If you watch your national news or some form of international news, you might think that the Paris Agreement of 2015 is holding water and that it is somehow being implemented . . . Well, that is inaccurate in any way you might want to look at it.

While it is accurate to say that Climate Change sadly being at best ignored, it is and at worse, possibly being depleted further; that does not mean that it is forever jammed as put here by Ron Clutz who knows what he is talking about in his blog?

Greatest COP OUT Ever is Jammed

Bangkok Post brings word that the Paris Accord is falling apart.  It’s coming down to the many “Developing” nations saying: “Show us the money!” The few “Developed” nations are responding: “We don’t write blank checks.”  The article is US, allies roasted as UN climate talks end in Bangkok  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Experts from around the world have been locked in discussions this week in Bangkok, aiming to reach a comprehensive rulebook for countries to implement the landmark Paris Accord on climate change.

But talks have foundered over the key issue of how efforts to limit climate change are funded and how contributions are reported.

Delegates representing some of Earth’s poorest and smallest nations said on the final day of the summit that the US and other Western economies were failing to live up to their green spending commitments.

The Paris deal, struck in 2015, aims to limit global temperature rises to less than two degrees Celsius and to below 1.5C if possible by the end of the century.

To do this, countries agreed to a set of promises, including to establish an annual $100-billion fund to help developing nations react to our heating planet.

The US and other developed economies want less oversight on how their funding is gathered and more flexibility over how future funding is structured.

But developing nations insist they need predictable and open funding in order to effectively plan their fight against the fallout from climate change.

The Bangkok talks were organised as an emergency negotiating session after little progress was made at previous rounds towards a final rulebook.

Under the timeframe set in Paris, the guidelines for nations must be finalised by the COP 24 climate summit in Poland in December.

While delegates have made some progress on areas such as new technology and carbon markets, activists said the US — with Western acquiesence — had stonewalled any momentum on the key funding issue.

Background:  Definition of Cop Out

1. An excuse designed to shirk responsibility;
   n. Refers to taking the easy way out of a sticky situation. Placing blame on something else to make things easier for yourself is a cop out

Synonyms: pretence, dodge, pretext, fraud, alibi.  See Twitter .

Within the thousands of laudatory media reports of the Paris climate agreement, there are frequently embedded paragraphs such as this:

Scientists who closely monitored the talks in Paris said it was not the agreement that humanity really needed. By itself, it will not save the planet. The great ice sheets remain imperilled, the oceans are still rising, forests and reefs are under stress, people are dying by tens of thousands in heatwaves and floods, and the agriculture system that feeds 7 billion human beings is still at risk.  Here

I was struck by the list of calamities that used to be labelled as “Acts of God.”

Definition of Act of God
n. a natural catastrophe which no one can prevent such as an earthquake, a tidal wave, a volcanic eruption, or a tornado. Acts of God are significant for two reasons: 1) for the havoc and damage they wreak, and 2) because often contracts state that “acts of God” are an excuse for delay or failure to fulfil a commitment or to complete a construction project. Many insurance policies exempt coverage for damage caused by acts of God, which is one time an insurance company gets religion. Here

Now insurance companies have been well-served by that excellent cop out. My father-in-law always said insurance policies were like umbrellas that won’t open when it rains. Probably that bit of folk wisdom prompted one insurer to come up with this logo:

What Paris Agreement Means

With the momentous agreement in Paris, there is now a universal cop out for all elected officials at every level of government. Why wouldn’t they all sign up? It’s a get-out-of-accountability card. Because whatever bad thing happens on your watch, it’s the result of “climate change”.

Having a drought in California? The climate did it, caused by everyone burning fossil fuels, so not the government’s fault. Never mind the lack of attention and funding for the water storage infrastructure, including the neglect by first time elected Gov. Jerry Brown of his father’s, Pat Brown’s California Water Project to provide water security. No, in his second mandate, Jerry Brown addresses the problem by setting up a carbon market, so they can sit back and collect carbon offsets while waiting for El Nino to come through.

Worried about flooding in Florida or New Jersey? Climate change causes it, so everyone is guilty, and no one is accountable. Never mind that people foolishly build on flood plains, or on subsiding coastlines, or locate New Orleans below sea level between the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Pontchartrain. If only we reduce our CO2 emissions, these disasters will never happen again.

So I go on? Wildfires in old growth forests where people have built homes so that controlled burning of underbrush is not done. It’s climate change, not bad forestry practices.

No wonder such rejoicing at the conclusion of COP 21. Raise your glasses of Kool-Aid and recite together the IPCC Creed:

We claim for ourselves the authority,
On behalf of all needy countries,
To collect Other People’s Money,
For a solution that won’t work,
To solve a problem that doesn’t exist.
If we keep the Fear alive,
We will surely meet again and again.

Truly, Paris Accord is the Greatest COP OUT Ever.

Footnote:

French Mathematicians spoke out prior to COP21 in Paris, and their words provide a rational briefing for subsequent COP gatherings.  In a nutshell:

Fighting Global Warming is Absurd, Costly and Pointless.

• Absurd because of no reliable evidence that anything unusual is happening in our climate.
• Costly because trillions of dollars are wasted on immature, inefficient technologies that serve only to make cheap, reliable energy expensive and intermittent.
• Pointless because we do not control the weather anyway.

Details at Bonn COP23 Briefing for Realists