EU on Kyoto

Russel Norman blogs:

In what will hopefully be an historic moment in the campaign to save the planet from catastrophic human induced climate change, the EU Council has agreed to a unilateral 20% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions below 1990 levels by 2020.

Now this indeed does look somewhat positive if you believe that lowering greenhouse gas emissions is the best way to proceed. But let’s first look at whether the EU is on track to meet its existing targets:

The EU15 in 1990 had 4,238 megatonnes of emissions. Their target was to reduce it by 8% to 3,899 by 2008-2012. How much has it reduced? Only 0.8% by 2004. And to quote Wikipedia:

Further complicating the debate over the Kyoto Protocol is the fact that CO2 emissions growth in the US was far ahead of that of the EU-15 from 1990-2000, but from 2000-2004, America’s rate of growth in CO2 emissions was eight percentage points lower than from 1995-2000, while the EU-15 saw an increase of 2.3 points. From 2000-2004, the United States’ CO2 emissions growth rate was 2.1%, compared to the EU-15’s 4.5%. That happened while the US economy was expanding 38% faster than the economies of the EU-15 while experiencing population growth at twice the rate of the EU-15.[73]

As of year-end 2006, the United Kingdom and Sweden were the only EU countries on pace to meet their Kyoto emissions commitments by 2010. While UN statistics indicate that, as a group, the 36 Kyoto signatory countries can meet the 5% reduction target by 2012, most of the progress in greenhouse gas reduction has come from the stark decline in Eastern European countries’ emissions after the fall of communism in the 1990s

Make sure you re-read the post 2000 data. The US has gone up only 2.1% since 2000, while the EU15 has gone up 4.5%, despite 38% higher economic growth in the US, and twice the population growth. So why should we think the EU new target will be any more successful than the existing one?

Now I am not an expert in this area, but I have a question for those who are. If the EU does manage to cut emissions to 20% below 1990 levels, what effect will that have on the average global temperature in 2020? Will it be 1 degree lower than it would be if emissions continued at the same rate? Would it be 0.1 of a degree? Or would it be 0.01 of a degree?

Because surely unless one can be informed of the benefits of the reduction in emissions, can you sensibly decide whether the cost of reducing emissions is justified?

So how much of a temperature reduction would this be?