This is my first in a series of short(ish) posts on making difficult modern topics easier to understand.
They're created for you to be able to quickly read whatever you need to to grasp the subject. Feel free to skim/skip to whatever section you find most relevant.
Basics
CO2 is a gas that gradually makes the world hotter.
Since the 19th Century humans have been emitting huge amounts of it, slowly making the world warmer.
Global warming is caused by many smaller factors such as the sun and other gases such as methane, but CO2 is the most significant element involved and also the one easiest to reduce.
Why is it difficult to get rid of?
Countries round the world are now reducing their CO2 output but it is often difficult because alternative sources of energy are either slow coming (solar, tide, etc) or controversial in themselves (nuclear) so they cannot instantly replace it.
It is also difficult for governments and companies to lower their emissions because it costs a lot of money while the future benefit is uncertain.
What's Copenhagen and other big meetups like Kyoto about?
Kyoto was the world's first legal agreement saying that countries should cut their CO2 by a certain amount by a certain time. Its deadline is 2012. This is still far away but so far many countries aren't doing well at cutting their emissions and since Kyoto new studies have shown that climate change is more dangerous than previously thought. People now think that a much stronger and more ambitious treaty is needed to replace Kyoto.
Do different countries agree on what to do? Why is it hard for people to agree?
All countries agree that overall CO2 emissions have to drop, but they disagree about how to do this. Richer countries like the US want poorer countries that are starting to use a lot of CO2 as they grow to do more as they are going to be giving out most of the emissions in the future. But poorer, developing countries like China and the African countries want bigger countries to do more as they can afford more.
What should I be looking out for? How do I know whether the treaty will work?
The biggest actors are the US, China and the EU.
The US and China are the biggest polluters but also individually represent the richer world and the developing world respectively. How good a deal they make together in their part of the Copenhagen agreement will tell us a lot about how well the whole project will come together.
The EU is a collection of many states that mostly by themselves don't compare with the US and China in terms of their emissions but the group has a lot of influence. If the EU countries (especially the UK) agree to do more than their part, cutting their emissions by a lot, it may well make the bigger polluters feel inclined to do the same.
Why do people not believe in climate change?
Among climatologists there is disagreement about how much we know about climate change and how bad it will be. There are also many people who do not believe that the world will get dangerously warm at all. These people give many, many different arguments for their position but they are mostly not climatologists. Any that are climatologists or in scientific fields are in a small minority. Most people are not in the position to look at most of the relevant information to decide for themselves whether climate change is real or not. Because of this we must listen to relevant experts in the field. Overwhelmingly experts in climate science believe in and are deeply concerned about global warming. This is shown by the UN's recent study on climate change which involved hundreds of relevant scientists and researchers and concluded that the world is getting warmer and will lead to harsher climate.
Skeptics of climate change will never confront the evidence that global warming is real because they can't, so they say that individual scientists are wrong/bad people, or that some pieces of evidence for climate change are dodgy, ignoring the fact that to criticize climate change you have to argue away huge amounts of evidence that has been building over the last century and especially in the last few decades.
What's 'Climategate'?
Recently some emails were stolen from a university in England and published online. The emails are controversial because they talk about altering data and destroying evidence. There is an investigation under way into the people involved, but whether what the scientists were doing was unscientific or not, nothing but a series of significant studies could alter scientific confidence in climate change, so the event is irrelevant to the topic.
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