From Tallbloke’s Talkshop

June 6, 2023 by oldbrew

Another year, another season of so-called climate negotiations. The planet is more than capable of warming, or cooling, on its own without human activities. But the current obsession with minor trace gases, and their supposedly disproportionate effects on the global climate, has infected too many minds to consider such realities at the political level. As a result all manner of pointless ‘remedies’ have to be mulled over.
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Banish fossil fuels, capture their emissions, pull CO2 from thin air—diplomats in Bonn for UN-led climate talks agree there’s too much planet-warming carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but remain at loggerheads on the best way to reduce it, says Phys.org.

At stake is nothing less than a liveable world: even if humanity caps global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius—a huge ‘if’—hundreds of millions will still confront devastating heat, drought, flooding and sea level rise, recent studies have shown. [Talkshop comment – often meaning the output of unreliable climate models using unlikely scenarios as input].

There are three ways to deal with the problem, intervening at different points in the CO2 “value chain” from source to tailpipe: stop burning fossil fuels, by far the main driver of warming; if you do burn them, stop carbon pollution from seeping into the air; and remove CO2 from the atmosphere once it’s there. [Talkshop comment – ‘carbon pollution’ is a false term].

“All technologies, all levers available need to be used,” Simon Stiell, the head of UN Climate, told AFP as the talks in Bonn opened.

“But the science is very, very clear: the fastest and most effective way of getting us to where we need to is the phasing down and phasing out of all fossil fuels.”

Politically, an informal “high ambition” coalition including the European Union (especially Germany) and scores of climate vulnerable developing countries are pushing—to cite the Association of Small Island States (AOSIS)—to “radically reduce fossil fuels now” through policy, regulatory and economic levers.

But major oil and gas exporters, the United States and some emerging economies are keen to shift the focus further downstream, saying the world can reduce carbon emissions without ditching the fossil fuels that generate them.

Full article here.