Think of the Labour Party.
Who is the climate spokesperson?
Yeah, no, you didn't get it right because it's Deborah Russell.
I know.
I didn't think it was that either.
I didn't know it.
And you know what, it's my job to know this kind of stuff.
But to be fair to me, in the entirety of this year thus far, Deborah has only put out 3 press releases on the climate and the third one was today.
And guess what it was about?
It was announcing that Deborah is going to the annual Global Climate conference, COP 30, and she's gonna be leaving on Sunday and she's gonna be coming back Saturday, which means she's there basically for a week because of course she is, because who doesn't want a week in Brazil on the boss's credit card.
I see what Deborah's doing.
But let's also see this for what it is, right?
Deborah's contribution to the climate this year is 3 press releases and a long-haul flight to Brazil return.
So all up, a net negative contribution to the climate, which pretty much is the story though.
And just not to pick on Deborah here, because this is what everybody's doing.
This is the story of every single COP, isn't it?
Thousands of people fly into a place burning up who knows how many emissions, only to have a gab fest, issue a bunch of press releases and really achieve nothing.
A massive net negative for the climate.
That's what COP is.
You know what the big news story out of COP is today?
That it's failed.
1.5 is dead.
It will not be achieved.
This was what we were told we needed to do to save humanity.
Hit 1.5, keep the temperature rises to 1.5, no more.
We have known for a while that 1.5 is dead.
It is now officially dead.
So Deborah is flying to a conference that has already admitted that the aim of COP 26, which is four conferences ago, which was to keep 1.5 alive, is actually dead in the water.
In which case, it begs the question, why do we keep wasting emissions to go to an annual get-together that fails every single year?
I think I've got the answer, because it means a week in Brazil.
Heather du Plessis-Allan is a journalist and commentator who hosts Newstalk ZB's Drive show.
23 comments:
I can help with answering these for Heather
COP, or Conference of the Parties, is the annual United Nations summit where countries gather to negotiate and make decisions on how to address climate change. It's the decision-making body of the UNFCCC and is where global agreements, like the Paris Agreement, are made. These conferences review progress, set new goals for reducing emissions, and plan for climate resilience.
Key achievements include:
(a) The Paris Agreement: Adopted at COP21 in 2015, this is a legally binding international treaty where nearly every nation committed to collectively reduce emissions enough to limit global warming to well below 2°C (ideally 1.5°C) above pre-industrial levels.
(b) Climate Finance Goals: COPs have led to agreements on financial support for developing nations. Most recently, at COP29 (2024), a new goal was set to triple climate finance to developing countries to $300 billion annually by 2035 (part of a broader $1.3 trillion annual target), and an agreement was reached to operationalize a dedicated Loss and Damage Fund to compensate vulnerable countries for climate impacts.
While critics argue that progress has often been slow and has not matched the scale and urgency of the climate crisis, the conferences have been instrumental in building a global consensus, shaping international policy, and fostering cooperation necessary to address climate change.
Tax all will sort it...
The Romans grew grapes in Scotland. Must have been a micro climate zone.
The Climate fantasy continues....
Fact is, climate changes all the time, without human influence.
The climate is always changing, and has done so for over 600 million years. (Fact)
The planet is slowly warming, in fits and starts, as the planet emerges from the Little Ice Age. (Fact)
Records show that the warming process occurs before the rise in CO2 levels (Fact)
The Planet Earth is currently in a state of CO2 near starvation levels. (Fact)
She should have been asked why 1.5 °C warming is a problem. Far more people die from extreme cold than from extreme heat. This means fewer people will die from extreme temperatures with moderate warming. Dr Willlian Happer from the CO2 Coalition will be touring NZ, thanks to Groundswell and the Methane Science, starting 4 Dec in Hamilton.
We also have a severe wind crisis.
If you truly believe all this bollocks, good on you.
Climate is ever changing - so what.
Show us some proof of a 'crisis' that has suddenly appeared in the last few decades?
A few decades does not even register in the hiostory of the planet.
If it's CO2 that's an issue (funny we don't hear so much aboiut that lately), man is responsible for the creation of around 3% of the planet's total.
So, if we could somehow cut that in half, that's sweet fanny adams in the over all scheme of things.
At school a long time ago I learnt that plants suck in CO2 and produce oxygen from that.
Obviously bullshit from our 'old' education system.
If CO2 is bad, what is the ideal level?
If it's zero%, we all die.
We look forward to your response 'anonymous'. (Could you perhaps add you dob to that to differentiate you from all the other 'anonymouses')
And please don't say 'scientists say......'
Mean while the planet is greening thanks to slight increases in CO2, plant food.
All the omg, gotta keep it 1.5 people - I have one word for you, volcanos
How do your suspect models deal with that??
They are my comments above re wind crisis etc.
After criticising all the 'anonymous' posters, I accidently posted using that nom de plume myself.
I've aslways been ihcpcoro, but that now apparently has to be entered every time I post, where it used to be the default for me.
Moderator, can you assist?
It would be great to be able to edit out finger troubles etc after posting
Thanks.
International emissions from aeroplanes are NOT identified in any emission targets for any country . HDPA creates more gas personally bloging about non events, like aeroplane emissions .
I would remain anonymous to Anonymous 7.38am. You are defending the greatest lie ever told. A lie that will bankrupt the West eventually.
Ihcporo, I am no expert on ICT (quite the opposite, unfortunately) but will note that when I hit the button enabling me to comment the comment-to-be is headed "Comment as" followed by whatever name you have been using when logging in, failing which you can click on the little arrow and enter a new or different name.
Water levels are rising in Nauru due to sea-level rise, a direct impact of climate change. The rate of sea-level rise around Nauru is faster than the global average, and the country’s low-lying coastal areas, where most of the population and infrastructure are located, are vulnerable to increased coastal flooding and erosion. This rising water threatens homes, infrastructure, and food security, while more frequent droughts also put pressure on the country's freshwater supply.
I see your volcanoes and suggest you take a look at what is happening with another word: permafrost. And here’s another word: research. It doesn’t mean googling for opinions that align with your own, it means looking at real scientific data and studies.
The concern is not that climate is changing, but that it is changing too quickly due to human activity, making adaptation difficult for both ecosystems and human societies. This rapid change leads to severe consequences like intensified extreme weather, rising sea levels, food and water scarcity, and threats to human health and livelihoods, creating a global crisis.
Informed people look at the outputs from scientific studies. If they want to challenge them, they analyse and critique the methodology. These things require focus, intelligence, and effort.
Other, lazier, people throw reckons onto the internet with strawman, off topic, and attack-the-person-not-the-substance arguments.
climate has always changed due to natural causes, and historic temperature fluctuations involved CO2 as a feedback rather than the initial trigger. However, the current rapid warming is largely caused by anthropogenic CO2 emissions, occurring much faster than past natural changes, posing significant risks. The implication that current warming is just natural "fits and starts" or due to low CO2 is not supported by the totality of evidence.
Dr. William Happer, a physicist holds views that challenge the scientific consensus on climate change. He argues that increased atmospheric CO2 will benefit plants and that moderate warming may not be harmful. However, Happer is not a climate scientist, and his positions are disputed by the vast majority of climate researchers. The CO2 Coalition, which he leads, promotes messages that more CO2 is beneficial, but these claims are contradicted by extensive scientific evidence showing that the overall effects of rising CO2 and warming are harmful to ecosystems, agriculture, and human health.
Regarding the claim that far more people die from extreme cold than extreme heat and thus moderate warming could reduce death rates: While it is true historically cold weather has caused many fatalities, rising global temperatures also increase risks such as heatwaves, wildfires, extreme weather events, droughts, and spread of diseases.
Anonymous at 1106 - there is no such entity as "scientific consensus" which is an oxymoron. If there was we'd still be living in the Dark Ages. There was a consensus that the earth was at the centre of the solar system, that it was flat, that the atomic theory was nonsense, that the germ theory of disease was so ridiculous as to be unbelievable, that gravity bends light couldn't be correct and so on.
William Happer is a physicist - that's hard core science, not "climate science", which seems to be whatever the proponents want it to be as long as everyone labelled a "climate scientist" agrees with all the other "climate scientists". It doesn't matter if you've got a PhD and if your stuff is published in a peer reviewed journal. What matters is whether it withstands critical reasoning. It only takes one contrary observation to invalidate a scientific hypothesis and then it's back to the drawing (thinking) board. The CO2 hypothesis has a few holes in it which have been well described. Time to think outside the CO2 box.
People who study the weather do so in Depts of Physics as meteorology comes under atmospheric physics. People who study climate do so in Depts of Geography one specialisation in which is climatology and a subspecialisation is palaeoclimatology.
So we can have PhD X whose doctorate was in climatology and is referred to as a 'climate scientist' without even having graduated from a Faculty of Science, while PhD Y graduated in atmospheric physics from a Dept of Physics but is not recognised by most people as a 'climate scientist'.
Anon 305 is dead right - forget about the fancy (and misleading) labels and confine your attention to the empirical data.
I am not quite with Anon 305 about the 'scientific consensus' bit, though - the term does not necessarily connote firm conclusions having been reached. But that's more semantic nitpicking...... boring.
“It only takes one contrary observation to invalidate a scientific hypothesis” - hence Dr Happer’s grift can be dismissed.
“ t only takes one contrary observation to invalidate a scientific hypothesis” - this statement is from someone who doesn’t understand science. I will explain, you’ll need to bring your attention span!
The notion that a single contrary observation invalidates a scientific hypothesis misses important nuance and depth found in the philosophy and practice of science. While Karl Popper's principle of falsifiability asserts that a hypothesis must be disprovable by at least one possible observation to be scientific, the real-world application is more complex.
The Duhem-Quine thesis highlights that no hypothesis is tested in isolation, since empirical tests rely on background assumptions. Therefore, a single contradictory result may not solely invalidate the main hypothesis but can also challenge auxiliary assumptions or experimental conditions, causing ambiguity about what exactly is falsified.
Scientists often modify or extend hypotheses in response to contrary evidence, a practice called "research programmes" by Imre Lakatos. These modifications can defend a hypothesis from falsification by adjusting it to accommodate new data, so falsification is rarely a simple one-step process.
The strength and specificity of hypotheses matter. More precise, risky predictions bring clearer falsification opportunities, while broad or vague hypotheses are harder to falsify conclusively. Scientific progress often occurs through competing hypotheses being tested against one another rather than straightforward falsification.
The idea of falsification as a definitive test is also challenged by the complexities of scientific measurement, interpretation, and theory-laden observation. Experimental results are not mere facts but are interpreted through webs of theories, making singular refutation more difficult in practice than in principle.
In sum, while logically one contrary observation can invalidate a hypothesis, in scientific practice falsification is a nuanced, iterative process involving background assumptions, hypothesis adjustment, and interpretation within broader theoretical frameworks. Hence, scientific hypotheses are subjected to robust debate and refinement rather than immediate dismissal upon a single contrary observation.
Anon 3:05pm says that climate science “seems to be whatever the proponents want it to be as long as everyone labelled a "climate scientist" agrees with all the other "climate scientists". This is patently false and is not anything that anyone is even suggesting.
The idea that climate science is simply "everyone agreeing" ignores how science actually works. The scientific consensus on climate change has developed over decades through rigorous testing, evaluation, and replication of evidence by thousands of independent scientists from different disciplines worldwide.
It is not a vote or a popularity contest but the result of careful review and synthesis of data, where alternative explanations are tested and discarded if they don't fit observations. The consensus emerges because the evidence overwhelmingly supports the conclusion that human activities are driving global warming, not because scientists blindly agree with each other.
Suggesting otherwise is a complete misunderstanding of the scientific process.
Why is it that Nauru and other small islands seem be the ones with rising sea levels? Why isn't every country affected? The answer could be that a lot of these island are coral atolls and are slowly subsiding due to natural causes? Any way considering all the tides, cyclones, anticyclones and all the other weather events going on, trying to measure 'average' sea water level is like trying to herd cats
When you are talking about 1 year, you are correct, but it is different for a decade.
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