When tens of thousands of people fly to a climate summit hosted by an oil exporter with a long record of human rights abuses, the accusations of hypocrisy and greenwashing come in hard and fast. So, too, do the demands for concrete action. Before Cop26 took place in Glasgow three years ago, Greta Thunberg dismissed the “blah blah blah” spewed at such events. “Our hopes and ambitions drown in their empty promises,” the Swedish climate activist said.
Such scepticism is not lost on the hosts. On Monday, Sultan Al Jaber, the outgoing Cop president from the United Arab Emirates, gave a stark piece of “brotherly advice” to Mukhtar Babayev, the new Cop president from Azerbaijan. “Let actions speak louder than words,” he said. “Let results outlast the rhetoric. And remember, we are what we do, not what we say.”
But even the language has long been lacking. Fossil fuels didn’t even appear in a Cop declaration until the 26th iteration, while the need to “transition away” from fossil fuels, at least in energy systems, was acknowledged for the first time in 2023. Negotiators who went to last year’s Cop28 in the United Arab Emirates fought bitterly over whether to phase them “out” or “down”, before ditching the phrasing altogether.
At the same time, politicians and scientists have grown increasingly creative in how they describe the goal of trying to stop the planet from heating 1.5C (2.7F) by the end of the century. Depending on your view, the much-touted target is on life support, hanging by a thread, or deader than a doornail. This year was the first in which the world was more than 1.5C hotter than before the mass-burning of fossil fuels, the World Meteorological Organization announced last week – though, as the target is measured in decadal averages, a single year above the threshold does not mean it has been missed.
Still, experts disagree on whether the 1.5C target can be written off. From a physical perspective, scientists tend to agree it is still possible. From an engineering perspective, it is daunting, once you factor in the time taken to build clean infrastructure and the challenges that remain with key technologies. But it’s when you look at the state of policies and targets that the question of crossing the threshold seems to leap from “if” to “when”.
A 1.5C rise in global temperatures will not mean the apocalypse. But it will crank up the damage from slow-burn disasters and violent shocks, which have already been inflamed, and make the most catastrophic “tipping points” inch ever closer.
And yet the repeated bleak prognoses have not kept vulnerable countries from turning up to climate talks. For small island states that may not survive the rise in sea levels, Cops are among the only diplomatic venues where they can try to hold rich polluters to account. Poor countries around the world – who need money to clean up their economies, adapt to a hotter world and pay for the damage done by violent weather – have scored some serious wins.
And even as climate deniers have gained ground in some big polluters – most recently with this month’s re-election of Donald Trump in the US – the shift to clean energy is moving at a pace even its fiercest opponents may struggle to stop.
“It is in our blood to know when a tide is turning,” said Hilda Heine, president of Marshall Islands, on Tuesday. “And on climate, the tide is turning today.” But whether the balance of gains and losses leaves you feeling cautiously optimistic or deeply pessimistic is largely a matter of perspective. But scientists stress that each fraction of a degree of warming is worth fighting for, and delegates at climate summits still see them as useful venues of change.
Alexander De Croo, the Belgian prime minister, made the case for engagement as he pointed to rising emissions, destructive climate disasters and the forecast of 3C of warming by the end of the century. “Meetings like these are often perceived as talking shops,” he said. “And yes, these strenuous negotiations are far from perfect. But if you compare climate policy now to a decade ago, we are in a different world.”
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