The UN conference at Copenhagen was a failure. Despite the fact that the Copenhagen Accord agreed last December has a stated aim of keeping global warming to below 2°C, and reviewing a 1.5°C goal by 2015 the emission targets set by the accord almost guarantee that that wont happen.
A recent paper published in Nature demonstrates the inadequacies of the emission targets (which are non-binding) of the Copenhagen Accord. As the figure above shows, there is only a small chance of getting only a 2°C rise in temperature, and a rather large chance of a substantially higher temperature increase. Actually it is worse than it looks because the lower end of the rage of possibility assumes that that nations meet their highest stated ambitions, and do not use surplus allowances or land-use credits.
I don’t like those odds.
And Canada even gets a special mention in the paper:
By aligning itself with the US target, Canada is the only country that both weakened its ambitions in the course of the negotiations, and effectively argued for an increase of 2020 emission allowances above its current Kyoto Protocol target: 3% above instead of 6% below 1990 levels.
Pathetic.
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