The U.S. needs to take seriously the carbon emissions of the early 1900s to 1.5 degrees Celsius – note from John D. Sutter

Editor’s Note: John D. Sutter is a CNN contributor, climate journalist and independent filmmaker whose work has won the Livingston Award, the IRE Award and others. He has been hired as the Ted Turner Professor of Environmental Media at The George Washington University. The opinions that he makes in this commentary are not of his own. CNN has more opinion.

Developing nations got onto the summit agenda for the first time, demanding that other countries pay for the damage caused by climate-generated disasters.

The alliance of small-island states, led by Vanuatu, argued that the costs of pollution should be paid for by those who cause it.

For many years, the world has known that it needs to hold the line at 1.5 degrees Celsius to stave off the worst effects of global warming. To make serious cuts to carbon emissions we need to do it in less than two decades. That’s been the aim since 2015, when world leaders came together to sign the Paris Agreement. When global climate negotiators gathered at the United Nations Conference of Parties meeting, known as COP26, they came with a clear mandate. Yet by the end of the marathon negotiations, they left Glasgow with the carbon arithmetic far from solved.

After decades of deflection, it’s overdue for high-polluting countries like the United States to take this question seriously. It’s clear that polluters should be held accountable for these losses to territory, culture, life and property.

Yes, it is also absolutely critical that the world abandons fossil fuels as quickly as possible. That is another central discussion point at COP27, and the world is well behind on its goal of holding warming to 1.5 or at most 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial averages. (We’re on track for about 2.7 degrees of warming, based on current policies; recent climate bills passed by the US Congress are a step forward, but are not enough).

The less carbon we put into the atmosphere, the less risk we put into the climate system — with important consequences for sea levels, storms, drought, biodiversity and so-on.

The International Commission on Climate Change and International Law – Part II – The case against the ill-preparedness of the present and the future

Over the decades, different types of arguments against action have been taken. The most laughable idea is that this was a problem for the future, rather than the present.

We know that the climate crisis is making extreme weather more common. There were floods in Pakistan this summer, as well as Hurricane Ian in Florida this September. Disasters are getting more expensive because they’re becoming more intense as humans continue to burn fossil fuels and swamp the atmosphere with heat-trapping gasses.

That may feel like a new phenomenon, but it’s been decades in the making. Scientists linked a deadly 2003 heat wave in Europe, for example, to human-caused warming. That heat wave killed an estimated 20,000 people.

The fossil fuel industry enjoys hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies and windfall profits while household budgets shrink and our planet burns, according to the UN Secretary General.

The idea of reimbursement for loss and damage is based on the principle of pollutant pays, according to the editor of science magazine Down to Earth in New Delhi. This financing “must be on the table — not to be pushed away with another puny promise of a fund that never materializes”, Narain writes in the 1–15 November issue.

The commission formed by Tuvalu and other small island states is on Climate Change and International Law. The aim is for the claims to be explored in international courts.

“Litigation is the only way we will be taken seriously while the leaders of big countries are dillydallying,” Gaston Browne, the Prime Minister of Antigua and Barbuda, said last year, according to The New York Times. “We want to force them to respond in a court of law.”

Observing the impact of climate change cuts on the world: where are we heading? How much CO2 are we? Where do we go? Where are we going?

There have been some bright spots. The Australian government doubled its planned cut to 43 percent below 2005 levels by the year 2030. A handful of other countries, including Chile, which is working to enshrine the rights of nature into its constitution, have already promised more cuts or say they will soon. But most of those updates are from smaller polluters, or from those, like Australia, that are playing catch-up after previously submitting goals that were egregiously lacking in detail or ambition. The lowhanging fruit has already been picked.

A number of wins have made it easier for the emitters to make good on their promises. Fransen points out that the United States has taken a major step towards meeting its pledge to reduce emissions by 50 percent. But the US still isn’t on track to reach that commitment. She says increasing the ante on goals this year is a bad idea.

Fransen is one of the people in the business of keeping track of all emissions plans and whether they are sticking to them. It’s tricky to take stock. For one thing, it means actually measuring how much carbon nations emit. It involves showing how those emissions will affect the climate in 10, 20, or 100 years.

It is difficult to determine how much CO2 is being produced, and whether or not countries are keeping their pledges. That’s because the gas is all over the atmosphere, muddying the origin of each signal. Carbon is released by natural processes, like decaying vegetation and thawed permafrost. Think of it like trying to find a water leak in a swimming pool. If you see CO2 from space, you shouldn’t assume it came from the nearest human emissions, because it may be different than you think. “That’s why we need more sophisticated methods.” Climatetrace can train a program to use steam from the power plants as a proxy for emissions. Other scientists have been making some progress using weather stations to monitor local emissions.

The Egyptian hosts of the conference are warning the leaders of wealthy countries that there can be no backsliding on commitments made in Glasgow.

The meeting, formally the 27th United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties, begins on 6 November. Sameh Shoukry, Egypt’s foreign minister, wrote a letter to the leaders of the world this week, stating his concerns that the extra climate finance for the most vulnerable countries hasn’t materialized. Industrialized countries had pledged to double funding for climate change projects from 25 to 40 billion dollars per year.

This week, researchers at Greenpeace Research Laboratories, based at the University of Exeter, UK, reviewed climate-impact studies on six countries: Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates. They concluded that the Middle East and North Africa are warming at twice the global average rate. However, they also said that it is hard to track this trend, because of a lack of consistency across data sets in the region.

In 2015, Egypt estimated how much it will need to set aside to fight climate change and adapt its infrastructure. The environment minister says this number has tripled to $246 billion. The national budget makes climate actions more burdensome and competes with our basic needs that have to be fulfilled.

The World is on a highway to climate hell: a case for cooperation between the United Nations and the countries that are most affected by climate change

Ian Mitchell, a researcher with the Center for Global Development in London, warned that an agreement on loss and damage could potentially affect the meeting’s outcome. High-income countries could agree to the principle and then absorb loss-and-damage finance as part of their humanitarian-aid spending — meaning it would not be new money.

The climate diplomacy expert at Boston University says that politics will probably get messy when the issues are resolved in Egypt. He adds that loss-and-damage finance can no longer be avoided by the high-income countries, especially given that climate impacts in vulnerable countries are becoming much more visible and severe.

Fouad says that organizing this year’s COP in Africa has been transformative. More attention is expected to be given to issues that are meaningful to Africans, such as food security, desertification, natural disasters and water scarcity. African youth, non-governmental and civil-society organizations have a chance to be heard at the COP.

SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt — “Cooperate or perish,” the United Nations chief told dozens of leaders gathered Monday for international climate talks, warning them that the world is “on a highway to climate hell” and urging the two biggest polluting countries, China and the United States, to work together to avert it.

The leaders of nations that are affected by climate change will dominate Monday, not those that created the problem of warming up the atmosphere with fossil fuel burning. It will be mostly African nations and small island nations and other vulnerable nations that will be telling their stories.

“Is it not high time to put an end to all this suffering,” the summit’s host, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi, told his fellow leaders. Without intervention, climate change will never stop. Our time here is limited and we must use every second that we have.”

El-Sultan said that the world is on a highway to “climate hell” and called for an end to the Russia-Ukraine war.

He called for a new pact between rich and poor countries to make deeper cuts in emissions with financial help and phasing out of coal in rich nations by 2030 and elsewhere by 2040. Until the last few years, China and the United States worked together on climate, something that he called on them to do again.

Most of the leaders are meeting Monday and Tuesday, just as the United States has a potentially policy-shifting midterm election. The leaders of the world’s 20 wealthiest nations will have their club confab in Indonesia a few days later.

United Kingdom Prime Minister Rishi Sunak was initially going to avoid the negotiations, but public pressure and predecessor Boris Johnson’s plans to come changed his mind. The new King Charles III will not be attending because of his new role. And Russia’s leader Vladimir Putin, whose invasion of Ukraine created energy chaos that reverberates in the world of climate negotiations, won’t be here.

My expectations for ambitious climate targets in these two days of the summit are very low, as it’s impressive that so many leaders are coming. He said the invasion ofUkraine caused energy and food crises that took away from climate action.

“We always want more” leaders, United Nations climate chief Simon Stiell said in a Sunday news conference. ” I think we have enough leadership to have a very productive outcome right now.”

In addition to speeches given by the leaders, the negotiations include “innovative” roundtable discussions that “we are confident, will generate some very powerful insights,” Stiell said.

Adow of the Power Shift Africa: Climate Change, Development and the Challenges Nigeria’s Environmental Minister Mohammed Abdullahi says Africa is Leading

Mohammed Adow of Power Shift Africa said the historical pollutants who caused climate change were not showing up. Africa is the least responsible and vulnerable to the issue of climate change, but it is providing leadership and stepping up.

Nigeria’s Environment Minister Mohammed Abdullahi called for wealthy nations to show “positive and affirmative” commitments to help countries hardest hit by climate change. He stated that the priority was to be aggressive when it came to climate funding.

“We can’t discount the impact that an entire continent such as India has on us and the consequences it has for us,” Waskow said. “It’s pretty clear that Africa will be at risk in a very severe way.”

Leaders come “to share the progress they’ve made at home and to accelerate action,” Purvis said. In this case, with the passage of the first major climate legislation and $375 billion in spending, Biden has a lot to share, he said.