Climate Week/NYC – Oh Well!

By Robert Hunziker

Climate Week/NYC September 22-29, 2024, is underway and expects 100,000 attendees for cocktails, hors d’oeuvres, and expensive rooms in NYC’s ultra-expensive hotels amidst breast-pounding speeches and promises to fix civilizations’ biggest threat to continued existence. For over 30 years, climate change conference commitments to do something constructive have been embarrassing flops. What will Climate Week/NYC come up with to fix a broken climate system that’s been decades in the making?

People attuned to the changing climate know only too well that the planet is starting to come apart at the seams where it counts most, away from urban settings like NYC and countryside towns in America. It happens at the fringe of civilization where nobody lives, and the change is chilling. It’s where climate change struts its stuff before clobbering civilization at an unpredictable future date. This strutting where nobody lives in the hinterland inadvertently seduces society into a false sense of climate change security, not to worry nothing going on in my backyard. But the evidence of a very rambunctious worldwide climate system that’s already starting to go haywire is everywhere to be found away from NYC. And it spells danger ahead.

For example, new research on global warming’s impact on West Antarctica concludes risk of 13 feet of sea level rise by 2100. This is substantially higher than any estimates heretofore by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and it puts several of the world’s coastal megacities underwater way ahead of 2100. And scientists like Katey Walter Anthony (link to a Yale Climate Connections video with balanced view of permafrost methane risks) research professor at University of Alaska, Fairbanks conducting field work in Siberia and Alaska permafrost, uncovered thousands upon thousands of thermokarst lakes bubbling methane, CH4, into the atmosphere in the wilderness where nobody lives. Permafrost covers a quarter of the northern hemisphere land surface and contains twice the amount of carbon than is currently present in the atmosphere. These are climate changes that nobody sees but warn of danger ahead, and they are happening in real time today.

As a prelude to the momentous Climate Week/NYC occasion, billed as a major climate change event, big players in the arena like John Kerry and Al Gore came out swinging ahead of time. They are uniformly disgusted with results of prior climate change conferences. Nobody is doing what they promise to do and oil producers are all-in for massively increasing production, forget commitments to cut back by 2030. Nobody cares. It’s basically, blah, blah, blah, ignore climate change but charge ahead with rapid fossil fuel growth plans and let greenhouse gases like CO2 do whatever they do to the climate system, who cares?

Here’s a sampling of name-recognition statements before the doors opened for Climate Week/NYC: John Kerry, the US former climate envoy: “We made an agreement in Dubai to transition away from fossil fuels. The problem? We aren’t doing that. We’re not implementing. The implications for everybody, and life on this planet, is gigantic.” (Source: Kerry Gives Scathing Rating on Climate Action: ‘Is There a Letter Underneath Z?’ The Guardian, September 23, 2024)

Meanwhile, in the real world, apart from the fantasy world of Climate Week/NYC, wealthy countries are handing out new oil and gas exploration leases hand over fist despite COP28 talks in Dubai last year to cut back production of emissions by 2030, blah, blah, blah. According to António Guterres, secretary general of the UN: “In signing such a surge of new oil and gas licenses, they are signing away our future,” Ibid.

According to Al Gore: “Many people felt it was a great victory to have that language about transitioning away from fossil fuels, I felt that too. But now look at the agenda for this year’s COP and they’ve completely ignored that. The climate crisis is a fossil fuel crisis, the fossil fuel industry is the wealthiest and most powerful industry in the history of the world. They fight ferociously to stop anything that would stop consumption of fossil fuels. They are way better at capturing politicians than emissions,” Ibid.

“A weariness with seemingly endless, fruitless meetings about the climate crisis – there have been annual UN talks on this for nearly 30 years – and a litany of unfulfilled promises is particularly grating for the small island states most vulnerable to the impacts of floods, droughts and heatwaves, despite themselves only emitting minuscule amounts of greenhouse gases, “Ibid.

According to Philip Davis, prime minister of the Bahamas: “I’m tired of talks, I want to see some action. We have been talking about climate change for 29 years now where are we today? For the first time in one whole year, we have been over 1.5C – that should shake us. I’m not listening now, I want to see some action, real action,” Ibid.

Many readers interpret articles like this one as too negative, not holding out enough hope that technology will save the day by removing excess CO2 from the atmosphere (extremely doubtful) or some other miraculous event like fusion technology, mimicking the sun, that really works, saving the day (decades away) or renewables like solar and wind coming to the rescue. Meaning, we should put a positive spin on the human connection to combating climate change, blah, blah, blah!

Well, after 30 years of UN climate conferences, inclusive of all of the nations of the world assembled together to address the issue, and after 30 years of promises by 195 countries to fix it, carbon CO2 emissions (which must be reduced as priority number one) have never been higher throughout human history and global mean temperatures of +1.5°C above pre-industrial for 12+months running 2023-34 have exceeded the limit 195 nations promised not to exceed at Paris ’15, and with oil companies publicly admitting production levels are ramping up considerably higher than Paris ’15 commitments, 30 years of promises are going backwards faster than ever before.

In fact, the two key issues in all climate change conferences for the past 30 years, i.e., CO2 emissions and global mean temperatures, are accelerating much faster than ever before, setting new all-time records in 2024. It’s not difficult to see why global warming is rapidly accelerating to dangerous levels because of excessive CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels. Recent acceleration has doubled and tripled historical rates. This spooky increase has occurred over only the past couple of years.

The numbers tell the story: (the origins of climate change/global heat)

August 2024 global temperature relative to 1880-1920 @ +1.56°C warmest August on record.

Atmospheric CO2 (Aug. 2024) 422.72 ppm vs. 419.56 ppm (Aug. 2023) = +3.16 ppm. Historical comparisons: (1) 2000-year CO2 change +1.26 ppm (2) 1990-year CO2 change +1.14 ppm (3) 1960-year CO2 change +0.71 ppm.

Annual CO2 released into atmosphere from burning fossil fuels: 9 billion metric tons (1960) vs. 37.4 billion metric tons (2023)

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This article was originally published on September 27, 2024 © Counterpunch
Robert Hunziker lives in Los Angeles and can be reached at rlhunziker@gmail.com.

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