 "Photo: Courtesy of Mark Fahnestock")
When the representatives of 192 countries gather in Copenhagen in the next two weeks for the United Nation’s Climate Change Conference, they will be debating a global response to a great deal of scientific data, including some compiled by Mark Fahnestock, a glaciologist and research associate professor within UNH’s Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space (EOS).
Fahnestock is the co-author of the chapter on Greenland in the “Snow, Water, Ice, and Permafrost in the Arctic” (SWIPA) report. This report will be released at the conference on Dec. 14, along with a 20-minute corresponding video, which Fahnestock appears in.
“The report captures a bunch of different information of what is changing in Greenland [due to climate change] and tries to make it coherent,” Fahnestock said.
The United Nations (UN) Climate Change Conference, officially known as COP15 in reference to it being the 15th gathering of the UN’s Conference of Parties, began yesterday in Copenhagen, Denmark, and continues until Dec. 18. The goal of the conference is to develop a global framework for climate change mitigation.
According to Robert Mohr, associate professor of economics at UNH, the debate over whether global warming is real or not is effectively over.
“The remaining real question is what to do about it, and that’s an economics question,” said Mohr, who will be teaching an upper-level economics course on the economics of climate change in the spring that will include a trip to Copenhagen over spring break.
While there is debate over whether a framework for climate change mitigation will actually emerge from the conference, Fahnestock said he is “cautiously optimistic.” However, he sees the conference itself as a positive sign.
“I think it’s clear that every country is engaged, and that’s different from the past,” Fahnestock said.
However, Scott Ollinger, associate professor of natural resources and earth system science, said the problem is simply too big to be solved at Copenhagen.
“It’s become clear in the weeks leading up to the meeting that an agreement that’s ambitious enough to solve the climate change problem won’t be reached in Copenhagen,” Ollinger said. “At this point in history, the two most important nations are China and the United States, and both are still far from the kind of commitment that’s needed.”
Mohr said that the conference may not live up to everyone’s high expectations for it, but will hopefully be a step in the right direction.
“There was this real hope that the follow up to Kyoto [Protocol on Climate Change] would come out of Copenhagen,” said Mohr. “It won’t. I’m still hopeful that it lays the groundwork for having that follow-up treaty in the near future.”
The conference has been in the news a lot recently, though not all of the coverage has been positive. Last week, the internationally known climate research center at the University of East Anglia in Britain leaked emails that some say show scientists trying to hide data contrary to the existence of global warming.
Fahnestock called the episode “a distraction.”
“It’s a small piece of a very large set of scientific undertaking,” said Fahnestock. “There’s nothing in there that changes the picture you get from the data.”
Instead, Fahnestock said through his travels to Greenland and extensive study of the arctic region, he has seen first-hand the effects of climate change.
“I just look at pictures of the Arctic,” he said. “I think the planet is telling us something and the planet isn’t part of a conspiracy.”
Fahnestock said that the earth’s glaciers are melting at a rate far greater than the rate only a decade ago.
“They’ve sped up a lot,” said Fahnestock, who attributed the change to the rise in sea temperatures. “They’re putting a lot more in the ocean than they were 10 years ago.”
Fahnestock also noted that sea ice, which serves as a vital habitat and hunting grounds for animals such as walrus and polar bears, is decreasing as well.
“By the end of the summer there’s far less ice left in the ocean than there used to be,” he said.
Additionally, shrubs are growing in the tundra where plants previously were limited to only a few centimeters high. The region’s permafrost is also either degrading or disappearing completely.
“The arctic region is where the effects of climate change appeared first, and where they are the most dramatic,” Fahnestock said.
He attributed this to albedo, the portion of sunlight that is affected by an object. The arctic is traditionally associated with white objects such as ice and snow, which reflect a majority of the sun due to their high albedo.
But as these objects melt, they reveal darker objects beneath, such as the bare ground, which have a lower albedo and absorb more light and heat. This, in turn, drives further absorption of the sun.
If anything, said Ollinger, the climate change problem is greater than most people currently think.
“The climate change problem is huge and may be even greater than we’re willing to admit,” Ollinger said. “Tinkering with the earth’s climate system is like popping rivets out of an airplane while it’s still in the air. It’s unclear how many rivets we can lose before the planet fails to stay aloft.”
The attention on climate change in Copenhagen mirrors attention on the issue back in the United States. While campaigning, President Obama promised to address the issue of climate change, but the issue has been overshadowed in Congress by the recession and health care.
“Obama would have liked to have a climate bill before the conference,” Mohr said.
However, Fahnestock said the administration has not lost sight of the issue.
“The federal government is trying very hard to support effective science and make progress in having a clearer picture of the future,” Fahnestock said.
Yesterday, however, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) ruled that greenhouse gases are harmful to human health, a move that is expected to give the US both more clout in Copenhagen negotiations and spur Congress into action into passing regulations.
However, Ollinger noted that the administration will still face debate over the issue.
“I think the Obama administration is taking the conference and the climate change problem very seriously,” Ollinger said. “But Obama is limited in how much he can offer to other countries because there are still huge political pressures at home that resist emissions regulations."
The White House also announced today that Obama will be visiting the conference in Copenhagen on Dec. 18, the last scheduled day of the conference when most heads of state are planning to attend, rather than Dec. 9, as he originally planned.
"I think everybody agrees that we are in a better position - I mean, we, globally - to get some sort of agreement out of Copenhagen," said White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs during a press conference in Washington D.C. on Dec. 5. "And the president believed, having helped to work both in enunciating our commitments as well as ensuring that the Indians and the Chinese talked about their commitments, that we could move that (Obama's trip) to the end of the conference, when some agreement is likely to need some help from world leaders."
Whether from Copenhagen or not, at UNH, the hope is that changes concerning climate change come sooner rather than later.
“My hope is that even a little movement in the right direction will make a more substantial agreement possible in the future,” said Ollinger. “We just don’t have a lot more time to wait for that to happen.”
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