Tag Archives: 70000 delegates

Shock COP28

Friends of Science

Over 70,000 climate activists, government leaders and influencers are at COP28 – the big UN Climate Conference – set in fabulous Dubai, a miracle city that rises from the desert.

One of the main objectives for activists is to phase out fossil-fuels to allegedly stop global warming.

Imagine their shock when the president of this year’s COP Conference, Sultan Ahmed al-Jaber, said that there is ‘no science’ behind demands for the phase-out of fossil fuels!

Of course this rather spoiled the party for the activist set; some had been dreaming of crushing Big Oil and Big Natural Gas; other had been planning to put a wealth or giant carbon dioxide pollution tax on Big Oil and Big Natural Gas; others had been dreaming of how to force Big Oil and Big Natural Gas to finance the triple the renewables demanded by activists; other want to impose a global carbon tax LAW.

No matter how you look at it, they are all using the fantasy claims of a to try and pick the pockets of energy corporations, and to make ordinary people poor by driving up the cost of everything through these draconian energy taxes.

This video explainer walks through some of what the reactions were and also gives people a glimpse of the energy and materials that went into the building of the Burj Khalifa tower in Dubai, surely the most prominent reference to the miracles that hydrocarbons help humans create.

But the climate cult is not amused by Sultan al-Jaber’s comments and are just digging in their heels.

COP28 Mind-Boggling Numbers

From Science Matters

By Ron Clutz

The Green Mirage recedes as you approach it.

Robert Lyman exposes the freakish math swirling around Dubai COP this fortnight in his Financial Post article COP28 by the (very big) numbers.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

This weekend’s climate meeting will discuss trillions of dollars.
No one will mention its chance of success is zero.

Neuroscience tells us the human brain is very bad at interpreting large numbers. Most people know that million, billion and trillion are all big numbers but can’t really understand what the difference between them is. Answer: it’s big. A million seconds is 12 days. A billion seconds is 31 years. A trillion seconds is 31,688 years, which is a lot more than 12 days.

Our cognitive difficulties with large numbers will be a problem when reading the news from the COP28 climate conference that convenes in Dubai on Thursday.

The conference has a wide-ranging agenda. It also will be attended by a large number of people — over 70,000 at last count. There’s the first large-number problem for COP28. How does a group of 70,000 people possibly discuss anything in a coherent way?

The organizers have identified five themes on which they would like to see agreement among the almost 190 governments that will be represented. When you’re talking governments, 190 is yet another brain-challenging number.

To oversimplify, there are four main themes:

♦  how to accelerate all countries’ efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions so as to meet a proposed 2050 “net-zero” target (zero not being a large number);
♦  how to induce wealthier countries to give much more money to poorer countries to help them both mitigate and adapt to climate change;
♦  how to persuade all countries to phase out production of fossil fuels by 2050; and, finally,
♦  how to increase the UN’s role as central coordinator and global regulator of climate efforts.

Most discussions behind closed doors will be about money. Rich countries are now paying about US$70 billion in climate aid, mostly to help finance GHG emissions reduction. The developing countries want this raised to at least US$1.4 trillion per year by 2026, 20 times higher. Twenty is not actually that large a number, except when talking about multiplying already very big dollar amounts by it. Developing countries have also demanded that funding for adaptation rise to at least US$600 billion per year. At last year’s COP27 in Egypt, they got agreement in principle for a new fund to pay for the “loss and damages” they will incur from adverse weather events they attribute to the historic GHG emissions of the industrialized countries, though no dollar amounts were agreed to. Finally, developing countries are pushing for a new Global Biodiversity Fund, to which developed countries would donate a mere US$20 billion per year.

Round numbers: rich countries would be on the hook for US$2 trillion per year. If allocations were based on GDP, Canada would owe three per cent of the total — or US$60 billion per year. In Canadian dollars, that’s roughly 78 billion CAN$. There are about 16 million households in Canada so (do the math) each household would owe $4,875. Per year. That’s a number the average person can easily understand. He or she can also understand there is absolutely no way the Canadian public or voters in any other OECD country would ever agree to such a thing. Not even if they didn’t know (but they do) that China, producer of 30 per cent of the world’s GHG emissions, not only would not be contributing but might well qualify as a recipient.

The previous 27 COPs (for Conference of the Parties) have all promoted ever-more ambitious emissions reductions. But since the first COP global emissions have risen 60 per cent, driven by developing countries’ relentless efforts to achieve more economic development for their burgeoning populations. There is no evidence that trend will change. 

China, India, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq and others all see fossil fuel production as key to their economic development and energy security. They are unlikely to commit to production declines even if a few OECD countries do.

The United Nations secretariat will lobby hard at COP28 to expand the role of existing institutions, including even more climate summits to place even more political pressure on leaders, and they may succeed in this (though many of us feel just one a year is already more than enough). How difficult can it be to convince tens of thousands of climate stakeholders to travel to exotic conference locales each year? Especially if the general public cannot grasp the numbers they’re playing with.

Yes, those are trillions of dollars in the projection.

This weekend the media in general will report in glowing terms on the energy and enthusiasm of conference participants, especially those representing environmental NGOs. The communiqué will note every new commitment made yet entirely ignore that the probability the entire process will meet its objectives is a very, very small number not significantly different from zero.

Get ready for another pointless UN climate conference

By Steve Goreham

The United Nations Climate Conference begins on Thursday in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. More than 70,000 delegates are expected to attend from almost 200 nations. The COP28 event will emit large amounts of carbon dioxide but is unlikely to have any measurable effect on global temperatures.

COP28 is the 28th meeting of the Conference of the Parties, an annual event that has been going on since 1995. The Conference of the Parties is the decision-making body of the Framework Convention on Climate Change, which is an international agreement that was established in 1994 by the U.N. with the intention of “preventing dangerous human interference with the climate system.”

Pope Francis, King Charles III, Bill Gates, John Kerry, and many other dignitaries will lead the 70,000 attendees. Heads of state, industry and business leaders, leaders of environmental groups, and media representatives will also attend. The Nature Conservancy plans to send representatives from 20 nations.

The attendees will arrive in the UAE primarily by private jet or commercial aircraft, powered by jet fuel. For each kilogram of jet fuel burned , 3.16 kilograms of carbon dioxide will be emitted. They will then travel from the airport to Dubai’s Expo City by limousine or taxi, fueled by gasoline or diesel fuel. Some may take electric vehicles, but these EVs will be charged by UAE electricity, 82% of which is produced by natural gas.

And yet, COP28 delegates will inevitably push for the end of the use of hydrocarbon fuels, which are coal, oil, and natural gas. Fatih Birol, the executive director of the International Energy Agency, who is likely to attend, stated in 2021: “If governments are serious about the climate crisis, there can be no new investments in oil, gas, and coal, from now — from this year.” Many delegates support Birol’s statement.

But most of the conference attendees will have cellphones, which are made from plastic from oil or natural gas. They will be wearing suits, ties, shoes, and other clothing, much of which will be composed of synthetic fibers from hydrocarbons. They will dine on food produced by farms that use synthetic nitrogen fertilizer created from ammonia, produced using natural gas or coal fuels. Hydrocarbons drive our modern society.

Developing nations, too, need oil, gas, and coal to raise the standard of living for their people. Renewables provided only a tiny part of the energy consumed in developing countries in 2022, such as in Africa (2.4%), India (5.9%), the Middle East (0.7%), and Southeast Asia (6.3%). More than 1,000 coal-fired power plants are now being planned or under construction across the world.

Ironically, developing countries appear to be all in for world decarbonization, with heavy participation at annual U.N. climate conferences. And why shouldn’t they be? Poorer nations seek billions in wealth transfers from richer nations in the name of climate change. Prior to the COP26 conference in Scotland in 2021, for example, India demanded $1 trillion per year from wealthy countries to help it reach “net zero” by 2070. About 25% of all financial aid to the developing world now goes to fund climate-related projects, up from only 4% in 2005.

The U.N.’s attendees don’t seem to mind since its climate conferences are already steeped in hypocrisy. Kerry, the U.S. climate envoy, is well known for his CO2-emitting private jet flights, but he considers his work too important to travel by alternatives that emit less CO2. Gates, the billionaire, built and owns a 66,000 square foot mansion in Medina, Washington, which uses more than 20 times the electricity of a typical U.S. home. Climate change advocates demand emissions reductions from society that they are unwilling to observe themselves.

Not that it matters much, anyway. There is little evidence that the annual COP climate conferences held over the last 27 years have had any effect on the climate. Data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration show that the concentration of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere continues to rise steadily. In 2020, global industrial emissions of CO2 declined by more than 8% during the COVID-19 crisis, but this decline was undetectable in the rise in atmospheric CO2.

Nor has there been any significant change in energy consumption. World energy consumption has tripled since 1965. From 2004 to 2021, the world spent about $5 trillion to promote renewable energy and installed more than 300,000 wind turbines. But in 2021, coal, oil, and natural gas provided 81% of global energy consumption, the same percentage as in 1999. The COP climate conferences can best be characterized as futile.

One thing rising faster than world energy use is COP attendance. About 5,000 attended each of the first five COPs, but this rose to more than 27,000 for COP15 in Copenhagen and more than 30,000 for COP21 in Paris. This year’s conference may have more than 70,000 attendees, but “the sky’s the limit” for future attendance at this carbon dioxide-emitting event.

The U.N. says climate change is “the defining issue of our time.” If we all live long enough, we may have to endure the 50th Conference of the Parties. And it will be just as futile and pointless then as it is now.

Steve Goreham is a speaker on energy, the environment, and public policy and the author of the new bestselling book Green Breakdown: The Coming Renewable Energy Failure.

Originally published in Washington Examiner.