by Peter Koenig, New Eastern Outlook:

Does anyone know what COP25 stands for? Probably very few. Its unimportant. As unimportant as the whole roadshow itself. Just for the hell of it, for those who read this article, COP means Conference of the Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The 25 stands for the 25th year that such annual conferences have taken place – every year in another country – what a tourist bonanza for the hundreds, if not thousands of attendees and participants who travel – by air – many of them business class, to these most questionable, even useless conferences.

The first of the COP summits took place in Berlin, Germany, in March 1995. The COP’s Presidency rotates among the 5 UN recognized regions and so do the conferences – to make “eco-tourism” most of the time for the same UN and government bureaucrats and jokers more attractive. I can’t help thinking of the enormous cost of these conferences – travel, food, lodging and everything in between – for two weeks – in the case of COP25 Madrid (2-16 December 2019), two days more than planned, because after the scheduled two weeks no agreements were reached, so it was decided to add two days. Add to this all the preparatory meetings and related travels – tens of millions of dollars, possibly more, are spent for nothing, absolutely zilch, nada. That’s the officially recognized outcome at the end of the extended COP25 in Madrid – nothing.

There are UN staff, directors mostly, at the UN in Geneva and in New York, who earn huge salaries in the hundreds of thousands a year, for doing what? Some of them are directing their staff to preparing the extravagant but mostly useless COPs – and of course, they are also attending them. When I see monetary figures like this, and we are now talking of only one kind of UN conferences, it occurs to me that this is money stolen from the poor. It is taken from the very people whom the UN is committed by its Charter to help. – How many simple drinking water supply and sanitation systems could you build with all this money? How many millions of people could you serve with the money wasted for such conferences with safe drinking water and safe sanitation?

According to the WHO-UNICEF Joint Monitoring Program (JMP), some 2.1 billion people have no safe drinking water at home and more than twice this number lacks safe sanitation. At the same time, these agencies also monitor the death toll among less than 5-year-old children from unsafe water and sanitation, from the lack of hygiene, from diarrheal diseases – nearly 400,000 die per year. In addition, contaminated water and poor sanitation also contribute to the transmission of cholera, dysentery, hepatitis A and typhoid. This does not even take into account those who die due to a famine-reduced immune system.

Precious money deviated from the UN system by men-invented rather unproductive, but usually lush conferences – of which the COPs are just one category – could save millions of lives.

This is a real environmental issue, in fact more vital than just environment, it is environmental health. It is certainly competing in importance with the man-made CO2 issue. Climate change is happening, no doubt, it always did for the 4.5 billion years of Mother Earth’s existence. But the way the west is dealing with it is a sheer farce; no, it’s actually worse, much worse, it’s criminal, because it’s knowingly made into a commercial globalized profit-making enterprise. Knowingly, because the elite that pulls the strings behind these events – the same who finance Greta Thunberg – are well aware of what they are doing and why they are doing what they are doing. It helps none, but global corporate finance. Those who suffer most are the people living in the Global South which is, as with most natural disasters, most affected by naturally occurring climate change.

It’s still worse, because the western propaganda message promises actions towards saving the world from climate change which are entirely deceptive. So, the poor are again being lied to. They are being lured into making huge investments with huge loans – the World Bank, IMF and bilateral lending institutions, let alone Wall Street, stand ready – loans and interest which the borrowing countries have to repay. If they can’t, they have to give their collateral, meaning, let the west privatize their public services and assets, and grab their natural resources for a pittance. That’s how it works – the west preventing climate change from happening.

Not to mention the enormous arrogance with which the eminent COP attendees pretend humans can control Mother Earth’s temperature fluctuations, i.e. to less than 2 degree C. Or arguing, whether “we” (almighty humans) should agree on limiting a temperature rise in the next 30 or 50 or 100 years to 2 or 3 degrees C, exceeds any reasonable level of human absurdity and conceit. Our assumed power over nature is at best ridiculous.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the United Nations body for assessing the science related to climate change. IPCC has 195 members and some 2000 scientists who contribute to IPCC’s work. Any serious scientist knows that the main cause for climate change are variations of solar activities, but they sell us CO2 as chief villain, knowing well, that the world, especially the western world, functioning under a turbo-neoliberal corporate and finance driven capitalist system, based on ‘eternal’ consumption and eternal growth – which drives the ever-growing profit margins – will not change its behavior vis-à-vis nature, unless it collapses under its own weight. Not with a million COPs it will change its profit-making thinking and business motives. – These mostly famous scientists know it. If they don’t follow the line, they risk losing their reputation and, who knows, their jobs?

Ice core records studied by scientists, combined with many types of proxy records to reconstruct past atmospheres and environmental conditions, back from thousands to many millions of years, suggest that climate changes in large cycles, and within them, in smaller cycles. For example, it appears that between 2.6 and 5.3 million years ago, during the Pliocene Epoch, CO2 levels were comparable to those of today. Models suggest global temperatures were 3 to 4 degrees C warmer than pre-industrial levels.

Similar patterns were repeated 400,000 to 600,000 years ago. What is important to notice though, is that temperatures rise first, followed by CO2 levels which is logical, since the sun is hearting the earth. It is the complete opposite to what today’s climate gurus are telling us. In the second half of the 1900s, NASA studied during some 30 years temperature fluctuations in the Pacific Ocean, investigating causes and effects of El Niño. The result was similar; the higher the water temperature of the Pacific, the more CO2 was released by the sea into the atmosphere. High CO2 levels are eventually followed by lower temperatures.

Read More @ Journal-NEO.org