United Nations – Page 5 – Desdemona Despair

Delegates applaud as COP27 president Sameh Shoukry delivers a statement during the closing plenary at the climate summit in Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh on Sunday, 19 November 2022. Photo: Mohamed Abd El Ghany / Reuters

November 20, 2022

The big takeaway from COP27? These climate conferences just aren’t working – “It really does beggar belief, that in the course of 27 COPs, there has never been a formal agreement to reduce the world’s fossil fuel use”

By Bill McGuire 20 November 2022 (The Guardian) – In the end, the recent shenanigans at the COP27 meeting in Sharm el-Sheikh at least ended up making modest progress on loss and damage: high-emissions nations agreeing to pay those countries bearing the brunt of climate mayhem that they had little to do with bringing about. But, yet […]

An activist holds a sign showing Earth with a fever and an oral thermometer at the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP27), in Sharm El-Sheikh, 19 November 2022. Photo: Sedat Suna / EPA

November 20, 2022

The 1.5C climate goal died at COP27, but hope must not – “It is mindboggling that countries did not muster the courage to call for phasing down fossil fuels”

By Damian Carrington 20 November 2022 (The Guardian) – When the history of the climate crisis is written, in whatever world awaits us, COP27 will be seen as the moment when the dream of keeping global heating below 1.5C died. Does that mean giving up? Absolutely not. The 1.5C target is not a threshold beyond which hope […]

Nakeeyat Dramani Sam holds up a placard at an informal stocktaking session during the COP27 climate summit, in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, 18 November 2022. Photo: Mohamed Abd El Ghany / REUTERS

November 19, 2022

COP27 nears breakthrough on climate finance in scramble for final deal – “We’d rather have no decision than a bad decision”

By Kate Abnett, Shadia Nasralla, and Gloria Dickie 19 November 2022 SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt (Reuters) – Negotiators at the COP27 climate summit in Egypt neared a breakthrough deal on Saturday for a fund to help poor countries being ravaged by the impacts of global warming but remained locked over how to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions driving […]

Landsat images from 21 February 2000 (left) and 27 July 2019 (right) illustrating glacier retreat on top of Mount Kilimanjaro (United Republic of Tanzania). Photo: U.S. Geological Survey

November 19, 2022

Kilimanjaro’s and Africa’s last glaciers to go by 2050, says UN – “What is quite unprecedented in the historical record is how quickly this is happening”

By Patrick Hughes 3 November 2022 (BBC News) – Glaciers across the globe – including the last ones in Africa – will be unavoidably lost by 2050 due to climate change, the UN says in a report [UNESCO finds that some iconic World Heritage glaciers will disappear by 2050 –Des]. Glaciers in a third of […]

Deforested area of Amazon rainforest in Brazil, 2006-2021, with large increases shown during the Bolsonaro regime. Data: Brazil National Institute for Space Research (INPE). Graphic: DW

November 19, 2022

Lula insists “Brazil is back” at UN climate summit

By Stuart Braun 16 November 2022 (DW) – One of the most-watched visitors to the UN climate summit in Egypt this week has been incoming Brazilian president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva — more commonly referred to as Lula. With his successful election campaign having included a promise to arrest record deforestation in the Amazon, Lula carried huge expectations into the yearly climate summit […]

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, Secretary-General of the United Nations Antonio Guterres, Saudi Adel Al-Jubeir, Egypt's Foreign Minister Sameh Hassan Shoukry, Crown Prince and the Prime Minister of Bahrain Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa and other leaders pose for a family photo during the COP27 climate summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, 7 November 2022. Photo: Mohammed Salem / REUTERS

November 19, 2022

At COP27, climate change framed as battle for survival – “We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot on the accelerator”

By William James, Valerie Volcovici, and Simon Jessop 7 November 2022 SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt (Reuters) – World leaders and diplomats framed the fight against global warming as a battle for human survival during opening speeches at the COP27 climate summit in Egypt on Monday, with the head of the United Nations declaring a lack of […]

Global human population, 1700-2022. On 15 November 2022, the world’s population was estimated to reach 8 billion people, having grown by 1 billion since 2010. This is a remarkable milestone given that the human population numbered under 1 billion for millennia until around 1800, and that it took more than 100 years to grow from 1 to 2 billion. By comparison, the increase of the world’s population over the last century has been quite rapid. Despite a gradual slowing in the pace of growth, the global population is projected to surpass 9 billion around 2037 and 10 billion around 2058. Graphic: UN DESA

November 19, 2022

Global human population hits 8 billion – “We are already overstretching what we have: the housing, roads, the hospitals, schools. Everything is overstretched.”

By Dan Ikpoyi and Chinedu Asadu 15 November 2022 LAGOS, Nigeria (AP) – The world’s population will likely hit an estimated 8 billion people on Tuesday, according to a United Nations projection, with much of the growth coming from developing nations in Africa. Among them is Nigeria, where resources are already stretched to the limit. More than […]

November 13, 2022

COP27: Corporate climate pledges rife with greenwashing, says U.N. expert group – “Too many of these net-zero pledges are little more than empty slogans and hype”

By Gloria Dickie and Simon Jessop 8 November 2022 SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt (Reuters) – Promises by companies, banks and cities to achieve net-zero emissions often amount to little more than greenwashing, U.N. experts said in a report on Tuesday as they set out proposed new standards to harden net-zero claims. The report, released at the […]

A man from the Maasai pastoralist community affected by the worsening drought due to the failed rainy season, attends to an emaciated cow at a livestock market in Ilbisil settlement of Kajiado, Kenya, 17 October 2022. Photo: Thomas Mukoya / REUTERS

November 13, 2022

Climate disasters put plight of displaced in COP27 focus – “Drought kills the plants, it kills everything, and then the rain comes washes away your homes”

By Gloria Dickie; editing by Katy Daigle and Ros Russell 13 November 2022 SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt (Reuters) – Issack Hassan lives in a migrant camp in Baidoa city in Somalia – one of more than a million people displaced since January after five successive failed rainy seasons. With Somalia in the grips of its worst […]

Near-surface temperature differences relative to the 1981–2010 average for 2022 to September. The map shows the median anomaly calculated from six data sets: HadCRUT5, ERA5, JRA-55, GISTEMP, NOAAGlobalTemp, and Berkeley Earth. Graphic: WMO

November 7, 2022

State of the Global Climate 2022: Sea level rise accelerates, European glacier melt shatters records, extreme weather causes devastation – “What climate scientists have warned about for decades is upon us”

By Seth Borenstein 6 November 2022 SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt (AP) – Earth’s warming weather and rising seas are getting worse and doing so faster than before, the World Meteorological Organization warned Sunday in a somber note as world leaders started gathering for international climate negotiations. [Eight warmest years on record witness upsurge in climate change impacts –Des] […]