No ‘meaningful progress’. Needless to say, climate alarmists wanted more alarm than was delivered. One wailed: “With every vague verb, every empty promise in the final text, millions more people will enter the frontline of climate change and many will die.” Shouldn’t that already have happened according to previous COP, and other, forecasts of doom? If not, the next claim is that ‘the window is closing’. The melodrama limps on.
– – –
A UN climate deal that approved a call to transition away from fossil fuels has been hailed as a major milestone and a cause for at least cautious optimism.
But many climate scientists said the joyful sentiments of world leaders did not accurately reflect the limited ambition of the agreement.
‘Weak tea at best’
Michael Mann, a climatologist and geophysicist at the University of Pennsylvania, criticized the vagueness of the fossil fuel statement, which has no firm, accountable boundaries for how much countries should do by when.
“The agreement to ‘transition away from fossil fuels’ was weak tea at best,” he told AFP.
“It’s like promising your doctor that you will ‘transition away from donuts’ after being diagnosed with diabetes. The lack of an agreement to phase out fossil fuels was devastating.”
Mann called for a substantial reform of the COP rules, for example permitting super-majorities to approve decisions over the objections of holdout petro states like Saudi Arabia, and barring oil executives such as COP28 president Sultan Al Jaber from presiding over future summits.
“Mend it, don’t end it,” he said. “We still need to continue with the COPs. They are our only multilateral framework for negotiating global climate policies.
“But the failure of COP28 to achieve any meaningful progress at a time when our window of opportunity to limit warming below catastrophic levels is closing, is a source of great concern.”
‘Death knell for 1.5C’
“No doubt there will be lots of cheer and back-slapping… but the physics will not care,” said Kevin Anderson, a professor of energy and climate change at the University of Manchester.
Humanity has between five and eight years of emissions at the current level before blowing through the “carbon budget” required to hold long term warming to the 1.5 degrees Celsius needed to avert the worst impacts of long term planetary heating, he said.
Even if emissions begin to go down in 2024, which is not a requirement of the text, we would need to have zero fossil fuel use globally by 2040, rather than the “fraudulent language of net zero by 2050” envisaged in the deal, said Anderson.
He described it as a “death knell” for 1.5C, with even the less ambitious target of 2C, which carries a significant risk for triggering dangerous tipping points in global climate systems, becoming more distant.
‘Many will die’
Friederike Otto, a climatologist and leader in the field of assessing the role of climate change on specific extreme weather events, was equally damning.
“It’s hailed as a compromise, but we need to be very clear what has been compromised,” said Otto, who lectures at The Grantham Institute for Climate Change. “The short-term financial interest of a few have again won over the health, lives and livelihoods of most people living on this planet.”
“With every vague verb, every empty promise in the final text, millions more people will enter the frontline of climate change and many will die.”
Full article here.
Tallbloke's Talkshop 
COP28 wasn’t a complete failure. Look what it did for Arctic Ice
“No doubt there will be lots of cheer and back-slapping… but the physics will not care,” said Kevin Anderson, a professor of energy and climate change at the University of Manchester.
Indeed, ‘physics will not care’, but not for any alarmist reason he wants to put forward.
An air of desperation appears to be creeping in.
I’m sure that many of these so-called “climate scientists” are uncomfortably aware that climate is a product of a number of cycles, and that as a result of cycles such as the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation and the solar cycles, it is coming to the point when they won’t be able to rely on urban heat islands, volcanos pumping megatons of water into the stratosphere and temperatures measured at operating RAF bases to maintain the illusion that the Earth’s climate has not entered a cooling phase.
It will be interesting to see their contortions when they are finally called upon to account for their unjustifiable prognostications.
The fossil fuels the planet has will not last forever. Alternative reliable sources of making energy to keep us warm and allow freedom of movement and continuous manufacturing are required. As yet we do not have the technical ability to do this without using fossil fuels. Nuclear is a proven answer but considered too dangerous. Storage of renewable power is eluding us so far. Photo voltaic is pretty useless in the UK in winter darkness and with low sun in the sky. Low or too high windspeed causes no output from the wind farms. Zero carbon will sink the nation faster than the threat from so called anthropagenic warming imho!
Using modern prospecting and extraction techniques there are hundreds – perhaps thousands of years’ worth of available petroleum resources left as yet untouched.
Then, using the steerable drilling techniques used for shale extraction and in situ gasification which produces synthesis gas, feedstock for the Fischer-Tropsch coal to oil process, there are trillions of tons of coal accessible in the UK alone.
And then there is the vast amount of methane available as hydrate on the ocean bed and in the arctic permafrost which is even now being investigated with a view to commercial exploitation, see here:
“At the same time, new technologies are being developed in Germany that may be useful for exploring and extracting the hydrates.
The basic idea is very simple: the methane (CH4) is harvested from the hydrates by replacing it with CO2. Laboratory studies show that this is possible in theory because liquid carbon dioxide reacts spontaneously with methane hydrate. If this concept could become economically viable, it would be a win-win situation, because the gas exchange in the hydrates would be attractive both from a financial and a climate perspective.” http://worldoceanreview.com/en/wor-1/energy/methane-hydrates/2/
COP28 wasn’t a complete failure. Look what it did for Arctic Ice
The ‘death spiral’ merchants have fallen silent after every alarmist prediction proved a dud. Natural variation has proved to be the only winner. Summer sea ice can’t be on a
‘rapidly melting’ trend for 40 years without in fact melting.
The Phony Climate Promises Of COP28
DEC 14, 2023
WSJ: The point of the deal is to preserve the West’s illusion that its climate policies are accomplishing something.
China and oil-producing countries refused to sign an agreement committing to “phase out” fossil fuels.
. . .
The COP28 agreement, weak as it is, reflects the arrogance of global elites who are ignoring what electorates are saying about the costs they are willing to pay.
https://climatechangedispatch.com/the-phony-climate-promises-of-cop28/
How COPs follow the same script every time…
COP 28: UN climate conference ends with more of the same tired ‘goals’
December 18th, 2023
The reality of these COP meetings is quite different. The heroes are not selfless defenders of “truth and justice.” They are elites who never lead by example or give up their private jets, limos, red meat, and other conveniences for the betterment of humanity. They indulge in them every year, as I have seen firsthand, basking in the opulence of exotic cities like Dubai while insisting that others (we commoners) follow their dictates, not their examples.
Perhaps when the public understands this ongoing, repetitive charade, these COP dramas will enter a final season and finally get canceled. Sadly, that’s likely wishful thinking. There’s far too much money and power at stake.
So expect the same sorry plotline to emerge same time next year.
https://www.cfact.org/2023/12/18/cop-28-un-climate-conference-ends-with-more-of-the-same-tired-goals/