COP28 boss’ appeal to raise climate targets met with global indifference
Sultan Al Jaber urged governments to update their national climate targets by September. Not one heeded the call
In July, when Cop28 chief Sultan Al Jaber laid out his battle plan for the upcoming climate summit in Dubai, he issued a plea to all governments: raise your climate targets by September.
His appeal has gone totally unanswered. Two and a half months later no country has updated its nationally determined contribution (NDC), the Paris Agreement-mandated blueprint to reduce emissions and adapt to climate impacts.
The deafening silence comes as the UN restates the urgency of stepping up action. More ambitious targets are needed as current NDCs are not collectively sufficient to limit warming to 1.5C, the Global Stocktake report said last month.
Tom Evans, a policy advisor at E3G, says it was always “quite unlikely” countries would submit updated NDCs before Cop28. “I don’t think there are tonnes of appetite among governments to revise their targets so often,” he told Climate Home News. “It’s challenging politically because these aren’t light decisions, and it’s challenging technically as it takes time with lots of modelling to do them properly.”
Ambition gap
Current NDCs are short of what is needed. If countries meet their 2030 emission targets in full, global heating could only be limited to 2.4-2.6C this century, according to the UN Emissions Gap report. Emissions need to decline by 45% from 2010 levels by 2030 to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said in its latest report.
NDCs are an integral part of the “ratchet mechanism” built into the agreement: each climate plan should be stronger and more ambitious than the one that is replacing. In 2015 governments agreed to update the documents every five years, but since then many have called for more frequent reviews.
Like with Al Jaber’s plea, they have mostly gone unheeded. At Cop26 in Glasgow, governments agreed to “revisit and strengthen” their 2030 emission targets so that they are aligned with the goals of the Paris Agreement by the end of 2022.
Only a handful of countries submitted new NDCs within that timeframe and, crucially, none of them produced one that is compatible with keeping global warming below 1.5°C, according to Climate Action Tracker.
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Greenie Pope has his head in the clouds
Pope Francis has taken aim at the US, “irresponsible” Western lifestyles and fossil fuels in a new highly political document on climate change.
Laudato Deum (Praise God), released in Rome on Wednesday, said “emissions per individual in the United States are about two times greater than those of individuals living in China, and about seven times greater than the average of the poorest countries”.
The document also took aim at climate-change sceptics who disagreed with him, inside and outside the church, for their “dismissive and scarcely reasonable opinions’’.
It said a broad change “in the irresponsible lifestyle connected with the Western model would have a significant long-term impact. As a result, along with indispensable political decisions, we would be making progress along the way to genuine care for one another”.
The release of the apostolic exhortation, a high level of papal teaching, just below an encyclical, coincided with the first day of the Synod on Synodality, for which 400 church leaders and staff have converged on Rome.
In one of the most controversial proposals in the document, Francis called for “more effective world organisations, equipped with the power to provide for the global common good, the elimination of hunger and poverty and the sure defence of fundamental human rights”.
Such organisations, he said, “must be endowed with real authority, in such a way as to ‘provide for’ the attainment of certain essential goals. In this way, there could come about a multilateralism that is not dependent on changing political conditions or the interests of a certain few, and possesses a stable efficacy”.
Despite its cost and practical challenges, the Pope championed wind and solar power. “The transition towards clean energy sources such as wind and solar energy, and the abandonment of fossil fuels, is not progressing at the necessary speed,’’ he said.
“Consequently, whatever is being done risks being seen only as a ploy to distract attention.”
The Pope praised the work of “activists from very different countries’’ who help and support one another and who can “end up pressuring the sources of power. It is to be hoped that this will happen with respect to the climate crisis”.
He also rejected the view that efforts to mitigate climate change by reducing the use of fossil fuels will lead to a reduction in the number of jobs.
“Millions of people are losing their jobs due to different effects of climate change: rising sea levels, droughts and other phenomena affecting the planet have left many people adrift,’’ he claimed. The transition to renewable energy was capable of “generating countless jobs in different sectors. This demands that politicians and business leaders should even now be concerning themselves with it”.
Laudato Deum comes eight years after the Pope’s green encyclical, Laudato Si.
“With the passage of time, I have realised that our responses have not been adequate, while the world in which we live is collapsing and may be nearing the breaking point,’’ he wrote. “No one can ignore the fact that in recent years we have witnessed extreme weather phenomena, frequent periods of unusual heat, drought and other cries of protest on the part of the earth that are only a few palpable expressions of a silent disease that affects everyone.”
In one paragraph likely to provoke controversy, Francis argued against those “who would place responsibility on the poor, since they have many children, and even attempt to resolve the problem by mutilating women in less developed countries. As usual, it would seem that everything is the fault of the poor. Yet the reality is that a low, richer percentage of the planet contaminates more than the poorest 50 per cent of the total world population, and that per capita emissions of the richer countries are much greater than those of the poorer ones. How can we forget that Africa, home to more than half of the world’s poorest people, is responsible for a minimal portion of historic emissions?”
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Inundated Islands? The Science Says "No"
On September 11, in a hearing before the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, a group of island nations argued that greenhouse gas emissions emitted by developing nations should be considered pollution. According to Kausea Natano, the prime minister of Tuvalu, “Sea levels are rising rapidly, threatening to sink our lands below the ocean.”
Is this the case? Are nations like the Bahamas, Tuvalu, Vanuatu, Antigua and the Maldives likely to be underwater in the next several decades?
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (AR5), the 20th century average of Global Mean Sea Level Rise was about 0.07 inches (1.7 mm) per year, or 7 inches per century. That means that by 2050 we should expect to see a rise in global sea level of slightly less than 2 inches.
Many of the islands that we are told are threatened to be underwater by 2050 are only tens of feet above sea level today. Bear in mind that 15,000 years ago, those very same islands were also just barely above sea level.
Over the last 15,000 years, sea level has risen nearly 400 feet, yet the islands still remain above the waves. This is because the islands grow as sea level rises. It is a geologic process known as "accretion." Gravels and sediment are transferred from the shore face to the island surface during storm events, gradually raising the island's surface.
We are being told that 400 feet of sea-level rise did not inundate these islands, but the next two inches will!
This is misleading and, thankfully, these islands are not in danger any time soon.
https://myemail.constantcontact.com/Islands-in-Danger--Nope--Not-Really.html?soid=1101509381788&aid=9XgIlZ2X2wY
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Suppressing Good News Is Scaring Our Kids Witless
It’s easy to believe life on Earth is getting ever worse. The media constantly highlight one catastrophe after another and make terrifying predictions.
With the never-ending torrent of doom and gloom about ‘climate change’ and the environment, it’s understandable why many people — especially the young — genuinely believe the world is about to end.
But the fact is that though problems remain the world is getting better. We just rarely hear about it.
We are incessantly told about disasters, whether it is the latest heat wave, flood, wildfire or storm. Yet the data overwhelmingly show that over the past century people have become much, much safer from all these weather events.
In the 1920s, around half a million people were killed by weather disasters, whereas in the last decade the death toll averaged around 18,000. This year, like both 2020 and 2021, is tracking below that. Why? Because when people get richer, they get more resilient.
Weather-fixated television news would make us think disasters are all getting worse. They’re not. Around 1900, about 4.5 per cent of the land area of the world burned every year. Over the last century, this declined to about 3.2 percent In the last two decades, satellites show even further decline: in 2021 just 2.5 percent burned.
This has happened mostly because richer societies prevent fires. Models show that by the end of the century, despite climate change, human adaptation will mean even less burning.
And despite what you may have heard about record-breaking costs from weather disasters — mainly because wealthier populations build more expensive houses along coastlines — damage costs are actually declining, not increasing, as a per cent of GDP.
But it’s not only weather disasters that are getting less damaging despite dire predictions. A decade ago, environmentalists loudly declared that Australia’s magnificent Great Barrier Reef was nearly dead, killed by bleaching caused by ‘climate change’.
The Guardian newspaper even published an obituary. This year, scientists revealed that two-thirds of the Great Barrier Reef shows the highest coral cover seen since records began in 1985. The good-news report got a fraction of the attention the bad news did.
Not long ago, environmentalists constantly used pictures of polar bears to highlight the dangers of climate change. Polar bears even featured in Al Gore’s terrifying movie An Inconvenient Truth.
But the reality is that polar bear numbers have been increasing — from somewhere between five and 10,000 polar bears in the 1960s up to around 26,000 today. We don’t hear this news, however. Instead, campaigners just quietly stopped using polar bears in their activism.
There are so many bad-news stories that we seldom stop to consider that on the most important indicators, life is getting much better. Human life expectancy has doubled over the past century, from 36 years in 1920 to more than 72 years today.
A hundred years ago, three-quarters of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty. Today, less than one-tenth does. The deadliest environmental problem, air pollution, was four times more likely to kill you in 1920 than it is today, mostly because a century ago people in poverty cooked and heated with dung and wood.
Despite COVID-related setbacks, humanity has become better and better off. Yet doom-mongers will keep telling you the end is nigh. This is great for their fundraising but the costs to society are sky-high: we make poor, expensive policy choices and our kids are scared witless.
We also end up ignoring much bigger problems. Consider all the attention devoted to heat waves. In the United States and many other parts of the world heat deaths are actually declining, because access to air conditioning helps much more than rising temperatures hurt.
Almost everywhere, however, cold quietly kills many more people than heat does. In the U.S., about 20,000 people die from heat every year, but 170,000 die from cold — something we rarely focus on.
Moreover, cold deaths are rising in the U.S. and our incessant focus on climate change is exacerbating this trend because politicians have introduced green laws that make energy more expensive, meaning fewer people can afford to keep warm.
Lacking perspective means we don’t focus first on where we can help most.
On a broader scale, global warming prompts celebrities and politicians to fly around the world in private jets lecturing the rest of us, while we spend less on problems like hunger, infectious diseases and a lack of basic schooling.
When did politicians and movie stars ever meet for an important cause like de-worming children?
We need balance in our news, but that doesn’t mean ignoring global warming: it is a real problem humanity has caused. We just need perspective.
To know what to expect from a warming planet, we can look at the damage estimates from the economic models used by the Biden and Obama administrations, which reveal that the entire, global cost of ‘climate change’ — not just to economies, but in every sense — will be equivalent to less than a four per cent hit to global GDP by the end of the century.
Humanity is getting more prosperous every day. The United Nations estimates that without global warming the average person in 2100 would be 450 per cent better off than today. Global warming means people will only be 434 per cent richer instead.
That is not a disaster.
https://principia-scientific.com/suppressing-good-news-is-scaring-our-kids-witless/
***************************************My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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