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US stands alone as Syria plans to join Paris climate accord

The only other holdout says it'll sign on to the worldwide effort to curb global warming.

Anne Dujmovic Former Senior Editor / News
Anne Dujmovic was a senior editor at CNET. Her areas of focus included the climate crisis, democracy and inclusive language. She believes in the power of great journalism and art, and the magic of tardigrades.
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Anne Dujmovic
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The UN is hosting the COP23 climate change conference this week in Bonn, Germany. At the conference, Syria said it would sign on to the Paris Accord.

The UN is hosting the COP23 climate change conference this week in Bonn, Germany. At the conference, Syria said it would sign on to the Paris climate accord.

 Oliver Berg/Getty Images

The US will soon become the only country that opposes the international landmark climate change accord known as the Paris Agreement.

At a UN conference on climate change, Syria said Tuesday that it will sign the agreement, according to news reports. Nicaragua, which was one of the last holdouts, in September announced it would join the accord. That leaves the US as the sole country to reject the agreement, a global effort to combat climate change. The US, which helped broker the deal in late 2015, was one of more than 170 countries to sign the accord in April 2016.

President Donald Trump said in June that the US would withdraw from the accord, saying it put the country at a disadvantage. It's "very unfair, at the highest level, to the United States," he said.

However, the agreement doesn't set binding limits on emissions, and each country sets its own targets and is free to change them.

The US government on Friday released a report, prepared by hundreds of scientists, on climate change and its primary cause: human activity.

It's "extremely likely that human activities, especially emissions of greenhouse gases, are the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century," the report concludes. "For the warming over the last century, there is no convincing alternative explanation supported by the extent of the observational evidence."

The White House didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. The UN, which is hosting the COP23 climate change conference in Bonn, Germany, this week, didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. 

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