Moon(-bat)

Another pointless gab-fest with a carbon footprint the size of Liechtenstein will end without any agreement, predicts UN head Ban Ki-moon(-bat). The economies of the world will be spared, for the time being at least, from the ravages of a pointless carbon tax.

UNITED Nations chief Ban Ki-moon has voiced doubts that member states can reach a new global climate change agreement in December at a conference in Mexico.

Mr Ban, who pushed hard for a deal during the 2009 conference in Copenhagen, suggested that a better approach might consist of small steps in separate fields that build towards wider consensus rather than aiming for a sweeping pact.

”Climate change, I think, has been making progress, even though we have not reached such a point where we will have a globally agreed, comprehensive deal,” he said. (source)

Another bullet dodged.

UN: more hot air than a ballooning festival

Which is better than “moving forward”, isn’t is Julia? Did you know climate talks were going on currently? No, neither did I. But given that the UN is just one big gab-fest, you can be pretty sure that any week of the year there will be some climate talks going on somewhere! Fortunately, however, things aren’t going too well:

UN climate talks tasked with curbing the threat of global warming are backsliding, delegates said at the close of a week-long session in Bonn.

Record global temperatures, forest fires in Russia, lethal floods in Pakistan “are all consistent with the kind of changes we could expect from climate change, and they will get worse if we don’t act quickly,” said US negotiator Jonathan Pershing. [In other words, weather isn’t climate, except when we say it is]

“Unfortunately, what we have seen over and over this week is that some countries are walking back from the progress made in Copenhagen,” he told journalists, referring to the 11th-hour accord hammered out at the climate summit in December.

That agreement enshrined the goal of capping the increase of global temperatures at 2.0 degrees, but did not muster the commitments needed to attain it.

It also pledged long-term financing to help poor countries green their economies and cope with consequences of climate change, without specifying where the money would come from.

Dessima Williams of Grenada, speaking for the 43-nation Association of Small Island States, said she was “greatly concerned” by the slow pace of the talks.

“The situation on the ground for all our countries is worsening,” she said at a press conference. (source)

Given that the Copenhagen Accord was worth less than the paper it was printed on, sliding back from that is pretty desperate! At least Western economies will be spared for a little while longer.

Keep up the good work!

Clearly wishing he was somewhere else

Which is obviously good news. The longer it takes for the UN to reach a pointless “climate deal” the more likely it is that the whole climate edifice will have crumbled to dust. But Yvo de Boer, who’s clearly in Prozac mode at the thought of escaping the UN’s climate bureaucracy is trying to spin it as some kind of progress:

A new round of climate talks has ended with rich and poor countries both sharply criticising a new text meant to pave the way toward a deal to halt global warming.

Still, the United Nations says progress has been made at the two-week meeting in Bonn.

“This, all in all, is a big step forward, making much more possible in Cancun,” UN climate chief Yvo de Boer said on Friday, referring to the next major climate summit in Mexico at the end of the year.

In Bonn, negotiators from 185 countries tried to revive efforts for a global treaty to fight climate change after the disappointing UN summit in Copenhagen in December.

Summing up the talks, the chair of a negotiating group, Margaret Mukahanana-Sangarwe, presented a compromise text on all major issues of a climate treaty which was meant to bridge some of the differences between rich and poor nations and to become the basis for further negotiations.

However, delegates from countries including the United States, China, India, Brazil and Pakistan rejected the text in a floor debate.

Bolivian ambassador Pablo Solon told reporters the document favours developed countries and incorporates too much of the so-called Copenhagen Accord, a political declaration brokered by President Barack Obama in the Danish capital.

“This is not a basis for negotiations,” Solon said. “We are in the middle of a very complicated situation.”

Environmental groups also were not impressed. [When are they ever?]

“This text has moved very little,” Wendel Trio of Greenpeace told reporters.

“On content, we don’t see the progress we need,” said Antje von Broock of Friends of the Earth.

Business as usual, then.

Read it here.

Enough already!

If we’re unlucky enough to get one at all. So remarks outgoing UN climate chief Yvo de Boer as the latest gab-fest in Bonn enters its second week:

It was hoped that by June 11, the 182 delegations taking part would agree on a draft agreement to be signed at the next major meeting in Cancun, Mexico next December.

However, Mr de Boer, says he doesn’t believe developing and industrialised countries will reach a meaningful agreement in time.

“I don’t see the process delivering adequate mitigation targets in the next decade,” he said.

“What we have on the table now from industrialised countries takes you to about 13 or 14 per cent below 1990 levels, and clearly we need to move beyond that, so I think that in this process we will need a number of steps and phases to get to that ultimate response, but I am confident we will get there in the longer run.“

Fortunately I don’t share your confidence. With luck, in the next ten years, it will be apparent that man-made CO2 plays a minor role in climate, dwarfed by natural drivers and suppressed by low climate sensitivity, and the whole emissions reduction hysteria will be looked back on as a rather quaint episode in humanity’s history.

Read it here.