in this video we are going to go through the history of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change or UNFCCC Conference of parties so basically this is the group that convenes through the United Nations to discuss the state of the global climate and decide what to do with it what to do about it the first summit happened in 1992 in Rio and they came up with the original goal to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions at 1990 levels by the year 2000 remember in the last video we talked about how the IPCC formed in the late 1980s due to the availability of the first climate data from the Keeling curve and 1992 is the year when they first had the data from the IPCC and they could start to make some global goals so this was basically at the start of the process that led up to where we are today in 1995 they hosted cop 1 remember Conference of parties so that technically their first summit and they've developed what they call the Berlin mandate and a big part of that Berlin mandate was the idea that developed countries are responsible for the historic emissions and so developed countries were the ones who had to act first and if we look at this graph that shows the per capita or per person responsibility for current carbon dioxide in the atmosphere which basically is showing the historic responsibility so in the past leading up to this point how much carbon dioxide did each country put into the atmosphere per person we look at this graph we can see that the countries are in purple have the highest amount of carbon dioxide measured in tons of equivalent carbon dioxide and those countries are primarily North America and Australia Europe and northern Asia are fairly high and a large portion of the developing world China and India these countries all have low emissions historically this chart is showing not the current levels of what countries are producing today but leading up to today overall how many emissions that these countries produce in developed countries today are developed because they produced a lot of emissions in the past which went into making their countries developed so this berlin mandate said okay we have to have some sort of mandatory limits on the countries of the world otherwise nothing is going to happen but right now they are in 1995 they decided to stick with mandatory limits only for two developed countries and they said that developing countries you know much of South America Africa China and India they didn't have to have mandatory limits they could place voluntary limits on their emissions because of this history that was a little bit different they called this the idea of common but differentiated responsibilities so developed countries have the responsibility to immediately start to reduce their emissions based on history developing countries they said had more time and they could do things more on a voluntary basis as they were able to in 1997 at cop 3 they formed the Kyoto Protocol where the countries actually came up with their specific targets for how they were going to cut emissions which country is how much and so 37 countries of the world came up with specific binding targets and that's 37 countries and also the EU and these cuts were to place the carbon dioxide 5 percent below 1990 values by the early part of the 21st century and this was the the famous treaty that happened that it happened right before the election of george w bush and the u.s. ended up actually withdrawing from the Kyoto Protocol after that election based on the politics in our own country but this map shows which countries signed the Kyoto Protocol so the developed countries that sign the protocol are the ones mainly have these targets and those are in the red kind of shading the green countries are the developing countries that did not have to make targets because of that common but differentiated responsibilities and the US was in yellow it said no intention to ratify the treaty and then so yellow and orange is either they didn't want to ratify it or they were withdrawn from the treaty the signing of a treaty is kind of a lengthy process and so the US and Canada both backed out of it during at some point during that process so a lot of people have pointed to the Kyoto Protocol as being one instance where North America was not very ready to cooperate with the rest of the world when the rest of the world was ready to face climate change some people say well the u.s. in fact at the time said well we're not ready to act if China and India aren't ready to act we know that they didn't emit the historic emissions but they are emitting a lot right now why should they be allowed to emit and we are not allowed to that's going to damage our economy so obviously you can see the therm multiple perspectives in play here all of which to some extent have merit so figuring out where to fall on a treaty like this is not simple and so that's what ended up happening with the United States in this case moving forward we get to about cops 7 took until about 2001 for them to make some rules for how to implement the q2 protocol again this didn't exactly apply to the US since we never signed the Kyoto Protocol but it did impact the rest of the world in 2005 we got to cop 11 in Montreal and in that time they decided that they needed to extend Kyoto beyond 2012 because at that time the Kyoto Protocol was only was designated to expire in 2012 and they stays decided well we're getting close to 2012 we need to expand it a little bit longer and this is kind of a turning point because at this point that's when fossil fuel interests begin began to get a little bit nervous and they noticed wow this isn't just going to be a short term investigation of climate change by these countries but it looks like over time they're actually going to be getting more serious about cutting back on their emissions and so this led to a new era and the era of climate change do not deniers which we'll talk about in a minute in 2007 there was cop 13 which is when they created the Bali action plan and this is where they decided to reinvestigate the idea of these developed versus developing countries and so they said okay for our next climate agreement we're going to have two different tracks that countries can be in track one is going to be for those developing countries that previously had no commitments under the Kyoto Protocol and in in 2007 they said we're going to start encouraging these developing countries to take action and we want them to take measurable action that is reportable and verifiable and the developing countries agreed to that as long as they could get help from the developed world either with technology transfer with money in some way they needed to get help so that they could accomplish that action track - were the countries that were already committed under the Kyoto Protocol and those countries agreed to increase their cuts to be 25 to 40 percent below 1990 levels at some point after 2012 so they decided that they would keep going and decrease their emissions even more in the future in 2009 and cop15 took place in Copenhagen now this was the summit that was supposed to create a treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol and many people after the fact said that it was a failure because it didn't produce that sort of climate treaty that people were able to agree on in particular the United States the main issues well first of all it happened in 2009 which was less than a year after the major global economic collapse that happened in 2008 so there was a very poor economic climate and so countries were really sensitive to anything that would that they would perceive us be something to damage their economy and so that just made negotiations more difficult going in right away the second thing that happened is that right before this this summit there was the manufactured Climategate scandal and I'm not gonna spend a lot of time talking about it because honestly it was fake and it wasn't that important but if you haven't heard about it it's something you could go look up on the Internet what is Climategate scandal and basically it was a scandal manufactured by climate deniers who hacked into a particular climate scientist email found something and then you know took it out of context and tried to make it seem like these climate scientists were really covering up a lot of data and that climate change was being blown out of proportion and that happened strategically I'm sure in my opinion right before this Copenhagen climate summit and and since it's been completely you know disproven debunked you can look it up but that did create an issue at the time because at the climate summit that just created a seed of doubt in some people's minds about how important this issue really was the last and probably most important issue with what in terms of why Copenhagen was not a success was there a stalemate that happened between the basic countries Brazil South America or South Africa India China and the u.s. so between the basic countries in the u.s. there was a stalemate these are the most developed of the developing countries so they're you know getting much closer than say you know Costa Rica or something you know China is a major economic superpower in the world even though it was still at that time considered a developing country and so there was a big stalemate where the US was saying we will only participate if the basic countries also had these binding commitments because especially China China's always the one that the US is most focused on but all of those countries which have a little bloc but especially China they said China needs to make commitments if we're going to make commitments because we're in direct competition with them in the global marketplace and they were not able to resolve that stalemate at the Copenhagen summit so what was the results that came out of it why do they say it was a failure well they were only able to get about 60 percent of the necessary cuts to carbon emissions that were needed to maintain the goals that they had put forward previously to make those cuts of 20 to 25 percent below 1990 levels of carbon dioxide in particular the US and China had very pathetic results because of this stalemate the u.s. agreed to cut their carbon 17 percent below 2005 levels and China agreed to a 40 to 50 percent cut below 2005 levels but 2005 levels are very different from the 1990 levels that the other countries from that track to had been focusing on so those results were not great although some people who are a little more optimistic say at least eight games the table at all at least they agreed to something and there were some truly positive outcomes of the Copenhagen summit including the formation of the red the red program which is the reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation program so this is the program by which countries can actively try to reduce their emissions by stopping deforestation which is really important so it's not just about combusting fossil fuels forests are also important and so that program was it's definitely a positive outcome from this conference and secondly the establishment of the Green Climate Fund to help those developing nations get to their emissions goals and so the countries of the world including the US and China were able to agree to establish this fund now how much money to put in the fund that's a whole another issue but the fact that they could agree to even establish the fund was a major step forward in terms of helping the developing countries start to mitigate climate change as well as adapt so this brings us to cop21 in 2015 which was the Paris summit with the goal of creating a Paris climate agreement or the most recent climate treaty when did it happen it happened in 2015 November 30th to December 11th so this was very recent if you want you can watch the promotional video online and so what happened so the first thing to point out about the Paris climate calm is that the Nations that the world did make a commitment to combat climate change by phasing out the use of fossil fuels so 195 nations who were there agreed to keep the warming well below two degrees Celsius and to try to limit the warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius so they actually made a temperature agreement at the Paris climate conference which is something that they hadn't done before and all the nations that were there 195 that is pretty much every nation of the world with the exception of two which are Syria and Nicaragua and so it was pretty remarkable that all of these countries were able to come together developed and developing to create this climate Accord so part of this is that participating countries will resubmit their mitigation plans every five years in order to continue to tighten the emission standards and wealthy countries will provide financing to developing countries the goal was going to be a hundred or is going to be a hundred billion dollars per year starting in the year 2020 and this is to help those developing countries switch directly to renewable energy and also adapt to climate impacts so to summarize the Paris climate conference it was not a perfect agreement but it's very historically significant especially now that you know the history of these private previous climate conferences so it was a major step forward in dealing with human induced climate change it opened for signatures in April of 2016 and all of those countries signed it including the United States and so when we do our world climate summit coming up soon in class you'll get to actually have a chance to mimic this process and see how easy or how difficult it is for the nations of the world to come to an agreement and also how close the agreement can actually get to the major temperature goals that these nations have and so just to talk a little bit more about the Paris climate conference I told you why it was considered such a success because the world came together and agreed on binding temperature targets and all the nation nations submitted their own plans for how to do this a couple of the things that made it not so perfect were the fact that first of all the emissions targets that Nations put forward did not match the temperature targets that they put forward so in this class we've spent a lot of time talking about how the carbon emissions are directly related to the temperature increases that we see in the future and the countries of the world did agree on certain temperature increases and certain emissions changes but they didn't match up with each other so there are missions their emissions decreases that they committed to were not enough to actually keep our temperature as moderate as they wanted them to be so that's why some people really have a problem with the outcome they say it doesn't go far enough and so for example Nicaragua who didn't sign the Paris climate agreement did so because they they didn't think it went far enough and they didn't want to agree with it and so it does you know we need to keep iterating it toward the future to make it go farther now something else you might have recently heard about is the fact that in May of 2017 President Trump has announced the u.s. is going to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement this is something that we're going to be talking about this week a lot as we go through our discussions and in the lab but it's something to be aware of that he announced that the u.s. is pulling out of the climate agreement because according to him he doesn't think it's fair for the United States to be contributing so much and to have other countries contributing much less especially especially China and he's concerned he doesn't want to contribute to that Green Climate Fund because he says it's not fair that we should have to help other countries in terms of adaptation and moving into the renewable energy so the fact that he's withdrawing us from the climate agreement we've already signed the treaty the treaty is already in effect so it'll take about three I think more than three years for it to actually happen so we're still technically part of it now but of course that does show the US has true intentions about whether we keep to the to the spirit of the treaty or not there's no global police force out there that is going to that is going to enforce this treaty it's a goodwill treaty among nations and so whether or not we choose to go along with it there's not going to be you know someone standing over our heads forcing us to decrease carbon emissions but at the same time and announcement like that from one of the main countries involved in the treaty process I'm sure is very discouraging for some of the other countries of the world okay more on this later