WMO Press conference 06 March 2023

Good morning, good morning, good afternoon everybody.

This is the World Meteorological Organisations press conference about a planned new global greenhouse gas monitoring infrastructure.

It was endorsed last week at our Executive Council meeting and so given that you were busy on Friday, we decided to have the the press briefing today to explain explain to you about it.

We sent out the press release this morning.

Apologies in English only.

Our translation services were busy last week with translating documents for EC, so exceptionally we we couldn't translate the press release, but the document itself is available in all UN languages.

So if you do need that for some technical, you know, details in in your own language, please, please let me know.

Without further ado, I will present you to Lars Peter and I'm sorry, I can never say his name.

He's going to say it for us.

Lars Peter, he's like that.

And he's WMO, the deputy director of WMO Infrastructure Department and Lars Peter's spearheading this, this, this initiative.

So without any further ado, I'll I'll pass over to Lars Peter.

Thank you very much, Claire.

So I will try to explain to you using a couple of slides what this is really about.

So if you could bring up the presentation, Claire, so we all know, sorry.

Can you, can you just let me share the screen?

It says host disabled participant screen sharing.

It's still not letting me.

Can you can you just talk to it?

I'm having problems.

Can you can you start talking?

I'll try and sort this out.

Yeah, I I kind of need to get that stuff up.

Sorry about this everybody.

Just just bear with us for a couple of minutes.

Good.

If you can put it in presentation more and go directly to the next slide.

Next slide, please.

OK, apologies for that.

Yeah.

So the problem that that we're going to be talking about today is really the implementation of the Paris Agreement.

We all know that Paris was adopted to help us mitigate climate change and to do this via a reduction of the net anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.

There are two problems with that.

One is that we are not.

We humans have pumped a lot of additional greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and we rightly try to control the climate system by mitigating that.

But we are not the only ones doing this.

There are natural, natural processes that pump in and take out much more greenhouse gas than we humans do, and we need to understand how that works also and how that interacts with our emissions.

Otherwise we don't understand how to operate our control.

The second problem is that in the context of the UNF Triple C and the Paris Agreement, human emissions can be both positive and negative.

The positive emissions are what we pump into the atmosphere in terms of fossil fuel burning and and other activities.

The negative emissions is what we take up via changing our agricultural practises by aforestation, reforestation, combating forest degradation, etcetera.

The second problem is that the accounting and the monitoring of negative emissions is on very shaky ground.

There's been a fair amount of of press around this recently.

There's no centralised accounting for this.

The guidelines are and not uniformly approved and not universally adopted.

So all of that leads to a risk of the perhaps overestimating the impact and the risk of double counting as well.

If you click forward on the slide 11 time please, what is important to realise is that can you click on the slide please?

What is important to realise is that we went one too far there is that the climate actually does not react to our emissions per SE.

The only thing that matters to the climate is how much greenhouse gases is in the atmosphere.

And on the curve on the right hand side, you can see how that has been growing over the last over the last 60 years.

And none of the big climate agreements that that we've had Kyoto or Rio or Kyoto or Paris so far has really made any difference in in terms of bending that curve.

So there is something that we either are not understanding properly or that we are not doing right.

And now we're going to take a look at the next slide at what we might be able to do better.

So what can you do?

If you want to understand the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere better, you have fundamentally two different approaches.

Click one time on the slide please.

1st is bottom up estimation.

So the idea there is that you look at every individual source of carbon, source of sink of carbon and you try to estimate what might that do to the atmosphere.

So you look at the cars, the planes, the ships, the forest, the agriculture of the cows, of the cities, etcetera and you try to Add all that up plus and minus.

What might that be doing to the atmosphere?

Everything that happens in the context of Paris Agreement and IPCC is based on bottom up estimation at this point.

Click one more time please.

The second approach is top down.

The idea of top down monitoring is that you take a look at the growth curve and you try to understand where in the atmosphere and when in the atmosphere does stuff come in and go out so that it adds up to what we see in the curve there on the left.

Click one more time please.

So you use atmospheric observations and atmospheric modelling to build up that estimate.

This is this is the can you click one time which it should move forward.

It's just a little bit slow to react apparently.

So you use atmospheric observations and atmospheric modelling to build up an estimate of what is actually happening to the atmosphere.

Click one more time please.

The reason why we are having that conversation in the context of WMO is that the infrastructure that is required to do top down monitoring is very a very close analogue to what WMO has been doing the last 60 years in terms of preparing for or or coordinating weather prediction and climate analysis.

The same models, the same type of international data exchange, the same type of international coordination.

The beauty of top down monitoring is that it provides a direct link to the only centralised accounting system that actually matters for this, namely the growth curve.

When you add up everything that happens everywhere in the atmosphere, it has to line up with the growth curve, otherwise you are doing something that doesn't quite work.

The bottom up monitoring doesn't work that way because you can only count what you can count.

It works well in developed countries where you have a lot of data on which you can build bottom up accounting.

It doesn't work well in developed country in developing countries because they often don't have the the national data sets that will let you do bottom up measurements.

It doesn't work for natural processes in the Southern Ocean, in the boil forest, because nature doesn't report anything.

It only reports via the atmosphere.

It doesn't tell you where and where and when it's doing things.

Let's go to the next slide.

So WMO and his partners are developing a a top down internationally coordinated greenhouse gas monitoring framework, which was endorsed by our executive council last week.

That's really why we wanted to to talk to you about this and the key ingredients of it are listed here.

An integrated global greenhouse gas observing system with both satellite and and surface based assets route international data exchange of all these observations.

This is vitally important, just as it is for weather and climate that everybody has access to all the observations so everybody sees the same reality.

It is just as important for greenhouse gas monitoring as it is for climate analysis and weather prediction, routine operational modelling of these that will turn the observations into a flux estimate so you can see where greenhouse gases actually come in and out of the atmosphere, and routine international into comparison of this.

Again, vitally important, in order to make this trustworthy to the parties of the Paris Agreement, the big economic blocs will want to cross verify and sanity check each other's data.

It would be unthinkable that, for instance, the US would let its mitigation activity be driven solely by a system operated by China or by the by by Europe and and vice versa.

The the authoritiveness of this really hinges on transparency, on international exchange and international coordination of verification of these data.

The main output is what's highlighted in green here.

It is consolidated authoritative top down flux estimates.

When and where do greenhouse gases come in and out of the atmosphere?

We can do this initially at a 100 by 100 kilometre grid scale globally.

We have the the the science and the technology to do this by at a 1 by 1 kilometre grid.

We don't have the financial resources, we don't have the observational resources to do that, but that would be doable.

Now, who would use this?

Parties to the Paris Agreement?

So this would be countries and also local jurisdictions who might be on the hook to report their emissions.

That is happening already in many parts of the world.

There are private companies who are on the hook to report their emissions as well.

So parties who are active in the carbon trading market would be able to use this and the scientific community who work on better understanding what's happening with the greenhouse gases.

And via that route, it would philtre into the IPCC guidelines as well.

And I think there's one more slide, if we could click on that, please.

So the timeline for this, we've been working on this system for a year and a half.

It was discussed extensively in Sham El Sheikh and it was recognised by SOBSTA and it made its way into the overarching COP 27 decision as well.

We had a big symposium just down the road in the WMO building a few weeks ago where the scientific community that was represented there in large numbers endorsed this concept.

And we had our executive Council last week that gave us the green light to do put forward a proposal to WMO Congress to do this.

We'll be discussing this in Congress in just a little under 3 weeks and hopefully we will get into governmental agreement to actually push ahead and, and, and do this.

And then we will go back to the COP and, and have a talk about that also in, in Dubai later this year.

The goal is to have a fully operational capability in five years.

And we believe that we can do this at a 1 by 1 kilometre grid scale globally in, in 10 years.

And I think that's all I, I needed to show here.

So this is in a nutshell, it is meant to support the implementation of the Paris Agreement and actually help both parties and private sector players understand what do we need to do better in order to bend this the greenhouse gas concentration curve, which at this point keeps it steady upward March, seemingly ignoring what what we say and what we think we're doing.

We hear again and again, my country is moving towards carbon neutral or my company is net 0.

But it appears that the atmosphere doesn't quite agree with the way we're counting.

So we need to do certain things better.

And the top down monitoring is really based on the idea that if you want to understand what's happening in the atmosphere, look at the atmosphere.

Don't just look at the trees and the cars and the cows and the factories.

Look at what's actually happening in the atmosphere.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

So it's quite a lot of information quite quite technical.

Is there anybody online with with with any questions on on that?

Could you just raise your hand?

So, Robin, Robin, Robin Millard from a French news agency.

Thanks, Robin.

Thank you.

Good afternoon.

I think you mentioned there that it sounded like you said natural greenhouse gas emissions put more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than than humans do.

Did I, did I hear that right?

And is that something you could expand on bit for us?

Thank you.

Yes, nature, not national nature puts in and takes out very importantly more greenhouse gas than we do.

So the land biosphere, the the forests and and the fields and the grasslands and etcetera put in about 10 times as much as we humans do, but it takes most of it out again.

So the net contribution of nature is the difference between 2 very large terms 1 into the atmosphere, one out of the atmosphere.

The same with the oceans.

We think of oceans as a net sink of the of carbon dioxide of CO2.

So it takes up net a lot of the carbon dioxide annually, which is true, but that uptake again is a result of the difference between a lot of carbon dioxide that out gases from the ocean into the atmosphere and a lot that is taken up.

Again.

In order to understand what will happen long term with that, we need to understand those processes better.

We tend to take it for granted that the ocean will just continue to do whatever it's doing.

But we know that's not true because the uptake of the, of the CO2 in the ocean depends on the, among other things, on the temperature of the ocean surface.

And we know that is increasing and that will lead to a decrease in the, in the uptake ability of CO2 in the ocean.

It also depends on salinity and a couple of other things.

But it is a, it's a complicated system with interaction between the, the various components.

So we cannot just look at what we emit as a human species and assume that nature will just take up half of whatever we emit, which is roughly what is happening today.

I don't know whether that helps answer your question.

Yes, I think, I think it did.

Agnes, who's also from the French News Agency, which is in French.

Agnes, yes, hi, everybody.

Thank you for taking my question.

I have a more general question with this system, with this new system, if it's put in place, how much do you think it would give a much different picture of what we already have today of the these greenhouse gases?

Do you think the picture will change?

Really a lot or just slightly and because in the end, the idea is to to fight against the climate change.

So I was wondering if if the if the final picture will really look different of what we have today and what we know today and if that really will help us to, to fight against climate change.

Thank you.

Thank you very much for the question.

It's a very good one, actually.

It will not change the overarching picture, which is that we emit too much greenhouse gas and we need to, we need to limit that.

But there is a fair amount of confusion about what we should be doing and how effective our various measures are.

And we believe that this system will be immensely helpful for that.

So right now we know on an annual basis how much excess CO2 we put into the atmosphere.

We know, we know in global bulk numbers that is not good enough to truly Dr mitigation action because you can see that from one year to the next the CO2 concentration has risen by so much or the excess amount of of the CO2 has been 10 or 15 gigatons or, or, or whatever the the exact number happens to be.

And everybody can say, OK, this is not me.

My company is carbon neutral.

Or if you are country, you can say, but I reduced my emissions by so and so much last year.

And you don't actually know where that comes from.

The system that we are talking about here will be able to show you on a map.

This is where it came in.

This is where it came out.

So you can see grid cell by grid cell on a global scale where that actually happened today, we don't have that.

We only have a global bulk number.

The second thing that we can do better is that we can do this in near real time.

So when parties meet at the COP these days, typically in in late November, early December, they look at what we what did we do on a global basis, not the year before, but two years before they actually met.

And there is a psychological disconnect in that that will let us humans think, OK, that's not so good.

But maybe last year we did better and this year we are doing even better.

The new system here will be able to show you on a month by month basis exactly when and where the the greenhouse gases entered and exited the atmosphere.

And that is a very, very different thing for decision making rather than knowing that two years ago this is what happened in global bulk and what do we do with that information?

Thank you.

And Robin from AFP has a follow up question.

All right.

Thanks again.

Just in terms of where carbon ends up, how, how short do you think our knowledge is of of where greenhouse gas carbon emissions actually end up so in say in in permafrost or or the ocean or the Amazon?

And do you think that that this new system of monitoring will will shed a great deal of light on that area that we perhaps might not know much about?

So that's a very good question.

And there, there are several parts to it.

So what do we not know?

It's perhaps easier to say what we know.

We know roughly how much all the coal, oil and gas we dig out of the of the ground, and we can assume that all of it is burned.

We know what the process is, so we can calculate fairly accurately what we pump into the atmosphere via fossil fuel burning.

And we have some level of the handle on what we do with our agriculture.

We know relatively little about what nature does.

We don't have a lot of measurements, hardly any.

In fact, in the permafroster areas.

We don't have any measurements almost at all.

In the Southern Ocean.

We have very few measurements.

In the tropics where the big rainforest areas are.

We have very few measures, measurements in the boreal forest, so the Great Northern coniferous forest over Canada and and Alaska and Russia.

So we know very little about what's happening there.

We understand the processes to some extent, but we cannot verify them because we don't have, we don't have measurements there.

That is a huge risk just on the natural side.

On the human side, we have very limited data in the roughly 2/3 of the world's countries that are that are developing.

So there are enormous gaps in our knowledge.

We know the overarching global number because the atmospheric growth curve tells us and that is measured as many of you know, on top of mountain called Mauna Loa in Hawaii, so far from far removed and far higher in the atmosphere than most human activities.

So that's a good average global background number and we know how that is growing.

But in terms of where and when that happens on a map of the globe, we have very limited knowledge.

We have very few observations in the ocean and the ocean is covers 2/3 of the surface of the globe and they are responsible for roughly half the uptake of the excess CO2 that we have met.

Sorry that may be a bit of a long winded answer, but I hope that I hope it helps answer your question.

Robin has a follow up.

Yeah.

Thank you.

One, one more for me in in terms of measuring greenhouse outflows and inflows on a on A1 kilometre square scale, how, how does, how does that happen?

How do you get to be that precise?

Thank you.

It happens the same way.

I I drew this analogy with the weather prediction.

So we actually know that it is possible to do atmospheric modelling on a 1 by 1 kilometre grid scale.

And what you do with greenhouse gases is you use the exact same model and the same technology as as you do for weather prediction.

Nobody runs a weather model at a 1 by 1 kilometre grid scale these days because it really stretches the maximum that we have in.

In terms of the computational resources.

It is simply not affordable today.

Many of us believe that we will get there within 10 years.

So that's why I said it is.

It is feasible technically and scientifically.

We just do not have the resources to it yet.

We don't have the observations to back it up either for greenhouse gases.

Let me be clear on this.

So there, there is there there is a fairly significant development that needs to happen in terms of improving the observational data coverage of the planet.

And we are working with both private sector entities and with our development partners to to make that happen.

There's development funding that is willing to help us out in developing countries and there are private sector entities who are willing to help us out with the ocean coverage and also with covering the vertical domain in, in terms of of putting measurement equipment on, on, on, on on aeroplanes.

And finally, satellites provide phenomenal global coverage both of greenhouse gases on and our basic weather variables.

They cannot do the job alone, but the way that you do currently, we do 10 by 10 kilometre weather modelling globally.

We do that on an everyday basis and you could think how on earth can we do that.

I mean, a lot of the Earth doesn't have any measurement equipment.

There's very little in the Southern Ocean.

There's very little in the **** latitude.

We do it by combining what we have on the ground with satellite data, and we would do the exact same thing with the greenhouse gas monitoring.

Do we have any more questions from anybody apart from AFP?

Doesn't look like it.

Well, thanks.

Thanks very much.

And for your time.

If you do have any questions, you, you, you have my phone number, you can, I'll be happy to help.

So thanks.

Thanks very much indeed for joining us.