now we are going to start thinking about how the science we have learned about translates into some of the decisions that are happening globally translating science into policy keep in mind we're not in a government class so if you're interested in this topic I hope that you will go out and learn more about it we're going to try to answer the following questions what do policy makers mean by the term stakeholders and how do these stakeholders shape climate policy what do you think is the appropriate role for science in guiding public policy and also summarize current international efforts to respond to climate change and compare the roles of developed and developing nations so when we're talking about stakeholders who is involved basically when we're talking about climate policy a stakeholder is any person who has some investment or a stake in the matter so you and I are stakeholders because any types of climate policies meaning laws or rules put in place by the government these affect us and in terms of climate it's kind of an interesting topic because climate affects everybody therefore really everybody is a stakeholder usually when we're talking about stakeholders though the amount of money that people are contributing is taken into account and so if you look at the two graphs shown here it's showing the amount of money spent lobbying on for oil and gas companies on the left and for alternative energy companies on the right and so when you look you can see that the y-axis sense is in millions of US dollars and so you can see that lobbying from oil and gas companies is somewhere in you know currently between 100 and 200 million dollars per year whereas for renewable energy sector it's a look it's a lot lower less than 50 million dollars per year so and you can also notice how the graph changes over time you might notice some peak years that are similar in both of those industries and so it's important to remember that this is the amount of money that is spent lobbying the US Congress or asking them for involvement in the decision-making process and so we're talking about stakeholders a lot of the money is coming from our energy supply sector directly do you think this is appropriate where do you think that science should fall in guiding this policy now let's talk about the global scale on the global scale we don't have one global government but we do have the United Nations which tries to help create order on the global scale and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which is commonly called the IPCC was established in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations environmental programme the IPCC is an organization that is in charge of climate information on a global scale why did it start in the late 80s if you think back to our Keeling curve that we've looked at many times we remember that the 1980s is the first time where they really started to have a significant amount of data about carbon dioxide concentrations rising in the atmosphere we've said in the past that for data to be considered climate usually we need at least 30 years of data in our data set and carbon dioxide didn't start being measured until the late 1950s therefore it took until the late 1980s before we had about 30 years of data to say wow it looks like this carbon dioxide concentration increasing over time is truly a climate trend and not just a variation related to weather or another shorter term time scale so the United Nations and the World Meteorological Organization founded the IPCC so what do they do they have two main purposes which is to collaborate and share information about the science of climate and to highlight uncertainties and gaps in our knowledge this is really useful because there are scientists working all over the world on this topic in a variety of locations and some are more communicative than others and so it's hard to know if you're in um say you're in California working as a climate scientist it's hard to know what another scientist might be doing in Russia or Australia or South Africa and so the IPCC has the goal to bring the science from all those scientists together and see where the similarities are and where the places are where more scientific research needs to be done they do have a couple of major goals the first being that they are going to be policy neutral so the IPCC does not recommend a particular course of action they're not activists they are simply pulling in all of the science so that the policymakers have all the information they need to make appropriate decisions the IPCC also strives to be politically neutral and in order to be politically neutral they request and they approve government representatives from all of the participating nations so they want every nation to participate in their program and they want government representatives to be part of the process and if everyone is participating then it should remain politically neutral so as I said the IPCC is open to all countries and in the last IPCC report there are more than 600 authors of on the report coming from 40 countries but there were actually representatives from 113 different governments that were represented even if they weren't all authors on the report everyone who works in the IPCC is a volunteer and they try to come out with a report about every five years the most recent one coming out in 2013 and 2014 the IPCC is divided into different working groups as you can see in the diagram working group one tackles the physical science basis so the very basic physical science behind climate and climate change Roop too is in charge of climate change impacts and adaptation working group three charge of mitigation and they also have a taskforce on national greenhouse gas inventories which will see why we might be interested in that a little bit later so the IPCC has a lot of roles they are the ones who coordinate the climate model runs and the emission scenarios so these are the ones that scientists look to to say what parameters should I run my model with that way all the models running all across the world have the same starting point and so if the models made differently but it has the same starting point then we can compare models to see what the different scenarios are for how the future could turn out the IPC is also the one who synthesizes all the data they take all of the peer-reviewed scientific studies they carefully comb through them and they take away what the consensus messages from all the scientists around the world this is a very rigorous a very intense process scientists who are part of this process it takes an immense amount of time but it's also looked upon as being something very prestigious to have on your resume and the goal is that all this information will help policy decisions that are being made by the United Nations and the countries that make up the United Nations the IPCC has been criticized a lot in the past for a couple of different reasons one is that they're too slow it takes so many years to comb through all of this climate information that they have to determine some sort of artificial stopping point before they make their report and it might be years before the report even comes out so by the time the report comes out it's already a couple of years obsolete just because of the time it takes to write this massive report as we go toward quicker and quicker release of information in the modern world people have asked the IPCC to consider changing their model to something that can happen a little bit faster and more in real time we'll see what happens with that the other thing the IPCC sometimes gets criticized for is that it's synthesis is a little bit too watered down that things that are potentially slightly controversial in the scientific community get taken out and or I should say controversial not by the scientific community but by the governments of the world because remember there representatives from 113 world governments on the IPCC and so sometimes there will be facts that are coming from science that might be well supported but the 113 different governments and the 40 countries that the authors are coming from aren't able to agree that some of those facts are important enough to be included in the report and so they get left out for the purposes of having a report that everyone can agree upon with a consensus and so people say sometimes the IPCC it's a little bit weak but overall this is an excellent resource that is used by policymakers politicians scientists educators for me personally as a climate scientist when I want to learn about something that's a little bit outside of my main segments of science like say you know I studied jet streams but say I wanted to learn about permafrost melting the first thing I would do as a scientist is go to the IPCC report look at what they have to say about the permafrost and look at the references that they cite and that will help me get to the correct scientific peer-reviewed research articles that I can use to learn more about permafrost so it's not just used by policymakers it's used by a lot of people it's a great resource and it's all free online if you go to the IPCC website to type it into Google you can get all this data - so based on our US policy and our global policy what can we do with this last concept that's in here today which is that of economics and these might seem like different ideas but they all sort of tie together with us figuring out what we're going to do about climate change and the reality is when we talk about global warming we know that global warming will cost us money because having to adapt to all of the changes that we see happening because of our changing climate is expensive you know relocating a city that's expensive building a new dam or a seawall that's expensive changing the crops we grow in different places because of changing climate zones that's expensive but the other side of the coin is that stopping global warming or mitigation also costs money right so you know transitioning our energy grid that costs money and you know there's a lot of debate that happens between whether we should solve global warming because won't it cost too much money now or whether we should solve it now because it's gonna cost too much money later and we'd rather solve it now being proactive versus reactive so some major economists actually really took this up to see what is the cost-benefit analysis of working on this issue of global warming now versus later and what they came up with was actually rather shocking in Stearns Report he said that the cost today to deal with climate change is about 1% of the global GDP which is a lot of money but the cost later if we wait would be about 20% of the GDP a different economists put it in dollars a little bit differently and he said the cost of weaning 50 years would be about four point one trillion dollars in 2012 dollars so it's very clear that the longer we wait the more it will cost so why is it hard for us to act now on stopping the reason it's hard to justify stopping global warming now using economics is that economic models discount future events so things that happen in the future just aren't worth as much money in the present so things that are good in the future aren't as good things that are detrimental not as bad so a future catastrophe has a low influence in economic models this comes down based on psychology and the idea that people like short-term benefits the classic experiment that that they do is they ask people would you rather have $90 right now or would you rather have $100 one in one week most people would rather have $90 now rather than $100 next week because money in the hand is worth more than potential money in the future that's the basic idea that underlies economic discounting but there also are economic strategies that can show us how to maximize benefits and minimize costs in the model things like a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade plan which you have read about this week so let's just use the carbon tax as an example to see how a carbon tax could affect future carbon emissions so a carbon tax is simply the idea that every amount of carbon that is emitted into the atmosphere has a tax on it so something bad you don't want has a tax and so someone who drives a gas-powered car would have to pay a small tax usually as a gas tax someone that runs a power plant would have a large tax unless they were able to clean up their emissions so in the model Sterne and Nordhaus those same two economists they used a gas tax as their example and they had unstow so Stern's model had a gas tax in 2013 that was 30 cents per gallon gradually working its way up to three dollars per gallon in 2095 Nordhaus had a more gradual carbon tax with a nine cent carbon tax in 2013 working its way up to a sixty cent carbon tax in 2095 so you can see in this figure here it just shows the carbon tax over time starting in 2015 to 2019 five Nordhaus has a very gradual carbon tax Stearns is a lot more aggressive what this graph shows is how that affects carbon dioxide emissions so let's focus on the Nordhaus and the stern lines you can ignore the gore line and you can ignore the kyoto line and you can see how well let's first let's look at the business-as-usual line which remember that's the line that shows without any intervention no carbon tax nothing happening that's how our carbon dioxide emissions would just continue to increase over time the your house line which was the more gradual carbon tax it does decrease those emissions a little bit because by taxing carbon people are going to be more careful with their emissions and try to actually emit less carbon so they don't have to pay as much it's using the stern model which was the more aggressive carbon tax you can see that carbon dioxide emissions drop off very trim dramatically how does this relate to our 2 degrees Celsius temperature line that we are so concerned about keeping - well the business-as-usual line again it just continues going up over time I didn't draw exactly on top of the line but you get the idea the Nordhaus line has the temperature still increasing and plateauing somewhere around three and a half degrees Celsius temperature increase and then the stern line which is the little black circles actually has temperature plateauing less than two degrees and then actually starting to decrease again back toward pre-industrial values so you can see how a carbon tax is one strategy that economists have in their pocket to deal with this idea of a future climate change there are other options other than just a carbon tax there's a carbon fee which would just is very similar to a carbon tax sometimes they even are interchangeable the one that's talked about in your book talks about collecting from fossil fuel companies at the first sale so at the mine instead of at the power plant Andry distributing that money to have the public to help them with their gas tax for example there's the cap-and-trade plan which or an emissions trading scheme where countries if they have too many emissions they can sell them to countries that or they can buy they can buy extra from countries that didn't emit as much so it's kind of like if you want to end it a lot that's fine as long as you can find a country that emitted less and you pay that money so trading like trading cards there's a joint implementation mechanism we're one country would invest in emissions reductions in another developed country or a clean development mechanism where they finance emissions reductions in the developing world these are all different models something for you to think about is which type of model do you agree with more in particular the biggest divide tends to be between the idea of a carbon tax or a carbon fee versus a cap-and-trade system both have been implemented in other countries around the world and in some market places in the US and we don't have a nationwide model for this yet but it's something that is important to think about and going along with this how justified is it to pass along these economic costs to the next generation do you think that we should be taxing carbon now do you think we should be trying to front some of the costs toward stopping global warming now or do you think it is justifiable to leave it to the next generation and have them pay for it later one last topic that I want to look at before we close is the idea that there are differences among different countries in the world between what we call the developed world and the developing world so in making global policy and global strategies whether that's economic strategies political strategies or even just treaty commitments that we'll talk about in the next video there are differences between countries some people think these are very important to something people think these are not very important some people think that these differences are discriminatory and some people think that they are just historical so think take take a moment to think about this and think about what you think about it so basically they call some countries developed and on this graph they often call them advanced economies and developed countries our country is that became industrialized and what we call quote unquote modern already a long time ago so this is North America Europe and Australia Japan is also often lumps in there but those are really the big ones the two biggest being North America the US mostly and Europe these countries have used fossil fuels and have emitted the majority of the historical carbon dioxide emissions through their development the red countries on this map are the least developed countries so these are countries where there might be many thousands or millions of people living without electricity they have a very very low energy and carbon footprint and they probably actually have a lot of energy poverty happening in their country and then there are also the ones that are shaded in orange with show that they're developing but maybe they're slightly more developed in the red countries and lumped in with these orange countries I just want to point out is China and India China and India are developing very rapidly and especially China their manufacturing sector is really expanding at a rapid pace and so when we're talking about what should be done about climate change and we talk about transitioning our energy supply to renewable sources a lot of times we are thinking globally but it's important to remember that there are places in the world that don't even have any energy now and so a big concern that's gonna come up when we start thinking about world climate policy is the idea of should developing countries be allowed to use fossil fuels maybe they have barely any energy production now they want to produce energy they want to have an electricity is it possible for them to leapfrog right over fossil fuels and go straight to renewable energy the way they leapfrogged over the landline telephone and went straight to cell phones or is that something that we should even have as a goal for them so that's that's something that I want you to think about as we move forward and move toward our world climate negotiations happening during the last week of class