TIPPING POINTS AND COP28

                                            from Understanding climate tipping points: PHYS.ORG
 

As COP28 winds down humankind now faces at least four major irreversible climate change
tipping points. One can't help but feel COP28 was just a deceitful ruse in which the world leaders of richer countries pretend to address a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions with hot air and empty promises. This, while the leaders of lesser countries, more vulnerable (and less responsible for the,crisis) ineffectively resisted. Run an Internet search on “tipping points in the climate crisis” and dozens of alarming scientific studies and sobering assessments will pop up along with innumerable full color graphic depictions of the crisis.

The main online news sources (NY Times, etc) do dutifully include the latest grim assess-ments and warnings from IPCC and other scientific organizations. But the seriousness of the problem is drown out by background noise like the latest accounts of mass shootings (US), natural disasters (often climate change induced), endless on-going wars, and other madness. And of course there is the daily dose of interminable political wrangling and now dark threats to our very democracy..  And that's for those who still read online or follow MSM rather than relying on second-hand crapola passed along through social media. Yet on the Climate Crisis front all the indicators are flashing bright red with bells ringing loudly. But, alas, most of us have either turned off the source of the noise or havebecome inured to it.

Yet the tipping points and their feedback loops are upon us. Once we are over the brink, it will be too f***ing late.

    
                            1.          Collapse of big ice sheets in Greenland and West Antarctica                                                           

                                        

                                       

                              2.             Widespread thawing of permafrost

                                        

                              3.            Death of coral reefs worldwide.

                                         

       
                              4.          Collapse of a major oceanic current in the North Atlantic

                                 

 

These calamitous possibilities (or are they already inevitabilities?) stand as a dark backdrop as the world's so-called leaders and/or their acolytes again assemble for yet another charade - COP28. It's number 28 and still no firm acknowledgment that the burning of fossil fuels must stop as soon as possible. Ostensibly they gather annually to agree upon as to how all of the world's 195+ nations can collectively confront the greatest threat ever faced by human-kind. Yet this year's COP28 was hosted (un-ironically) by an oil producing Gulf State – the United Arab Emirates. Is there even a smidgen of surprise that again there will be no resoundingly firm commitment to ending our deadly embrace of fossil fuels.

The citizens of the several very wealthy Gulf States like UAE, none of which are democracies, have the world's largest per capita energy footprints. They work and live surrounded by a luxurious negation of anything environmentally sound, in monstrous 21st Century space age skyscrapers (including the highest building in the world, the 2,722 ft. Burj Khalifa, in Dubai). This monstrosity makes the Empire State Building look like some lowly Omaha Nebraska bank building. All of these glitzy ultra high-rise structures existing in a roasting hot desert climate are kept so cold that some people even wear sweaters inside.

The current fantasy peddled by the petrostates (and the fossil fuel industries) and included in the COP28 discussions is the unproven techno-fix, 'C02 sequestration', injecting CO2 back back into the ground. This comfortable delusion is that someday this technology will actually prove feasible and allow the lucrative oil business to proceed as usual. This fantasy is fostered while each year the average global temperature exceeds the previous one temper-ature exceeds the previous one. Even if this stab at geoengineering worked it would only slow or even cripple the still necessary difficult transition.

This year's COP28 made headlines by finally agreeing to grudgingly include the statement in their final agreement that all 195+ nation states) would begin "transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner." It took 28 meetings to get to to this obvious acknowledgment - no real committment, no real plan. One continues to wonder how seriously our political leaders and their billionaire friends are taking the impending doom that they are still not materially confronting. Or are they blowing (more) hot air our way while simply squirreling away as much money as possible to build artificial redoubts that can survive a new Paleocene Epoch?