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Climate change: this Canadian study actually has some good news

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Arctic Shipping talksWhile many studies on climate change have readers bracing themselves for the latest and most dire warnings before they even scan a paragraph, a new report out of Montreal’s McGill University actually delivers some good news.

The study, published yesterday in the journal Nature, called “National-level progress on adaptation“, looked at how various countries are adapting to the prospect of climate change. And it found some surprising progress. Comparing stats from two separate rounds of data supplied by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), researchers reported significant advances in some key areas of climate adaptation over just a few years.

BIG POLLUTERS ARE MAKING PROGRESS

The study says that between 2010 and 2014, there was an 87% overall increase in climate change adaption from the 41 Annex 1 Parties who reported to the U.N. That’s a group that includes The United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, the Russian Federation, France, Australia, Italy, and Canada, a list that also represents some of the world’s largest polluters. The study also reports a 139% increase in building code changes amongst the group, a 114% increase in the surveillance and monitoring of extreme weather conditions, and a 101% increase in public awareness campaigns.

“Identifying these patterns and gaps is crucial for decision-making about where to invest climate financing and other resources so that we have the biggest impact on reducing vulnerability,” says Alexandra Lesnikowski, one of the study’s authors.

BUT NOW THE BAD NEWS…

The bad news? The McGill study that the most vulnerable in our society are the most and risk, and that the elderly, those with low incomes and indigenous communities, will feel the pain of climate change the most. Another negative noted by the study is that climate change initiatives initiated by one government are often dismantled when another government takes power.

The report comes ahead of the 21st Session of the Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP-21) in Paris.

The United Nations Climate Change Conferences are yearly meetings that began two-decades ago in Berlin to negotiate the Kyoto Protocol, a treaty meant to establish legally binding obligations for countries to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. The Paris meetings, to be held in December, are the twenty-first. Last December, almost 200 countries gathered in Peru for the twentieth meeting, where the focus was on rising global surface temperatures.

The 100 heads of state and government, which include United States President Barack Obama and China’s President Xi Jinping are expected to work towards a new global climate agreement that will in 2020 succeed the Kyoto Protocol, a 1997 agreement that was signed in Kyoto, Japan that required developed countries to reduce emissions by approximately 5% below 1990 levels between the years 2008 and 2012.

While Canada, under then Prime Minister Stephen Harper was famously the first country to pull out of the Kyoto Protocol, the EU last month announced it had already met its 2020 greenhouse gas emissions target. In a recent report, the EU said its 2014 emissions were actually 23% below 1990’s, and that the union was on pace to to be as much as 25% below the Kyoto target by 2020.

Canada, meanwhile, is not on track to meet its more modest goal of 17%.

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About The Author /

Cantech Letter founder and editor Nick Waddell has lived in five Canadian provinces and is proud of his country's often overlooked contributions to the world of science and technology. Waddell takes a regular shift on the Canadian media circuit, making appearances on CTV, CBC and BNN, and contributing to publications such as Canadian Business and Business Insider.
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Comment

  1. The world has been slightly warming, by about 1.5 degrees, since the little ice age about 200 years ago (they were skating on the river Thames in England in the 18th century which of course they aren’t doing now.) – most of that temperature increase occurred without any influence from man.

    The rates of global warming from 1860–1880, 1910–1940 and 1975–1998, are similar and not statistically significantly different from each other.

    Since 1880 when thermometers were first used, the temperature increase globally has been about 0.8 degree C with 0.4 degree increase happening between 1910 – 1940 and 0.4 degree C occurring from 1950 to 1998.

    The global warming alarmist stated that all the warming that has occurred since 1950 was because of man made CO2; yet they can’t explain why there was a similar amount of warming from 1880 to 1940 – before man made CO2 was an issue.

    Since 1998 there has been no statistical warming globally even though CO2 in the atmosphere has increased by about 10%.

    Data has showed that CO2 increases have happened after temperature increases, not the other way around like the global warming theory states it is.

    Recent temperature readings from stations installed in 2004 in the US (2004) have indicated that there has been a 1 degree cooling across the US during that time.

    Government directed agencies in the US like NOAA and NASA are adjusting historical temperature data up to make it look warmer than reality.

    The 2013 IPCC report (AR5) says in Chapter 2 that there is “low confidence” that man-made CO2 has affected the frequency or intensity of extreme weather events such as hurricanes, droughts, floods, and storms. – which all are at historic lows for both frequency and intensity.

    And if 111 of the 114 climate models predicated on the IPCC’s warming projections were wrong, can we really have any confidence that the “consensus” science is reliable?

    Climate related deaths has decreased by 98% from 1930 from 3.7 million world wide to 30,000 last year.

    So now matter what the media and alarmist says the data states that climate related events are getting better and not worst.

    This whole climate scare is based on the redistribution of wealth which is why there will be no agreement if the rich countries don’t agree to pay $100 billion per year to the UN so that they can tell the rest of the world how to live.

  2. Give it a rest. You are making yourself personally responsible for a continued precipitous collapse of your own world. For what? Just so you can enjoy being insulting? Just stop it. Please give it up now. This is not a joke.

  3. Hey Yall, Looky here,

    “This month’s RSS temperature record shows that the Pause now stands at 18 years 9 months.The UAH dataset shows a Pause almost as long as the RSS dataset. The ARGO bathythermograph data shows the oceans are warming at a rate equivalent to less than a quarter of a Celsius degree per century.The fastest warming rate lasting 15 years or more since 1950 occurred over the 33 years from 1974 to 2006. It was equivalent to 2.0 Cº per century.The global warming trend since 1900 is equivalent to 0.75 Cº per century. This is well within natural variability and may not have much to do with us.The warming trend since 1990, when the IPCC wrote its first report, is equivalent to 1 Cº per century. The IPCC had predicted close to three times as much.The fact of a long Pause is an indication of the widening discrepancy between predictions of computer models and the reality of the temperature record. Even NOAA, in a very rare fit of honesty, admitted in its 2008 State of the Climate report that 15 years or more without global warming would demonstrate a discrepancy between prediction and observation. The reason for NOAA’s statement is that there is supposed to be a sharp and significant instantaneous response to a radiative forcing such as adding CO2 to the air.
    In a rational scientific discourse, those who had advocated extreme measures to prevent global warming would now be withdrawing and calmly rethinking their hypotheses. On the evidence to date there is no scientific basis for taking any action at all to mitigate CO2 emissions.”

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