Punctuation and other ways negotiators have resolved climate change issues | Hacker News Reader

Punctuation and other ways negotiators have resolved climate change issues

repository.law.umich.edu

26 pointsmooreds14 comments

"No, money down!"

These climate conferences are so frustrating. Everybody knows it is a real time catastrophe, but nobody is willing to be the first guy to lose money trying to fight it. They'll make all of these promises that amount to nothing while their countries are destroyed by climate change.

https://external-preview.redd.it/uWjHanrNxwJEPM4II82nHpGKWzl...

It's important to state that with all these negotiations, the entire process is an abject failure. The emission of green house gases continues to increase and extreme weather is noticeably increasing with the increased temperatures (Deadly heat waves in the Pacific North West US and Europe, the flooding of huge areas of Pakistan, etc, etc). Claims of "reasons for optimism" involve "less CO2 increase per increase in economic activity", a "gain" that could keep "improving" forever as C02 pollution continues at the present disastrous rate.

This graph shows it well- https://www.science-climat-energie.be/2021/11/18/la-nature-i...

And the title is a banger too. Nature ignores COP conferences.

Edit: oddly enough, I kept trying to find a source that wasn't climate change denying, but I can't find one!

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/carb...

Emissions are generally decreasing…

Perhaps so, but your link is to the USA, not for the entire world.

They are not. Each year, more CO2 is emitted than the previous year, and the increase over the previous year is larger than last time.

So, the total CO2 in the atmosphere is larger each year: positive first derivative, slope is up. The total added to the atmosphere per unit time is also larger than last year: positive second derivative. It is possible that the amount by which it is larger than last year's is itself decreasing: negative third derivative. But that is hard to perceive.

This chart shows the sharp increase for the entire world.

https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions

Moveover, the problem is both the developing nations don't want to postpone development to prevent climate change and that the CO2 production in China often involves good consumed in more developed nations - so the US is exporting a significant part of it's CO2 production rather than ending it.

Whoops should have linked directly to the paper: https://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article...

We usually call that "weaseling".

You could say it is why CO2 emissions continue increasing at a sharply increasing rate. But presumably any behavior within an "agreement" is better than identically the same behavior with no agreement. Somehow.

One wonders if this isn't the esoteric reason for writing the paper in the first place. The "victories" involve getting parties to agree to subtle linguistic changes to various documents which have no impact at all on the actual problem they're supposedly addressing, and writing a paper that points this out sure seems like a way of making the whole enterprise look ridiculous, even if the explicit frame is one of praise.

Emissions are increasing at a decreasing rate and are in the declining in absolute terms in the largest economies, except for China and India.

Too little, too late. Without extreme carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), we're boned.

We need to CCS at greater than the rate we are extracting ancient carbon… IOW, sequestering more than 90 million barrels a day. We are dead men walking.

Most people think displacing CO2 production is a much more cost-effective course than building out carbon capture.

After we have deployed enough carbon-neutral energy production, we will then need to do massive carbon capture. But in the meantime, carbon capture mostly just enables polluters.

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