An MIT scientist has accused US President Donald Trump of manipulation and misuse of an MIT study he co-authored to justify the decision of pulling the US out of the Paris Climate Agreement, the first global climate pact with worldwide representation under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The agreement signed by 195 countries in Paris in December 2015 has been ratified by 147 countries so far.
While Trump blasted the Paris Accord of being unfair to the US, at the same time, he tried to downplay the global agreement as ineffective in combating the climate change by quoting an MIT finding, though without naming it, "It is estimated it would only produce a two-tenths of one degree Celsius reduction in global temperature by the year 2100. Tiny, tiny amount." But soon it emerged that Trump had picked up selective information to justify the rationale behind his decision.
According to an article in the MIT Technology Review, Donald Trump and his team quoted figures from an earlier MIT study which was done a year before the Paris Climate Agreement was signed and therefore could not factor in the emission pledges of all the signatories to the accord.
Erwan Monier, co-author of the study, "How much of a difference will the Paris Agreement make?", and principal research scientist at MIT’s department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences says "It appears that the White House cherry picked the lowest number they could find among studies that explored the impact of the climate accord". And as per Monier, the Trump administration didn't contact the MIT team before quoting its findings.
The 2016 MIT study which took into account emission pledges of all the participating nations came to the conclusion that the Paris Agreement was the first step in the right direction and if the participating countries followed their pledges, it could "reduce the surface air temperature in 2100 between 0.6 and 1.1 C relative to the no climate policy case" and thus could slow down the global warming process.
The 2016 study also emphasized that tacking climate change and global warming needed much more. Monier says, "The Paris agreement is certainly a step in the right direction, but it is only a step. It puts us on the right path to keep warming under 3 C, but even under the same level of commitment of the Paris agreement after 2030, our study indicates a 95 percent probability that the world will warm by more than 2 C by 2100". And in absence of any global climate control framework, the earth may warm up to 5 C or more, a Time report said quoting co-director of the MIT program John Reilly.
©SantoshChaubey
