Analysis of UN climate summit: There was a time…when the climate world gathering at their meetings really believing they were going to save humanity’ with their ‘Soviet-style slogans’

Can’t anybody here play this game? – Climate Discussion Nexus

By John Robson

Excerpt: There was a time, and how recent it seems, especially to nostalgic COP junkies, when the climate world gathering at their meetings really believing they were going to save humanity from the dreaded carbon pollution. Why, as recently as COP21 in Paris in 2015 the assembled politicians set pseudo-targets for GHG emission reductions that would supposedly have held the global temperature rise from “pre-industrial” times to 1.5C. And yes, at Baku they still had 1.5C in the Soviet-style slogans on the walls (as in “Mobilizing funds and enabling action to keep 1.5°C Within Reach”) But 1.5C never was within reach. As we pointed out years ago, the same computer models that claimed man-made emissions were causing an RCP8.5-level heating catastrophe also said if everyone did meet their Paris targets it would change the temperature in 2100 by roughly 1/10^th of a degree, hardly worth getting excited over, let alone bankrupted. But one thing we learned at Baku was that if we got a nickel for every time we thought “told you so” we wouldn’t have to ask for donations ever again.

Of course they probably knew Paris would never work. They let nations decide for themselves what targets to set, how to try to meet them and how to grade their own work not in the already unreasonable sense of deciding if they’d succeeded but in deciding how they’d get punished if they failed. How anyone imagined that sort of thing would lead anywhere except back to the next conference is hard to understand although it is typical of a certain kind of worldview to think intentions are crucial and methods are for losers.

Alas, it proved to be untrue. So they gradually shifted, and last year in Abu Dhabi made the shift official, away from meeting emission targets to finding a huge pile of cash for the supposed victims of the disaster they’d spent years telling us they’d fix. And having realized they hadn’t fixed it not to worry they’d definitely pull off this new thing. Um no. One participant in a health panel at the Canadian pavilion insisted that cutting subsidies to fossil fuels would save the world $5 trillion a year in health costs, but when asked for a breakdown of where we’d save that kind of money if the world were, say, at the same temperature as in 1890 she said it was in this paper she read. And to quote the Duke of Wellington, and if he didn’t say it he should have, “If you believe that, you will believe anything.”