The United States will submit plans for slowing global warming to the United Nations early this week but most governments will miss an informal March 31 deadline, complicating work on a global climate deal due in December. Other emitters such as China, India, Russia, Brazil, Canada and Australia say they are waiting until closer to a Paris summit in December, meant to agree a global deal. Late submissions complicate the Paris summit because it will be far harder to judge late INDCs. –Alister Doyle and Valerie Volcovici, Reuters, 29 March 2015
Less than a week before the United Nations deadline for countries to file greenhouse-gas pledges necessary to keep a global climate change deal on track, it looks like most of the world is missing in action. Ahead of the March 31 target, only the European Union and Switzerland have unveiled plans, representing about 10 per cent of global emissions. The United States has promised to hit the deadline. The rest of the world’s major economies, including China, India, Australia and Japan, are unlikely to complete submissions in time, according to environmental groups tracking U.N. climate talks. –Alex Nussbaum and Alex Morales, Bloomberg, 25 March 2015
Countries may be holding off on individual plans as long as possible to see what others are doing and to shrink the time for negotiation on their own programs, suggested Wai-Shin Chan, a strategist at HSBC Holdings Plc. “There’s a bit of a waiting game going on,” Chan said by telephone from Hong Kong. Delaying “doesn’t really give other countries much time to scrutinize and assess, and say ‘We’ll do more if you do more.'” –Alex Nussbaum and Alex Morales, Bloomberg, 25 March 2015
India wants a global agreement that will address intensified efforts to tackle climate change between 2015 and 2020 and has questioned the single-minded focus on finalising a global compact for the post-2020 period, which is to be inked in Paris in December. Industrialised countries are required to provide financial support, which was agreed in 2009 and 2010 to be to the tune of $100 billion a year, and were also committed to provide technology to developing countries to address climate change. India’s demand has the broad support of developing countries. –Urmi Goswami, The Times of India, 30 March 2015
This Saturday, the world marked the one of the biggest environmentally-friendly initiatives ‚Äì Earth Hour. However, while a record number of countries and cities participated in the 2015 campaign, people in many part of the world showed less interest in saving the planet than ever before. The Earth Hour campaign registered a massive decline in interest. Although participation continues to be high, the meaning of Earth Hour has begun to blur. Media coverage in the country focused more on saving electricity than on saving the planet. —Dubai Chronicle, 30 March 2015
I abhor Earth Hour. Abundant, cheap electricity has been the greatest source of human liberation in the 20th century. Every material social advance in the 20th century depended on the proliferation of inexpensive and reliable electricity. The whole mentality around Earth Hour demonizes electricity. I cannot do that, instead I celebrate it and all that it has provided for humanity. Earth Hour celebrates ignorance, poverty and backwardness. By repudiating the greatest engine of liberation it becomes an hour devoted to anti-humanism. —Ross McKitrick
In 2007 we were told on all sides that, by the end of the summer melt in 2014, the entire Arctic would be “ice free”. Polar bears were disappearing. The mighty Greenland ice cap was melting. Even as late as 2013 the National Geographic warned that the great expanse of Hudson Bay was warming so fast that it would soon reach “tipping point”, changing its ecosystem forever. How have all those predictions turned out? In fact last year’s Arctic ice melt was the smallest in nine years and its thickness is now back to its level in 2006. Several studies show that across most of the Arctic, polar bears have never done better. –Christopher Booker, The Sunday Telegraph, 29 March 2015
Cold snaps like the ones that hit the eastern United States in the past winters are not a consequence of climate change. Scientists at ETH Zurich and the California Institute of Technology have shown that global warming actually tends to reduce temperature variability. —Reporting Climate Science, 27 March 2015
