The Paris COP21 Climate Conference: What Does It Mean for the Southeast?

If you follow climate news or have climatologist friends like we do, you will have noted the successful end of the Paris Conference of Parties (COP21) meeting in mid-December. As the supreme decision making body of the United Nation’s Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the Conference of Parties is a central actor in international climate policy. The 1992 Rio Earth Summit adopted the UNFCCC as an international environmental treaty. The annual Conference of the Parties meetings have attempted to establish a framework for stabilizing greenhouse gases (GHGs). Outcomes from previous Conference of Parties include the Kyoto Protocol, Marrakesh Accords, and Green Climate Fund.¹ However, a comprehensive agreement has been elusive.

At the end of a long (and by some accounts grueling) process, 196 nations joined together in December 2015 to recognize the importance of climate change for the earth and its inhabitants, with 174 of these countries signing the agreement on April 22, 2016. COP21 set in motion some methods to deal with the changes that are sure to come from a warming earth as well as methods to learn how to adapt to risks that are not yet clear. Some of the key provisions:

• • Limit the increase of global average temperature below 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F), but with a specific attempt to remain below 1.5 degrees C, a threshold that has been shown to be the point beyond which highly vulnerable populations can adapt,

• • Preserve forested landscapes to offset carbon emissions and increase conservation and global sustainability goals,

• • Encourage climate financing to help all nations transition from fossil-fuel dominant economies to more renewable energy-dominant power systems,

• • Establish a rigorous and transparent system for accounting for the Parties’ carbon reductions,

• • Recognize that certain countries are more vulnerable to climate change than others and that efforts must be made to avert, minimize, or address “loss and damage,”

• • Mandate increasingly aggressive carbon reduction targets every 5-year.²

In this essay, we highlight what the historic results of Paris COP21 mean for the Southeast. To do that, it is important to put the climate changes that have occurred in the Southeast in a global context. It is intriguing to note that over the much of the last 100 years the Southeast was one of the few places on the globe where the climate did not become significantly warmer compared to other parts of the world, although that is beginning to change. In the climate literature, this is referred to as the “warming hole.” The warming hole dominates some narratives to suggest that climate change is not real; however, multiple contributions to the climate literature confirm that the “warming hole” no longer exists and that the Southeast is warming, albeit a slower rate than other parts of the United States.³ Most of the change has been in the winter months, with lower trends in other seasons.

The last century’s warming hole has been attributed to aggressive reforestation, large-scale shifts in atmospheric wave patterns in certain geographic regions (e.g., Southeast Asia, another past warming hole region), and the influence (directly or indirectly) of aerosols. The Southeast is now over 70 percent forested, and many scholars support the reforestation theory. Since forests are generally cooler and moister than unforested ground, this has reduced the temperatures in the region over time compared to other places where this transition did not occur. Since the 1960s, when most of the conversion of open fields to forests was completed, temperatures in the Southeast have begun to rise in concert with those in other parts of the globe. Further scientific work is needed to conclusively establish attribution.

During the same 100 years, the annual average precipitation across the Southeast barely changed at all, staying at an average of about 50 inches for Georgia and similar flat trends in other southeastern states, rising only slightly over time. But while the annual total has not changed, the distribution of the precipitation over time has changed quite a bit. Seasonally, winter and spring have had the smallest changes over...