Climate Talks Stall

December 12, 2023

An ancient sea monster’s massive skull has been found in seaside cliffs in Britain, stunning palaeontologists — an appropriate metaphor as any for the impasse at the CoP28 climate talks.

A stunning 6-foot-long skull of a 150 million-year-old carnivorous marine reptile has been chiselled out from a cliff along southern England’s Jurassic Coast in what scientists are calling a one-of-a-kind find. The pliosaur skull was discovered after pieces of it started to fall from an English cliff onto a beach. The skull, unique because it’s complete, unusual fossils of its kind, was extracted from the cliff in Dorset this past weekend using ropes and a makeshift stretcher.

This is a timely — and appropriate! — metaphor for the UN climate talks in Dubai, which were supposed to end today in a ceremony of back-slapping and mutual celebration but which are instead mired in hostility and acrimony. This is what the UN gets for staging a conversation about phasing out fossil fuels — a primary driver of global heating — in an oil sheikdom on the Arabian peninsular, where Big Oil is not just a way of doing business: It’s practically a religion.

And so it goes.

First the facts, as of 11:34 GMT.

More countries have expressed anger over the leaked draft text of the CoP28 final agreement. It says nothing, promises nothing, and delivers nothing. It is, however, very long, which has slowed down the process of reading between the lines to find something — anything — worth talking about. So far, the paralysis of analysis has drifted beyond 48 hours.

• The UK’s climate minister — an oxymoron if ever there was one — has left the climate conference, not so much in a ceremonial parade of celebration as sneaking out in the middle of the night, metaphorically speaking, hoping that no one would notice. They have. “(Climate minister) Graham Stuart flying home in the middle of critical negotiations tells you everything you need to know about this Conservative government,” Ed Miliband, Gordon Brown’s climate change minister at Copenhagen in 2009 and a regular at climate summits ever since, told reporters. “They are weak, divided and chaotic … They can’t stand up and fight for lower energy bills for the British people, can’t stand up and fight for investment into our country, and they can’t stand up and fight to provide climate leadership.” Other than that, though, they’re great.

Climate campaigners warned that details of the historic loss-and-damage agreement from the first day of the summit are still lacking — nearly two weeks later. Oh, well, what’s the hurry? It’s not as if the climate crisis is, well, a crisis.

Indigenous groups and climate activists from the global south have once again called out the hypocrisy of “rich nations” over their demand that fossil fuels be phased out globally — while increasing production at home.

Where’s Kurt Vonnegut when you need him?

The talks continue — if, strictly speaking, they can no longer be called talks anymore .

”There’s No Science...”

December 04, 2023

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.

Where de Money?

December 01, 2023

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?

Crisis, What Crisis

November 29, 2023

Where to hold a global conference about the climate crisis? Why, Dubai of course

A petrostate hosting a climate conference: Brilliant!

It sounds like a Monty Python sketch, as dreamed up by Terry Gilliam, newly wakened from a fever dream, and hosted by Spiny Norman, the giant hedgehog.

Almost everything about CoP28, underway in Dubai through Dec.12th, is enough to fry the brain, from the name — “CoP” stands for “Convention of the Parties,” a headline grabber if ever there were one — to the inconvenient truth that the conference’s president, Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, also happens to be the CEO of the United Arab Emirates’ state oil firm.

Don’t look so doubtful! It’s a coincidence, and coincidence only. What’s the matter with you?

As extinction events go, debating the End of Days in the glass towers of Dubai, a gleaming metropolis on the Persian Gulf where, rightly speaking, there shouldn’t even be a town, let alone one of the shinest cities on the planet, deserves top marks for style, if not substance.

It’s hard to go out on a limb and argue the benefits of keeping carbon emissions within a limit that will hold temperature to within the 1.5°C increase agreed to at the 2015 Paris Agreement if that limb is no longer attached to a living, breathing tree.

Most scientists worth their 250 grams of salt now say we’ll be lucky if we can keep world temperatures within 3.0°C of the ideal. In the same way those same scientists admit their original climate projections, criticized at the time for being overly pessimistic and alarmist, were too conservative.

Never mind Al Gore. Global heating is happening at a faster rate than even the most dire predictions in 2015. That’s especially evident in the polar regions, where ice melt is accelerating at a pace not seen since the last mass extinction. The day may yet come when even 3° seems mild. The question is no longer if, but when.

Against this backdrop, an opinion piece by climate campaigner Vanessa Nakate for Al-Jazeera, posted this past summer, hit any number of sore points, all the more so as Nakate, from Uganda, has become the public face for the climate campaign across the developing world, in the same way Greta Thunberg, a close friend, has raised consciousness across the northern hemisphere.

“There is a big difference between national leaders and global leaders,” Nakate wrote. “The former push national interests on the global stage, often using the rhetoric of global solutions. The latter carry a vision that extends beyond personal interests, election cycles or profit margins to do the best for humanity.”

The world will have to heat a lot more before Thunberg’s native Sweden is affected to the point where it becomes unlivable; Uganda, on the equator, is already on the way there.

Global ice melt may be easiest to spot in the polar regions, but it’s across the equatorial tropics that climate change’s effects will be felt first.

With that as a backdrop, it’s hard not to be skeptical of the idea that the head of a global oil company will drive CoP28 towerd an outcome that will give the world hope in the looming shadow of a mass extinction.

Nakate: “The United Nations has made it clear that the world needs to cut its emissions by 45 percent by 2030 to have a chance at staying under the 1.5C warming threshold. Currently, carbon capture and storage technology is highly expensive and simply does not exist at the necessary scale to make even a scratch on that target. We do not have time for fairytale solutions designed to save the oil and gas industry.

“UN Secretary-General António Guterres has called investing in new fossil fuel projects ‘moral and economic madness.’ The International Energy Agency says we cannot afford to put in any new finance for coal, oil or gas if we are to meet net-zero targets; instead, we need a massive deployment of renewable energy. The science is clear and the goal is clear, but we are still missing the global leadership to take us there.

“We can no longer prevent the climate crisis, but every fraction of a degree of further warming will make heatwaves more intense, droughts more pro- longed and storms more powerful.

“Every year that passes without a rapid transformation of our economies away from fossil fuels means more will be lost to the climate crisis.”

The truth is no longer just inconvenient. It’s beginning to hurt.