Guest essay by Eric Worrall
UN officials have decided it is too dangerous to hold in person climate change talks in 2020.
No UN climate talks to be held in 2020, as interim meeting postponed again
Published on 23/06/2020, 10:29am
Health restrictions by the German authorities left no alternative but to defer negotiations planned for October, UN Climate Change said
By Chloé Farand
There will be no UN climate negotiations this year, after preparatory talks scheduled in October have been postponed a second time into 2021.
On Monday evening, top climate diplomats decided the intersessional meeting which happens every year between UN climate summits in Bonn, Germany, where UN Climate Change is headquartered, would not be able to take place on the proposed dates of 4-12 October. A new date for the meeting is yet to be decided.
The meeting, initially scheduled in June, was tentatively moved to Octoberafter the coronavirus pandemic made it too risky to hold international conferences. The next major summit, Cop26 in Glasgow, UK, has been pushed back to 1-12 November 2021.
The UN Climate Change bureau, which is constituted of 11 climate diplomats from around the world, met at short notice on Monday after the German government announced last week it would extend a ban on large events until at least the end of October, to avoid a new wave of coronavirus infection.
In a statement, UN Climate Change secretariat said the decision was based on the need to ensure “the well-being and safety of all involved under the current travel restrictions and guidelines from local German health authorities”.
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Read more: https://www.climatechangenews.com/2020/06/23/no-un-climate-talks-held-2020-interim-meeting-postponed/
The UN Press release;
UN CLIMATE PRESS RELEASE / 22 JUN, 2020 COP Bureau Reschedules UNFCCC Subsidiary Body Meetings to 2021
Bonn, 23 June 2020 – At a virtual meeting yesterday, the Bureau of the Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC decided to postpone the UN Climate Change meetings of the Subsidiary Bodies (SB52) until next year.
The meetings are to take place in the World Conference Centre in Bonn, Germany at a date which has yet to be decided.
The decision by the Bureau was based on the need to ensure not only full inclusion and participation, but the well-being and safety of all involved under the current travel restrictions and guidelines from local German health authorities in relation to the global health crisis around COVID-19.
The 11 members of the Bureau are nominated by each of the five United Nations regional groups and Small Island Developing States and provide advice and guidance regarding the ongoing work under the Convention, the Kyoto Protocol, and the Paris Agreement, the organization of their sessions and the relevant support by the UN Climate Change secretariat.
The members of the Bureau expressed their concern and regret regarding the situation but stated that there is no alternative to the decision.
The COP Presidencies of Chile and the UK, the Subsidiary Bodies (SB) Chairs and the UN Climate Change secretariat pledged that they will do everything to drive the UN climate change process forward despite the adverse circumstances.
The UN Climate Change secretariat and the SB Chairs will soon make proposals that will be sent to the members of the Bureau in order to decide on the specific plan going forward towards COP26.
Since the outbreak of the pandemic, several initiatives have been launched in order to drive momentum, showcase continuing climate action and urge greater climate ambition from all segments of society.
For example earlier this month, a series of online events were successfully conducted under the guidance of the Chairs of the UNFCCC’s Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice and the Subsidiary Body for Implementation and with the support of the UNFCCC secretariat, the June Momentum for Climate Change.
“COVID-19 is an exceptional challenge impacting the lives of billions,” said UNFCCC Executive Secretary Patricia Espinosa, “but it has not put an end to climate change which continues to accelerate, it continues to be an existential threat and we must therefore, continue to take collective, multilateral action at a global scale to address it. It has changed the way we work, but it has not stopped it.”
COP25 President Minister Carolina Schmidt from Chile said: “Due to the global effects that COVID-19 continues to cause and taking note of the measures put in place by the German government, the COP Bureau decided to reschedule the UN Climate Change meetings of the Subsidiary Bodies. This is a necessary measure to protect all attending participants, delegates and observers.
Meanwhile, we will continue accelerating and foster the climate action agenda. This includes a continued dialogue with countries to present enhanced Nationally Determined Contributions during this year 2020, as well as the formulation of a clear roadmap towards COP26.”
COP26 President-Designate and Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Alok Sharma said: “While it is disappointing that the Bonn Subsidiary Body October meetings will no longer take place as planned, we appreciate that this is for the right reasons. Despite this postponement we must not lose momentum in our work to accelerate global climate action.
We will continue our close collaboration with the UNFCCC, COP25 Presidency Chile, the Subsidiary Body Chairs and our international partners to deliver a successful, ambitious COP in partnership with Italy in the U.K. next year.”
In May of this year, the Bureau of the Conference of the Parties, with the UK and its Italian partners agreed that the new dates for the COP26 UN Climate Change Conference are to be between 1 and 12 November 2021, in Glasgow.
About the UNFCCC
With 197 Parties, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) has near universal membership and is the parent treaty of the 2015 Paris Climate Change Agreement. The main aim of the Paris Agreement is to keep a global average temperature rise this century well below 2 degrees Celsius and to drive efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. The UNFCCC is also the parent treaty of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. The ultimate objective of all agreements under the UNFCCC is to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that will prevent dangerous human interference with the climate system, in a time frame which allows ecosystems to adapt naturally and enables sustainable development.For media enquiries, please contact:
Alexander Saier
Chief, Communications and Knowledge
(mobile) +49 172 179 8835; E-mail: asaier(at)unfccc.intUNFCCC Press Office: press(at)unfccc.int
Source: https://unfccc.int/news/cop-bureau-reschedules-unfccc-subsidiary-body-meetings-to-2021
In my opinion the United Nations has just blown the credibility of the alleged climate crisis.
The UN told us the world is on fire, that we cannot delay acting on climate change, but now we know that “fire” is not urgent enough to convince UN delegates to expose themselves to personal risk.
Ever heard of Zoom?
A city 3000 miles away with 5 star hotels and generous expenses claimable ?
I thought Zoom meant getting a close look at something, not getting as far away as possible for as long as possible with someone else paying for it.
Ah, so at last they are being honest about the fundamental aims and objectives. They are not trying to understand climate, they are not trying to estimate the human effects of climate. All that is ASSUMED from the start. Their “ultimate objective” is to reduce CO2. End of story.
Gore is pissed off with the “oil men” who stole his presidency and is out to take revenge on the entire FF industry, the well being of the rest of humanity is just collateral damage in his attempt to avenge his ego.
A so-so movie staring Tim Allen?
It was a rocket shaped ice lolly in the UK during my childhood. Nice too.
“UN officials have decided it is too dangerous to hold in person climate change talks in 2020.”
My first thought is that by postponing the conference to 2021 they may also be hoping the US elects Joe Biden who will be more amenable to their agenda.
Well of course…the EU will be banning Americans and letting everyone else except Russians and Brazilians in…even letting Chinese in! What’s the point of a UN conference if you’re going to ban the country that you will be asking money from?
It’s time to pull all our troops and assets out of Germany and the other ungrateful EU countries that have been openly hostile to the US for many years now. Let them ask China to defend them from big bad Russia.
Poland is now on the frontline anyway with Russia. Russian ground forces moving through Belarus open a land corridor to Kaliningrad though Lithuania puts Poland in the strategic defensive positon to stop Russia. NATO has been planning and preparing for Russia to start some kind of pretext to invasion via Little Green Men operations and how to defend Lithuaina and beefing up US forces in Eastern Poland is high on that list.
The Poles are being much more friendly to the US and even to Trump because they see this “national interests” first is the only way to counter the globalism that is threatening to swallow up individual countries in Europe. The globalist movement from the elites of Europe are essentially bringing back the Iron Curtain of a 21st Century version of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact agreement of division between totalitarian interests within the EU and a Russian dictator.
I love the Poles, they really know how to stand their ground. The Soviets might have conquered them with overwhelming force, but they still had to compromise with them, allow Catholic services for Polish units in the Soviet military.
Russia is a paper bear, it has no chance of success in an attack on western Europe. Russia does not have the staying power of a prolonged offesive, and they know it. Such a war would be fought somewhere in the eastern part of poland, where there are no strategic prizes to be had for Russia. It would only bankrupt the nation, creating a popular discontent which would be a grave danger to the regime. The only theater where Russia can be a serious threat is the Arctic / North Atlantic.
Someone else once said “We have only to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down”. They were wrong. Despite the Afghanistan embarrassment I’m not quite ready to write off Russian military prowess.
Having said that they seem especially vulnerable to a determined counter offensive. A high risk deep penetration mission to wreck a few Siberian pipelines might rattle them.
You may be right, but there’s one factor more important than anything else. The Russian population has been shrinking for decades. That means there are no surplus men of fighting age left, a prerequisite for an expansion driven conquest. It will be woman who are the break on adventures. Too many would lose the only son or grandson they have and they won’t take that lightly.
The Chinese however, after decades of a one child policy and female infanticide have a surplus of some 100 million males, many of fighting age. Don’t be distracted by the smiles, that’s where the real threat is.
Hi Eric, I certainly don’t write off Russian military capacity. But the point is that only a total victory in Europe will make sense, considering the huge resources needed for such a campaign, and if it becomes a more or less stagnant battle in eastern Poland or Byelorussia, it is in reality a defeat. During the cold war, there was a realistic chance of a Soviet breakthrough to strategic vital areas, like the Rhine. Such prizes are out of reach today, and the Russians know it very well.
The whole idea of a Russian aggression is BS. They have neither the means nor the intention of a conventional assault on any part of Europe. The only risk is US encroachment ever nearer to the Russian border installing anti-missile missiles in an attempt to create a possible first strike scenario. That is incredibly destabilising and risky.
A much more sensible approach would be useful cooperation on common issues which Trump wanted to do before the deep state undermined his presidency and started the RussiaGate fiasco.
“During the cold war, there was a realistic chance of a Soviet breakthrough to strategic vital areas, like the Rhine.”
A Russian armored breakthrough in Germany would have been met with nuclear weapons. When I was stationed at Wildflicken, Germany, a NATO nuclear base, we used to regularly practice evacuating the area in anticipation of a Russian nuclear strike on the base.
We would have replied with nuclear weapons, and the Russian armored attack would have been stopped in its tracks, short of its goal. That was our job: Stopping any Russian attack into Germany through the Fulda Gap.
They don’t have to attack. The Germans want to surrender without even being asked. Why have they gutted their armed forces? Why have they agreed to Nordstream II.
$35/bbl oil is devastating to Russia and Putin’s military.
At $40/bbl they are just getting by in stasis.
$55/bbl would make Russia dangerous again.
So between my wanting West Texas/Permian shale oil to MAGA, I’m torn as to what high oil prices allows for Kremlin bad behavior.
Many countries will have travel restrictions in place for the rest of the year. And those that allow it are imposing 14 day quarantines on travellers before they can go out into public. So the Fear Mongering Industry has created two competing, mutually exclusive scare-monger artifices.
Their “Defeat Climate Change” via unified global action where all the parties come together in the COP process and coordinated by the UNFCCC skimming a piece-of-the-action is mutually incompatible with the “Shutdown of the World Economy” for a cold virus scare monger story. And with most Western countries not coming forth with climate aid donations to the UNFCCC, this action of delaying the 2020 meetings to 2021 likely is face-saving way to save dwindling cash reserves.
And remember this cancel trend started before the COVID epidemic. After mass protests in Santiago brought security questions into play, Chile has to cancel it last fall, and hastily moved to Madrid. That had to be quite expensive to rebook many of those venues in Madrid on short notice.
“Chile cancels climate and Apec summits amid mass protests”
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-50233678
Those Chilean Protests that were originally said to be triggered by climate policies that raised the price of public transportation, that then spiraled into other areas of grievances. Sound familiar?
“This is a necessary measure to protect all attending participants, delegates and observers.” Those are ones to protect. Who cares for the man on the street?
Wuhan Virus lockdown with no church assemblies—until BLM riots are OK with blue states.
AGW urgent crisis until Wuhan virus, so AGWC boondoggles indefinitely deferred. Climate warriors sad that their junkets are deferred.
The whole lot of them tipped their hand fully when the rioting started in the US- It is crystal clear to anyone with a pulse by now that Climate Change is a fraud perpetrated to try and install an UN-elected and unaccountable totalitarian government. The last desperate chance to try and defeat Trump has made them show their hands.
Of course if you read up on it that was a known fact many years ago that CO2 was invented as a phony villain to attempt to create a public scare.
Time to let all the useful idiots they have been duped…
“science” has been badly abused and may take a long time to recover from this fraud.
It’s an existential crisis, demanding immediate attention to halt the dire effects of Climate Change! But let’s put it off until next year, when socialist distancing ends and we can all meet in Thailand.. or Tuvalu! Yeah – That’s the Ticket!
Are there any caves near Bonn, would be a fitting venue to offset the carbon generated from all the delegates flying in.
They could just all sit there in the dark and chant “Om, Om, Om”.
Finally some good news! 😉
cheered me up too;-)
by the time its due to come round hopefully enough funding etc is withdrawn due to covidcrashing economies money needed for REAL use for helping humanity
Dis viral thingy might just have a useful side after all 🙂
The longer this climate boondoggle continues the less people pay attention. Same same every year. The prelude up to the actual meeting is punctuated with press releases of new cataclysmic phenomena caused by using fossil fuels. They have grand meetings where the virtue signaling is so thick you can walk on it. The USA is always the whipping boy despite the fact they have done more to reduce the dastardly CO2 than probably all countries combined. Mea culpa from countries that didn’t make their goals …. which is all of them ….. followed by new promises that everyone knows full well will not, and can not, be met. More derision of Western industrial powers that caused AGW to begin with flow freely. Developing countries want to know why they haven’t received the money they were promised and once again it’s the West’s fault. At the end all the fellow travelers depart with promises of receiving or giving that are vapor and nothing changes.
Conference couldn’t have been that important if it’s this easy to delay it.
If it’s actually important, they could do what the rest of the world and conduct the meeting online.
“The main aim of the Paris Agreement is to keep a global average temperature rise this century well below 2 degrees Celsius….”
I thought it was to keep it under 2 C rise by 2050.
What is the present decadal global average temperature rise of –
(1) The lower troposphere
(2) the oceans?
From what I can gauge the answers are
(1) 0.04 C. (From 2000 to 2013 there was no statistically significant warming and from January 2016 to 2018 NASA GISS shows a global cooling of 0.56 C).
(2) 0.04 C. (This figure is not clear from the Argo buoys which confuse us with “Zettajoules” of warming).
In both cases the warming is within the margin of error.
How are we on track to reach the 2 degrees Celsius by either date?
And no interest in online conferences, even to save the climate? Well what would you expect? The small African country of Guinea sent 406 delegates to COP 24 in Katowice. Can you imagine them Corona-tied to computer screens back home, with no UN-paid hotel rooms and restaurant dinners? Man made climate crises is a spectre, but the gravy train is very real.
“Guinea is sending 406 delegates this year, the Democratic Republic of Congo is there with 237 participants, and the Ivory Coast is sending 191 compatriots to Poland. The list of participants is available on the homepage of the conference as a pdf and is 1084 pages long.”
http://notrickszone.com/2018/12/11/cop24-in-large-part-an-expensive-taxpayer-funded-junket-for-third-world-delegates/
They should hold all climate related meetings over the Internet so as to reduce the unnecessary burning of fossil fuels and hence decrease the amount of additional CO2 that these meetings cause to be added to the atmosphere. The technology to do so is already in place.
It is good the climate conference was cancelled, because it would have released a lot of CO2, on an A to Z basis, with 20,000 “delegates” staying at 5 star hotels and flying in and out first class.
The climate will never stop changing if they can’t have their meetings .
Damn the oil and gas industry could have used the uptick demand side of the market.
Damn the entitled globalist could have spread their wealth ( I am mean their robbed, er redistributed, wealth around) to the people for they claim to be helping.
Just askin’…..
1) How much CO-2 will NOT be generated, with the conference cancelled (for now).
2) How many high-end hotel room-days will NOT be used?
3) How much Foi Gras will NOT be ordered and consumed?
4) How much Caviar will NOT be ordered and consumed?
5) (previously mentioned) Why haven’t all these supposed super-smart, world-leading intellectuals figured out how to hold the whole conference online?
6) Does the answer to (5) have anything to do with the answers to (2), (3), and (4)?
You forgot the most important one. No meeting in Glasgow in autumn will mean more whiskey for the rest of us.
“There will be no UN climate negotiations this year, after preparatory talks scheduled in October have been postponed a second time into 2021. ”
The last I heard Climate said “Nyet”, “No negotiation”
Drivel. Why is there no mention of the Figueres /Thunbergian Experiment – a radical deindustrialisation caused by the pandemic with a sharp fall in CO2 emissions. This will show up in the Hawaiian readings as a fall in atmospheric CO2. Oh, it hasn’nt? Oh dear. Oh dear. Quick fix the data or our case collapses.
I guess ‘catastrophic climate change’ will now be deferred by another year too.
Think of all that money that won’t change hands.
It’s odd that the rest of us have meetings via online services. This is not only because of COVID-19, but also for firms with multiple offices in far flung cities. I have taught programs in Eastern Europe via remote meeting technology. I have had routine meetings for years which involved at least some of the participants in other locations/countries.
It is such gross hypocrisy that the groups which want to limit OUR travel, can not (or are unwilling to) adopt the very technology which we use to achieve that move toward that goal.
“The ultimate objective of all agreements under the UNFCCC is to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that will prevent dangerous human interference with the climate system, ” [from the final para re the UNFCCC.]
But we are already suffering dangerous human interference with the climate system from all those climate activists and climate alarmists, and possibly a few ‘climate scientists’. Can someone stop them?
It is a bit cold here in Australia (admittedly it is winter) but can someone warm it up by about four degrees?
If you ever wondered about the makeup of the Yartz, at present struggling under Covid distancing with paying customers, here’s one Guy Sebastian getting the lefty purge/exorcism treatment for giving the nod to nowhere near enough handouts-
https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/australia/guy-sebastian-cancelled-by-twitter-mobs-after-supporting-scott-morrison/ar-BB15W2Xc