it appears that parties request the floor by turning their country nameplates on their side, so that they are sticking up in the air.  (You can see this in the photo above.)   I couldn’t see everything that was happening (we were watching on closed-circuit TV from another room), but everyone who spoke had an upended nameplate, and they put it back down when they finished speaking, so this appeared to be what was going on.

Some of the remaining discussion amounted to parties saying to each other, “No you need to be more flexible,” albeit in a diplomatic way.  Other countries weighed in with additional comments on the fast pace or the need for progress.

The final statement came from the representative from Mexico, who said, “We have talked about urgency for a long time, but this is the place to show it.”  The negotiations are continuing today, and it will be interesting to see whether the collective sense of urgency produces more progress.

Would you cross the road if there was a one-in-three chance you’d be hit by a bicycle?  (Maybe.)  Would you cross the street, holding the hand of a child, if there was a one-in-three chance you’d be hit by a bus?  (Probably not.)

I’ll bet that the above questions grabbed your attention more than this would:

Limiting the warming caused by anthropogenic CO₂ emissions alone with a probability of … >66% to less than 2°C since the period 1861–1880, will require cumulative CO₂ emissions from all anthropogenic sources to stay between … 0 and about 1000 GtC (3670 GtCO₂) since that period. These upper amounts are reduced to about… 790 GtC (2900 GtCO₂) … when accounting for non-CO₂ forcings as in RCP2.6. An amount of 515 [445 to 585] GtC (1890 [1630 to 2150] GtCO₂), was already emitted by 2011.

The latter is a quote from the “Summary for Policymakers” in the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) from Working Group 1 of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).   The former is an example of how to communicate essentially the same idea in a different way, focusing on the 1/3 risk of surpassing 2° C even with the quoted emissions budget, and how extreme and dangerous that would be.  The example comes from Keith Tuffley, one of the speakers at a very interesting session I attended on Monday.  The event was organized by the IPCC, requesting feedback on how they could better communicate the results that they present in their assessment reports.  The IPCC is the body charged with assessing the science related to climate change, and their reports are widely viewed as the gold standard in presenting a consensus view of scientists about these issues.  At the same time, the reports have also been criticized for being hard to read and understand.

To distill a very interesting discussion down to its essence, the bottom line of the contributions of the panel members, and the questions and answers that followed, was this: as human beings, we respond to stories.  So to communicate the results of climate change, we need a layer of storytelling between the technical details of the reports and the listening ears of the world.   As a scientist and a teacher, I think that is exactly right.  And indeed it is the same message that my Swarthmore colleague Tristan Smith has been conveying, bringing the work of the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science to Swarthmore’s campus via a series of workshops for our students on how to be better communicators.  I’m also assigning the students in my Climate Change class this semester to make one-minute videos of themselves explaining the real science behind one “climate myth” of their choice.

The session did not ultimately answer the key question of whose job this is.  Is it the IPCC’s job to tell more compelling stories?  Personally, I don’t think so—their primary focus has to be to continue to convey the latest science, including its technical detail and its uncertainty.  And, as Paul Lussier of Yale pointed out in the session, what resonates with one group may not resonate with another—your story may not be my story.  Lussier is the founder of the Science Communication with Impact Network (SCWIN), and he argued that effective climate change communication should start by connecting with values: Do you care about food?  About the oceans?  About livable cities?  About social justice and equity for low-income people?   Any of these things can connect with climate change, and Lussier argued that you will be more willing to dive into understanding the science of climate change if your point of entry into the issue is via something you value, rather than climate change being a (relatively abstract) idea in and of itself.

In that light, it’s encouraging to see the number of organizations here at COP21 that are focused on telling the climate change story in different ways and engaging people via particular issues that resonate with them.  As for me, I’ll keep telling the stories in the ways that I can, and I hope that you will, too.

What if we could see what we’re doing?  One of the challenges of climate change as a global problem is that the underlying cause—greenhouse gas emissions—is largely invisible.  We associate “emissions” with “pollution”, which is correct in this case, but we’ve done a much better job of cleaning up the visible emissions (like the smog that blanketed Los Angeles starting in the 1950s) than we have with greenhouse gas emissions.  And part of that may be the fact that it’s not in our faces like other emissions are.  Richard Alley, a geoscientist at Penn State and an IPCC member, notes in this Marketplace story that in the 19th century we had much more visible “emissions” from our horse-based transportation system.  If our roads were being covered in waste at the pace of about an inch per year, perhaps we’d feel a greater sense of urgency about cleaning it up.

And not only can we not see it, but it doesn’t stay in one place.  Arguably Los Angeles was motivated to clean up its act because they could see the problem and it was clear that the source was local, so that local actions could help address a local problem.  Greenhouse gases, on the other hand, don’t stay local; while particulate emissions like soot are heavy enough to fall out of the atmosphere within a few hundred miles of where they are emitted, CO₂ stays in the atmosphere for hundreds of years.  That means that it circles the globe in just a few weeks, and eventually mixes entirely into the global atmosphere within a year or so, which makes anyone’s local greenhouse gas emissions a global problem.

I was struck by this today when I saw the image above (in a display from the Korea Green Foundation, one of many organizations that are displaying their work here in the hall devoted to observer / NGO organizations) right after hearing President Obama call for “a strong system of transparency that gives all of us confidence that all of us are meeting our commitments.”   Transparency, in this case, would be good, since in the context of these talks it means that countries would commit to some sort of accountability about the extent to which they are meeting their commitments to reduce their emissions.  Exactly what form that takes, and how strong an obligation it will be, remains to be seen.  That will be one of the negotiating points over the next two weeks.  Let’s hope that it will indeed be strong, so that, counterintuitively, the increased transparency will help us see what we’re doing and work hard to fix it.

“No surprises.”  That was the emphatic message from Christiana Figueres this afternoon at a security briefing before the kickoff of COP21 tomorrow.  Figueres, the Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC (and also Swarthmore class of 1979), emphasized the security challenges of the conference, which tomorrow will bring together almost 150 heads of state.  She said that that is the largest number of heads of state that have ever come together anywhere, for any reason, in one day, even at other UN events.  What “no surprises” means in this context is that security will react rapidly to anything unexpected that happens anywhere in the venue.  So while she didn’t say so in so many words, I took her to be saying in part that any sort of outcry / demonstration / interjection could have negative consequences, as anything surprising would provoke an “immediate reaction” from security.

She emphasized the importance of participation from “civil society” and stressed that it would be possible for people to make their points and have their voices heard—as long as security was aware beforehand of what they planned to do.  She said that a “legally-binding agreement” that is “fair” and “transformational” is “the star that we are reaching toward,” but added, “We have to keep our eyes on the stars, but we also have to keep our feet on the ground.”  And the ground, in her metaphor, is a security atmosphere that is very tense right now.   Kevin, the head of security (at right in the photo above), repeated the “no surprises” theme, but also said to the assembled group of observer delegates, “we will work with you to achieve your goals.”

Interestingly, Figueres extended her “no surprises” theme to the negotiations, saying that the COP President will bring no surprises to the floor, and that she didn’t want any from other parties, either.  I don’t know enough about how these negotiations work to know how surprising a statement that is.  I presume that it is intended to apply to how debate occurs on the floor, rather than implying anything about flexibility (or lack thereof) in what a final agreement might look like.

After an overnight flight from Philadelphia (one of the emptiest flights I’ve been on in quite some time), I’m excited to be here in Paris for the start of COP21.  “COP” is the “Conference of the Parties”, in this case the parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).  U.N. member delegations from around the world are convening here in Paris this week and next to negotiate an agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.  I’m here this week (along with Swarthmore College students Indiana Reid-Shaw and Dakota Pekerti) to observe the negotiations (and the many side events that go along with it – essentially a large climate change conference, with an expected attendance of 40,000 people).  We’ll be here for the week, and next week we’ll hand the baton to Professor Ayse Kaya and students Stephen O’Hanlon and Anita Desai, who will come for the final week of the negotiations.  (Swarthmore College has three “badges”, official credentials for attending the conference.  We are not parties to the negotiations, but rather are “observers”, an official designation that encompasses roughly half of those in attendance.  For a nice summary of COP, listen to this presentation by Neil Leary from Dickinson College.)

Arriving in Paris, preparations for the conference are obvious everywhere – signs in the airport, special kiosks with information, lots of helpful people in green vests to help you figure out where to go.  And today and tomorrow, free public transportation throughout the city as many major roads are closed as part of the tight security surrounding the arrival of many heads of state (including President Obama) to kick off the negotiations.

At the conference venue itself (in Le Bourget, north of Paris), I was greeted with a display of flags of the U.N. member countries:

Security to get into the venue was much like an airport – metal detectors, all bags x-rayed – but moved quickly due to the large number of people working.  After getting photographed for my badge, I headed into the venue.  It’s a little disorienting at first – several different pavilions, each housing different types of displays or meeting rooms.  (Just a few hours of sleep probably isn’t helping with the disorientation factor.)

One of the pavilions has displays from some (many?  most?) of the countries in attendance, all with different styles.  The U.S. looks like they are expecting to be holding group events there:

whereas Mexico’s display is more focused on showcasing impacts of climate change (there was a video display highlighting the recent hurricane that hit Mexico’s west coast, and tying it to expected increased frequency of severe weather events from climate change) as well as highlighting renewable energy projects around the country.

The Gulf Cooperation Council (Persian gulf states) has one of the fancier displays – I haven’t yet looked inside to see how they are presenting their engagement with the issue of climate change.

Mostly things are quiet – a fair amount of set-up still going on, but not a huge number of people in attendance just yet.  I’m sure that tomorrow things will be much busier, including the press area:

Unfortunately, one of the big events originally scheduled for today (a large public march through Paris) was canceled in the wake of the Nov. 13 attacks.   Events inside the conference venue are continuing as planned (with the BBC even suggesting that an agreement is more likely since the attacks), but outside events in public spaces have been canceled.

Looking forward to the actual start of the conference tomorrow!