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UN Climate Talks Wrap Up with World Leaving Trump Behind
‘However much Trump wants to take us backward on climate change, the rest of the world — and the rest of the U.S. — is intent on moving forward.’
Two weeks of international climate talks in Bonn made only incremental progress toward resolving disputes that have been lingering since the Paris Agreement of 2015. The main achievement may have been cementing a firebreak to prevent the Trump administration from torching the whole process.
The strategy is to assert a broad new leadership among nations big and small, to bolster their resolve with high-profile commitments from American cities and states, to muster corporations and financial institutions in an attempt to kickstart renewable energy and assist poor countries, and to leave Washington isolated on the world stage.
It's a strategy pinned on the hopes—although diplomats would never put it so bluntly—that either Donald Trump will change his mind or that the United States will change its leader.
"The story of these climate talks was that however much Donald Trump wants to take us backward on climate change, the rest of the world—and the rest of the U.S.—is intent on moving forward," said Nathaniel Keohane, vice president for global climate at the Environmental Defense Fund.
UN Climate Talks Wrap Up with World Leaving Trump Behind by John H Cushman Jr, InsideClimate News, Nov 16, 2017
“This is the worst moment for the Americans to start behaving like a five-year old all of a sudden,” Christian Ehler, a German member of the European Parliament who speaks on EU and U.S. relations at the climate change talks, said in an interview. “The leader of the western world is stepping out of the multilateral framework used to tackle the most dramatic problem the world might be facing in the next 100 years.”
U.S. Is Acting ‘Like a 5-Year-Old’ Over Global Warming, EU Official Says by Jess Shankleman, Bloomberg News, Nov 17, 2017
Climate Feedback asked its network of scientists to review the article, The three-degree world: the cities that will be drowned by global warming by Dom Phillips, Helen Roxburgh, Jonathan Watts, Josh Holder, Justin McCurry, Niko Kommenda, Richard Luscombe & Ruth Michaelson, Guardian, Nov 3, 2017
A majority of reviewers tagged the article as: Insightful and Misleading.
Review Summary
This story in The Guardian includes maps of, and reporting from, five coastal cities that will be affected by continued sea level rise. The story discusses the impact sea level rise will have on those cities, and what they are doing to prepare and adapt.
However, scientists who reviewed the story found that it fails to explain one very important thing to readers: nowhere is it explained that the magnitude of sea level rise shown (for a scenario in which the world warms by 3 °C) is the amount that would occur after the planet has had centuries to millennia to come into equilibrium with elevated temperatures. Readers are likely to assume that the story’s maps illustrate sea level rise that could occur before the end of the 21st century, but this is not the case.
See all the scientists’ annotations in context
UPDATE (15 November 2017): The article has been updated to include some explanation in an expandable box. It states, in part, “How quickly will oceans rise? It could take decades or centuries, but change will be locked in by a 3C temperature rise, which would extensively melt ice caps, shrink glaciers and thermally expand the oceans so many current coastlines and low-lying plains would be under sea level.”
Guardian explores sea level rise impact on cities, but fails to make timescale clear, Climate Feedback, Nov 10, 2017
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Posted by John Hartz on Sunday, 19 November, 2017
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