02-18-19 Joint Health and Public Safety and Utilities

Home Browse Search

CITY OF SOUTH BEND , OFFICE OF THE CLERK He continued, Climate change isn't something new thought up a couple of years ago. The greenhouse effect was actually discovered over one hundred(100) years ago, and ever since then, climate change has been widely debated. That began to change in 1988. In 1988, Dr. James Hanson,then the NASA Director of the Institute for Space Studies,testified before Congress about the impending perils of climate change. This marked a turning point, thrusting climate change more into the public eye and out of the fringes. That same year, the United Nations and the World Meteorological Association established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC. That is a coalition of some of the world's leading scientists in climate and climate science. They are basically the world's foremost expert body on climate science. Since their founding, the IPCC has released five (5) general assessments throughout the years. Each general assessment basically says the same thing: the planet is getting warmer and humans are causing it through our carbon emission. Unless we change, there are serious environmental consequences coming down the pipeline. The main difference between each of these reports is the certainty with which the IPCC makes these claims. They have progressed from use of terms such as 'we are unclear' to 'we are virtually certain that climate change is happening.' I note this because the IPCC is a rigorous scientific body and they don't use terms like `virtually certain' lightly. He went on, Now, in 1997, eighty-two (82) countries and the European Union signed the Kyoto Protocol. The Kyoto Protocol is an international treaty that mandated a monitoring and subsequent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions for industrialized signatories.Now,the treaty didn't go into force until 2005,but that didn't really matter because most of the countries that had signed it were actually exempted from the treaty because they were considered developing countries and it would stunt their growth too much to try and curb their greenhouse gas emission. The US dropped the Kyoto Protocol in 2001 and the treaty is criticized by many as a failure. That being said, it did lay the groundwork for the Paris Agreement. The Paris Agreement started in 2015. France hosted the twenty-first (21St) Annual UN Climate Change Conference in Paris. The attending countries created the Paris Agreement which was essentially a stronger version of the Kyoto Protocol. The Paris Agreement calls on each of the one hundred and eighty-four (184) ratifying parties to contribute to reducing greenhouse gas emission. Contributions vary, country by country. The stated goal of the agreement is to limit climate change to two (2) degree Celsius above pre- industrial levels with the ambitious goal of keeping that change within one point five(1.5)degrees Celsius. I say this is an ambitious goal because we have already seen an increase of one (degree) Celsius, so, there is not much wiggle room left. Although the Paris Agreement went into force in 2016, the White House has since signaled that American withdrawal from that is on the table. So, it is clear that federal help in this is not necessarily coming. Committeemember Regina Williams-Preston arrived at the meeting at 6:01 p.m. Ms. Brebeck stated, I will next be discussing the impacts of climate change, building off of what Tai had described about global warming. So, this graph here (referencing a slide in the presentation) is from a recent IPCC report. It shows how much our Earth could warm in a high emissions scenario in red and a low emissions scenario in blue. As you can see, in the high emissions scenario it reaches about six (6) and in some even more recent reports it has been projected to maybe reach seven (7). In the low emissions scenario, it keeps it under two (2). As Tai mentioned, the goal was to keep it under two (2) degrees Celsius but the IPCC this year released a new report advocating for policies to really aim for under one point five (1.5) degrees Celsius. This is because the impact of one point five (1.5) degrees Celsius are already going to be EXCELLENCE ACCOUNTABILITY INNOVATION 1 INCLUSION EMPOWERMENT 455 County-City Building 227 W.Jefferson Bvld South Bend,Indiana 46601 p 574.235.9221 f 574.235.9173 TTD 574.235.5567 www.southbendin.gov 7