The Paris climate agreement sounds promising but it came toward the end of Earth's warmest year on record and now in 2016 warming has only gotten stronger. The increase in global temperatures over pre-industrial levels surpassed one degree Celsius in 2015 and is now inching its way to 1.5 degrees Celsius and that horrifies any person who is paying attention. Voluntary pledges made in Paris to limit greenhouse gas emissions are insufficient to the task of averting drastic climate change. They are, at best, incremental moves and not the steps that are necessary to avoid catastrophic climate change including the sixth mass extinction event which we find ourselves in at this very moment. What we needed was the types of programs that ex President Jimmy Carter had rolled out, almost 40 years ago, before he lost his re-election bid to Ronald Reagan. President Reagan immediately dismantled all federal clean energy efforts. And here we are today.
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists note:
There have been some positive developments, however, notably the agreement in Paris among 196 countries on a global climate accord. Boldly setting a goal of keeping global mean warming well below 2 degrees Celsius, the agreement recognizes the need to bring net greenhouse gas emissions to zero before the end of the century. Still, it is unclear how the world will actually meet that goal. The backbone of the accord—pledges submitted by each of the signatory countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions—is far from sufficient. Even while acclaiming the Paris agreement as a landmark achievement, the UN Climate Change Secretariat acknowledged that if all countries fulfill their voluntary commitments but do no more than that, then by 2025, the world will have used half of the remaining carbon dioxide budget consistent with a 2 degrees C goal. Three-quarters of that budget of carbon emissions will have been exhausted by 2030. And this assessment assumes that countries will fully comply with their pledges—even though the Paris agreement includes no effective enforcement mechanisms to assure that countries do so.