Language matters: the difference between noted and welcomed and a Norwegian red line

By: Will Kochtitzky

At the COP, language matters. Delegates spend their entire days negotiating words and sometimes it gets heated. Last night Norway claimed that merely "noting the IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C crosses a red line".

While the above sentence may not seem like a big deal, countries are intensely arguing over how they talk about the Special Report on 1.5°C at this COP. So to understand why, we need to understand a little more about the Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C and its history.

Since the beginning of the COP, developing countries have recognized that while they have contributed the least to causing global climate change, they are the most at risk from the impacts of climate change. This great irony has caused tensions for the last 23 COPs. The main goal of COP is to not cause dangerous climate change and to maintain a habitable planet. In the past, delegates have agreed to work towards a 2°C warming target and agreed to do their absolute best not to warm the world more than 2°C. This made the assumption that below 2°C warming was not dangerous for the planet.

That leads us to a few years ago, when developing countries led the charge to get the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the global authority on climate science, to write the Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C. This report came out in October and can be found here. This report is so important because it is the first time the IPCC has investigated levels of warming below 2°C. The findings are clear, we need immediate climate action to not warm the planet more than 1.5°C because we have already caused 1°C of warming. This means that we only have 0.5°C of warming left before we blow past the 1.5°C warming mark. The current 1°C of warming is already causing devastating impacts around the world, including more intense fires, stronger hurricanes, pronounce droughts, among others. 

The fight over the Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C is not just about noted vs. welcomed, it is about countries approach to limiting warming to 1.5°C. Saudi Arabia and Kuwait are leading the charge to limit the implications of the Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C. They are among the biggest road blocks to ambitious climate action. The world needs to find a way to overcome these roadblocks to push forward towards an ambitious outcome from these Katowice climate talks.

It doesn't help that the US wants to join Saudi Arabia in merely "noting the IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C".

Countries huddling on December 6, 2018 to figure out how to talk about the IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C.