Nov 12, 2025 02:44 AM
(This post was last modified: Nov 12, 2025 02:44 AM by C C.)
https://reason.com/2025/11/10/the-u-n-ha...-to-climb/
EXCERPTS: United Nations' climate change conferences are exercises in futility. That is becoming ever clearer as the 30th conference of the parties (COP30) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) opens in Belém, Brazil. The chief goal of the UNFCCC is to achieve the "stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system."
Since the UNFCCC was negotiated at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, the concentration of greenhouse warming carbon dioxide (CO2) in the global atmosphere has been anything but close to stabilized. Instead, it has increased from 359 parts per million (ppm) to 425 ppm this year. And the increase is speeding up.
The World Meteorological Organization reports that from 2023 to 2024, the global average concentration of CO2 "surged by 3.5 ppm, the largest increase since modern measurements started in 1957." The increase is largely the result of rising emissions from burning oil, natural gas, and coal to produce the energy that drives economic growth.
[...] At COP30, the Paris Agreement signatories are supposedly obligated to increase their nationally determined contribution pledges to cut their greenhouse gas emissions. But at the opening of COP30, around 130 out of 194 signatory countries had not yet submitted any new emissions reduction commitments.
The U.N. report calculates that the pledges that have been made would cut global emissions by only 10 percent by 2035. So yes, the aspirational 1.5 degree limit is kaput.
So why have more than three decades of international negotiations largely failed? Because they have run headlong into what political scientist Roger Pielke, Jr. calls the "iron law of climate policy." As Pielke puts it, "when policies focused on economic growth confront policies focused on emissions reductions, it is economic growth that will win out every time."
In their October 2025 article in Communications Earth & Environment, a team of researchers at the University of Washington more or less confirmed Pielke's law... (MORE - details)
EXCERPTS: United Nations' climate change conferences are exercises in futility. That is becoming ever clearer as the 30th conference of the parties (COP30) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) opens in Belém, Brazil. The chief goal of the UNFCCC is to achieve the "stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system."
Since the UNFCCC was negotiated at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, the concentration of greenhouse warming carbon dioxide (CO2) in the global atmosphere has been anything but close to stabilized. Instead, it has increased from 359 parts per million (ppm) to 425 ppm this year. And the increase is speeding up.
The World Meteorological Organization reports that from 2023 to 2024, the global average concentration of CO2 "surged by 3.5 ppm, the largest increase since modern measurements started in 1957." The increase is largely the result of rising emissions from burning oil, natural gas, and coal to produce the energy that drives economic growth.
[...] At COP30, the Paris Agreement signatories are supposedly obligated to increase their nationally determined contribution pledges to cut their greenhouse gas emissions. But at the opening of COP30, around 130 out of 194 signatory countries had not yet submitted any new emissions reduction commitments.
The U.N. report calculates that the pledges that have been made would cut global emissions by only 10 percent by 2035. So yes, the aspirational 1.5 degree limit is kaput.
So why have more than three decades of international negotiations largely failed? Because they have run headlong into what political scientist Roger Pielke, Jr. calls the "iron law of climate policy." As Pielke puts it, "when policies focused on economic growth confront policies focused on emissions reductions, it is economic growth that will win out every time."
In their October 2025 article in Communications Earth & Environment, a team of researchers at the University of Washington more or less confirmed Pielke's law... (MORE - details)
