US Rejoins Paris Climate Agreement; Biden To Convene World Leaders Talk On Climate Change

....WILL IT USHER IN A NEW COMMITMENT TOWARDS CLIMATE CHANGE?

The Biden administration is planning to host the world leaders in a climate summit on the Earth Day, according to people familiar with the matter— a sign of the new President’s commitment to not just rejoin the Paris carbon-cutting accord but also strengthen it. The US hosted meeting on April 22 could be virtual, one of the people said, similar to a United Nation’s climate summit in December, which featured six hours of remarks from the world leaders. However, they only offered incremental steps to combat climate change. The US-organised event, which could be announced next week as part of a package of climate-related policies, is likely to focus on major world emitters of greenhouse gases. Biden has made climate change one of his main priorities, and has set a goal of achieving a zero-emission energy grid by 2035, and carbon net-neutrality by 2050.


WHY CLIMATE CHANGE SHOULD BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY?

1. RISING TEMPERATURES: The year 2020 was one of the three-warmest years on record and rivalled 2016 for the top spot, indicating the pace of the ‘humaninduced’ climate change, which is now as powerful as the force of nature, the UN weather agency has said. All the five datasets surveyed by the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) concur that 2011-2020 was the warmest-decade on record, in a persistent long-term climate change trend. The warmest-six years have all been since 2015, with 2016, 2019 and 2020, being the top three.

2. THE ARCTIC IS MELTING FASTER THAN THE REST OF THE WORLD: According to environmentalists, the Arctic sea ice is melting at an alarming rate, especially during the boreal or the northern hemisphere summer. The trend, which started in the 1980s, is continuing to increase at an alarming rate. The temperatures in the Arctic have warmed twice as fast as the global average. Scientists have warned that it is likely that the Arctic summer sea ice could disappear as early as 2035.

3. CO2 LEVELS CONTINUE TO RISE: According to the WMO, despite lockdown-related fall in emissions, the global greenhouse emissions increased in 2020. In May 2020, the CO2 levels hit 417 ppm, highest in human history.

4. LOSS OF FORESTS: Since 1990, the world has lost 178 million hectares of forest. In 2020, the deforestation of the Amazon rainforest surged to a 12-year high.

Did You Know

The Paris Agreement, a legally-binding international treaty on climate change, adopted in 2015, aims at limiting global warming to well below 2, preferably to 1.5 degrees Celsius, compared to the pre-industrial levels. India is one of the few countries, which is on track to meet the 2009 goal of limiting the global average temperature increase to not more than 2 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial level.

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