The Climate Apocalypse Postponed

Yes, I know that none other than President Obama himself warned us all against not taking climate change seriously. Tom Friedman, writing from a bunker somewhere, even suggested that the failure to respect the dogmas peddled under the name of climate science was of a piece with the failure to understand the dangers of the coronavirus. 

They should all take a deep breath and recognize that predictions are not facts. They are hypotheses.And many of the world’s leading climate scientists believe that the apocalyptic hoopla over the end of the world is seriously overblown. Aside from the fact that scientific truth is not established by taking a vote, that is, by consensus, we might, with our climate hysteria, have been distracting ourselves from the real threats.

 Besides, all the time and money we have spending trying to control the climate might have been spent on pandemic preparations. And, let’s not forget the money we have been spending to provide medical care for the transgendered. Does it all seem quite so urgent right now?

Anyway, it seems that climate change hysteria is taking a back seat to the pandemic. This has produced the following: the world’s most important climate change confab, a meeting that would have gathered together the world’s leading climate change hustlers, is going to be postponed for a year. Which puts it in the same class as the Summer Olympic Games. Apparently, it’s not quite as much of an emergency as people think.

The New York Times reports:

This year’s United Nations-sponsored climate talks, widely regarded as the most important climate meeting of the past four years, were postponed on Wednesday because of the coronavirus pandemic.

The session, known as the Conference of Parties, had been scheduled to take place in Glasgow for a week and a half in mid-November. It was postponed to 2021, the world body’s climate agency and the host government, Britain, confirmed late Wednesday.

“In light of the ongoing, worldwide effects of Covid-19, holding an ambitious, inclusive COP26 in November 2020 is no longer possible,” the British government said in a statement.

The conference venue in Glasgow, an arena where tens of thousands of delegates from around the world were to have gathered, is being turned into a field hospital for people with Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus. Covid patients are also being housed in the convention center in Madrid where the Conference of Parties took place last December; Spain has one of the world’s largest outbreaks.

The decision to postpone this year’s conference, known as COP26 because it’s the 26th such annual meeting, was made at a virtual meeting of the rotating decision-making board for the conference.

The conference is vital to the world’s ability to avert the worst effects of climate change, including fatal heat waves and flooded coastal cities.

Apparently, it’s not quite as vital as all that. 

The story remarks that it took 26 meetings of this group to forge the Paris climate accord, the one that allows the world’s most polluting nations to continue polluting but that punishes Western democracies.

And let’s note a salient point, one that the Times neglected to mention, namely that the United States is no longer party to this accord-- largely because President Obama did not submit it to the Senate for ratification as a treaty-- and because President Trump withdrew from it. Do you think it will be a big issue in the presidential campaign?