Nearly three decades after it first agreed to tackle climate change, the world has failed miserably to curb the growth in CO2 emissions. To succeed, it urgently needs to establish an effective price for carbon.
In the 1820s, French mathematician Joseph Fourier calculated an object the size of Earth, and at its distance from the Sun, should be considerably colder than the planet is if warmed only by the effects of incoming solar radiation. His consideration of the possibility the Earth’s atmosphere might act as an insulator is widely recognised as the first proposal of what came to be known as the greenhouse effect.
It took over a century, however, for the dangers of burning fossil fuels to be better understood. Edward Teller, a Hungarian-American theoretical physicist, sometimes referred to as ‘the father of the hydrogen bomb’, was among the first to sound the warning. At an address to the membership of the American Chemical Society in December 1957, Teller warned the large amount of fuel that had been burnt since the mid-19th century was increasing the concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere and would “act in the same way as a greenhouse by raising the temperature at the surface”.
By 1992, with evidence of the perils of man-made climate change mounting, 154 countries agreed to begin to address the problem. Signatories to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Rio de Janeiro committed to reduce atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases with the goal of “preventing dangerous anthropogenic interference with Earth’s climate system”. Nearly three decades and countless international conferences on, efforts to curb climate emissions have failed miserably.
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