UN climate delegates failing everyone

President Bush signs the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in Rio, June 1992 (Source: UN).

Since then, the FCCC has been the source document upon which the Kyoto Protocol, the Cancun Agreements that form the basis of current negotiations, and all other UN climate agreements have been based. Even the IPCC science reports were whipped into line, each one claiming greater and greater certainty that humans were the main cause of global warming. 'The science is settled' became the new mantra.

Finally, at last year's round of UN climate talks in Doha, Qatar, developing nations began to push hard for developed countries to pay for "loss and damage" caused by extreme weather events supposedly caused by our historic GHG emissions. Negotiators from developed countries balked, and the conference was on the verge of breaking down over the issue.

At that point, our negotiators should have explained that extreme weather events are normal, that there has been no worldwide increase in such phenomena, and that even the IPCC said in their March 28, 2012 Special Report on Extremes (SREX),

"There is medium evidence and high agreement that long-term trends in normalized losses have not been attributed to natural or anthropogenic climate change."

Instead, our inept representatives agreed with the demand, promising to put in place "institutional arrangements" in Warsaw in 2013.

So this year, developing countries staged a walk out at the conference to bring attention to their demand for real action on loss and damage. With public sympathy on their side after Typhoon Haiyan's devastation of the Philippines and the UN Secretary General blaming the tragedy on man-made global warming, Prakash Mathema, chair of the Least Developed Countries group at the talks, threatened:

"We are not going home without a loss and damage mechanism [within the FCCC]! They [developed countries] cannot postpone this forever and ever."

Representatives from developing countries asserted that adaptation efforts are overwhelmed by the supposed increase in extreme weather events, and so the FCCC must therefore address loss and damage as a standalone issue.

The proper response should have been easy for representatives of developed nations. They should have again highlighted the IPCC's SREX conclusions, and explained that in their September 2013 assessment report the IPCC had only "low confidence" that damaging increases will occur in tropical cyclones (typhoons and hurricanes) due to global warming. Developed country representatives should have also cited the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) report, also released in September, which asserted:

"in no case has a convincing relationship been established between warming over the past 100 years and increases in any of these extreme events."