EDITORIAL: More hot air on global warming

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The best way to judge the sincerity of governments is the same way we assess the sincerity of individuals.

We do it by looking not at what they say, but at what they do.

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In that light, the sincerity of the 195 parties (194 countries plus the European Union) that signed on to the United Nations’ Paris climate agreement in 1995 to lower industrial global greenhouse gas emissions can be judged by how much they’ve lowered those emissions in the decade since.

The news on that front is not good.

As of 2024, the global carbon budget produced by an international team of more than 120 scientists estimates global industrial emissions reached 37.4 billion tonnes, up 0.8% from 2023 and the highest level ever recorded.

This after a decade of annual extravagant UN gabfests flying in thousands of national leaders, diplomats, bureaucrats, jet-setting celebrities and climate activists to many of the world’s vacation hotspots.

The latest one was held in Baku, the capital of oil-rich Azerbaijan.

Over the past decade they’ve descended on Marrakech, Bonn, Madrid, Sharm El Sheikh and Dubai, each time generating a massive carbon footprint by a UN bureaucracy which apparently hasn’t discovered video-conferencing to do what the UN wants the rest of us to do — lower our emissions.

In recent years we’ve been told that global industrial emissions are about to peak and start falling and yet the totals keep rising, except during global recessions such as the one caused by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, before resuming their upward march.

Last year, we’re told, was the first year that average global temperature rose 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, the threshold the UN says is needed to avoid catastrophic climate change, and that if emissions keep rising, the impacts of climate change will become increasingly severe.

But despite all these warnings, emissions keep rising.

What never seems to occur to the UN and to the political leaders piously proclaiming year after year that people must change their behaviour and lower their standard of living to save the planet, is that their own failure to do so undercuts that message year after year.

And that doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results, is the definition of insanity.