Playing The Ridiculous ‘Death By Climate Disaster’ Game
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 1/10th 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.”
As we observed in one of our quick-reaction videos posted from Baku, where in true galactic metropolis style the WiFi works better than the taps, it is a sound principle of diplomacy articulated by the master of the meaningful summit Richard Milhous Nixon that you do not gather before the cameras with your fellow wizards to solve a major problem in a short period of time unless you have, in fact, already solved it behind the scenes by months of hard, determined, practical work.
The summit was in that sense theatre: the pretense that it was face-to-face meetings and the sudden flowering of empathy and understanding that brought results sounds good, but it’s hooey.
Nixon’s deal with Brezhnev on nuclear missiles and related matters was in the bag before he got on the plane and if it had not been he would not have gotten on the plane.
It was also the result of hard-headed calculation. So the methods couldn’t have been more different than with regard to COP, which is why the outcome couldn’t either.
Delegates, observers and gadflies in Baku tried to remain enthusiastic, or seem so. But at the conference we spoke with Marc Morano of Climate Depot, who’s been to every COP since and including Paris, though not as a true believer, to put it mildly.
And he commented that on walking into the hall on his first day at the conference, the first thing that struck him was the very low level of energy. Not that the hosts were in a mood for a rowdy conference anyway, and one thing the New Azerbaijan Party does know is how to prevent rowdiness.
It helps explain why Alieyev pere and fils have been in power more or less continuously since 1969. But the delegates weren’t feeling feisty anyway because the impracticality of their plans or plan-like objects had been dragging down their lofty proclamations for years and in 2024 they bit the mud.
There were many interesting aspects of the conference and its participants anyway and we’re glad we went.
But it was a damp squib and no wonder.
See more here climatediscussionnexus.com
Header image: Carbon Brief
Please Donate Below To Support Our Ongoing Work To Defend The Scientific Method
PRINCIPIA SCIENTIFIC INTERNATIONAL, legally registered in the UK as a company 
incorporated for charitable purposes. Head Office: 27 Old Gloucester Street, London WC1N 3AX.
Trackback from your site.