After the starkest warnings yet of the catastrophic threat posed by climate change, nations gathered in Poland on Sunday to chart a way for mankind to avert runaway global warming.
The COP24 climate summit comes at a crucial juncture in the battle to rein in the effects of our heating planet.
The smaller, poorer nations that will bear the devastating brunt of climate change are pushing for richer states to make good on the promises they made in the 2015 Paris agreement.
Three years ago countries committed to limit global temperature rises to well below two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), and to the safer cap of 1.5C if at all possible.
But with only a single degree Celsius of warming so far, the world has already seen a crescendo of deadly wildfires, heatwaves and hurricanes made more destructive by rising seas.
Mankind faces extinction
UN General Assembly president Maria Espinosa told AFP that mankind was “in danger of disappearing” if climate change was allowed to progress at its current rate.
“We need to act urgently, and with audacity. Be ambitious, but also responsible for the future generations,” she added.
In a rare intervention, presidents of previous UN climate summits issued a joint statement as the talks got underway, calling on states to take “decisive action… to tackle these urgent threats.”
“The impacts of climate change are increasingly hard to ignore,” said the statement, a copy of which was obtained by AFP. “We require deep transformations of our economies and societies.”
At the COP24 climate talks, nations must agree to a rulebook palatable to all 183 states that have ratified the Paris deal.
The road to a final rulebook is far from smooth: the dust is still settling from US President Donald Trump’s decision to ditch the Paris accord.
G20 leaders on Saturday wrapped up their summit by declaring the Paris Agreement “irreversible.”
But it said the United States “reiterates its decision to withdraw” from the landmark accord.
The UN negotiations got off to a chaotic start in the Polish mining city of Katowice Sunday, with the opening session delayed nearly three hours by a series of last-ditch submissions.
A string of major climate reports has cast doubt over the entire process, suggesting the Paris goals fall well short of what is needed.
Contributions must triple
Just last week, the UN’s environment programme said the voluntary national contributions agreed in Paris would have to triple if the world was to cap global warming below 2C.
For 1.5C, they must increase fivefold.
While the data are clear, a global political consensus over how to tackle climate change remains elusive.
“Katowice may show us if there will be any domino effect” following the US withdrawal, said Laurence Tubiana, CEO of the European Climate Foundation and a main architect of the Paris deal.
Brazil’s strongman president-elect Jair Bolsonaro, for one, has promised to follow the American lead during his campaign.
Many countries are already dealing with the droughts, higher seas and catastrophic storms climate change is exacerbating.
“A failure to act now risks pushing us beyond a point of no return with catastrophic consequences for life as we know it,” said Amjad Abdulla, chief negotiator for the Alliance of Small Island States, of the UN talks.
A key issue up for debate is how the fight against climate change is funded, with developed and developing nations still world’s apart in their demands.
Poorer nations argue that rich countries, which are responsible for the vast majority of historic carbon emissions, must help others to fund climate action
Poorer nations argue that rich countries, which are responsible for the vast majority of historic carbon emissions, must help others to fund climate action.
“Developed nations led by the US will want to ignore their historic responsibilities and will say the world has changed,” said Meena Ramam, from the Third World Network advocacy group.
“The question really is: how do you ensure that ambitious actions are done in an equitable way?”
Michal Kurtyka, Poland’s deputy environment minister, who is chairing the conference, urged envoys to use the time between Sunday and December 14 to make progress on fleshing out the Paris agreement.
“We are here to enable the world to act together on climate change,” he said. With further meetings next year meant to build on what’s decided in Katowice, Kurtyka urged all countries to “show creativity and flexibility.”
He added, “The United Nations secretary-general is counting on us, all of us to deliver. There is no Plan B.”
– With reporting from Agence France-Presse and Associated Press
Great work!
Great work!
It never ceases to amaze me how arrogant uninformed people especially in the media portray man as capable of controlling the climate.
The whole discussion regarding climate change is a muddled exchange of people talking past each other making the discussion fruitless.
And the victim is rational discussion of human influenced pollution.
There are so many important points to view it is hard to know where to begin
Firstly, people confuse global warming with climate change frequently in this discussion and corrupt the arguments as a result.
Secondly, people assume man can control climate change which is an insane and completely unprovable perspective, but a perspective they assume is true as a beginning point in their discussion.
There is such a thing as climate change. That is undeniable. Just look at what lies below Antarctica and therein is proof that a whole continent that was once thriving is now immobilized under eons of ice cover. We don’t know exactly how this came to be and we’ll most likely never know for sure.
We do know this, weather patterns of my youth were different from weather patterns of today.
But what affects climate change? The truth is so many elements do that it is impossible take them all into account, even worse identifying the impact of their interactions is impossible except in limited examples and measuring all this is a quixotic adventure except in the gross level on a limited elemental basis.
Furthermore, scientists are assumed to be logical in their conclusions and precise in their analyses, both of which are far from reliable conclusions.
Hasty generalization is a common flaw of logic in scientific research. While it is obvious that because elephants are gray and the sky is gray, that elephants are not the sky just because they have common properties, but this is one of the flaws in research.
The power of nature is enormous compared to the power of man made events. Yet, in our arrogance, we think and therefore claim we can control the climate or even influence it substantively.
The earth’s rotation has influence on climate. The tilt of the earth has influence on climate. The Jet Stream has influence on climate. The Gulf Stream has influence on the climate. The temperatures of various bodies of water affect climate/ Earthquakes influence the climate because they influence the earth’s crust and produce heat. Remember the earth’s crust move even to the extent that Africa is thought to have broken away from South America. Climate may be influenced one way in one part of the earth and another way in another part of the earth. The earth is a system of elements in balance. So changes in one section can change the balance and therefore influence other sections. Volcanoes can influence climate. Forest fires can influence climate. These are not systemic and therefore difficult to predict. The gravitational pull of the moon influences climate. Earth’s geologic evolutions influence climate such as creeping desert perimeters, changing rivers such as those that created the Grand Canyon and disappearing forests. The changes in specific gravity of the earth’s crust by emptying it of oil influences the climate.
Changes can be big or small and immediate or long term and as Einsteins Perturbation Theory emphasizes even small changes can produce substantial changes.
It’s been proven that our experience in measuring climate changes such as the earth’s temperature is flawed through inferior measuring techniques and therefore the data used to support conclusions is unreliable.
Instead of trying to play God, scientists would do well to address man influenced pollution.
For example, lumber companies and paper companies make money with lumber and other wood products. Forests need to be thinned out to lower the likelihood of a forest fire or the intensity of a forest fire. We should work out a deal where they are allowed to thin the forests responsibly in exchange for keeping the wood they extract.
It is well known that there are enormous, continent sized piles of plastic in the ocean that should be cleared up. They’ve been around far too long to believe environmentalists are serious about the environment.
California has a huge coastline with the Pacific Ocean, and yet, they cut off water to their farmers to protect snail darters. They take water needed by land locked states from the Colorado River when they should have a chain of desalination plants all along their coast to give them independence in their dry years and allow the land locked states to have a safer share of the dwindling Colorado River supply.
These are just some thoughts that it seems to me do not get thoughtful consideration as presented in the media. Yet dark conclusions are set forth like they are QED.
Shallow news is similar to fake news.
It never ceases to amaze me how arrogant uninformed people especially in the media portray man as capable of controlling the climate.
The whole discussion regarding climate change is a muddled exchange of people talking past each other making the discussion fruitless.
And the victim is rational discussion of human influenced pollution.
There are so many important points to view it is hard to know where to begin
Firstly, people confuse global warming with climate change frequently in this discussion and corrupt the arguments as a result.
Secondly, people assume man can control climate change which is an insane and completely unprovable perspective, but a perspective they assume is true as a beginning point in their discussion.
There is such a thing as climate change. That is undeniable. Just look at what lies below Antarctica and therein is proof that a whole continent that was once thriving is now immobilized under eons of ice cover. We don’t know exactly how this came to be and we’ll most likely never know for sure.
We do know this, weather patterns of my youth were different from weather patterns of today.
But what affects climate change? The truth is so many elements do that it is impossible take them all into account, even worse identifying the impact of their interactions is impossible except in limited examples and measuring all this is a quixotic adventure except in the gross level on a limited elemental basis.
Furthermore, scientists are assumed to be logical in their conclusions and precise in their analyses, both of which are far from reliable conclusions.
Hasty generalization is a common flaw of logic in scientific research. While it is obvious that because elephants are gray and the sky is gray, that elephants are not the sky just because they have common properties, but this is one of the flaws in research.
The power of nature is enormous compared to the power of man made events. Yet, in our arrogance, we think and therefore claim we can control the climate or even influence it substantively.
The earth’s rotation has influence on climate. The tilt of the earth has influence on climate. The Jet Stream has influence on climate. The Gulf Stream has influence on the climate. The temperatures of various bodies of water affect climate/ Earthquakes influence the climate because they influence the earth’s crust and produce heat. Remember the earth’s crust move even to the extent that Africa is thought to have broken away from South America. Climate may be influenced one way in one part of the earth and another way in another part of the earth. The earth is a system of elements in balance. So changes in one section can change the balance and therefore influence other sections. Volcanoes can influence climate. Forest fires can influence climate. These are not systemic and therefore difficult to predict. The gravitational pull of the moon influences climate. Earth’s geologic evolutions influence climate such as creeping desert perimeters, changing rivers such as those that created the Grand Canyon and disappearing forests. The changes in specific gravity of the earth’s crust by emptying it of oil influences the climate.
Changes can be big or small and immediate or long term and as Einsteins Perturbation Theory emphasizes even small changes can produce substantial changes.
It’s been proven that our experience in measuring climate changes such as the earth’s temperature is flawed through inferior measuring techniques and therefore the data used to support conclusions is unreliable.
Instead of trying to play God, scientists would do well to address man influenced pollution.
For example, lumber companies and paper companies make money with lumber and other wood products. Forests need to be thinned out to lower the likelihood of a forest fire or the intensity of a forest fire. We should work out a deal where they are allowed to thin the forests responsibly in exchange for keeping the wood they extract.
It is well known that there are enormous, continent sized piles of plastic in the ocean that should be cleared up. They’ve been around far too long to believe environmentalists are serious about the environment.
California has a huge coastline with the Pacific Ocean, and yet, they cut off water to their farmers to protect snail darters. They take water needed by land locked states from the Colorado River when they should have a chain of desalination plants all along their coast to give them independence in their dry years and allow the land locked states to have a safer share of the dwindling Colorado River supply.
These are just some thoughts that it seems to me do not get thoughtful consideration as presented in the media. Yet dark conclusions are set forth like they are QED.
Shallow news is similar to fake news.