The climate conference is here again. Will we make any progress?

COP30 Delegates at session reviewing the 10 years since Paris. Photo – UN Climate Change/Kiara Worth

How we over-use the planet.

People have always tapped the resources offered by the environment around them to make a living. This, after all, is how all living things make their livings – plants tap the nutrients in the soil, water and sunlight to build organic matter; animals tap the plants and water to make different types of organic matter; and decomposing species, mostly minute, tap dead plants and animals to fulfill their own little lives.

At first, in the grand scheme of things, it did not matter much if one group of humans was profligate in its use of resources or was more frugal. Nor did it matter how we got rid of waste products. If a group exhausted the available resources, or polluted its environment with waste, it could move across the bay or up the next valley to obtain new resources in a new environment. Sometimes this would lead to contact with a neighboring group; such contact often resulted in battles and the subjugation of one group by another. From a whole of planet perspective, such events were trivial sideshows in the grand dance of using sunlight to move molecules into novel compounds that supported life.

But over time, we humans became ever more effective at using natural resources to make our lives more successful. As a result, we became more abundant. So abundant, in fact, that our use of resources began to alter the way the planetary dance proceeded.

The extent of this change in the planetary dance is mind-boggling yet rarely appreciated. Humans and their five or six species of domesticated animals now comprise 96% of all mammalian and avian biomass on the planet. All the whales, elephants, kangaroos, racoons, skunks, squirrels, mice, hummingbirds, warblers, woodpeckers, honeyeaters, owls, ibises and ostriches are crammed into the remaining 4%. This is just one of the ways in which we have altered the richness and biodiversity of the planet. In becoming so obscenely abundant we and our domesticated species have led to the loss of numerous species, the near loss of many other species, and the great reduction in numbers of individuals of other wild species. We’ve made the world measurably less wonderful.

Gone are the great flocks of passenger pigeons that filled the skies of North America from sun-up to sundown, the immense herds of bison that used to roam where corn and soybeans now flourish, and the cod that were so abundant in the Gulf of Maine that you could almost get from ship to shore by walking on their backs. Going are the swarms of insects that less than 25 years ago made driving in the North American summer an adventure broken by frequent stops to clean the windshield. Our great hollowing out of creation has proceeded silently year by year with most of us unaware it has been happening.

Along the way, the wastes we discarded had their own deleterious impacts on the environment. We managed to put far too many nutrients into our fields, which then washed into streams and rivers along with other organic wastes, nutrifying fresh waters and creating over 500 dead zones in coastal ocean waters around the world. We released other kinds of wastes through smokestacks, settlement ponds, and landfills, and we manufactured novel chemicals that once released proved very resistant to breaking down, contaminating soils, waters, air and living organisms. Many of these had deleterious impacts on life; DDT is now present in the breast milk of every human, and in all whales and dolphins.

As our numbers and economic activity grew further, our waste products began to change the atmosphere by the addition of CO₂, CH₄, NO_x and other greenhouse gases (GHGs). With that, we began to warm the planet at rates that had not been seen since the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), a brief period 55 million years ago when extensive volcanism resulted in a pulse of warm climate. PETM rivaled the toasty late Mesozoic a few million years earlier (global mean temperature around 20^oC compared to 15^oC now). In 2025, we continue to add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere and our climate continues to warm at this fastest rate ever although it is not quite so toasty yet.

Larder or garbage dump, it is still a finite planet

Clearly, humans have not been very good at living on a finite planet, although there are signs that we are beginning to understand our mistakes and the need to rectify them. The problem, of course, is that individual humans, or individual communities of humans cannot fix these global problems alone. To bring the climate back requires that we stop adding GHGs to the atmosphere and that we reduce the concentrations of GHGs already there. This cannot be done for a single nation unless we are going to somehow fence in the atmosphere. It has to be a global effort. And for the past 30 years, the international community has been meeting to try and negotiate a fair distribution of effort to wrestle climate back.

We are not trying to control climate; that is well beyond our capabilities. We are just trying to stop it continuing to warm in a way it had not been doing until very recently. For the 8000 years or so since agriculture began, we lived on a remarkably stable planet. There were warm years and cold ones, and different parts of the planet experienced different variations in climate. Some of these, such as the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age, very modest changes in average temperature over several decades in the North Atlantic and Europe, got fancy names. Today we have the ENSO or “el Niño – southern oscillation”, a modest change in average temperatures that cycles on a five to ten-year timescale. ENSO’s impact on climate is much less than the now 1.5^oC of increase in average global climate since pre-industrial times that we have created.

There are good reasons to avoid climate change. Our agriculture is adapted to our 8000 year-long stable climate. Warming and associated changes in precipitation will make regions once suitable for certain crops no longer suitable for them and other places formerly farmable no longer suitable for agriculture. Some parts of the planet are already prone to very hot dry weather in summer, and warming can push these places into ones where enormous numbers of humans will die during summer heat waves. Warming is already melting ice in glaciers as well as at the poles, and glacial ice provides the base flow of most of the planet’s major river systems. As glaciers disappear, rivers will be unable to sustain their flows during dry seasons. The melting of ice and the thermal expansion of water are causing sea levels to rise around the world. The rate of rise is increasing and projections of sea level at 2100 get higher each time the calculations are redone. I think it is worth reflecting on how high sea level has been in the past during climates little warmer than our own – all of our coastal cities are at risk of significant flooding and some will be inundated if warming is permitted to continue. I could go on, but I think it is obvious that we will be far better off if we stop stupidly polluting the atmosphere and try and bring climate back to what our civilization has been used to.

The Human Endeavor

Talking about the battle to bring climate change under control, forces us to recognize the form of the human endeavor (if we can dignify the muddled actions of a bunch of apes that way). This endeavor is a communal enterprise carrier out jointly but separately by a disparate array of some 200-odd nations each containing many people. Some nations are small and weak; a few are large and powerful. Some are major emitters of greenhouse gases; others emit trivial amounts of these pollutants. Some work well at communal endeavors; others prefer to forge their own paths.

Many of the leaders of these nations are exceedingly rich individuals for which environmental issues are more academic than real. They are surrounded by a growing number of other exceptionally rich individuals, who exert considerable influence on nations, are similarly insulated from the effects of environmental issues, and oftentimes seem more selfish than responsible. The many little people in each nation rarely have much say about national policies.

At present, humanity is caught up in a monumental struggle between those who would look after their own well-being, trampling on others to ensure their own success, and those who recognize that we are all stuck on a rocky orb hurtling through the universe and that it might be wise to find ways of working effectively together to take care of this place we share. This struggle can be seen among nations as well as among individuals. This struggle is apparent whenever we seek global solutions to global problems. It is unclear whether collaborative approaches will ultimately win.

And so we come to COP30

On November 10^th, in Belem, Brazil, the 30^th Conference of the Parties, aka COP30, aka climate change conference will commence. This year will be different to past years because of the absence of much governmental representation from the USA, the world’s second-largest emitter of greenhouse gases. Will there be real progress? Is real progress possible with a major emitter absent? Have these annual talk-fests lost their value altogether?

It is the nature of the United Nations that decisions are usually made by consensus among the member nations. It is the nature of nations that they rarely act entirely altruistically. Instead, each nation acts to secure as much of its own goals in any negotiation as it can. That any progress ever happens is due entirely to the fact that self-interests of nations are often complementary – especially when long-term interests are considered. Still, while it works, agreement by consensus can be very slow as each meeting minute, each supporting document, is scrutinized line by line to ensure each nation’s goals are being upheld.

And remember the numerous, super-rich, powerful men (and occasional women), those titans of industry who are not part of government but do influence government? They get involved on the sidelines of United Nations conferences, and they work hard to ensure that their own self-interests are upheld in the documents and the agreements that are painfully stitched together.

The Closing Plenary at COP28, when the world grudgingly agreed to an eventual phase-out of fossil fuels. Photo: UN Climate Change/Christopher Pike.

Why did it take until COP28, held in Dubai in 2023, for assembled nations to formally agree to an eventual phase-out of unabated use of all fossil fuels, our primary way of releasing GHGs? And why was the language around that agreement filled with wiggle words? Because the fossil fuel industry was heavily represented and nations that produce fossil fuels worked hard to minimize the force of the final compromise agreement.

It is possible that COP30, with the disruptive influence of the USA muted, may make real progress. It is also possible that it will end up much like the other 29 such conferences because there are plenty of nations and leaders outside the USA who will seek to avoid real action.

The UN process is slow and inherently weak. But it is also the only process we have if we want to effect global change in human behavior, and Belem 2025 is the latest time to try and make progress.

The current state of the climate

The world is lagging seriously in its commitments to reduce emissions although considerable progress has been made. In the weeks leading up to COP30, the UN Climate machine has been pumping out reports on different aspects of the current state of climate negotiations, and all of them repeat this same message – progress has been made but much more effort is required.

Climate Action Tracker is a valuable source of technically accurate but readily understood information on the global climate change battle.

If all the promises by nations are fulfilled, the world is currently on track for a warming of 2.1^oC by 2100 according to Climate Action Tracker. If we accept only those policies and actions already in place (not all the promises) warming is trending towards 2.7^oC by 2100. There really is substantial additional work needed. Furthermore, the commitments made by countries in the run-up to COP30 continue to be far too weak in the short term, meaning that the long-term goals are going to be more difficult to reach.

Of course, we don’t need to wade through all these reports and charts to realize this. Globally, the last ten years, 2015-2024, have been the ten warmest on record, and 2025 looks set to come in 2^nd or 3^rd warmest. Violent storms and serious droughts seem to be everywhere, and Hurricane Melissa hit Jamaica on October 28^th with winds up to 298km/h, the most powerful storm in that island’s history. According to a report in The Guardian, climate change is making hurricanes of this magnitude five times more likely than they used to be. In October, release by University of Exeter of the 2025 Global Tipping Point Report made headlines by announcing that coral reefs had now reached their tipping point with the worst global mass bleaching episode ever in 2023-2025. The report identified several other tipping points that could be on the near horizon as global temperatures climb. It used to be that tipping points were safely off in the future, but apparently not anymore. (Tipping points, technically, are points beyond which it is much more difficult to get back to the way things were before – once you start accelerating down the roller coaster track, it is hard to stop and climb back up.)

Bill Gates to our rescue

Naturally, the flurry of alarming climate news over the last several months is fueling a backlash of sorts. We can dismiss the ravings of a certain national leader at the UN General Assembly in September, when he referred to climate change as “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.” I am referring instead to the memo released by Bill Gates just hours before Melissa crashed into Jamaica. In it, he said that climate change was not an existential threat, which is true if you mean by existential the wiping out of human civilization.

Gates’ message was a bit more noble than it sounds. He was making the point that we can get fixated on cutting emissions (or not) but we must not neglect the need to provide for the health and well-being of the people, chiefly the poor, who will face the brunt of the impact. I can endorse his argument, but, naturally, his comments got picked up by the media and interpreted as no need to worry about whether or not we bring warming under control.

I do not know how relaxed Bill Gates is about climate change. He may be convinced that 2.7^oC or so of warming will not be too bad for most people, or he may be more cognizant of the many consequences of such warming. In his earlier book on climate change, he demonstrated substantial understanding of the science, but he also revealed an uncanny faith in our ability to engineer our way out of any problem. Humanity is unfortunately quite capable of creating problems we cannot repair – microplastics anyone?

I do know Bill Gates is one of the few billionaires genuinely committed to using a significant portion of his wealth to help less advantaged people (and in this way stands in marked contrast to that other American who called climate change a con job). And successive climate conferences have been struggling to get any small amount of funding promised by wealthy countries to assist less advantaged countries in their struggles to adapt to the changing climate so his reminder to not forget the disadvantaged is timely. But the way his memo was interpreted was not helpful so close to COP30.

With a somewhat less lofty profile than any utterings of Bill Gates, the community of coral reef scientists has been engaging in a not exceptionally edifying discussion, mainly on social media, ever since the release of the Global Tipping Point Report. Have coral reefs reached their tipping point or have they not? Scientists who I respect have argued for both conclusions, a perfectly reasonable discussion among peers. Unfortunately, the public may be confused by the evident disarray – does the science community know what it is talking about when it discusses coral bleaching, or any other aspect of climate change?

The gradual disappearance of coral reef ecosystems was always going to be a long-drawn-out affair rather than the short, sharp flip that the phrase ‘tipping point’ suggests, so we are unlikely to know definitively that it has arrived until well past the rather unpointy point of inflexion. (I am personally on record saying this tipping point passed before nearly all living reef scientists began their careers.) The real question is whether we can halt warming fast enough and do all the local conservation we have talked about (and tried to do) for many years, in order to save reefs. Only in that way will we be able to give reefs a fighting chance. Otherwise, corals are going to become very rare creatures and reefs essentially gone in this increasingly hostile world we are building.

Where I think Bill Gates, coral reef scientists and other people who think constructively about climate change sometimes miss the point, is in the fact that climate change has ramifying impacts on environment and is occurring at the same time that we humans are doing so many other things that diminish the capacity of the biosphere to thrive. If our environments were lush with abundant populations of a huge range of species, as many were before the Anthropocene commenced (say 1950), their capacity to cope with warmer temperatures would surely be greater. Climate change is a serious impact on the sustainability of the planetary system. But climate change is not the only way in which we are damaging our only home. Let’s hope for some real progress in Belem over the next 10 days.

Longer-term, let’s also hope we can retain at least some of the majesty of coral reefs on this planet. Photo: Luis Rocha.

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