Long Live the COPs! By Gwynne Dyer 13 December 2023 The poet Horace foreshadowed the COP28 climate summit by more than 2,000 years when he wrote “Mountains will labour. What’s born? A ridiculous mouse!” A mouse that couldn’t bring itself to speak of “phasing out” fossil fuels, but squeaked instead about “transitioning away” from them. The mighty struggle over precisely which set of weasel words to use is over for another year, and everybody will go home happy knowing that they have kept global warming from exceeding 1.5 degrees C for another year. Except, of course, for the large proportion of the delegates who secretly know that battle has already been fought and lost.The temperature in Sydney, Australia hit 43.5C last Saturday, fifteen degrees higher than the usual highs in early summer. The northern hemisphere summer, when it arrives, will also surpass all previous records, and the average global temperature for 2024 as a whole will almost certainly exceed +1.5C. El Nino, which will go away again in a year or two, can be blamed for a bit of that, but we’ll be back up beyond +1.5 for good by 2029 or 2030. It’s therefore reasonable to suppose that by next year’s COP everybody will be frightened enough to vote for serious action. That will obviously require a radical departure from the system that was set up in the 1990s, when global warming first became an international priority. The Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) was then much more powerful than it is today, and it insisted that every decision of the COPs must be made by consensus. Even a single one of the 198 countries at this year’s COP (including all 13 OPEC members) could veto any decision. That explains the strangulated language of the final resolution: the fossil fuel lobby would have vetoed anything stronger. So the process continues to stumble forward very, very slowly – but next year will be different. I have long assumed that this veto will be overridden when deaths attributable to climate change reach between one and ten million a year, and we are probably in the lower end of that zone already. (It would be useful, by the way, if someone reputable set up a site to keep track of that number.) But the COPs need to be reformed, not replaced.In their current form they are a toothless wonder, but they still have value – for two reasons.....read on             https://gwynnedyer.com/2023/long-live-the-cops/