Saturday 16 June 2012

SciAm: "Earth Summit: A Report Card to Preview the Rio+20 Mega-Conference"

Link to Scientific American

"The climate numbers are downright discouraging. The world pumped 22.7 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in 1990, the baseline year under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. By 2010 that amount had increased roughly 45% to 33 billion tonnes. Carbon dioxide emissions skyrocketed by more than 5% in 2010 alone, marking the fastest growth in more than two decades as the global economy recovered from its slump. And despite constant deliberations under the convention, the overall growth rate of global emissions hasn’t changed much since 1970.

“Plausibly we are a little better off than if we didn’t have all of this diplomacy,” says David Victor, director of the Laboratory on International Law and Regulation at the University of California, San Diego. “But the evidence is hard to find.”

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