Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol
What is Climate Change?
According to the US National Academy of Sciences, the Earth's surface temperature has risen by about 1°F in the past century, with accelerated warming during the past two decades. There is new and stronger evidence that most of the warming over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities. Human activities have altered the chemical composition of the atmosphere through the build-up of greenhouse gases (GHG) - primarily carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide.
Greenhouse gases have always existed. Without this natural "greenhouse effect", temperatures would be much lower than they are now, and life as we know it would not be possible. Energy from the sun drives the earth's weather and climate, and heats the earth's surface; in turn, the earth radiates energy back into space. Atmospheric GHGs trap some of the outgoing energy, retaining heat somewhat like the glass panels of a greenhouse.
Certain human activities, however, add to the levels of most of the naturally occurring GHG. Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide have increased nearly 30%, methane concentrations have more than doubled, and nitrous oxide concentrations have risen by about 15%.
These increases have enhanced the heat-trapping capability of the earth's atmosphere and thus, may cause the global temperature to climb from 1.4 to 5.8 °C in the 21st century; the sea level may rise from 9 to 88 cm. Still the minimum warming forecast for the next 100 years is more than twice the 0.6 °C increase that has occurred since 1900 and that earlier increase is already having marked consequences. Extreme weather events, as predicted by computer models, are striking more often and can be expected to intensify and become still more frequent. Sea levels already have risen by 10 to 20 cm over pre-industrial averages and are certain to climb farther. A future of more severe storms and floods along the world's increasingly crowded coastlines is likely, and will be a bad combination even under the minimum scenarios forecast.
The Kyoto Protocol
In response, the nations that are party to the United Nations Framework
Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) drafted the Kyoto Protocol in 1997.
The Kyoto Protocol provides a framework for remedial and precautionary
action to tackle adverse effects of climate change. The protocol commits
industrial countries to limit their GHG emissions, assigning country-specific
goals to reduce overall industrial-country emissions to 5.2% below 1990
levels over five years beginning in 2008.
The Protocol could only enter into force after at least 55 Parties to
the Convention had ratified it, including enough industrialized countries
listed in UNFCCC’s Annex I to encompass 55% of that group’s
carbon dioxide emissions in 1990. The first Parties ratified the Protocol
in 1998. With the ratification by the Russian Federation on November
18, 2004, the prescribed 90-day countdown was set in motion: The Kyoto
Protocol entered into force on February 16, 2005.
The UNFCCC and the Kyoto Protocol divides countries into three main groups with differing commitments: