Climate Change – Comparisons and Conclusions

Hello everyone! Welcome back to our blog. We will be concluding the laws around climate change in this post. Do let us know if you have any questions or comments that you have, we will be happy to discuss!

 

Comparison

Here is a summary of the definitions of climate change:

Our definition: “The pollution of air with greenhouse gases, in particular, of anthropogenic origins or as a result of anthropogenic processes.”

UNFCCC definition: “change of climate which is attributed directly or indirectly to human activities that alters the composition of the global atmosphere and which is in addition to natural climate variability observed over comparable time periods.” (UNFCCC, 1992)

Based on the definitions above, we can compare the definitions of climate change.

 

Similarities

Both definitions of climate change focused on the aspect of humans modifying the climate. In our definition, we explicitly stated “of anthropogenic origins or … processes” while UNFCCC stated “attributed directly or indirectly to human activities”. This illustrates the importance of recognising how human activities have severely altered our global environment, rather than be confounded by climate change as a natural process.

Another similarity is related to how we looked at climate change as a result of atmospheric pollution. While climate change changes the total environment as they are interconnected, both definitions focused on the atmosphere as seen from how our definition looked at “pollution of air” while UNFCCC looked at “composition of the global atmosphere”. This does not mean that we are not concerned with environmental pollution of other aspects of the environment, rather, this is a starting point for us when considering how climate change is affected by environmental pollution.

 

Differences

One stark contrast between our definition is how the UNFCCC’s definition included natural climate variability as a basis of comparison when tackling climate change. This shows the importance of having a benchmark to test against to refute climate change deniers (Doyle, 2019). In comparison, our definition was a general statement that only focused on greenhouse gas pollution due to anthropogenic factors. While this is useful as a general guideline when understanding climate change, it is less suitable when drafting legal policies. As we have learnt in our first tutorial on creating a message box, this statement did not consider the audience, in this case, policymakers and country leaders.

Although we did mention at the start that we are looking only at emission of greenhouse gases, we could have done better by specifying what types of greenhouse gases much like how criteria air pollutants were considered in various countries when substantiating their air quality indices. Similarly, we could have also considered natural variability and used it as a benchmark when defining climate change. This could have illustrated how anthropogenic processes have accelerated climate change and provide a distinction between natural variability and human-induced variations.

Once again, we will strive to do our best to provide a definition that encompasses the topic without being too restrictive. However, in this case, we acknowledge that our overly general definition without a basis of comparison may illustrate a lack of scientific rigour when considering climate variability.

 

Opinions

The UNFCCC, Kyoto Protocol and Paris Agreements each have their specific pros and cons. This is especially true when you consider the entire treaty. However, that is beyond the scope of this blog and we shall instead focus on how well climate change is defined.

We think that both the UNFCCC and Paris Agreement defined climate change in the most ideal way, where the desired end result (the “negative man-made interference with the Earth’s climate systems” or the “2 degrees climate scenario”) were mentioned (UNFCCC, 1992, 2015). On the other hand, the Kyoto Protocol implied that climate change only occurs with the emissions of greenhouse gases based on Annex A (UNFCCC, 1997). We feel that the Kyoto Protocol is too specific and would fail to consider the effect from other greenhouse gases even if we understand that its role was to operationalise the UNFCCC and focusing on specific major greenhouse gases would be more efficient.

This would boil down to your preferences: would you prefer a more idealistic definition as in the UNFCCC and Paris Agreement, or the practical definition as seen in the Kyoto Protocol? Do comment down below and tell us why!

Our journey to look at how climate change is defined has been a long one. We hope that you found the journey insightful and fruitful. As we start on a new pollutant next post, we would love for you to feedback down below on things you enjoyed or disliked from our posts, as well as things you want us to do or improve on.

Thank you 🙂

Ryan and Lee Yang

 


References

Doyle, A. (2019, 26 February 2019). Evidence for man-made global warming hits ‘gold standard’: scientists. Reuters. Retrieved from https://www.reuters.com/article/us-climatechange-temperatures-idUSKCN1QE1ZU

UNFCCC. (1992, 2020). What is the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change? Retrieved from https://unfccc.int/process-and-meetings/the-convention/what-is-the-united-nations-framework-convention-on-climate-change

UNFCCC. (1997, 2020). What is the Kyoto Protocol? Retrieved from https://unfccc.int/kyoto_protocol

UNFCCC. (2015, 2020). What is the Paris Agreement? Retrieved from https://cop23.unfccc.int/process-and-meetings/the-paris-agreement/what-is-the-paris-agreement

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