COP21: what does it all mean? 'I'm an island boy,' says Obama

Island nations speak out at climate change conference 

Marshal Islanders are seeing their beaches slowly eroding away

IT'S A MATTER OF DEGREES. A half-degree may sound small, but it could spell the difference of the elimination or survival of island nations most threatened by rising sea levels.

The final agreement among the 195 nations to implement measures to lower the impact of climate change was a significant step but not the leap forward that some countries feel is necessary. The Conference of Parties (COP21), an annual meeting of all nations that make up the United Nations Framework on Climate Change. It was the 21st meeting of the countries' leaders, activists and climate experts in Paris earlier this month.

Among the key provisions of the agreement is the capping of global temperature rise “ to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, recognizing that this would significantly reduce the risks and impacts of climate change.”

The island nations such as the Marshall Islands, Samoa and the Philippines wanted set 1.5°C as the goal but in order to get the larger countries to agree, the language allowed for some leeway with the understanding that future negotiations would reach to attain that half-degree difference.

Other provisions that are considered significant are the inclusion of human rights as a bedrock principle, the mention of ecosystem integrity, the commitment on financial and technological support, and the inclusion of a Loss and Damage article.

RELATED: Key points of the COP21 agreements 

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President Obama addressed leaders of the island nations during the COPO21 meeting in Paris.

In a nod to the very real threats faced by small island states, President Barack Obama declared, “I am an island boy,” referring to his childhood years spent in Hawaii and Indonesia during a meeting with Association of Small Island States member states.

In fact, the least powerful nations in the world, may have had the most at stake in and may have had the most influence in the outcome in Paris. President Obama met with the island leaders on the second day of his visit to the United Nations climate negotiations in Paris.

"The bottom line is this," said Obama. "The nations that are represented by the leaders who are here today, they’re not the most populous nations. They don’t have big armies. May not have the most influence in international organizations. But as Prime Minister O’Neill indicated from Papua New Guinea, they have a right to the dignity and sense of place and continuity of culture that everybody else does. And their voice is vital in making sure that the kind of agreement that emerges here in Paris is not just serving the interests of the most powerful, but is serving the interests of the most vulnerable, as well.

"And the United States intends to stand with them as a partner in this process."

Indeed, the dignity and preservation of the world’s vulnerable islands took on a leading role at the talks with the call for a 1.5 degree goal has taken center stage.

The temperature goal is widely viewed as a much safer limit, not just for islands but for a world increasingly experiencing extreme weather events with warming of less than 1 degree above pre-industrial levels today.

Organizers of the Paris conference will be the first to admit, the commitments made by nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions will be insufficient to prevent global warming from exceeding the 2°C warming threshold, let alone 1.5°C. For that reason, the agreement calls for nations to revisit their commitments every five years, with the expectation that national goals will be made increasingly ambitious. 

The U.S. and Europe and the other developed countries view climate change as something that will impact them in 20 or 30 years. To the island nations, it is happening now. Hear the words of Filipina/Australian Eunice Andrada below, one the winners of an international spoken word contest as she performs in Paris during the COP21 summit.

In the middle of the Pacific Ocean, the Marshall Islands rise only to a height of 6 feet above sea level. High tide or stormy seas flood the streets of its capital and eat away at the island beaches. The government has plans in place to evacuate all its people, either to nearby island nations such as Fiji where they would buy land for their 57,000 people or emigrate to the United States. It would be the disappearance of the country, the extinction of a people and the demise of their culture and heritage.

“As an island boy, (Obama) understands the unique challenges we face," said Marshall Islands President Christopher J. Loeak after the meeting. "The meeting was a chance to talk, at a very personal level, about how vulnerable we are to climate impacts and that we all need to work together to tackle what is now the gravest risk to humanity.” 

“Everything I know — and everyone I love — is in the hands of all of us gathered here in Paris,” said Loeak. “This is the most important trip of my life. I need to be able to return to my people and say that we joined a Paris agreement that gives us hope and a pathway to survival.”

"I think it was a much better and a much more ambitious agreement than we had expected going into Paris,” said Saleemul Huq, a long-time advisor to some of the world's poorest countries at COP21. “The biggest thing is that we have all countries working together to fight the problem, not just some.

Work of Filipino/American scientist critical to Paris climate talks

Credit: NASA

Josefino Cosimo, is considered one of the leading experts on polar science in the world? 

A LOT of important people from around the world are gathered in Paris this past week and into next week trying find agreement on how best to slow down or stop the world's rising temperatures.

When scientists and climatologists talk about climate change, a lot of their conclusions are based on the work of a Filipino/American scientist, Josefino Cosimo, senior scientist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Comiso is considered one of the world's leading experts on polar science.

He said the NASA studies in the polar regions were based on expectations the regions are the places where early signal of a climate change can be found “because of ice-albedo feedback associated with the high albedo of ice and snow.”

"I’ve found that the Arctic perennial ice cover, the ice that survives at the end of the summer, is declining at a rate of 11 percent per decade. For about 1,500 years, the perennial ice has been observed, but if the current decline rate continues we would have an ice-free Arctic in summer within this century - it will be the first such occurrence in modern history."

Why does this matter to us ordinary folk?

"There would be more warming in the Arctic region and more melt in land ice that would cause sea level rise," Cosimo says. "There would be ecological changes, like primary productivity, that would spread to other parts of the world. The highest plankton (or chlorophyll) concentration has been near the polar regions in part because of sea ice. Melted sea ice water forms a stable water layer that is exposed to abundant sunlight and becomes a platform for enhanced photosynthesis and hence high productivity. The loss of the ice cover would mean reduced plankton concentration. Since the plankton is at the bottom of the food chain marine life would be affected and fishery production would be reduced."

Whew! Scary!

RELATED: Filipina/American spoken artist performing at Paris climate talks

Before you give up all hope, Cosimo says the pattern can be halted. "Modeling studies indicate that if we keep the level of greenhouse gases constant from now no," he says, "we will be able to keep the temperature from reaching more undesirable levels. The sea ice cover in the summer could be salvaged." 

How did a scientist, who graduated from the University of the Philippines in Quezon City in the warm tropical Philippines, become interested in glaciers and other freezing stuff?

The Philippines, made up of 7,000 islands with the bulk of its population at sea level, like other island nations, will be among the first affected by the melting ice, the colder waters and the rising sea levels.

Comiso pointed out the irony that developing countries are the ones suffering more from the effects of greenhouse gas warming than developed economies.

“The Philippines is highly vulnerable to climate change. It is ironic that a country that is contributing to only a small fraction of atmospheric greenhouse gases will be among the most affected by greenhouse gas warming.

“My advice to the Philippine government is to focus on resiliency and adaptation. A large fraction of Filipinos live in coastal areas and there should be a plan for them to start moving to higher elevations,” he added.

Earth’s northern ice cap is heating up and melting down at an alarming, not previously predicted, rate. A paper just out in Wiley Interndisciplary Reviews: Climate Change, by Josefino Comiso and Dorothy Hall looks at recent historic transformations in the Arctic using satellite imagery, mainly from 1979 to the present. The decline of Arctic ice is so extreme that ice thought to have existed for over 1450 years is melting now. (None of the sea ice is really ancient, even the “old” ice recycles over geologically short time periods. But in the near future there will be virtually no “old” ice left in the region.)

According to Cosimo, of NASA, who authored the study, “The Arctic region has been
 warming faster than anywhere else in the globe from 1981 to 2012. Such warming is manifested strongly in all components of the cryosphere in the Northern Hemisphere.”

For those who want the cold hard facts, (my apologies, the topic is no laughing matter) the following is paraphrased from the paper:

• Warming in the region has been amplified … with the rate of warming observed to be ~0.60±0.07 C per decade in the Arctic (>64 oN) compared to ~0.2 o C per decade globally during the last three decades.
• Sea ice extent has been declining at the rate of ~3.8% per decade, while the perennial ice (represented by summer ice minimum) is declining at a much greater rate of ~11.5% per decade.
• Spring snow cover [is] declining by –2.12 % per decade for the period 1967 to 2012.
• The Greenland ice sheet has been losing mass at the rate of ~123 Gt per year (sea level equivalence of 0.34 mm per year) during the period from 1993 to 2010 for the period 2005 to 2010, a higher rate of (Greenland ice sheet) mass loss of ~228 Gt per year has been observed.
• The average area of mountain glaciers has declined by as much as 10% per decade during the period from 1960 to 2000.
• Increases in permafrost temperature have also been measured in many parts of the Northern Hemisphere while a thickening of the active layer that overlies permafrost and a thinning of seasonally-frozen ground has also been reported.

In conclusion, the arctic ice can be reestablished, we stop dilly-dallying around and start weaning ourselves from the use of fossil fuels.

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