Environment
UN chief returns as climate talks teeter closer to collapse
KATOWICE, Poland — The United Nations secretary-general flew back to global climate talks in Poland Wednesday to appeal to countries to reach an agreement, as some observers feared the meeting might end without a deal.
U.N. chief Antonio Guterres opened the talks last week, telling leaders to take the threat of global warming seriously and calling it “the most important issue we face.”
But as the two-week meeting shifted from the technical to political phase, with ministers taking over negotiations, campaign groups warned of the risks of failure in Katowice.
Harjeet Singh of ActionAid International said the main holdouts were the United States, Australia and Japan, while the European Union was “a mere spectator.”
“A new leadership must step up,” said Vanessa Perez-Cirera of the environmental group WWF. “We cannot afford to lose one of the twelve years we have remaining.”
She was referring to a recent scientific report by a U.N.-backed panel that suggested average global warming can only be halted at 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) if urgent action is taken by 2030, including a dramatic reduction in use of fossil fuels.
Endorsing the report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change became a crunch issue over the weekend, with the United States, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait opposing the move.
Jean-Pascal Ypersele, a former deputy chair of the panel, said whether or not countries believe the conclusions of the report was irrelevant because the science was clear.
“Nobody, even the so-called superpowers, can negotiate with the laws of physics,” he said.
Ypersele called for the 1.5-degree target — already mentioned in the 2015 Paris accord — to be recognized in the final text.
“It’s a question of survival for a large part of humanity, and many other species,” he said.
Poland, which is chairing the talks, was expected to circulate a condensed draft text Wednesday running to about 100 pages, down from about 300 at the start of the talks.
The Dec. 2-14 meeting is supposed to finalize the rules that signatories of the Paris accord need to follow when it comes to reporting their greenhouse gas emissions and efforts to reduce them.
Li Shuo, a climate expert at Greenpeace, warned that the current text was riddled with loopholes
“A Swiss cheese rulebook is unacceptable,” he said.
Poor countries also want assurances on financial support to tackle climate change.
A third objective of the talks is getting governments to make a firm commit to raising ambitions in the coming two years, albeit without any precise figures.
One issue that has risen to the fore at the talks is the proposal by Poland for countries to back the idea of a “just transition” for workers in fossil fuel industries facing closure from emissions-curbing measures.
Germany’s environment minister, Svenja Schulze, told reporters that her country is committed to phasing out the use of coal, though the exact deadline has yet to be determined.
But in a nod to the recent protests in France over fuel prices, Schulze warned against governments forcing through measures, saying they would lose public support “faster than you can spell climate protection, and then people pull on yellow vests.”
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Monika Scislowska contributed to this report.
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Read more stories on climate issues by The Associated Press at https://www.apnews.com/Climate
Frank Jordans, The Associated Press
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
The purveyors of climate doom will not tolerate the good news of our planet thriving because of modest warming and increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide. However, a recent scientific paper concludes that an optimistic vision for Earth and its inhabitants is nonetheless justified.
Widely accepted data show an overall greening of Earth resulting from a cycle of natural warming that began more than 300 years ago and from industrialization’s additions of CO2 that started in the 19th century and accelerated with vigorous economic activity following World War II.
Also attributed to these and other factors is record crop production, which now sustains 8 billion people—ten times the population prior to the Industrial Revolution. The boost in atmospheric CO2 since 1940 alone is linked to yield increases for corn, soybeans and wheat of 10%, 30% and 40%, respectively.
The positive contribution of carbon dioxide to the human condition should be cause for celebration, but this is more than demonizers of the gas can abide. Right on cue, narrators of a planet supposedly overheating from carbon dioxide began sensationalizing research findings that increased plant volume results in lower concentrations of nutrients in food.
“The potential health consequences are large, given that there are already billions of people around the world who don’t get enough protein, vitamins or other nutrients in their daily diet,” concluded the The New York Times, a reliable promoter of apocalypse forever. Among others chiming in have been The Lancet, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the National Institutes of Health.
Of course, such yellow journalism lacks context and countervailing facts —elements provided in “Nutritive Value of Plants Growing in Enhanced CO2 Concentrations” published by the CO2 Coalition, Arlington, Virginia.
Any deficiency of nutrients from the enhancement of plant growth by elevated carbon dioxide “are small, compared to the nutrient shortages that agriculture and livestock routinely face because of natural phenomena, such as severe soil fertility differences, nutrient dilution in plants due to rainfall or irrigation and even aging of crops,” says the paper.
And while there is evidence of marginal decreases in some nutrients, data also show that higher levels of CO2 “may enhance certain groups of health-promoting phytochemicals in food crops” that serve as antioxidants and anti-inflammatory compounds, says the paper, which lists seven authors and more than 100 references. The lead author is Albrecht Glatzle, a member of the Rural Association of Paraguay and a former international researcher of plant and animal nutrition.
Among other points made by the paper are the following: Throughout a majority of geological history, atmospheric CO2 concentrations have been several times higher than today’s, which are less than optimum for most plants; atmospheric warming from even a quadrupling of CO2 concentrations would be small compared to natural temperature fluctuations since the last glacial advance more than 10,000 years ago.
Having virtually no scientific basis, the “green” movement’s hostility to carbon dioxide seemingly ignores the gas’s critical role as a plant food. As the paper notes, “CO2 is the only source of the chemical element carbon for all life on Earth, be it for plants, animals or fungi and bacteria — through photosynthesis and food chains.”
The so-called greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide— perversely exaggerated to support climate fearmongering— is a life-saving temperature moderator that keeps Earth from freezing over.
The obvious benefits of CO2 is “an embarrassment to the large and profitable movement to ‘save the planet’ from ‘carbon pollution,’” write the authors. “If CO2 greatly benefits agriculture and forestry and has a small, benign effect on climate, it is not a pollutant at all.
More CO2 is good news. It’s not that complicated.
Gregory Wrightstone is a geologist; executive director of the CO2 Coalition, Arlington, Va.; author of “Inconvenient Facts: The Science That Al Gore Doesn’t Want You to Know” and “A Very Convenient Warming: How modest warming and more CO2 are benefiting humanity” and a co-author of “Nutritive Value of Plants Growing in Enhanced CO2 Concentrations.”
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
What should we say when one of America’s pre-eminent media platforms endorses a plan so fraught with unknowns and pitfalls it invites potential global catastrophe?
That’s what the editorial board at the Washington Post did on April 27 in a 1,000-word editorial endorsing plans by radical schemers and billionaires to engage in various efforts at geoengineering.
The Post’s editors engage in an exercise of saying the quiet part out loud in the piece, morphing from referring to monkeying around with the world’s ability to absorb sunlight as “a forbidden subject,” to concluding it is “indispensable” and “urgent” in the course of a single opinion piece. Sure, why not? What could possibly go wrong with such a plan?
What could go wrong with plans to, say, block sunlight with thousands of high-altitude balloons? Or with a plan that involves spraying the upper atmosphere with billions of tons of sulfur particles? Or with a plan to spend trillions of debt-funded dollars to build a gargantuan shield placed in stationary orbit in outer space?
The editors are so cocksure in their arrogance that they even admit some such concepts have already been tried out, writing, “Climate geoengineering is so cheap and potentially game-changing that even private entrepreneurs have tried it out, albeit at small scales.”
The “small scale” experiment to which the editors refer took place in Baja, Mexico, where researchers launched two large balloons filled with sulfur dioxide particles into the stratosphere. The goal was to measure the sun-dimming effects of the sulfur dioxide, a real, actual pollutant that the Environmental Protection Agency and regulators all over the world have spent the last half century attempting to remove from the atmosphere.
It turned out that Luke Eisman, an entrepreneur who financed the experiment, launched the balloons without seeking prior approval. When Mexican officials found out it had been conducted, they quickly moved to ban such geo-engineering projects on the grounds that they violate national sovereignty. Reuters reports that Mexico’s environment ministry statement said it would seek a global moratorium on such geoengineering projects under the Convention on Biological Diversity.
But despite such concerns in Mexico, here come the Post’s editors advocating we simply just have to trust the science. You know, like we trusted the “science” of COVID vaccines and the “science” of locating giant offshore wind farms in the middle of a whale migration corridor off the Northeast coast, right? Sure. After all, what could go wrong?
The editorial writers go on to cite a similar, larger scale project being promoted by climate-engineering scholars David Keith at the University of Chicago and Wake Smith at Yale. These gentlemen propose to try to lower temperatures by spewing out 100,000 tons of sulfur dioxide – again, a real pollutant humanity has worked decades to eliminate – at an annual cost of $500 million (no doubt to be paid for by more taxpayer debt) using what they refer to as “15 souped-up Gulfstream jets” to create what could accurately be called chemtrails.
In a piece published in February at the MIT Technology Review, the scientists say the project could be mounted as soon as five years from now, which we should all probably consider a threat rather than a mere projection.
Talk of mounting similar geoengineering projects has been ramping up in recent years. In 2021, Bill Gates said he was investing in a project based at Harvard University to spray tons of calcium carbonate particles into the stratosphere above Scandinavia, but the project was ultimately cancelled due to understandable outrage from indigenous groups and environmentalists.
Fellow billionaires Jeff Bezos and Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz have also plowed millions into bioengineering projects.
But until recently, the thought of mounting projects designed to block out sunlight was, like the agenda to intentionally reduce the global population, a subset of their agenda that climate alarmists have tried to keep mainly under wraps. The reason is obvious: Whenever such radical and frankly dangerous ideas are made public, people tend to look at one another and ask, “who in the world would want to do that?”
Now come the members of the Washington Post editorial board, joining Gates and Bezos and Moskovitz in answering that question. Way to go, folks.
David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
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