UK announces that it will ratify Paris climate treaty, following US & China
Wed 21 September 2016
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The UK will back its commitment to tackling climate change by ratifying the Paris Agreement before the end of the year, the Prime Minister has announced. China and the United States - jointly responsible for 38% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions - have also recently announced that they will ratify the agreement.
In her maiden speech to the United Nations General Assembly, Theresa May said: "We will continue to play our part in the international effort against climate change."
The Paris Agreement committed the world to trying to limit global warming to as close to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels as possible.
This year has broken previous temperature records with the first half of 2016 being 1.3C warmer than the pre-industrial era of the late 19th century, according to Nasa, although this figure was inflated by the el Nino effect. Every month for the last 14 in a row has broken the record average global temperature for that month.
Currently around 30 countries have indicated that they will ratify the Paris deal, with several more, like the UK, indicating that they will do so at the UN's General Assembly. The European Union has yet to announce its ratification of the treaty but has indicated that it is looking for a way to speed the process up.
UN officials have said they are confident the Paris climate change agreement will enter into force by the end of 2016.
Meanwhile leading world scientists meeting recently in Oxford said they see few scenarios that would meet the Paris target to limit temperature rise to 1.5C.
“Currently we only have a few scenarios that get us there, and they are outliers,” said Valerie Masson-Delmotte, a climate scientist at Institut Pierre-Simon Laplace in Paris, said of the more ambitious goal. (Quoted in The Guardian.)
All but a few of the hundreds of complex computer models plotting the rapid reduction of greenhouse gases that drive climate change, in other words, zoom right past it.
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