The United Nations Will Not Fix Climate Change

The 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference — also known as the COP 26 — is still going on at time of writing, and will continue until 11/12/2021. Ever since 1995, all of the nations involved in the signing of the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change have met once a year to talk about climate change and how to stop it. Over time, the the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Climate Accords have also been phased into the original treaty.

This is the twenty-sixth time the United Nations has held a conference on climate change, and in that time, climate change has not been solved. Earlier this year, it was found that global CO2 levels are higher now than they have been at any point in the past three million years. In 2013, CO2 emissions were higher than they had been at any point since humanity existed. The COVID-19 pandemic did more to drop global CO2 emissions than the United Nations has ever done.

You might notice above I made mention of the Kyoto Protocols, adopted by the United Nations in 1997. However, as NCAR & UCAR news points out:

Tom Wigley in 1998 reported research showing that adherence to the Kyoto
Protocol alone, without subsequent action, would have a minimal impact
on global warming.

Tom Wigley, for those unaware, is a climate scientist who has contributed to the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — a group he has also constantly criticized as “too optimistic.” Similarly, although many experts agree the Paris Climate Accords would have a much larger effect, the fact is that — despite being in place for multiple years — climate change has not been solved.

In general, President Biden has been constantly downplaying just how much would be needed to reach his goals regarding CO2 emissions. Back in August, Biden signed an Executive Order mandating that half of all new cars be electric by 2030. However, most states still get large amounts of electricity from coal, with West Virginia getting over ninety percent of all its electricity from said source. For that matter, just creating an electric car releases a large amount of CO2 — more so than creating a normal car. However, one can hardly blame him for endorsing such simple solutions when that’s exactly what all world leaders are encouraging him to do.

Earlier this year, the IPCC released a report declaring that some effects of climate change might already be irreversible. But, wait a minute, when he was running for President, Colorado governor John Hickenlooper said in 2019 that we had ten to twelve years until climate change became irreversible. Where did he get such a flawed number? Oh yeah, from the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which said exactly that in a 2018 report. In said report, the IPCC writes:

Human activities are estimated to have caused approximately 1.0°C of global warming above pre-industrial levels, with a likely range of 0.8°C to 1.2°C. Global warming is likely to reach 1.5°C between 2030 and 2052 if it continues to increase at the current rate.

So are the effects currently irreversible or do we still have some time? CO2 emissions dropped in both 2019 and especially 2020, yet we are somehow getting worse results than we would have if we continued then-current trends, according to the United Nations.

Throughout the entire climate change debate, we have constantly heard that two degrees Celsius until things got particularly bad. Even if we warm to an increased 1.5°C, that is still much better than if we warmed to 2°C.

Going back to the 2021 report, the news website MSN writes:

The report highlights human responsibility for record heat waves, droughts, more intense storms and other extreme weather events seen around the world in recent years. It also sharpens estimates of how sensitive the climate is to rising atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases — a key metric in forecasting the rise of global temperatures in the years ahead.

But we have not hit that threshold yet and we aren’t slated to hit it by the end of the century. So did the United Nations intentionally downplay the effects of climate change, how much time we had before we could stop it, and what the end results would be? If the answer is yes, and it appears to be, then how could we trust them to solve an issue they won’t even admit the full size and scope of?

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