Home ›› 28 Dec 2021 ›› Back
Across a quarter century of UN climate conferences tasked with saving humanity from itself, one was deemed a chaotic failure (Copenhagen/2009), another a stunning success (Paris/2015), and the rest landed somewhere in between.
This year’s COP26 inspired all these reactions at once.
Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, leading a 100,000-strong march through the streets of Glasgow, dismissed the two-week meet as a “greenwashing festival”.
But dedicated experts in the negotiating arena hailed solid -- even historic -- advances in beating back the existential threat of global warming.
More often than not, observers vacillated between approval and criticism, hope and despair.
“The Glasgow Climate Pact is more than we expected, but less than we hoped for,” Dann Mitchell, head of climate hazards at Britain’s Met Office, said with haiku-like economy.
Gauging the efficacy of measures announced at the COP26 summit largely depends on the yardstick used to measure them.
Compared to what came before, the first-ever call by 196 countries to draw down coal-fired power, or a promise to double financial aid each year -- to roughly $40 billion -- so poor nations can brace for climate impacts, are giant steps forward.
Likewise a provision obliging countries to consider setting more ambitious targets for reducing carbon pollution every year rather than once every five years.
But all these hard-won gains at COP26 shrivel in significance when stacked up against hard science.
Glasgow exit lane
An unbroken cascade in 2021 of deadly floods, heatwaves and wildfires across four continents, combined with ever more detailed projections, left no doubt that going beyond the 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) heating limit envisioned in the Paris Agreement would push Earth into the red zone.
“As a lifelong optimist, I see the Glasgow outcome as half-full rather than half-empty,” said Alden Meyer, a senior analyst at climate and energy think tank E3G.
“But the atmosphere responds to emissions -- not COP decisions -- and much work remains ahead to translate the strong rhetoric here into reality.”
The past year also saw Part 1 of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) first comprehensive synthesis of climate science in seven years.
It found that global heating is virtually certain to pass 1.5C, probably within a decade. Meanwhile, ocean levels are rising faster than anticipated, and will do so for centuries.
And forests, soil and oceans -- which absorb more than half of humanity’s carbon pollution -- show signs of saturation.
Then there is the threat of “tipping points” that could see permafrost release massive amounts of CO2 and methane, the Amazon basin transformed into savannah, and ice sheets shedding enough mass to submerge cities and deltas home to hundreds of millions.
“Make no mistake, we are still on the road to hell,” said Dave Reay, head of the University of Edinburgh’s Climate Change Institute.
“But Glasgow has at least created an exit lane.”
