Paris climate talks won't beat dangerous global warming but they will try to build a vehicle that can

Meeting to take place at the end of what is likely to be the hottest year on record around the globe

The entrance to Le Bourget where the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference will take place in Paris.
The entrance to Le Bourget where the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference will take place in Paris. Photograph: Zheng Bin/Xinhua Press/Corbis

UN climate meetings are curious events where the future of the world’s climate and everything that’s part of it can come down to the removal of square brackets on documents and the strike of a gavel.

About 40,000 delegates from more than 190 countries will be in Paris for the next major talks starting on Monday, including more than 130 heads of state and governments.

If previous talks are any indication, then by the end of the second week the venue corridors will resemble a scene from an airport where all flights have been cancelled; most people are not really sure what’s going on, bodies are collapsed on the floor from sleep deprivation and every now and then an important person stands up in the middle to give an update.

At least in Paris, there should be no shortage of caffeine and sugary goodness to keep the world from falling into a crevasse of it’s own unexploited fossil fuel reserves.

Now 40,000 people sounds like a lot, right? And it is a lot.

But for context, consider that more than twice that many went to the oil and gas industry-focused Offshore Technology Conference in Texas this year. Numbers at OTC were down from a record 108,000 last year.

But back to Paris. Almost every major media website in the world has been producing its own version of the story that tells you “everything you need to know about the Paris climate talks”, the Guardian included.

That’s because what happens in Paris is challenging to interpret but also stunningly important for the future.

Make or break?

But is it the make or break, sink or swim, do or die, cool or fry event that some commentators and campaigners are making out?

Well yes. And no. But first, a few basics.

The UN framework convention on climate change (UNFCCC) has more than 190 signatories, known as parties.

The convention’s last major agreement, the Kyoto protocol, was put together in Japan in 1997 at the third Conference of the Parties (COP3). The Kyoto protocol to reduce greenhouse gas emissions only included rich developed countries.

The 2009 COP meeting in Copenhagen tried, but failed, to negotiate a new deal. At subsequent meetings, the commitments being made under Kyoto were extended until 2020.

Since Kyoto, the world has changed drastically.

As Australia’s lead UNFCCC negotiator Peter Woolcott pointed out last week, back in 1992 there were only three developing countries on the list of the world’s 12 biggest greenhouse gas emitters. Now there are seven.

China has replaced the US as the major global emitter and geopolitical power has shifted towards Asia.

So we need a new deal. COP21 in Paris is the culmination of years of work to get that deal done. This time, all countries are being asked to sign it and because the process works on a consensus approach, all parties need to agree or the deal dies.

The Climate Institute’s Erwin Jackson, who routinely attends UNFCC meetings, offered me a neat summary of how much further advanced the process is heading into Paris than at previous meetings.

At Copenhagen we had a draft agreement that was 200 pages long. At Kyoto it was 80 pages. At Paris, it’s 50 pages.

But there has also been a fundamental change in how the UNFCCC is trying to canvas agreement.

At Kyoto and at Copenhagen the UNFCCC was trying to impose targets to cut emissions from on high. This time the target-setting has been done by the countries themselves – a bottom-up approach.

Warsaw pact

It turns out that the Warsaw COP meeting in 2013 was key.

There, a deal was agreed whereby all the parties would go back to their own countries and work on what’s known as an intended nationally Determined contribution.

This set in train domestic conversations across the world about how, and by how much, each country should cut its greenhouse gas emissions.

So now, those countries are coming to Paris having already “determined” what they see as a fair effort to keep global warming below 2C (which all major UNFCCC parties have agree to). You can see all the INDCs here.

But here’s where some misconceptions start. The Paris negotiations won’t be about the targets.

The targets themselves won’t even be in the main text of the agreement, which will come out of a process with a title that only the UN could love – the ad hoc working group on the Durban platform for enhanced action.

The Paris deal will instead likely make it binding for countries to have an INDC.

As things stand, no analysts are finding that the INDCs are enough to keep global warming below 2C. Instead, they set us on a pathway to global warming of about 2.7C or higher by the end of the century.

Now that sounds a lot like failure. But a key aspect of the Paris deal will look to enshrine regular reviews of INDCs that would also make sure future pledges are better than previous ones. Or in other words, no backsliding.

This calls for an analogy. If getting below 2C of global warming is the destination, then the Paris deal is trying to build a reliable car to get us there. The car will need to be recharged (because it’s electric) and will need a service or two, but the Paris deal aims to plan for these eventualities.

Key elements up for negotiation will be to agree the rules around transparency and fairness of those INDCs.

Jackson says that the prospects for a deal look better than they did heading into previous meetings.

But that’s not to say things won’t be difficult, but given that climate change has become a central issue for many countries and regions, it’s now in their national interest to get this deal done.

The core issue at the end of the day is whether countries are implementing domestically binding policies. The international process can facilitate that.

When countries communicate their targets, countries are expected to show how they are a fair and ambitious way to keep global warming below 2C.

If Paris is an effective stimulus for further action then it needs to be bankable, transparent and fair. Without all those, it will be difficult to get all countries on board.

A major sticking point will likely be the support, both financial and otherwise, offered to poorer countries from the developed world (developed on the back of massive fossil fuel use).

Under the UNFCCC there are negotiations around pledges to the Green Climate Fund to provide US$100 billion a year to poorer countries by 2020 to help them cut emissions and adapt to climate change.

If it’s possible (which it is), an even more complex and contentious issue under the UNFCCC is known as loss and damage. This is an attempt to help poorer countries to cope with climate impacts that they cannot adapt to.

Some richer countries, including the US, are sensitive to the idea that this will lead to a “compensation” fund that will identify “liability”. Compensation and liability are not the sort of words that countries like the US are likely to be happy with.

Denialists on tour

At the beginning of the second week of the talks, the usual group of climate science denialists from conservative and fossil-fuel funded thinktanks will attempt to grab some limelight.

They are even premièring a “documentary” called Climate Hustle that will regurgitate the same old denialist myths. I’ve also written about the links between Climate Hustle and a religious group claiming that “climate policies kill” while promoting creationism.

Groups such as these may look like they’re on the fringes, until you remember that in the US, many (but not all) Republicans refuse to accept the evidence that human-caused climate change is real and needs urgent action.

The public in many developed countries, including Australia and the US, continues to be split on the causes of climate change, despite the overwhelming scientific evidence.

New research suggests that this confusion among the public is down to campaigns supported by fossil fuel interests, including ExxonMobil and foundations linked to the oil billionaire Koch brothers.

The talks in Paris will, fittingly (or should that be ironically, or predictably), be taking place at the end of what is almost certain to be declared the hottest year on record and the end of the hottest five-year period on record.

You tend to get records like that when you pump out the key greenhouse gas carbon dioxide to levels not seen in millions of years at a rate that is likely unprecedented in the geological record.

No amount of French fancies are going to entirely soften that blow.