Even as climate change continues to be a hotly debated topic across the world, a team of Oslo scientists are pushing for a “carbon law” policy in order to halve the world’s carbon dioxide emissions each decade starting 2020 to combat climate change.
This policy, similar to the carbon tax, requires the imposition of penalties on carbon emitters to fast-track the total shift towards renewable energies. The proposed policy, published in the journal Science, is an instrument every country can use to implement the 2015 Paris agreement, where some 200 governments pledged to do away with fossil fuels in the next half-century. Little has been done, however, since the agreement was signed, as pointed out by Antonio Manaytay in Tech Times.
The proposal from the Oslo scientists is that in order to achieve the goals of the 2015 Paris agreement, the CO2 emissions must be halved in each decade, bringing it down from 40mn tonnes in 2020 to 20mn tonnes by 2030.
In another related development, scientists at Nasa and the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colorado, US, announced last week that the amount of sea ice in both the Arctic and Antarctic is at a record low and climate change is partly to blame.
Overall, the combined Arctic and Antarctic sea ice numbers are at their lowest point since satellites began to continuously measure sea ice in 1979. Arctic sea ice reached a record wintertime low for the third straight year, while sea ice around Antarctica shrank to its lowest summertime area on record. Scientists blame the decline in ice on a combination of natural, random weather and man-made global warming from the burning of coal, oil and gas.
Sea ice is frozen ocean water that has an annual cycle of melting during the summer and refreezing in winter. It floats on top of the ocean. Sea ice in the Arctic affects wildlife such as polar bears, seals and walruses. It also helps regulate the planet’s temperature by influencing the circulation of the atmosphere and ocean. It can affect weather in the US. The area of Arctic ice this month was at 5.57mn sq miles - 471,000sq miles less than average. The Arctic has been freakishly warm over the past two years. NSIDC director Mark Serreze who has been looking at Arctic weather patterns for 35 years, said he has never seen anything close to what has been experienced these past two winters.
The ongoing decline of sea ice in the Arctic “is a clear indicator of climate change,” said Walt Meier, a Nasa scientist and an affiliate scientist at NSIDC. In Antarctica sea ice around the continent shrank to 815,000sq miles on March 3, the lowest on record, scientists said. The previous record low ice area in Antarctica occurred in 1997.
It was also announced last week that the planet sizzled to its second-warmest winter on record. The global temperature for December, January and February soared to 1.6 degrees above average this winter. Still, this winter was nowhere close to the past season’s record, when the planet sweltered to a tremendous 2 degrees above average. Statistics are aplenty. But action is lacking.
