By Richard Tardif
In 2003 the Canadian government was set to hand out $1 billion in funding to businesses and homeowners in the first steps toward a workable Kyoto Protocol aimed at slowing global warming. Funding was also expected for commercial building refits, tens of millions of dollars for ethanol-subsidies, and a whopping $150 million to fund partnerships with province and municipalities on climate-change abatements. Some of that funding made it, some didn’t but for many it was all for not; Canada eventually abandoned the Protocol. Nevertheless, the Kyoto Protocol was considered something the industrialized world needed to implement for future generations.
Kyoto emerged from the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), at the 1992 mega-meeting known as the first Earth Summit. The framework pledges to stabilize greenhouse-gas concentrations “at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system”. This was not binding. That treaty, one that bound countries to reductions, was finalized in Kyoto, Japan, in 1997, after years of negotiations. It went into semi-force in 2005.
The Kyoto Treaty called on industrialized nations to limit or reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, primarily carbon dioxide from industry and cars, which many scientists believed then and now are raising global temperatures. Kyoto assigns each country a target, requiring it to curb emissions. The first treaty set goals of reduction by an average of 5.2 per cent below 1990 levels by 2012.
Through all the rhetoric and flash-cash schemes, critics were fast to point out that Kyoto may just be another initiative headed for the recycling bin.The accord did not come into force until countries representing 55 percent of global emissions ratify the deal. Russia, with 17.4 percent of global emissions, held out eventually ratified the deal.
In the past Kyoto has done poorly with elected politicians, both federal and provincial, either in or out of office. Many tend to follow the line of then Imperial Oil CEO Bob Peterson, who shrugged off the notion of global warming and called Kyoto “the dumbest-assed thing I’ve heard in a long time.” He later softened his stance but insisted that Canada should take more time to ratify the treaty.
Jayson Myers, then Chief Economist of the Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters group, weighed in by saying, “Kyoto implementation will cause severe economic pain, particularly in the energy and manufacturing sectors.”
Enter the US
In March 2003 the US National Policy and Analysis Council claimed that the US would have to cut its energy use by one quarter, the equivalent of stopping all highway, rail, sea and air traffic permanently to meet the requirements of Kyoto. That prompted the US to withdraw support for the treaty.
The science world was still at odds over global warming. In 2003, the number of scientists who signed a petition denying global warming rose from 17,000 in 1997 to 44,000. They signed a petition saying, in part, “there is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.”
The NASA/Marshall Space Flight Center in 2003 reported, “the temperatures we measure from space are actually on a very slight downward trend since 1979 . . . the trend is about 0.05 degrees Celsius per decade cooling.”
A survey of 36 state criminologists, scientists retained by state governments to monitor and research climate issues, conducted in 1997 found that 58 percent disagreed with the statement, “global warming is for real.” While only 36 percent agreed. A remarkable 89 per cent agreed, “Current science is unable to isolate and measure variations in global temperatures caused only by man-made factors.”
There are two reasons behind the anti global warming movement. First, the most reliable temperature data show no global warming trend. Global warming alarmists point to surface-based temperature measurements showing 1997 was the warmest year on record. But satellites and weather balloons rank 1997 as the seventh coolest year since satellite measurements began in 1978.
The second reason is the reliance on global computer models that are too crude to predict future climate changes.
Predictions of global climate change are based on general circulation models (GCMs); complex computer programs that attempt to simulate the Earth’s atmosphere. GCMs help scientists learn more about atmospheric physics, but they have been unreliable as predictors of future climates.
While global temperatures have risen between 0.3 and 0.6 degrees Celsius over the past one hundred years, computer models predict that global temperatures should have gone up between 0.7 and 1.4 degrees Celsius by 1990. The two ranges do not even overlap.
The real Kyoto
Kyoto supporters acknowledge that the treaty represents only a first step toward achieving the goal set by the original climate treaty: to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere “at a level that would prevent dangerous interference with the climate system.”
Kyoto cannot be taken for granted. Its effects will only slow, not halt, the build up of greenhouse gases.
Unlike the 1990 Montreal Protocol on Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer, which was thought to eventually solve the problem of ozone depletion, the Kyoto Protocol did not solve the problem of climate change, but only launched the long process of weaning the world away from heavy reliance on fossil fuels.
Dr. Robert Watson, then chief spokesperson on Climate Change for the World Bank, an unpopular organization, a given, suggested in 2005 that, “Kyoto is unlikely to have much impact in stopping the effects of global warming, but it does open doors for the production of more energy-efficient technologies.”
If these doors are opened, the evolution of the Kyoto Protocol might resemble the Montreal Protocol, which evolved from a weak agreement into a model environmental treaty as the threat of ozone depletion became clear.
The real hope was that Kyoto would not become a broad, rhetorical, self-congratulatory design that describes existing environment and development programs but do little to redirect them, or attempt to spin off some good.
Did it?
On the tenth anniversary of the Kyoto Protocol, the United Nations reported that countries with targets under the Kyoto Protocol have collectively exceeded their original ambition. Those countries that took on targets under the protocol have reduced their emissions by over 20 percent, well in excess of the targeted five percent.
It’s not all rosy. In December of 2011, Canada, active in the negotiations that led to the Protocol in 1998 became the first nation to withdraw. Canada, under the Liberals signed the accord in 1998 and ratified it in 2002 but was not on track to meet its binding targets, and bounced out under the Conservatives to avoid stiff penalties. The Conservatives committed to 17 percent cuts from 2005 levels by 2020, a much lower threshold to meet than cutting below 1990 emissions levels.
In fact, the Conservative government was opposed to any extension of the Kyoto Protocol arguing instead for a new international agreement that would include commitments from the industrialized and non-industrialized nations.
The argument was heard.
The 194 nations attending the UN climate change summit in Durban, South Africa, in 2011 agreed to start negotiations on a new all-inclusive accord, one that proposed to take affect in 2020. This, too, never came to pass.
