COP28 is on—has now finished—and we continue to move the deckchairs around on the Titanic I read that we are now in the anthropocene, which will be evidenced in future fossil records as that layer of plastics in the geological record, along with the sharp spike in unexpected chemicals in the soil. I expect history to report COP28 as more fiddling while the planet burns; the takeaway seems to be 'do what you can', which no doubt will reduce to 'do as little as you can get away with'. We have a cognitive dissonance with messages such as 'it's the economy, stupid' and 'we need to do somethign about the climnate crisis. It is altogether too easy to point fingers at what obviously fails at such meetings - use of jets, huge presence of vested interests (in continuing as we are, ineffective), lack of consensus as to what might be truth, abosolute disagreement as to action and far too many nations wanting someone else to pay (and where one is certain sure that any money handed over will have very little of it directed to mitigation; money is not the solution). We also have unicorns, such as energy from fusion, carbon capture and copious greenwashing. I've written this before, but buying an existing forest does not excuse a business from, say, its use of airplanes. Planting a significant forest and perpetuating that growth might provide some mitigation, but the land required is far larger than anyone is prepared to spend. To make sense of carbon capture we would need to envisage things like re-converting our moorland to forest, and I am not yet convinced we could do that in a way that would satisfy the ecowarrior.
The siimplest solution remains to remove humans en masse.
I was struck, in my reading by the apparent lack of understanding within the UAE, COP28's hosts. I find this hard to comprehend, since these people are far from stupid. The arab states have direct knowledge of overheating, temperatures over 40º occurring with frequency, and in high humidity. These are conditions in which humans perish. Therefore one would expect an oil-rich nation to be looking at what it might do to perpetuate its very existence while at the same time balancing ite revenues against the dramatic losses that will occur from reduced oil sales. I think that means that, much like the rest of the (western) world, action is predicated upon usinfg what we have (quickly) while we're still allowed to do it / while we still can. That is refusing to recognise that (humans burning) fossil fuel is the much of the cause of global heating.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_United_Nations_Climate_Change_Conference