Climate Change News’ Kevin Rudd, who is a former Australian Prime Minister (2007-10, 2013) and Foreign Minister (2010-12), or whomever wrote the headline, puts in a qualifier so the Cult of Climastrology can scaremonger about 2021 being the last chance, just like it was in 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, all the way back to around 1998
2020 may be ‘last opportunity’ to limit warming to 1.5°C
While it’s unfair to describe the Madrid climate change conference in December as a complete failure, there is no sugar-coating the reality that it achieved much, much less than what the people and planet need to avoid catastrophic climate change this century.
It’s especially painful to acknowledge that my country, Australia, shares a lot of the blame for the outcome.
The current government’s insistence on using so-called “Kyoto credits†(carried over from my own period in office when we did take action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions) towards the implementation of their lacklustre Paris target, only sowed division and disharmony at the talks. (snip)
But now is not the time to simply reflect on what’s been done. We must quickly regroup in the knowledge that this coming year will be the most important year for climate action for a long time.
You see, a decade ago, in the wake of the Copenhagen talks in 2009, the usual suspects were eager to seize on the failure to agree substantial top-down emissions cuts.
The usual suspects, like Australia and the United States, who aren’t hot to implement Progressivism (nice Fascism). Who do not want a high taxation Authoritarian government system dominating their citizens.
Nevertheless, the scale of the task is still of biblical proportions. While more than 100 countries have now pledged to enhance their Paris targets by the end of this year and develop longer-term plans to reach net-zero emissions by mid-century, this still doesn’t include enough of the world’s biggest emitters.
As UN Secretary-General António Guterres has rightly identified, persuading these big emitters is a top priority for 2020. His decision to convene an event to take stock of the summit of world leaders he hosted last September will help.
Biblical! Remember, not a cult.
Above all, this means acting to keep global temperature increases below the 1.5°C guardrail that Maldivian president Mohamed Nasheed and I first proposed at Copenhagen. And, as the science tells us, this year might be the last opportunity to do that.
Good thing there won’t be 20,000 or so climate conference attendees heading to Glasglow in fossil fueled vehicles and private jets next December, right? And then they will tell us 2021 is our last chance.
So, did Klaus Schwab arrive at #WEF20 by private jet, the way so many others did? https://t.co/X76Ed3CsOI #Davos #Davos2020
When it comes to #ClimateChange, the Patricians want to set rules for the plebeians, but not for themselves. https://t.co/XHNEujmFya
— Dana Pico (@Dana_TFSJ) January 21, 2020
I remain fascinated by all the people who have apparently heard about planet doom in the next ten years, but do not have the interest? concern? panic? to actually go so ar as to study up, and read what the really qualified scientists (as opposed to those who became climatologists when the feds started giving out grants to whoever could write a good grant proposal. If there’s a deadly disease going around, would you just start wearing a face mask or try to find out what it is and what the likelihood of encountering it might be?
And in your efforts to find out something, would you choose to listen to a sixteen year old kid? Boggles the mind.