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COP24: Too little, but hopefully not too late

A day late, the UN COP24 cli­mate change sum­mit closed Sat­ur­day evening in Ka­tow­ice, leav­ing a bit­ter­sweet af­ter­taste for en­vi­ron­men­tal cam­paign­ers. A ten­u­ous pos­i­tive: The rep­re­sen­ta­tives of 200 coun­tries (and the EU) man­aged to ap­prove rules to put the 2015 Paris ac­cord into prac­tice – which aims to keep global tem­per­a­ture in­creases within 2 de­grees of those of the pre-in­dus­trial era. But the news was mostly neg­a­tive, de­spite what the or­gan­is­ers might say. Yes­ter­day NGOs, sci­en­tists and en­vi­ron­men­tal­ists de­nounced the ac­cord’s lack of am­bi­tion to re­duce green­house gas emis­sions by 2025, the fact that the sum­mit yet again made no de­ci­sion about car­bon mar­kets (upon which coun­tries would be able to trade quo­tas for pol­lut­ing gas emis­sions), not to men­tion the fact that the pres­sure from the U.S.A., Saudi Ara­bia, Rus­sia and Kuwait re­sulted in a de­cid­edly weak sum­mit state­ment. Green­peace went so far as ques­tion­ing the “lead­er­ship ca­pac­ity” of the sum­mit’s Pol­ish pres­i­dency, which in the end, had to be “res­cued” by UN ne­go­tia­tors. Two months ago, the In­ter­gov­ern­men­tal Panel on Cli­mate Change warned that global heat­ing of only 1.5 de­grees would cause ris­ing sea lev­els, ex­tinc­tion of species, drought, floods, storms and heat­waves which would threaten global sta­bil­ity.

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