COP21: Obama praises Paris climate change agreement - CNN.com - 0 views
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, the agreement would set an ambitious goal of halting average warming at no more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial temperatures -- and of striving for a limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius if possible.
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"This didn't save the planet," Bill McKibben, the co-founder of 350.org, said of the agreement. "But it may have saved the chance of saving the planet."
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If this [the Paris Agreement] is adopted as this currently stands then countries have united around a historic agreement that marks a turning point in the climate crisis."
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Scientists and policy experts say that would require the world to move off fossil fuels between about 2050 and the end of the century. To reach the more ambitious 1.5 degrees Celsius goal, some researchers say the world will need to reach zero net carbon emissions sometime between about 2030 and 2050.
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That level of warming is measured as the average temperature increase since the Industrial Revolution.
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Failure to set a cap could result in superdroughts, deadlier heat waves, mass extinctions of plants and animals, megafloods and rising seas that could wipe some island countries off the map. The only way to reach the goal, scientists say, is to eliminate fossil fuels.
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The entire agreement enters into force once 55 countries (who must account for 55% of the total global greenhouse gas emissions) have ratified it.
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The agreement calls for developed countries to raise at least $100 billion annually in order to assist developing countries.
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China and the United States, respectively, account for about 24% and 14% of total greenhouse gas emissions
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That means if the world's biggest polluters don't sign off on the agreement, enacting it could prove challenging.
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Rather, it sets up a bottom-up system in which each country sets its own goal -- which the agreement calls a "nationally determined contribution" -- and then must explain how it plans to reach that objective. Those pledges must be increased over time, and starting in 2018 each country will have to submit new plans every five years.
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Many countries actually submitted their new plans before COP21 started last month -- but those pledges aren't enough to keep warming below the 2 degrees target
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Another issue, according to observers, was whether there would be reparations paid to countries that will see irreparable damage from climate change but have done almost nothing to cause it.
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The agreement doesn't mandate exactly how much each country must reduce its greenhouse gas emissions.
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resident Barack Obama praised a landmark climate change agreement approved Saturday in Paris, saying it could be "a turning point for the world."
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"The Paris agreement establishes the enduring framework the world needs to solve the climate crisis,"
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"It creates the mechanism, the architecture, for us to continually tackle this problem in an effective way."
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"I believe this moment can be a turning point for the world," Obama said, calling the agreement "the best chance we have to save the one planet that we've got."
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The accord achieved one major goal. It limits average global warming to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial temperatures and strives for a limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) if possible.