The link between fossil fuels and global heating is bogus. Don’t believe it? Just ask the president of the CoP28 global climate conference.

So much for curing it with science. The president of CoP28, Sultan al-Jaber, has claimed that there is “no science” to indicate that a phase-out of fossil fuels is needed to scale back global heating to 1.5C, the Centre for Climate Reporting revealed over the weekend. As Thomas Dolby once sang, All my tubes and wires / And careful notes / And antiquated notions — all for naught.

Al-Jaber made the comments in response to questions from Mary Robinson, chair of The Elders, at an online event last month. The Elders, founded by Nelson Mandela in 2007, is a consortium of independent global leaders working together for peace, justice and human rights. Robinson, a former UN special envoy for climate change, is the curfrently serving chair of The Elders group.

Al-Jaber is the chief executive of the United Arab Emirates’ state oil company, Adnoc, in addition to his CoP28 hosting duties and responsibilities. To say that his day job may seem a conflict of interest is an understatement, and reaction to his comments — admittedly made two weeks ago — from environmentalists and climate scientists has been, forgive the analogy, fast and furious. Comments range from “incredibly concerning” to “verging on climate denial,” as reported in the Sunday Observer, the weekend edition of The Guardian. And so it goes.

The most discouraging development of CoP28 so far is that, far from being a global conference dedicated to finding common cause in the fight against climate change, it has hardened already entrenched views between those who insist that continued use of fossil fuels — indeed, expansion of fossil-fuel use — is critical to the global economy and those who point out that the economy won’t be of much use to anyone if global climate systems collapse.

The trouble with insisting there is “no science” to support the claim that phasing out fossil fuels will make any substantial difference is not just that it is wrong — actually, there’s plenty of science to suggest the opposite — but that it plays to the narrative that it’s too late, the damage has already been done. The tide is irreversible! Continue to party like it’s 1999 (Prince, not Thomas Dolby). Carry On Doctor.

The facts as they stand: While Earth’s climate has changed throughout its history, the current warming is happening at a rate not seen in the past 10,000 years.

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), “Since systematic scientific assessments began in the 1970s, the influence of human activity on the warming of the climate system has evolved from theory to established fact.”

The facts as they stand:

While Earth’s climate has changed throughout its history, the current warming is happening at a rate not seen in the past 10,000 years.

Scientific measurements taken from natural sources (such as ice cores, rocks, and tree rings) and from modern equipment (like satellites and instruments) all show the signs of a changing climate.

From global temperature rise to melting ice sheets, the evidence of a warming planet abounds.

These points are taken directly from NASA’s climate project, as reported on NASA.gov. There’s more where that came from.

The United Nations for one. Generating electricity and heat by burning fossil fuels causes a large percentage of carbon emissions worldwide. Most electricity is still generated by burning coal, oil, or gas, which produces carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide – powerful greenhouse gases that blanket the Earth and trap the sun’s heat. Globally, more than a quarter of electricity comes from wind, solar and other renewable sources which, as opposed to fossil fuels, emit little to no greenhouse gases or pollutants into the air (https://www.un.org/en/climatechange/science/causes-effects-climate-change).

Manufacturing and industry produce emissions, mostly from burning fossil fuels to produce energy for making things like cement, iron, steel, electronics, plastics, clothes, and other goods. Mining and other industrial processes also release gases, as does the construction industry. Machines used in the manufacturing process often run on coal, oil, or gas; and some materials, like plastics, are made from chemicals sourced from fossil fuels. The manufacturing industry is one of the largest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions worldwide.

And so on.

As one conference delegate told the Observer over the weekend: “CoP28 must deliver a decision on phasing out fossil fuels in a just and equitable manner, without any loopholes or escape routes for the industry to continue expanding and exacerbating the climate crisis.”

Good luck with that.

World leaders at the CoP28 climate summit in Dubai have agreed in principle to a global fund to help struggling countries deal with the effects of climate change. But what does that mean in real terms?

In Start the Revolution Without Me, Bud Yorkin’s 1970 parody of Alexander Dumas’ historical classic The Corsican Brothers, Gene Wilder and Donald Sutherland play identical twins who are accidentally switched at birth on the eve of the French Revolution.

One set of twins is born to a family of peasants, the other to aristocrats.

They grow up in different worlds, one hard-scrabble and beset by poverty, the other a world of sophistication and plenty.

Sutherland grows up to become the haughty, sophisticated Pierre DeSisi and the somewhat more intellectually challenged Charles Coupé; Wilder grows up to become the haughty, aristocratic Phillipe DeSisi and the excitable, rough-around-the-edges Claude Coupé.

When the revolution comes to a head — sorry — both sets of twins find themselves mistaken again, but this time as adults. A running gag involves the dastardly Versailles villain Count du Monet, who Claude calls “Count de Money!” as an exasperated Pierre tries to correct his pronunciation with the more cultured — and accurate — “Du Moan-ay, Du Moan-ay.”

One of the criticisms of the annual United Nations CoP climate talks over the years is that they’ve been full of financial promises from Western nations to the developing countries, that part of the world most affected by climate breakdown caused by carbon emissions from the excessive burning of fossil fuels, without actually producing the money.

That looked to change earlier this week at CoP28 when world leaders at the UN climate summit in Dubai approved a disaster fund to help low-lying tropical island states and coastal regions vulnerable to flooding from rapidly rising sea levels.

Conference president Sultan Ahmed al-Jaber, whose day job is the UAE’s Minister of Industry and Advanced Technology — he heads the UAE’s national oil company and has control of his country’s vast oil reserves — says world leaders need to “proactively engage” fossil fuel companies as a keystone part of any solution to climate challenges.

This matters because, like it or not, oil companies are where the money is. Al-Jaber described the agreement as a “positive signal of momentum” in his address at Thursday’s opening ceremony, but not everyone is convinced.

The UN climate chief, Simon Stiell, took a more cautious position, noting that there must be a terminal decline to the fossil fuel era if the world is to stop “our own terminal decline.”

In a speech earlier this year at the United Nations Security Council’s first-ever meeting on the threat to international peace and security from rising sea levels, UN Secretary-General António Guterres declared that sea levels will rise significantly even if global warming is “miraculously” limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), the elusive international goal. Guterres warned the Earth is more likely on a path to warming that amounts to “a death sentence” for countries vulnerable to that rise, including many small island nations.

Guterres added that the threat is not just limited to low-lying island states in the tropics: some of the world’s largest cities are also likely to be affected. “mega-cities on every continent … including Cairo, Lagos, Maputo, Bangkok, Dhaka, Jakarta, Mumbai, Shanghai, Copenhagen, London, Los Angeles, New York, Buenos Aires and Santiago.”

More than 70,000 delegates are attending the CoP28 climate talks, among them world leaders of France, Japan, the UK and Brazil, as well as activists, lobbyists and prominent public figures such as Bill Gates and King Charles III.

The leaders of the world’s largest emitters of carbon emissions, the US and China, have elected not to attend, however.

So far, nations at CoP28 have formally approved the implementation of a “loss and damage” fund to compensate “climate-vulnerable” countries — this, after months of hard-fought negotiations over how the fund will work. The UAE sees itself as a bridge between the rich developed nations most responsible for historic emissions and the rest of the world, which has contributed less to global warming but suffers its worst consequences.

While talk of a climate fund is encouraging, island states most likely to be affected in the short term — Tuvalu and Vanuatu, to name just two — risk being completely submerged by rising sea levels water by the end of the century. Tuvalu and Vanuatu, together with the Maldives, Kiribati, the Bahamas, Antigua, Palau, Barbuda and St. Lucia, tona me just a few, can be forgiven for asking, Where de money?

Journal

“Man is modifying the world so fast and so drastically that most animals cannot adapt to the new conditions. In the Himalaya as elsewhere there is a great dying, one infinitely sadder than the Pleistocene extinctions, for man now has the knowledge and the need to save the remnants of his past.”

— Peter Matthiessen