The UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change), adopted at the 1992 Earth Summit, is one of the first international treaties on the topic. It requires parties to meet regularly to address climate change at the Conference of the Parties, or COP. It formed the foundation for future climate agreements.
Over the years, countries made several agreements, but progress was limited until 2015, when 196 countries negotiated and signed the Paris Climate Agreement in 2016. The treaty aims to help countries adapt to the effects of climate change and mobilize enough finance. The Paris Agreement has a long-term temperature goal: to keep the rise in global surface temperature to well below 2 °C (3.6°F) above pre-industrial levels.
On 4 August 2017, the Trump administration delivered an official notice to the United Nations that the United States, the second-largest emitter of greenhouse gases after China, intended to withdraw from the Paris Agreement as soon as it was eligible to do so, which was in 2020.
Joe Biden defeated Trump in the 2020 presidential election, and on his first day in office, he signed an executive order to rejoin the Paris Climate Accord. John Kerry took part in virtual events, saying that the US would “earn its way back” into legitimacy in the Paris process. United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres welcomed the return of the United States as restoring the “missing link that weakened the whole.”
Of course, when Trump returned to the presidency, he issued an executive order on his first day to withdraw the United States from the Accords, which went into effect a year later. Trump’s “expert opinion” is in opposition to the expert opinions of virtually every reputable climate scientist in the world. Trump claims that climate change “is the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.”
Well, as we’ve seen this year, the climate alarmists were insufficiently alarmed. Here’s how Editor William Falk of THE WEEK summarized the global climate change situation in the September 4 edition of the magazine.
This summer, while we were directed or distracted by war, gas prices, gilded ballrooms, mean AI videos, and other reckless idiocy, climate change seems to have reached a tipping point. The U.S., Europe, and the world are suffering through the most extreme heat and related weather events in our lifetimes. “What we’re experiencing is what our community has been predicting for 30 years,” said Jean Jones, former vice-chair of the United Nations IPCC panel of climate experts.
In Europe, prolonged heat waves with temperatures over 100 degrees killed tens of thousands, baked Britain brown, sparked massive wildfires, and turned sections of the Danube, the Rhine, the Pole, and other rivers into cracked mud. It’s Europe’s second consecutive summer of apocalyptic heat and drought. In the United States, July was the hottest month since records began in 1895.
For weeks, most of the Southwest and Southern California have been roasting in temperatures near or over 110 degrees. A prolonged drought has left the Colorado River and Lakes Mead and Powell with so little water that California, Nevada, and Arizona now face major cuts in their allocations that may reach 40 percent if conditions worsen in future years. Wildfires of unprecedented intensity and scope have transformed vast tracts of majestic western U.S. Forests into charred, scraggly scrublands that may never regrow. The average temperature of the world’s oceans has climbed to just shy of 70 degrees–higher, scientists say, than at any time in the past 125,000 years.
They told us so. In fact, ugly consequences of climate change are arriving even faster than scientists predicted as temperature increases accelerate. The Super El Niño developing in the Pacific will add additional heat and make matters worse. Meanwhile, our would-be emperor spurns solar and electric vehicles, fetishizes oil and gas, and spent $4 billion to cancel already approved offshore wind farms. (Wind turbines cause cancer, he says.) Nero fiddles, Rome burns.
