The Weather Notebook: GCC #4

GCC #4
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Imagine what it's like to get 39 countries to sign a legally binding treaty to reduce emissions of gases, an energy source, which drives world economies.

Of course I'm talking about the Kyoto Protocol. It's the international framework for reducing greenhouse gases from combustion of fossil fuels that may be causing global warming. You may remember that the largest producer of those substances, the United States, pulled out of the agreement last year. leaving its future unresolved.

Hi, I'm Bryan Yeaton of the Weather Notebook and this report is part of our special series on global climate change.

Kyoto is not the first attempt at an international agreement on harmful emissions of a substance. Karen Fisher Vanden is an assistant professor of environmental studies at Dartmouth College and she says Kyoto traces its roots to another treaty in the late 1980s.

KFV: In 1987 countries agreed and signed the Montreal Protocol, which is an agreement that sets out targets and timetable to phase out ozone depleting substances and this was deemed a success because they were able to achieve international cooperation pretty easily and in fact they've been able to achieve phase out of the substance much sooner than they orignally expected.

Getting consensus went faster because chloroflurocarbons or CFCs, the culprit substances responsible for the ozone hole‹were easier to limit and took less of a bite out of the economies of producer nations.

KFV: And when we're talking about climate change we're talking about the combustion of fossil fuels we're talking about a huge number of different sources for that and a very unmanageable thing and in terms of alternatives for that--not that inexpensive and not that easy to achieve.

In future reports, we'll take a look at alternatives.

The Weather Notebook is a production of the Mount Washington Observatory. The series on global climate change is supported by the New England Science Center Collaborative and the Roy A. Hunt Foundation.