By Bennie Mills from Waltonian

As UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon stated: “We have entered a new era of global cooperation on one of the most complex issues ever to confront humanity”. Following the conference closure there was a short spate of positive reactions that has now been followed by a rather ominous silence.

The World Bank Group is now finalizing a Climate Change Action Plan that will help to integrate climate considerations across the institution’s operations, and make it easier to deliver comprehensive packages of financing, technical assistance and knowledge to help countries adapt to climate change and transition to a low carbon economy. “The Agreement has been hailed by many sectors as signaling the end of the fossil fuel era and ushering in sustainable economic growth fueled by clean energy”, the senator added.

“Most of these carbon farming practices and techniques are not yet a part of the mainstream climate discussion”, Wheeler wrote.

The Sun’s December 14 account of the Paris climate talks reported that the deal reached “requires everyone, not just rich countries, to set emissions targets and be transparent about what they are doing to meet them”. Personally, I think it’s more likely that improvements to traffic flows will shorten journey times and so reduce the climate change impacts, but it illustrates how strategies to reduce climate change are not always clear-cut.

The Paris agreement carries symbolic power and is a small pivot towards a stable and health-sustaining climate, but its legal force must be interpreted alongside parallel worldwide agreements that are expressly created to lock the steering wheel on reforms. Everyone wanted to find the glass half full.

“In the United States we have a Republican Party which is much more interested in contributions from the fossil fuel industry than they care about the future of the planet”, Sanders said the day of the agreement. “By comparison to what it should have been, it’s a disaster”.

The credibility of the IPCC’s projections of 21st century climate has been called into question by a slowdown of the rate of warming in the early 21st century, relative to a more rapid rate of warming in the last quarter of the 20th century. However, real estate along coasts could be a concern as sea levels rise. There are, however, no specified figures for the donor countries, and there is no knowing how the inevitable gap between pledges and actual funding will be met. The promised $ 100 billion a year for developing countries looks like a notional figure. However, a further increase of another 2 degrees could hurt those same areas.

In truth, even the 2 degree goal is insufficient. Or we may reach a much different conclusion.

5 – Exciting times for green business lie on the horizon. “Game on” (Common Dreams, Dec. 12). Private finance increased by almost $50 billion Dollars a year ago, driven mainly by a record amount of new renewable energy investment in emerging markets. That it can achieve its ambitious goal in the short run is doubtful because there are other, even larger, organizable masses out there who will resist rapid, necessary change.

“This will be the first election where climate change is one of the top two or three issues”.

An isolated United States capitulated, and the first roadmap for addressing climate change was adopted. Her practice focuses on economic growth, energy and the environment.

A major part of India’s pledge to lower and/or compensate for growing greenhouse emissions is the preservation and expansion of the country’s forests.

CO2 from wood burning and urban sources.

Countries need to continue current efforts. Potentially vulnerable regions include the temperate latitudes, which are projected to warm disproportionately, the regions around the Pacific and Indian oceans that are now subjected to large rainfall variability due to the El Niño/Southern Oscillation sub-Saharan Africa and sprawling cities where the urban heat island effect could intensify extreme climatic events. One of the important tasks for Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar is to see that the 14th Finance Commission award of listing forests as one of the criteria for the devolution of finance is implemented sincerely by the State Governments as there are reports that it is not being done. The answer is that both are threatened with inundation by 2100.

The prospect that 195 nations can successfully coordinate their efforts to put in place policies that, over the next hundred years, will negatively impact their economies and the standard of living of significant numbers of citizens is far-fetched.

For more on this story go to: http://waltonian.com/2016/01/fighting-climate-change-in-cayman/

See also iNews Cayman story published December 30 2015 “Paris agreement to shape Cayman’s climate change policies” at: http://www.ieyenews.com/wordpress/paris-agreement-to-shape-caymans-climate-change-policies/