The official site for the UN Climate Change Conference – Belém, November 2025 in Brazil notes “a look-alike domain” has been sending invitations trying “to obtain money and/or in many cases personal details.”
I don’t expect much progress at COP30, but will be glad to be surprised. Specifically, I mean finance, adaptation, carbon markets, keeping 1.5 C aspiration alive (with necessary cuts, phase-out of fossil fuels, energy, land use, and transport goals), loss and damage compensation/liability, social justice, carbon pricing, protection of biodiversity in Amazon rainforest and other places. As a minimalist poet, I searched for the fewest possible words to explain the pattern of insanity in previous COPS. It seems nothing does it better than the “11” scene in 1984 comedy This Is Spinal Tap.
To narrow even more, the IPCC’s hopes and dreams regarding direct air capture seem problematic, especially since, as Bill McKibben reported on his Substack site, The Crucial Years, “Reykjavik’s weekly newspaper Heimildin had the data [about Climeworks not working well enough] and also the reactions from good people around the world who had signed up to reduce their carbon footprints [ . . . . ]” The Heimildin article by Bjartmar Oddur Þeyr Alexandersson and Valur Grettisson was titled “Climeworks’ capture fails to cover its own emissions,” and notes, “[Managing Director] Sara Lind says she cannot answer questions about why CO2 capture is going so poorly that the company is unable to offset its own carbon footprint.” In the article an unnamed “professor of environmental and civil engineering at Stanford University in California says the carbon capture and disposal industry is a scam and is causing harm when it comes to climate solutions.”
The rate of change in land and sea is happening too fast for weak attempts. My January 16, 2024 post was “2023 Widely Noted as Hottest in About 125,000 Years.”
IPCC wishful thinking reminds me of my Grandma Armour paying kids a dime each to kneel at the finish line of Santa Anita Race Track in California to pray for her horse. IPCC blindness to climate reality reminds me of the 13 century poet Rumi scolding truth-seekers who always look outside themselves for answers, “He rides his horse from door to door, asking, ‘Has anyone seen my horse?’” (from the the book Rumi, Fragments * Ecstacies with translations by Daniel Liebert produced by Sunstone Press, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1981). Good medicine is Alexia Chellun’s 2018 song “The Power Is Here Now” with lyrics here and YouTube here. It would be a good theme song to start COP30 if they would play it.
I’m grateful for 17,033 views last month on my main site at riverseek.blogspot.com