PARIS: This time, it’s a hotter, waterier, wilder Earth that world leaders are trying to save. The last time that the nations of the world struck a binding agreement to fight global warming was 1997, in Kyoto, Japan. As leaders gather for a conference in Paris on Monday to try to do more, it’s clear that things have changed dramatically over the past 18 years.

Some differences can be measured: degrees on a thermometer, trillions of tons of melting ice, a rise in sea level of a couple of inches. Epic weather disasters, including killer heat waves and monster storms, have plagued Earth.

As a result, climate change is seen as a more urgent and concrete problem than it was last time.

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“At the time of Kyoto, if someone talked about climate change, they were talking about something that was abstract in the future,” said Marcia McNutt, the former US Geological Survey director who was picked to run the National Academies of Sciences.

“Now, we’re talking about changing climate, something that’s happening now. You can point to event after event that is happening in the here and now that is a direct result of changing climate.”

Cold numbers

Since 1997 the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets have lost 5.5 trillion tons of ice, or 5 trillion metric tons, according to Andrew Shepherd at the University of Leeds, who used NASA and European satellite data.

The five-year average surface global temperature for January to October has risen by nearly two-thirds of a degree Fahrenheit, or 0.36 degrees Celsius, between 1993-97 and 2011-15, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

In 1997, Earth set a record for the hottest year, but it didn’t last. Records were set in 1998, 2005, 2010 and 2014, and it is sure to happen again in 2015 when the results are in from the year, according to NOAA.

With 1.2 billion more people in the world, carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels climbed nearly 50 per cent between 1997 and 2013, according to the US Department of Energy. The world is spewing more than 100 million tons of carbon dioxide a day now.

The five deadliest heat waves of the past century — in Europe in 2003, Russia in 2010, India and Pakistan this year, Western Europe in 2006 and southern Asia in 1998 — have come in the past 18 years, according to the International Disaster Database run by the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disaster in Belgium.

UN climate chief Christiana Figueres said that while the Kyoto agreement dictated to individual nations how much they must cut, what comes out of Paris will be based on what the more than 150 countries say they can do. That tends to work better.

“It has to,” she said. “The urgency is much clearer now than it used to be.”

Published in Dawn, November 30th, 2015