Climate Change Humans Don’t

About six years ago we have written a critical review about the Paris agreement that contained specific matters in the climate agreement which world leaders were vainly proud to celebrate.
We argued that the Paris convention is far less exceptional, and more of another failure in the same line of failures in the way humanity confronts its greatest challenge ever. The convention’s greatest achievement, perhaps its only achievement, was that after 25 years of failures, the world’s so called leaders had finally managed to finalize a climate convention with a signed agreement.
But practically, the Paris Agreement was actually no more than a statement of intent, as any aspect of actual significance was set as non-legally binding. Instead, each country got to set its own reduction targets called “Intended Nationally Determined Contribution” (INDCs), and on a voluntary basis. None of the countries, no matter their level of emissions at the time or their historical contribution to climate change, were legally bound even to their own proclamations.
And what made the agreement even more ridiculous was that according to an evaluation published by the UNFCCC (The UN body that deals with climate change) even if all pledges were fully implemented, global warming was still expected to increase by between 2.7 °C and 3 °C.

There were many other significant problems with the Paris agreement besides that it isn’t legally binding, and that the evaluation of the sum contribution of all the INDCs, fell short of the formal goal of the summit (staying well below 2 °C increase in the average global temperature since pre-industrial levels by the end of the century, and even aiming for 1.5 °C), such as the formal reliance on the assumed but not yet existing option of “negative CO2 emissions” by using future technologies that can take carbon out of the atmosphere; the refusal of developed nations to make at least their INDCs legally binding considering that they were and still are the greatest contributors to the climate crisis while mitigation contributions by developing countries would be voluntary and conditional on the provision of financial support by the industrialized countries; the fact that although the agreement calls for rich countries to help in providing poorer countries with the finance needed both to adapt to climate change and mitigate emission, all financing is voluntary; and of course the fact that as usual, the ones who are always absent from humans’ discussions over the planet are the rest of the species living on it, despite that even according to the minimal estimations, greenhouse gases produced by industrially exploited animals represent 14.5% of all anthropogenic greenhouse gasses emissions, with other estimations claiming for around 50%, the agreement didn’t mention any of it nor did it recommend even a gradual global shift towards a plant-based diet. Animals were totally absent from the table of discussion and appeared only on the dinner table as courses. And of course, the same absurd, cruel, ignorant, and outrageous decision was made in Glasgow, where again the only presence of nonhuman animals was as corpses in the form of courses on the table of the delegates.

For a more elaborated criticism over the Paris agreement please read our post.
Anyway, even we, with all our criticism over the allegedly historical agreement, didn’t anticipate such a lame implementation of the promises written on it.
As super pessimistic people regarding the human race we have expected very little, but what has happened since the Paris Agreement was even lower than our very low expectations. Continue reading