The latest UN climate summit avoided even naming fossil fuels, while mounting evidence shows climate damage accelerating – from melting glaciers to declining ocean life.

Brazil’s “COP of Truth” underwhelms

Anyone who has bothered to pay attention to the media coverage of the recently finished COP meeting in Brazil will probably have concluded that, despite the face-saving protestations of the Pollyannas, it didn’t achieve much. Bathetic is a succinct summary.

Principal among the many disappointments for those wanting more action to control greenhouse gas emissions (which included many nations, not only climate activists) was the absence in the meeting’s final communiqué of any mention of a plan to transition away from fossil fuels, or indeed any mention of fossil fuels at all. It seems that 88 countries wanted the COP to agree to develop a roadmap to end fossil fuels but this was vetoed by several petrostates led by Saudi Arabia, Russia and India.

“A climate decision that cannot even say ‘fossil fuels’ is not neutrality, it is complicity. And what is happening here transcends incompetence,” said Panama’s climate negotiator Juan Carlos Monterrey.

Sir David King, chair of the UK’s Climate Crisis Group and previously the UK government’s Chief Scientific Advisor, said the COP’s decision failed “the most basic test: does it secure a manageable future for humanity? A credible pathway to phase out fossil fuels must be at the heart of any outcome here. As we move deeper into climate overshoot, the world cannot expect the most vulnerable countries to carry the burden while finance and support keep shifting out of reach.”

Simon Stiell, Executive Director of the UNFCCC (the position held by Christiana Figueres in Paris 10 years ago), made, perhaps inadvertently, the most damning condemnation of the meeting: “I’m not saying we’re winning the climate fight. But we are undeniably still in it, and we are fighting back.”

Really? That’s the best that the champion of the whole UN system for tackling climate change can muster? Thirty-three years, 30 COPs, dozens of preparatory meetings, millions of hours of negotiations, countless scientific reports, truckloads of agreements, pacts, frameworks, protocols, roadmaps and accords, and we’re still not winning? Staggering!

Two dim lights did flicker at the end of two weeks in Brazil. The final communiqué included an agreement to establish a just transition mechanism (the Belém Action Network or BAM) that includes reference to human rights, labour rights, the rights of Indigenous Peoples and Afro-descendants, women’s empowerment, education and youth development. Second, Brazil, Colombia and Denmark led 90 countries (including Australia) in agreeing to develop, outside the formal COP process, a roadmap for a transition away from fossil fuels. This will begin with the first Global Fossil Fuel Phase-Out Conference in April 2026.

In September, Brazil’s President Lula told the UN General Assembly, “COP30 in Belém will be the COP of truth. It will be the moment for world leaders to prove the seriousness of their commitment to the planet.”

We now know the truth: not enough world leaders, and certainly not the ones who have real power, are serious.

Three hard truths about climate change

In a recent edition of The Saturday Paper, Joëlle Girgis describes in very clear language “ three hard truths about the physical reality of our predicament”:

• The climate crisis is bad and getting worse. Emissions from all three fossil fuels are still increasing and remain responsible for about 90 per cent of annual global CO2 emissions. A continuation of current policies gives a 90 per cent chance of 3.3oC of global warming by 2100.
• The world’s collective failure to reduce emissions means that overshooting 1.5oC is now inevitable. This increases the risk of triggering environmental tipping points and irreversible changes to the planet, for instance the death of all coral reefs, including the Great Barrier Reef, within the lifetimes of people alive today.
• Net zero is an insidious loophole that is delaying genuine reductions in fossil fuel emissions. Politicians are deluded by the idea that it will be possible to remove CO2 from the atmosphere to reverse the temperature overshoot. But vegetation currently removes only 5 per cent of annual fossil fuel based CO2 emissions from the atmosphere and the various technologies remove about a millionth.

Girgis finishes with a fourth truth: “The hardest truth of all is that we are doing this to ourselves.”

How true! It is not as if we are fighting a technologically more advanced intergalactic invasion force or facing an inevitable outcome of the universal laws of physics such as the imminent death of our sun. We just have to change our own behaviours. Just. Ha!

Below are two graphs that illustrate Dr Girgis’s arguments.

Climate change is ungreening the oceans

Phytoplankton live near the surface of the ocean where there is sufficient sunlight for photosynthesis. They may be small and most of us might not recognise one if it bit us on the nose, but phytoplankton are responsible for about half of global photosynthetic activity and oxygen production and they play crucial roles in the marine carbon cycle and Earth’s climate system. Regions with high phytoplankton activity support marine fisheries and are biodiversity and ecosystem hotspots. Humans would be in a bit of a pickle if they all disappeared.

And disappearing is what they seem to be doing. The greenness of the oceans, a measure of the abundance of phytoplankton, has been declining since 2001 in the oceans between 45o north and south, with the decline occurring most steeply in coastal regions.

The frequency of high chlorophyll concentration events (algal blooms) in coastal waters is also decreasing globally at almost 2 per cent per year, although the authors of the study note that in some regions algal blooms have intensified, often with severe local environmental impacts.

These trends are mainly driven by rising sea surface temperatures which increase ocean stratification, suppress the upwelling of nutrients from the deep and limit phytoplankton growth. Unchecked, the consequences for the food chains, ecological systems, oceanic carbon cycling and human welfare are enormous.

The many ways that climate change is damaging the natural world continue to grow, or, more accurately, our awareness of them continues to grow. I think that climate deniers and those denying the need for urgent action have a very poor understanding of this point. They think it’s just more summer days.

Glacier loss, another cause of droughts

In recent months, I have highlighted increasing evaporation from soil and vegetation and the construction of dams as causes of droughts. The melting of glaciers due to global warming also causes droughts.

There are over 275,000 glaciers in mountain ranges from the tropics to the poles. Increasing temperatures are causing them to lose over 273 billion tonnes of ice each year. (I think that would occupy 273 cubic kilometres, i.e., an ice cube with sides of 6.5 km.)

Since 2000, glaciers have shrunk by an average of 5 per cent globally but in the European Alps and Pyrenees it’s around 40 per cent. By 2040 melting glaciers will have increased sea levels by 3-7cm. (These figures don’t even include the ice covering Greenland and Antarctica.)

Around two billion humans rely on glacier melt for drinking water and agriculture. In the short term, melting glaciers may increase the supply of fresh water downstream but later, when the glaciers are but memories, supplies will dry up.

Melting glaciers create small glacial lakes in the mountains. As melting continues, individual lakes grow and combine with their neighbours. As the glaciers disappear, the underlying rock and soil also becomes unstable and a rock fall or avalanche into a glacial lake may cause a tsunami-like flood. This process and the consequences are clearly described and illustrated, including an excellent animation, in a recent _New York Times_ article about the Himalayas.

Underground engineering by monitor lizards

I’ll come back to the intriguing diagram above in a moment.

Yellow-spotted monitor lizards grow to up to 1.4 m in length. Gould’s monitor lizard (or Sand goanna) is a bit smaller. Both occur fairly widely across Australia, particularly in the savannahs and deserts of the north and west.

Both lizards burrow into the earth to lay their eggs, and this is where it gets really interesting. The burrows the mothers dig are helical and up to four metres deep, the deepest vertebrate burrows in the world. But the hatchlings do not use the mother’s track to spiral up to the surface, they dig their own shaft directly up, demonstrated in the diagram above.

But that’s not all. Each burrow doesn’t occur in isolation. Lots of old and active burrows form labyrinthine communal warrens that can cover up to 120 square metres on the surface. The next diagram illustrates this with a view from below.

And it’s not just monitor lizards that live in the burrows. Snakes, geckos, skinks, other lizards, frogs, toads, scorpions, centipedes, beetles and ants have all been found using the burrows for sleep, rest, protection, foraging, thermoregulation and nesting. In one study over 750 individuals belonging to 28 species of vertebrates were found in just 16 warrens.

The lizards are also ecosystem engineers. Their activities modify the physical structure of their ecosystem with consequences for its aeration, hydration and carbon carrying capacity and for other species.

The good news is that the lizards don’t only create and maintain habitat for themselves, they create ecosystems. The other side of that coin, though, is that if the keystone species disappears, it’s not just one species that is lost but a whole ecosystem. And therein lies the rub: cane toads remove yellow-spotted monitors from their ecosystems.

Lady Coal flaunts her sparklers

The US Department of Energy is keen to flatter coal and deceive the unwary.