People protest for reparations for stolen land at COP27 in Sharm El-Sheikh in Egypt
>>> From Collected News by Duane Nichols, FrackCheckWV.net, January 21, 2023
SUMMARY ~ Despite strong evidence that human activity played a role in catastrophic weather events, and the emergence of a fuel crisis sparked by the war in Ukraine, greenhouse gas emissions continued to rise. Nevertheless, the UN kept the climate emergency high on the international agenda, reaching major agreements on financing and biodiversity.
At the end of 2021, when the UN climate conference (COP26) wrapped up in Glasgow, none of those present could have suspected that a war in Ukraine would throw the global economy into turmoil, convincing many nations to suspend their commitments to a low carbon economy, as they scrambled to reduce their dependence on Russian oil and gas supplies, and secure fossil fuel supplies elsewhere.
Meanwhile, a host of studies pointed to the continued warming of the Earth, and the failure of humanity to lower carbon emissions, and get to grips with the existential threat of the climate emergency.
Nevertheless, the UN continued to lead on the slow, painstaking, but essential task of achieving international climate agreements, whilst putting sustained pressure on major economies to make greater efforts to cut their fossil fuel use, and support developing countries, whose citizens are bearing the brunt of the droughts, floods and extreme weather resulting from man-made climate change.
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Breakthrough agreements reached at UN climate conferences
The year 2022 was punctuated by three important climate-related UN summits – the Ocean Conference in June, the COP27 Climate Conference in November, and the much-delayed COP15 Biodiversity Conference in December – which demonstrated that the organization achieves far more than simply stating the dire climate situation, and calling for change.
At each event progress was made on advancing international commitments to protect the environment, and reducing the harm and destruction caused by human activity.
The Ocean Conference saw critical issues discussed, and new ideas generated. World leaders admitted to deep alarm at the global emergency facing the Ocean, and renewed their commitment to take urgent action, cooperate at all levels, and fully achieve targets as soon as possible.
More than 6,000 participants, including 24 Heads of State and Government, and over 2,000 representatives of civil society attended the Conference, advocating for urgent and concrete actions to tackle the ocean crisis.
They stressed that science-based and innovative actions, along with international cooperation, are essential to provide the necessary solutions.
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‘Loss and damage’ funding agreed, in win for developing countries
COP27, the UN Climate Conference, which was held in Egypt in November, seemed destined to end without any agreement, as talks dragged on way beyond the official end of the summit.
Nevertheless, negotiators somehow managed to not only agree on the wording of an outcome document, but also establish a funding mechanism to compensate vulnerable nations for the loss and damage caused by climate-induced disasters.
These nations have spent decades arguing for such a provision, so the inclusion was hailed as a major advance. Details on how the mechanism will work, and who will benefit, will now be worked out in the coming months.
However, little headway was made on other key issues, particularly on the phasing out of fossil fuels, and tightened language on the need to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
See this Extensive Article explaining the various aspects of climate change in which the United Nations is involved:
https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/12/1131972
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Alphabet of Climate Change Includes “U” for Uncertainty
From Elizabeth Kolbert, New Yorker Magazine, Nov. 28, 2022
During the past billion years, the Earth’s temperature has fluctuated wildly. Around seven hundred million years ago, in the period known as the Cryogenian, the entire planet was covered with ice. “Snowball Earth” thawed, only to be plunged into another global glaciation.
About ninety million years ago, during what’s known as the Cretaceous Thermal Maximum, breadfruit trees grew in northern Greenland and the tropical oceans were as toasty as a hot bath.
In our own period, the Quaternary, the swings have been spectacular; at least twenty times in the last two and a half million years, glaciers have pushed south from the Arctic and then retreated again. The ice ages themselves were marked by dramatic temperature oscillations. The last one, which ended about twelve thousand years ago, went out, in the words of one glaciologist, in a “drunken stagger.”
You can’t prepare for a future you can’t imagine. The trouble is, it’s hard to picture the future we are creating. As the climate swings of the past suggest, even subtle and gradual forces — tiny variations in the Earth’s orbit, for example — can have world-altering consequences. And what we’re doing now is neither subtle nor gradual. In little more than a century, humans have burned through coal and oil deposits that took tens of millions of years to create.
Climate change is characterized not just by uncertainty but by something risk analysts call “deep uncertainty.” There are known unknowns to worry about, and unknown unknowns.
WHAT WE DO KNOW, WHAT IS CERTAIN …. 1/23/23
Diverse species of living things are disappearing at an alarming rate.
Carbon dioxide and methane (and some other similar gases) are accumulating rapidly in the Earth’s atmosphere.
The temperature on the Earth’s surface is rising rather steeply compared to before the Industrial Revolution.
The glaciers and polar ice caps are melting rapidly.
Sea level is rising because of the melting ice and because the sea water is swelling as it gets hotter.
Weather patterns are showing greater variations and the intensity of the weather is known to be greater, all this causing hot zones and droughts as well as wind storms and flooding.
The IPCC Report of 2021 is a comprehensive study of all these issues and much more …..
>> Duane G. Nichols, PhD Chemical Engineer, Morgantown, WV