THIS POST IS A CRITICAL COMMENTARY ON THE USE OF AGING NATURALISTS AS CLIMATE CHANGE AND OZONE DEPLETION EXPERTS TO PUSH THE CASE FOR CLIMATE ACTION AT COP26 .

WHAT THE DAVID SAYS

The naturalist, 95, posed with the crew on the deck of the RSS Sir David Attenborough, formerly known as Boaty McBoatFace, in Greenwich on Thursday. The RSS Sir David Attenborough is currently moored in London ahead of its first Antarctic mission later this year. The broadcaster pointed to how quickly world leaders acted in response to evidence from British scientists in the 1980s of the damage to the ozone layer, agreeing the Montreal Protocol to phase out CFCs just two years later. He said: ‘We all know the magnitude of the dangers facing us in the immediate future. ‘Would it not be marvellous to suppose that as a consequence of our discoveries, and science’s discoveries, the nations of the world joined together and actually did something in this coming Cop?’

THIS IS THE OLD ARGUMENT THAT SINCE WE DID THE MONTREAL PROTOCOL AND SAVED THE PLANET FROM OZONE DEPLETION, WE SHOULD BE ABLE TO DO THE MONTREAL PROTOCOL FOR THE CLIMATE AND SAVE THE PLANET FROM DESTRUCTION BY CLIMATE CHANGE.

CRITICAL COMMENTARY ON A MONTREAL PROTOCOL FOR THE CLIMATE.

#1: THE OZONE DEPLETION ISSUE IS PRESENTED IN RELATED POSTS ON THIS SITE:

LINK#1: https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/12/27/the-hole-in-the-sky/

LINK#2: https://tambonthongchai.com/2021/03/31/list-of-posts-on-ozone-depletion/

IN LINK#1 WE FIND THAT (#1) THE DATA DO NOT SHOW A LONG TERM DECLINE IN GLOBAL MEAN TOTAL COLUMN OZONE AND THAT THEREFORE THERE WAS NO OZONE DEPLETION PROBLEM FOR THE MONTREAL PROTOCOL TO SOLVE; AND (#2) THE BRIEF AND PERIODIC LOW OZONE EVENT ABOVE THE SOUTH POLE IS AN OZONE DISTRIBUTION ISSUE AND CANNOT BE UNDERSTOOD AS A LONG TERM DECLINE IN GLOBAL MEAN TOTAL COLUMN OZONE. A MORE COMPREHENSIVE STUDY OF THE DATA AND OF THESE ISSUES IS PRESENTED IN LINK#2.

CONCLUSION

IN THE ABSENCE OF EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE OF OZONE DEPLETION, IT APPEARS THAT THE ROLE OF THE UN IN THE ASSUMED SUCCESS OF THE MONTREAL PROTOCOL WAS TO DECLARE AN IMAGINARY PROBLEM AND THEN TO IMPLEMENT THE MONTREAL PROTOCOL WITH THE DECLARATION AT THE END THAT THE MONTREAL PROTOCOL HAD SOLVED THE IMAGINARY PROBLEM.

AS SHOWN IN THE TWO RELATED POSTS LINKED ABOVE, WHAT THE DATA TELL US IS THAT THERE WAS NO OZONE DEPLETION ISSUE TO START WITH.

IT IS A SAD AND CRUEL END TO A GLORIOUS NATURALIST CAREER OF AN OLD MAN NOW BEING USED MERCILESSLY AS A DESPERATE TOOL OF CLIMATE ACTION ACTIVISM.

(CNN): As the dust settles on Democrats’ $1.75 trillion economic framework, climate has emerged as a big winner.

PART-1: WHAT THE CNN REPORT SAYS ABOUT THE BIDEN CLIMATE PROGRAM

The framework crafted by President Joe Biden and congressional leaders includes $555 billion for climate and clean energy provisions. If passed, it would be the largest legislative investment on climate in US history, and a significant step forward for a Congress that has punted on climate action for decades while global temperatures have risen at an alarming rate. We’re spending over five times what we spent in the 2009 Recovery Act, and it’s a lot broader. These investments can have a huge positive impact on the economy. The White House ia preparing to roll out climate actions to meet Biden’s goals, with or without Congress. In the end, climate measures made up the largest policy line in Biden’s framework. It will cut a billion metric tons of US greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. The White House is also confident the legislation will put the US on track to meet Biden’s Paris Agreement goal of a 50% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions below 2005 levels by 2030. At the start of negotiations, environmental groups were asking for $700 billion in clean energy investments. The bill’s final number at $1.75 trillion. Senate negotiations were touch-and-go for months with Joe Manchin opposing the clean electricity program. That program was dropped but other investments were added to make up for it. A proposed $320 billion for clean energy and electric vehicle tax credits has survived negotiations. It includes electric vehicle tax credits of up to $12,500 for buyers of electric vehicles made in the USA with American materials and by union workers. The plan also expands existing home energy and efficiency tax credits, and create a new rebate program for electrification.

The Biden plan also includes a 300,000-person Civilian Climate Corps to conserve public lands and help the US be more resilient against climate impacts. Corps jobs will be union jobs. This progrm includes a Clean Energy and Sustainability Accelerator in the form of a green bank that will issue loans for clean energy projects. Though the framework has been announced and draft legislative text circulated, lawmakers have yet to vote. Manchin hasn’t endorsed the framework. It os unclear if and when the bill will be passed. Democrats in the House and Senate want to ensure that no more climate provisions get cut from the proposed $555 billion climate action budget. The Biden climate action framework is not yet codified but it gives Biden and Kerry some the opportunity to present these proposals at COP26 in Glasgow as the climate action roadmap for clean energy in the USA. And that will establish that Biden is living up to his ppromise to be a world leader on climate.

CRITICAL COMMENTARY

THE BIDEN CLIMATE ACTION PLAN DESCRIBED ABOVE IS BEST UNDERSTOOD AS A PREPARATION FOR COP26 WHERE THE USA WISHES TO BE SEEN AS A CLIMATE HERO SUCH THAT THE BILLYUNS AND BILLYUNS BEING SPENT IN THESE CLIMATE PROGRAMS ARE INTENDED TO MAKE BIDEN AND KERRY AND THE USA LOOK LIKE CLIMATE HEROES AT COP26. THIS IS NOT A CLIMATE ACTION PLAN. IT IS A KIND OF CLIMATE POLITICS.

OTHER ODDITIES AND WEAKNESSES OF THE PLAN ARE AS FOLLOWS.

FIRST, THE CLAIM THAT THE PROPOSED $555, $700, AND $320 BILLION BUDGETS FOR CLIMATE ACTION WILL REDUCE GLOBAL FOSSIL FUEL EMISSIONS BY A BILLION METRIC TONNES IMPLIES THAT THE NET EFFECT OF THIS PLAN IS A REDUCTION OF GLOBAL FOSSIL FUEL EMISSIONS BY 1/36 OR 2.8%. THIS IS WELL WITHIN THE UNCERTAINTY RANGE OF GLOBAL EMISSIONS. THEREFORE, NO MEASURABLE OR STATISTICALLY SIGNIFICANT IMPACT OF THE PROPOSED EMISSION REDUCTION ON THE CLIMATE IS POSSIBLE.

SECOND, AND MORE IMPORTANT, THE GLOBAL WARMING ISSUE IS A GLOBAL ISSUE AND ONLY A GLOBAL ISSUE IN WHICH GLOBAL FOSSIL FUEL EMISSIONS CAUSE GLOBAL WARMING AND THE CLIMATE ACTION SOUGHT IS A REDUCTION OF GLOBAL FOSSIL FUEL EMISSIONS TO ZERO. IT REQUIRES A GLOBALLY COORDINATED PROGRAM OF ALL COUNTRIES TO REDUCE GLOBAL FOSSIL FUEL EMISSIONS. THERE IS NO OPPORTUNITY HERE FOR THE CLIMATE HEROISM OF NATION STATES, EVEN OF A NATION STATE AS LARGE AND HEROIC AS THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. IN A RELATED POST ON THE “CATCH-22” PRINCIPLE IN CLIMATE ACTION: LINK: https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/05/22/climate-catch22/ , WE NOTE AS FOLLOWS:

Although the world of humans is separated into nation states, they are connected by economics. This connection is vast and complex and involves cross border investments, stocks, bonds, monetary policy, technology, intellectual property rights, and so on and so forth but most importantly in this respect, the nations of the world are connected by trade. International trade is so important, that even though we think of our civilization in terms of the nation states, we are really one huge global economy because we are connected by trade. Because nation states are independent nations in some respects but global in terms of trade, a climate action decision by an individual nation state will not lead to global emission reduction. This is because any national climate action plan by a single nation state will increase the economic cost of production and make that nation state less competitive in international trade and hand over a cost advantage to nations that do not have a national climate action plan. The cost advantage of non-climate-action takers will cause their production and exports to rise by virtue of demand from climate action taking nations. The net result will be that economic activity {and fossil fuel emissions} will decline in climate action taking nations but with a corresponding rise in economic activity {and fossil fuel emissions} in non-climate-action taking nations. In the net there may be no emission reduction. This is the Catch-22 of national level emission reduction plans. THEREFORE THERE IS NO OPPORTUNITY FOR CLIMATE ACTION HEROISM OF NATION STATES.

IN A RELATED POST: LINK: https://tambonthongchai.com/2021/02/23/renewable-energy-statistics/ WE SHOW THAT {NATIONAL LEVEL CLIMATE ACTION PLANS ARE FATALLY FLAWED BECAUSE THEY DO NOT CONTAIN USEFUL INFORMATION ABOUT CLIMATE ACTION. OVER THE LAST DECADE INTENSIVE NATIONAL LEVEL CLIMATE ACTION BY THE ADVANCED INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY NATIONS SUCH AS GREAT BRITAIN, THE EUROPEAN UNION, AND AUSTRALIA, AT GREAT COST AND SUFFERING BY THEIR CITIZENS, HELPED ALONG BY THE COVID PANDEMIC IMPLIES, IN ACCORDANCE WITH CLIMATE SCIENCE AND THE CALL FOR CLIMATE ACTION BY CLIMATE SCIENCE, THAT THE RATE OF INCREASE IN ATMOSPHERIC CO2 AND THE RATE OF GLOBAL WARMING SHOULD HAVE BEEN REDUCED. BUT NO SUCH IMPACT IS FOUND IN THE DATA FOR EITHER OF THESE KEY AGW VARIABLES. A SPECIFIC IMPACT OF THE PANDEMIC WAS THE REDUCTION IN GLOBAL AIRLINE TRAFFIC FROM 39 MILLION FLIGHTS PER YEAR TO 16 MILLION FLIGHTS PER YEAR. THROUGH ALL THIS CLIMATE ACTION AND THE PANDEMIC’S IMPACT ON ECONOMIC ACTIVITY WORLDWIDE, ATMOSPHERIC CO2 AND GLOBAL MEAN TEMPERATURE CONTINUED TO RISE AT THE SAME RATE AS THEY HAD WITHOUT ANY INDICATION OF AN EFFECT EITHER OF CLIMATE ACTION OR OF THE PANDEMIC. THESE DATA IMPLY THAT THERE IS NO CLIMATE ACTION INTERPRETATION FOR NATIONAL LEVEL EMISSION REDUCTION PLANS.

IN TERMS OF CONFERENCE OF PARTIES {COP}, THE OBJECTIVE THERE IS THAT THE GATHERING OF NATIONS WILL MAKE IT POSSIBLE FOR THEM TO COORDINATE A COOPERATIVE GLOBAL EFFORT OF ALL NATION STATES TO REACH AN EMISSION REDUCTION AGREEMENT LIKE THE MONTREAL PROTOCOL IN WHICH THE NET GLOBAL EMISSION IS ZERO.

THE COP IS NOT A PLACE FOR NATION STATES WITH INDEPENDENT AND UNCOORDIANTED CLIMATE ACTION PLANS TO IMPRESS THE UNITED NATIONS AND THE COP DELEGATES WITH THEIR INTENTIONS AND CLIMATE ACTION PLANS. IT IS A PLACE WHERE THEY CAN CREATE A COORDINATED GLOBAL PLAN TO ELIMINATE GLOBAL FOSSIL FUEL EMISSIONS AS IN THE SO CALLED “MONTREAL PROTOCOL FOR THE CLIMATE’.

THE LONG AND SORDID HISTORY AND THE DISMAL AND COMICAL FAILURE OF THE 25 COPS THAT HAVE BEEN HELD IN THE PAST IS DESCRIBED IN TWO RELATED POST:

LINK#1: https://tambonthongchai.com/2021/06/05/the-paris-agreement/

LINK#2: https://tambonthongchai.com/2021/08/21/cop26-glasgow-2021/ . THE USA CLIMATE ACTION HEROISM DESCRIBED ABOVE IS A CONTINUATION OF THIS BIZARRE CARICATURE.

THIS POST IS A CRITICAL EVALUATION OF THE CLIMATE DISINFORMATION PROBE BY CONGRESS

PART-1: THE CASE FOR A CLIMATE DISINFORMATION PROBE:

Oil Executives to Face Congress on Climate Disinformation. The heads of Exxon Mobil, Shell, Chevron and BP will testify Thursday in the first congressional inquiry into industry efforts to hinder action on climate change.

As in the tobacco hearings of the 1990s that exposed the lies pf tobacco companies about the health dangers of smoking and paved the way for tough nicotine regulations, executives of Exxon Mobil, Chevron, BP and Shell are set to appear before a congressional committee Thursday to address accusations that the industry spent millions of dollars to wage a decades-long disinformation campaign to cast doubt on the science of climate change and to derail action to reduce emissions from burning fossil fuels.

This is the first time that oil executives will be pressed to answer questions, under oath, about whether their companies misled the public about the reality of climate change by obscuring the SCIENTIFIC CONSENSUS that the burning of fossil fuels is raising Earth’s temperature and sea levels with devastating consequences worldwide including intensifying storms, worsening drought and deadlier wildfires.

BIG OIL WILL HAVE TO ANSWER TO THE AMERICAN PUBLIC ON THEIR CLIMATE DISINFORMATION.

There is an ongoing climate crisis and tons of news about the climate crisis. Oil companies have denied lying to the public about climate change, and have said the industry is now taking bold steps to rein in emissions.

Shell oil has admitted that meeting the demand for reliable energy must simultaneously address climate change and that it is a huge undertaking and one of the defining challenges of our time.

Exxon’s position is that it has long acknowledged that climate change is real and poses serious risks.The company’s statements about climate science have been factual aqnd transparent and consistent with the broader mainstream scientific community and it evolved as the science evolved although back in the year 2000, Exxon’s position was that scientists have been unable to confirm that the burning of oil, gas and coal caused climate change.

Yet, in 1950, the IPCC had confirmed that the planet had warmed by 0.5C over the previous century because of fossil fuel-driven greenhouse gases. The American Petroleum Institute has taken a position in favor of climate change policies.

SO THEREFORE, THE STATED POSITION OF EXXON ON CLIMATE CHANGE IS DISINFORMATION BECAUSE IT CONTRADICTS THE 1950 IPCC REPORT.

PART-2: THE CASE FOR SCIENCE

The essence of the case presented above is that the climate science position on climate change is correct and that therefore any deviance from the climate science position on climate change is an evil and unscientific enterprise of the profit motivation of the oil industry that threatens human welfare in the USA as well as globally and that therefore the US govenrment must intervene on the side of climate science in this issue.

This argument is fatally flawed.

(1): First, it is not a governmental function to resolve scientitic disagreements.

(2): Secondly, if the government can and must intervene into this science discourse it must do so without taking a position on the issue before it carries out its investigation.

(3): That there is a role of the government to determine that the the climate science position is information and that the oil industry position is disinformation and to resolve the disinformation of the fossil fuel industry is based on the assumption that the government has determined that the climate science position on climate change is information and that the fossil fuel industry position on climate change is disinformation.

(4): This position of the government is illogical and indefensible if the issue is science.

(5): Yet another aspect of a role for the government of the USA is that climate change is a global issue with no role for nation states. This is why the UN is running the show and why we have COPs. The tobacco issue was a national issue that was resolved by national policies . These two issues are not comparable and nothing about either contains implications for the other.

(6): If the government has a role in resolving the climate issue it should address the points of disagreement and not use the tobacco issue as a blanket rationale to conclude that therefore the climate science position is correct and the oil industry position is wrong.

(7): For example, what is the government’s position on the climate sensitivity (ECS) uncertainty issue : LINK: https://tambonthongchai.com/2021/05/10/the-climate-sensitivity-issue/

(8): And what is the government positon on the use of the TCRE instead of ECS and the statistical errors in the construction of the TCRE parameter? LINK: https://tambonthongchai.com/2021/05/18/climate-science-vs-statistics/ ????

(9): The government also needs to explain the observation in the data that warming cycles of 100 to 1000 years are common in interglacials: Interglacials such as the Holocene that we are in, are never at constant temperature but consist entirely of chaotic and alternating warming and cooling cycles LINK: https://tambonthongchai.com/2021/11/09/the-issue-is-human-cause/ .

(10): If climate science can explain these temperature departures as cause and effect phenomena and the creation of changes in atmospheric composition, they should explain all of them in that way and not pick just one of them to explain. That kind of science suffers from a science fallacy called “DATA SELECTION BIAS”.

CONCLUSION

If the government wants to intervene in the climate change issue it must address the issues in the science instead of simply citing tobacco. The tobacco argument is nonsensical. It says in essence that since the tobacco industry was wrong in the tobacco issue therefore, the fossil fuel industry must be wrong in the climate issue. This logic is flawed. If the government wants a role in the climate science it must address the science issues at hand.

THE PROPOSITION THAT SINCE TOBACCO SCIENTISTS WERE RIGHT THEREFORE CLIMATE SCIENTISTS MUST ALSO BE RIGHT IS NOT SCIENCE.

QUESTION:

WHAT WOULD YOU RATHER HAVE, GLOBAL WARMING OR GLOBAL COOLING? WHAT EXTREME WEATHER KILLS MORE PEOPLE, TOO HOT OR TOO COLD?

YOU HAVE TO PICK ONE OR THE OTHER BECAUSE THE HISTORY OF THE HOLOCENE INTERGLACIAL DOES NOT SHOW THAT “NO TEMPERATURE TREND” IS AN OPTION THAT IS AVAILABLE TO US.

ANSWER

Research shows that extreme heat and cold kills 5.08 million people on average every year.

Of this, 4.6 million deaths occurred due to extreme cold. {90.5%}

And 0.48 million deaths occurred due to extreme heat. {9.5%}

SO IF YOU HAD TO PICK BETWEEN GLOBAL WARMING AND GLOBAL COOLING WHICH ONE WOULD YOU CHOOSE? CLIMATE DATA FOR THE HOLOCENE INTERGLACIAL SHOWS ALTERNATING WARMING AND COOLING CYCLES FOR THE LAST 9,000 YEARS OR SO. WE HAPPEN TO BE IN A WARMING CYCLE THAT HAS MOTIVATED THE CLIMATE CHANGE WHINING OF OUR TIME. SO WHAT DO THEY WANT? A COOLING CYCLE?

QUESTION

What are “climate sensitivities,” and how do they impact climate change overall?

ANSWER

The theory is that global mean surface temperature (GMST) is a logarithmic function of atmospheric CO2 concentration. In practice, this relationship is measured as the temperature rise for each doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentration. This relationship is called equilibrium climate sensitivity or ECS. For example, if a doubling of atmospheric CO2 causes GMST to rise by 2C then ECS=2. In climate science the standardized value is ECS=3 but with an uncertainty range of 1.5 to 4.5, a rather large uncertainty that implies we don’t really know what the ECS is exactly.

This issue becomes all the more mysterious when we look at all the different values of ECS that climate scientists have measured and published over the years. For there we find ECS values all over the map. This range is much larger than the 1.5 to 4.5 range that has been standardized by the IPCC. It is so large that in any science other than climate science it would imply that we don’t really know the value of the ECS. Yet, the whole of the climate movement and their activism against fossil fuels is based on the ECS although they don’t know what that value is exactly.

DETAILS IN A RELATED POST: LINK: https://tambonthongchai.com/2021/05/10/the-climate-sensitivity-issue/

RELATED POST: WHAT DOES UNCERTAINTY MEAN?

LINK: https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/04/22/climate-science-uncertainty/

QUESTION:

Would Australia be affected by an ice age?

ANSWER

Australia has been in an ice age for more than 2 million years so you can see for yourself what the effects are if any. We are currently in the quaternary ice age. It consists of glaciation cycles that are about 100,000 years in duration of which about 80 to 90 percent is a glaciated state with brief interglacials in between that are warm and mostly deglaciated. We are currently in one of these interglacials. Interglacials also go through warming and cooling cycles at time scales of 100 to 1000 years. We are in one of those warming cycles. We live on a planet that is never at a steady temperature but is always going through warming and cooling cycles. These temperature cycles are natural.

To be alarmed by an interglacial warming cycle and to seek a human cause for it tells us more about human nature than about climate.

QUESTION

ARE HUMANS CAUSING THE INCREASE IN GREENHOUSE GASES? HOW?

ANSWER:

THIS IS A FOUNDATIONAL ASSUMPTION IN THE CLIMATE SCIENCE OF ANTHROPOGENIC GLOBAL WARMING BUT NO EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE FOR THIS RELATIONSHIP HAS EVER BEEN PRESENTED AND NO EVIDENCE IS FOUND IN THE DATA. WHAT’S MORE CLIMATE SCIENCE HAS ABONDENED THIS CAUSATION HYPOTHESIS BY MOVING TO THE TCRE METRIC FOR THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN EMISSIONS AND WARMING BUT THE TCRE IS A FLAWED DEVICE AS SHOWN BELOW.

FOUR LINKS BELOW TO RELATED POSTS ON THIS SITE

TEST#1 FOR THE ASSUMED RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN FOSSIL FUEL EMISSIONS AND ATMOSPHERIC COMPOSITION LINK#1: https://tambonthongchai.com/2021/10/05/rising-atmospheric-co2/

TEST#2 FOR THE ASSUMED RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN FOSSIL FUEL EMISSIONS AND ATMOSPHERIC COMPOSITION LINK#2: https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/11/21/the-case-against-fossil-fuels/

TEST#3: THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN CLIMATE SENSITIVITY AND THE TCRE LINK#3: https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/08/26/a-mathematical-inconsistency/

CONCLUSION:

THE PROPOSED RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN FOSSIL FUEL EMISSIONS AND ATMOSPHERIC COMPOSITION IS NOT FOUND IN THE DATA. THE CLIMATE SCIENCE RESPONSE TO THAT ISSUE WAS TO PROPOSE THE TCRE METRIC AS THE EVIDENCE THAT FOSSIL FUEL EMISSIONS DRIVE WARMING BUT THAT PROPOSAL CONTAINS SERIOUS STATISTICAL ERRORS AS DESCRIBED IN THE DOCUMENT LINKED ABOVE IN LINK#3:

THIS POST IS A STUDY OF THE ARTICLE IN THE MONTHLY ON A NEW THEORY OF CANCER PROPOSED BY PAUL DAVIES. LINK TO SOURCE: https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2018/november/1540990800/paul-davies/new-theory-cancer#mtr

PART-1: WHAT THE ARTICLE IN THE MONTHLY SAYS

After billions spent for little benefit, it’s time to look at the disease in a different way
When President Richard Nixon declared war on cancer in 1971, he set a goal for conquering the disease by 1976. The US National Cancer Institute (NCI) was empowered and expanded by the stroke of the president’s pen, and some serious public money injected into a mammoth research effort. In the intervening 47 years, in excess of US$100 billion of taxpayer money has been spent by the NCI alone on the search for an elusive “cure for cancer”. Its 2018 fiscal year budget is just shy of US$6 billion. Cancer research also attracts billions from drug companies and through charitable donations. Proportionately similar amounts have been spent in other developed nations, Australia included.

So what have we got for all the money spent? Not what was promised, clearly. Survival rates for many major cancers are little changed in several decades. Treatment regimes – a combination of surgery, radiation and toxic chemicals – remain much as they were in Nixon’s day. Life extension is often measured in weeks or months rather than years, and interventions are frequently a rearguard action against the inevitable. Optimistically touted “breakthrough drugs” are typically efficacious on only a few per cent of patients and often have dreadful side effects. Meanwhile, cancer incidence has grown remorselessly as overall life expectancy has risen, making cancer now the world’s number two killer, with about 14 million new cases per year. It’s fair to say that cancer touches every family on the planet.

Screening programs complicate the picture. They are very effective for skin and colon cancers because early surgical intervention can be 100 per cent successful. But breast and prostate cancer screenings are extremely controversial because even though doing nothing is often the best option – many early-stage cancers never progress to be life-threatening – patients are understandably reluctant to merely watch and wait when diagnosed with a potentially killer disease. Furthermore, as screening technology has improved, tiny tumours are being spotted earlier, which has the effect of skewing the statistics. The medical profession has defined a “cancer survivor” as someone remaining alive five years after diagnosis. Find tumours earlier and there will appear to be more survivors even if there was zero progress in treatment outcomes. So claims that we are slowly winning the war against cancer have to be nuanced. For the record, current overall five-year survival rates in Australia are still less than 70 per cent.

It is not all bad news. Some cancers have indeed been largely conquered by drugs, childhood leukaemia being a famous example. Lung cancer, the scourge of the Nixon era, has steadily declined as smoking has become unfashionable. And the careful use of drug combinations has progressively extended survival times for certain cancers. But others are on the rise, and the overall picture is far from rosy, as is obvious from the continual pleas for additional funding.

Unfortunately there is a widespread belief that if enough money is thrown at the problem a solution will be found. All science requires funding, of course, but the truth is we have to think our way to a solution, not spend our way to one. And we won’t outsmart cancer until we understand what it is. I don’t mean understand it as a disease, but understand it as a biological phenomenon. There are more than a million published research papers on cancer and yet the simple questions, “What is cancer?” and “Why does it exist?”, have no clear answers in the scientific community. Maybe progress against cancer is so slow because we have been thinking about the problem the wrong way?

I first became involved in this subject in 2008 when I received a phone call from Anna Barker, at that time deputy director of the NCI. She perceived the need for some radical new thinking to replace the same-old-same-old mindset of many cancer researchers, and wondered whether bringing in scientists from other disciplines, notably physics with its stunning track record of success, might provide a welcome shake-up of the field. I countered that I knew nothing about cancer, and she replied, “That’s perfect!” Thus began a US$35 million per annum NCI-funded program in physical science and oncology. In all, 12 new centres were created across the US, each pairing a physical scientist with an oncologist.

I (PAUL DAVIES) was chosen to run the centre at Arizona State University (ASU), and I took seriously Dr Barker’s entreaty to rethink cancer from the bottom up. As a physicist and cosmologist I am used to sidestepping technicalities and searching for deep unifying principles. A culture clash was immediately apparent. Oncologists work at the sharp end of the subject, and every patient is different. It’s natural that physicians should regard cancer as a bafflingly complex disease. But most cancers follow a fairly predictable pattern: a tumour grows in a specific organ, and after a while some cells leave the tumour and spread around the body, invading remote organs and creating secondary tumours, usually with fatal consequences. As cancer progresses, it displays several distinctive hallmarks, including uncontrolled proliferation, increased motility, evasion of the immune system and organisation of its own blood supply. I wanted to know what underlies this bizarre phenomenon and why it happens.

What first struck me was the fact that cancer, far from being restricted to humans, is found right across the tree of life, in most multicelled organisms. Scientists have found cancer or cancer-like phenomena in all mammals, as well as in fish, birds, worms, insects and corals. There are even cancers among plants and fungi; at ASU we have just created a “cancer garden” displaying striking examples of cancer in cacti. Recently, cases of cancer have been found in the humble hydra, a tiny organism with only seven cell types.

In biology, the most widespread properties of organisms are usually the most ancient, and can often be traced to a common ancestor in the far past. Photosynthesis, for example, is used by all plants and many bacteria, and dates back more than three billion years. Could we use the tree of life, I wondered, to trace the origin of cancer?

For the greater part of our planet’s history, life was restricted to single-celled organisms: bacteria and archaea. The earliest uncontentious traces of life come from the Pilbara region of Western Australia, and date back about 3.5 billion years. Single cells have but one imperative: replicate, replicate, replicate! Bacteria that go on dividing and multiplying are in a sense immortal. It goes without saying, however, that cancer is a disease of bodies; it makes little sense to say a microbe has cancer. But bodies in the usual meaning of the word, in which there are different tissue types with specialised functions, had to await the onset of multicellularity, which first emerged about 1.5 billion years ago. By 600 million years ago, many of the basic body plans we see today had evolved.

A multicelled organism executes the life project very differently from a microbe. Immortality is outsourced to specialised germ cells (for example, eggs and sperm), which carry the genetic legacy down the generations, while the rest – the so-called somatic cells – accept eventual death. In an echo of their free-living past, somatic cells may undergo quite a few rounds of division – skin cells, for example, can divide up to 40 times – but eventually all normal somatic cells commit suicide, a process known as apoptosis. In the absence of the cells’ renewal (by so-called stem cells), the organism must finally die.

To police this ancient contract between individual somatic cells and the organism as a whole, layer upon layer of regulatory control has evolved. As always with a cooperative venture, there is a danger of cheating. Just as humans are tempted to accept the benefits of society but dodge their taxes, so somatic cells harbour inner instincts to freeload off the benefits the organism provides but evade the apoptosis police. The result is cancer – the uncontrolled proliferation of a population of somatic cells, triggered by a disruption of functions that evolved to regulate multicellular organisation.

Nothing I have stated above is controversial, but few oncologists choose to think about cancer in this way – that is, as a biological phenomenon with deep evolutionary roots stretching back to the Proterozoic era of life on Earth. But to make serious progress we need this broader context.

Cancer as a throwback

The standard explanation for cancer, known as the somatic mutation theory, is that random mutations – genetic defects in DNA – accumulate in cells over time, perhaps as the result of chemical damage or radiation, until a point is reached where a mutated cell embarks on a rampage, multiplying uncontrollably, forming a “neoplasm”, or population of new cells, and behaving in many respects like a parasitic independent organism. Though entrenched, the somatic mutation theory has poor predictive power. Moreover, it struggles to explain how random mutations confer so many fitness-improving gains of function in a single neoplasm in the space of weeks or months. It also seems paradoxical that increasingly damaged and defective genomes engage in such systematic and broadly predictable behaviour, acquiring the various hallmarks I mentioned. On top of this, it is clear that mutations cannot be the whole story; a tumour’s micro-environment is also critical in determining the tumour’s behaviour. Even highly mutated cancer cells can be “tamed” by surrounding healthy tissues.

Over the past few years, my colleagues and I have developed a somewhat different explanation of cancer that seeks its origins in the far past. We were struck by the fact that cancer never invents anything new. Instead, it merely appropriates already existing functions of the host organism, many of them very basic and ancient. Limitless proliferation, for example, has been a fundamental feature of unicellular life for aeons. After all, life is in the business of replication, and cells have had billions of years to learn how to do it well and keep going in the face of all manner of threats and insults. Metastasis – the process whereby a neoplasm spreads around the body – mimics what happens during early-stage embryo development, when cells surge in organised patterns to designated locations. And the propensity of circulating cancer cells to invade other organs closely parallels what the immune system does to heal wounds. These facts, combined with the predictable and efficient way that cancer progresses through its various stages of malignancy, convinced us that cancer is not a case of damaged cells randomly running amok but an ancient, systematic and brutally efficient pre-programmed strategy that is deployed when cells are challenged or threatened in some way. Crucially, we believe that the various distinctive hallmarks of cancer do not independently evolve as the neoplasm goes along, but are deliberately switched on and deployed in an organised strategy.

In summary, our view of cancer is that it is not a product of damage but a systematic response to a damaging environment – a primitive cellular defence mechanism. Cancer is a cell’s way of coping with a bad place. To be sure, it may be triggered by mutations, but its root cause is the self-activation of a very old and deeply embedded toolkit of emergency survival procedures. A helpful analogy is a computer that suffers an insult, such as corrupted software, and starts up in safe mode. This is a default program enabling the computer to run on its core functionality even when defective. In the same way, we think, cancer is a default state in which a cell under threat runs on its ancient core functionality, thereby preserving its vital functions, of which proliferation is the most ancient, most vital and best preserved.

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Although elements of the cancer default program are extremely ancient, dating back to the origin of life itself, some of the more sophisticated features revisit later stages in evolution, especially in the period between one billion and 600 million years ago, when metazoans (complex multicelled organisms) first emerged. Thus cancer is a type of atavism – a throwback to an ancestral form or “phenotype”. That essential idea was proposed as long ago as 1914 by the German biologist Theodor Boveri, but was sidelined until recently. It is because cancer is so deeply integrated into the fundamental logic of multicellular life that combating it proves such a formidable challenge. People talk about our “inner fish”; well, rewinding the evolutionary tape still further back in time connects us to our inner cancer. Sadly, it seems that cancer is an accident waiting to happen.

Testing the new theory

A number of clinical oncologists had formed similar conclusions and shared our general unease about the inadequacy of the somatic mutation theory. Among these were Mark Vincent, medical oncologist at the London Regional Cancer Centre in Ontario, Canada, and David Goode of the Computational Biology Program at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre in Melbourne. In addition, one of the more far-sighted and renowned American oncologists, the late Don Coffey of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, was a strong supporter of our endeavours. He even invited me to do “grand rounds” at Hopkins to present the basic ideas.

In science, for a new theory to be taken seriously it has to not only explain the known facts but also offer testable predictions. Fortunately our theory was developed just as gene-sequencing technology was advancing rapidly and very large genetic databases were being compiled. The key novelty is our emphasis on the ages of genes, which is not normally a consideration in cancer research. It is possible to estimate how old a gene is by comparing how gene sequences diverge across many species. This procedure is known as phylostratigraphy, and it enables scientists to reconstruct the tree of life, working backwards from common features today to deduce the convergence point in the past. Using this technique, we can trace the evolutionary origin of genes that are implicated in cancer, a subset of which are called oncogenes. If the throwback theory is along the right lines, one expects that cancer genes would cluster in age around the onset of multicellularity.

A study by Tomislav Domazet-Lošo and Diethard Tautz in Germany used four different cancer gene datasets and confirmed the presence of a marked peak in age at around the time that metazoa evolved. A recent analysis of seven tumour types by Anna Trigos, Richard Pearson and Anthony T. Papenfuss in David Goode’s laboratory in Melbourne sorted genes into 16 groups by age and then compared how strongly the genes are expressed in cancer versus normal tissue for each group. The results were striking. Cancer over-expresses genes belonging to the two older groups and under-expresses younger genes, much as we predicted. The Melbourne study also went further, suggesting that the regression to a more primitive cellular state was not an across-the-board affair, but a highly regulated and finessed process. Genes rarely act in isolation; rather, they form cooperative networks. Goode and Trigos found that the gene networks dating from the era of unicellularity are systematically decoupled from the more recently evolved multicellular gene networks, revealing a novel pattern of gene expression specifically tied to gene ages. They reported a strong association between the evolution of multicellularity and patterns of gene expression in cancer. Furthermore, they found that as cancer progresses to a more aggressive, dangerous stage the older genes are expressed at higher levels, confirming our view that cancer reverses the evolutionary arrow at high speed as it develops in the host organism. Our own work at ASU, much of which was carried out by a geneticist, Kimberly Bussey, in collaboration with a physicist, Luis Cisneros, focused on mutation rates. The atavistic theory predicts that older genes should be less mutated in cancer (after all, they are responsible for running the “safe mode” program), while younger genes should be mutated more. My colleagues considered a total of 19,756 human genes and used an inventory of cancer genes, compiled by the UK’s Sanger Institute, called COSMIC. This data was combined with a database of genetic sequences from about 18,000 species across all taxonomic groups, which allowed an estimate of the evolutionary ages of the genes in the human genome. We found that genes younger than about 500 million years were indeed more likely to be mutated in cancer, while genes older than a billion years tended to suffer fewer mutations than average, as expected. The most telling result came from addressing a rather different question: what are cancer genes good for? A gene classification tool called DAVID organises genes around their function. When my colleagues fed the COSMIC data into DAVID, what leapt out was that recessive genes older than 950 million years were strongly enriched for two core functions: cell cycle control, and DNA damage repair involving double-strand breaks (the worst kind of damage DNA can suffer). Looking at the evolutionary history of those genes involved revealed a startling and unexpected result. The cancer genes implicated in DNA repair turned out to match up with genes in bacteria employed for a critical survival function. When bacteria are stressed, for example from starvation, they deliberately ramp up their mutation rates with a view to evolving out of trouble. The mechanism they employ was elucidated by Susan Rosenberg, who holds the Ben F. Love Chair in Cancer Research at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. Rosenberg found that stressed bacteria create a distinctive pattern of self-inflicted mutational damage around DNA double-strand breaks, extending either side of the repaired break for thousands of DNA bases, by strategically deploying a sloppy repair mechanism. Bussey and Cisneros at ASU found identical patterns of damage in cancer DNA, created by the same mechanism controlled by essentially the same genes. This discovery is important because the clustering of mutations in this manner is known to be associated with poor patient prognosis. Elevated mutation rates are one of the best-known hallmarks of cancer and the main reason why chemotherapy falters when neoplasms evolve drug-resistant variants. We collaborated with a research team led by Robert Austin at Princeton University to investigate the details of drug resistance, and specifically to address the question of whether resistance is acquired by random mutations plus Darwinian selection, as the somatic mutation theory predicts, or from a more deliberate and organised response. The Princeton group subjected human cancer cells to a therapeutic toxin (doxorubicin) and found a highly uneven pattern of mutations – hot spots of elevated mutation and cold spots that seemed to be protected from damage. And true to the atavism theory, they found that the genes in the cold-spot regions were significantly older than average. The Princeton results explain why natural selection hasn’t eliminated the scourge of cancer. If tumours really are a reversion to an ancestral form, then we might expect that the ancient pathways and mechanisms that drive cancer would be among the most deeply protected and conserved, as they fulfil the most basic functions of life. They can’t be got rid of without disaster befalling the cells concerned. It makes sense that organisms should work hard to protect key parts of their genomes, such as those ancient genes responsible for running the core functions of the cell, and devote fewer resources to the “bells and whistles” associated with more recently evolved and less critical traits. Further support for the atavism theory may come from a worldwide effort to enlist zoos in a comprehensive study of cancer across species. The initiative is being managed by the Arizona Cancer Evolution Center, run by my colleague Carlo Maley. As part of the program, we have begun collaborating with Taronga Zoo in Sydney. I want to know whether cancer in marsupials differs from that in placental mammals, given their widely different developmental strategies. It has been known for decades that certain oncogenes play a crucial role in early-stage embryo development. Normally, these developmental genes are silenced in the adult form, but if something reawakens them cancer may result; a tumour is, in effect, a botched embryo developing inappropriately in adult tissue. The disruption of gene regulatory networks that heralds cancer involves dramatic changes in the patterns of information flow between genes and between cells, just as safe mode on a computer represents a major reorganisation of the machine’s software. Our research group at ASU is trying to find “information signatures” of these gene network changes. We think it will prove possible to identify distinct “informational hallmarks” of cancer to go alongside the physical hallmarks I mentioned, providing a software indicator of cancer initiation that may precede the clinically noticeable changes in cell and tissue morphology, thus providing an early warning of trouble ahead.

Implications for therapy

The atavistic theory of cancer has important implications not just for diagnosis but also for therapy. Most approaches target the strengths of cancer. For example, many drugs try to block the propensity of cancer cells to replicate rapidly. However, as I have stressed, cells have had four billion years to combat threats to their proliferative ability and they usually find workarounds that render the drugs ineffective, such as pumping the toxins out or defensively switching on mutator genes to evolve resistant strains. The standard chemotherapy regime of applying the maximum tolerable dose to hit cancer hard therefore seems intrinsically flawed, because it risks provoking an aggressive atavistic response. We suggest instead an approach based on the minimum efficacious dose, with a view to containing and controlling cancer rather than trying to exterminate it. Two clinical trials along these lines are currently being conducted, one by the Arizona Cancer Evolution Center in collaboration with the Mayo Clinic, and the other at the Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Florida. Better still would be an alternative to toxic chemotherapy altogether. One of the more important “bells and whistles” that multicellular life has evolved over the past few hundred million years is the adaptive immune system, instrumental in fighting infections but also in surveilling for cancer. The atavism theory predicts that as cancer progresses – and hence regresses in evolutionary terms – it should subvert this system, and indeed it does. A great deal of attention has been given recently to immunotherapy as a powerful new way to combat cancer. The basic idea is to boost the body’s immune system so as to strengthen the immune response. It is too soon to know whether immunotherapy will prove to be the decisive breakthrough claimed or yet another example of cancer outwitting whatever the physician throws at it. But early results are promising. There is a curious backstory here. Over a hundred years ago, the American physician William Coley was intrigued by the fact that some cancer sufferers undergo spontaneous remission following an infection. Coley even experimented with deliberately infecting patients with streptococcus, a bold – some might say reckless – practice that soon went the way of leeches. But Coley may have been onto something. The conventional explanation is that the infections boosted the immune system, which then destroyed the cancer as incidental collateral damage. We contend, however, that at least part of the reason for Coley’s results is that cancer tumours are more vulnerable to infections than the rest of the body because they have decoupled from the adaptive immune system. In other words, by regressing to an immunocompromised state, tumours leave themselves unprotected against infections. The selective use of viruses and bacteria against some late-stage cancers therefore seems a rational approach. Another therapy idea to come from the atavism theory also harks back a century, to the work of Otto Warburg, a Nobel Prize–winning physician. Normal human cells use oxygen to generate energy, but cancer often switches to fermentation, a low-oxygen, high-glucose process. It is less energy-efficient, but good for making biomass. Warburg discovered that cancer will switch to fermentation even in the presence of normal oxygen levels. It is tempting to speculate that, in reverting to an ancestral form, cancer is reprising a lifestyle adapted to the state of planet Earth at the time when multicellular organisms first evolved. And geologists have determined that before a billion years ago there was indeed far less free oxygen in the atmosphere. Some researchers have used this insight to advocate the application of hyperbaric oxygen therapy combined with a low-glucose diet to stymie the Warburg effect and slow the cancer. I believe the search for a general-purpose “cure” for cancer is an expensive diversion. Being so deeply entrenched in the nature of multicellular life itself, cancer is best managed and controlled (not exterminated) by challenging the cancer with physical conditions inimical to its ancient atavistic lifestyle. It does, however, require a change in the culture of cancer care, away from Nixon’s all-out war and towards accepting cancer as a chronic disease. We don’t have to destroy cancer; we just have to prevent cancer destroying us. Only by fully understanding the place of cancer in the overall context of evolutionary history will a serious impact be made on human life expectancy.

PAUL DAVIES
Paul Davies is a physicist and astrobiologist at Arizona State University, where he is Regents’ Professor. His latest book is What’s Eating the Universe? And Other Cosmic Questions.

THE ASSESSMENT OF CLIMATE SCIENCE IN THIS LIGHT

THE CLIMATE SCIENCE RELIANCE ON (1) “CONSENSUS”, (2) “SETTLED SCIENCE” (3) THE ASSUMED AD HOMINEM CREDIBILITY OF CLIMATE SCIENTISTS THAT HAVE PROPOSED THE THEORY OF ANTHROPOGENIC GLOBAL WARMING, (4) THE VILLIFICATION OF CRITICAL EVALUATION AND OF NEW IDEAS, AND ALTERNATIVE VIEWS WITH REGARD TO THE DATA AND METHODS OF CLIMATE SCIENCE, ARE PRESENTED TO THE GENERAL PUBLIC AS ITS STRENGTH AND POWER AND PROOF OF THE CORRECTNESS OF THE THEORY AND THEREFORE THE DEMAND THAT THE THEORY MUST NOT BE QUESTIONED OR CHALLENGED AND THE ASSUMPTION THAT CRITICS ARE EVIL FOSSIL FUEL FUNDED CLIMATE CHANGE DENIERS WHOSE ACTIVITIES COULD UNDERMINE A SINCERE AND SCIENTIFIC EFFORT BY SCIENTISTS WHO KNOW THE SCIENCE AND WHO ARE DOING THE SCIENCE TO SAVE HUMANITY AND LIFE ON EARTH AND MAYBE THE PLANET ITSELF FROM DESTRUCTION BY CLIMATE CHANGE.

THIS POSITION OF CLIMATE SCIENCE IS INCONSISTENT WITH THE ADVANCES IN CANCER RESEARCH DESCRIBED ABOVE THAT WERE ACHIEVED BY CANCER SCIENTISTS COLLABORATING WITH VASTLY DIFFERENT ALTERNATIVE VIEWS BY RESEARCHERS WHOSE RESEARCH QUESTIONS, DATA, AND METHODS CAN BE DESCRIBED AS CANCER SCIENCE DENIAL.

THIS POST IS A BRIEF REVIEW OF THE ANNOUNCEMENT BY THE UNITED NATIONS THAT THE EMERGING DROUGHT CONDITIONS IN MADAGASCAR IS EVOLVING INTO A HORRIBLE FAMINE THAT COULD TURN OUT TO BE THE WORLD’S FIRST FAMINE CAUSED BY CLIMATE CHANGE. THE FULL TEXT OF THE UNITED NATIONS CLIMATE CHANGE FAMINE DECLARATION IS PROVIDED BELOW.

FULL TEXT OF THE UN CLIMATE CHANGE FAMINE DECLARATION FOR MADAGASCAR.

Severe drought could spur world’s first climate change famine in Madagascar.

More than one million people in southern Madagascar are struggling to get enough to eat, due to what could become the first famine caused by climate change.The region has been hit hard by successive years of severe drought, forcing families in rural communities to resort to desperate measures just to survive.

Madagascar is the fourth largest island in the world. The country experiences a dry season from May to October and a rainy season that starts in November but climate change has disrupted this cycle and devastated the smallholder farmers. There hasn’t been much rain this year. So, what we see is that the impacts of climate change are stronger and stronger with harvest after harvest turning into failed harvests. These people have not been able to renew their food stocks.

In Southern Madagascar WFP is supporting hundreds of thousands of people through short and long-term assistance. The impact of the drought varies from place to place. Some areas have not had a proper rainy season for three years. There are villages surrounded by dried-out fields, and fields of tomato that have turned brown. In some areas they are trying to grow sweet potatoes but there are areas where absolutely nothing is growing. People are surviving by eating locusts, fruits, and cactus leaves that are normally food for the cattle. The situation is dire. Even the cactus are dying from the drought. There is no water because there is no rain. This situation is really, really worrying because the farmers are selling their cattle to buy food.

Other essential assets such as land and houses are also being sold and the children have been pulled out of school and being put to work to generate income. WFP is helping these people. About 700,000 people are receiving food and water from WFP. The WFP is also building irrigation canals and carying out reforestation and providing microinsurance to help small farmers recover from a lost harvest. WFP will support up to one million people here and it is seeking $70 million to fund this operation.

More importantly, the WFP is working with partners to fund climate change solutions for the community so that the people can adapt to the impacts of climate change in southern Madagascar.

COP26: In just over a week, world leaders will gather in Glasgow, Scotland, for the COP26 UN climate change conference, which UN Secretary-General António Guterres has called the last chance to “literally turn the tide” on an ailing planet. WFP wants to use the conference to shift the focus from crisis response, to risk management. Countries must be prepared for climate shocks, and they must act together to reduce severe impacts on the world’s most vulnerable people, which includes the villagers of southern Madagascar.

COP26 is also an opportunity for us to ask governments and donors to prioritize funding relating to climate adaptation and help countries to build better risk management systems. Also WFP is here in Madagascar because if nothing is done, hunger will increase exponentially in the coming years because of climate change, not just Madagascar, but in many other countries, and that is why COP26 is so important for the the quality of life of all the people in this world as they face more and more climate change impacts like the climate change famine in Madagascar.

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION

WHAT WE FIND IN THIS TRAGIC STORY ABOUT A CLIMATE CHANGE FAMINE IN MADAGASCAR IS THAT THE UN AND ITS WFP ARE NOT ABOVE USING THE POOR IN THE THIRD WORLD AS PITIFUL VICTIMS OF CLIMATE CHANGE TO SELL THEIR COP26 AGENDA.

THIS KIND OF RACISM OF THE UNITED NATIONS IS NOT NEW AS WE FIND IN RELATED POSTS ON THIS SITE.

HERE IS AN EXAMPLE: LINK: https://tambonthongchai.com/2021/09/09/climate-change-racism-2/

WHERE WE FIND THIS:

CLIMATE CHANGE RACISM-2

Posted by: chaamjamal on: September 9, 2021

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THIS POST IS A CRITICAL REVIEW OF A RACIST PUSH FOR CLIMATE ACTION ON THE EVE OF COP26 BY PARADING POVERTY AND USING THE MISERY OF THE POOR IN THE THIRD WORLD AS A TOOL FOR SELLING COP 26 AND ITS CLIMATE ACTION AGENDA.

PART-1: WHAT THE BBC COP26 PROMOTIONIONAL ARTICLE SAYS

Climate change: Vulnerable nations call for ’emergency pact. The countries most vulnerable to climate change are calling for an “emergency pact” to tackle rising temperatures. The group wants all countries to agree to radical steps to avoid “climate catastrophe” at the upcoming COP26 meeting in Glasgow. Green campaigners are urging a postponement of the gathering, citing problems with vaccines for delegates. The Climate Vulnerable Forum (CVF) says the event is critical and cannot wait. Weather-related disasters have increased five-fold. The climate change summit at COP26 is a make or break event for planet. Representing some 1.2 billion people, the CVF, “CLIMATE VULNERABLE COUNTRIES”consists of countries in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America and the Pacific. The group has been key in pushing the rest of the world to accept the idea of keeping the rise in global temperatures to under 1.5C this century. This was incorporated into the Paris agreement in 2015. Recent research from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggests that the threshold will be passed in little over a decade at current rates of carbon emissions. In less than two months, global leaders will gather in Glasgow for COP26, the most critical meeting on climate change since Paris. Ahead of the Glasgow meeting, the CVF has issued a manifesto for what the conference must deliver to keep the planet safe and protect the most vulnerable. Environmental groups have suggested postponing the meeting, on the grounds that vaccine distribution is inequitable and that delegates from poorer countries face huge bills for quarantine hotels when they arrive in the UK. However, the CVF member states insist the meeting must go ahead in person, and are calling for support and facilitated access to ensure inclusive participation.The UK government has responded to these calls by agreeing to pay the quarantine hotel expenses of any delegate, observer or media from a developing country. The vulnerable group says that progress on climate change has stalled and COP26 should move forward with what it terms a “climate emergency pact”. This would see every country put forward a new climate plan every year between now and 2025. At present, signatories of the Paris agreement are only obliged to put forward new plans every five years. The vulnerable nations say that richer countries must fulfil their obligations to deliver $100bn in climate finance per year over the 2020-24 period. The CVF nations want this money to be split 50-50 between cutting carbon and helping countries adapt to the threat posed by rising temperatures.The countries also want the UK to “take full responsibility” for this aspect of the negotiations, saying it is vital to restore confidence in the Paris pact. Among the other areas that the most vulnerable nations want to see progress on is the question of debt-for-climate swaps. Many of the world’s poorest countries have large debt burdens, and these have been exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic which has stretched finances even further. In a debt-for-climate swap, a country can reduce what it owes to international creditors by directing the debt service payments to fund renewable energy or greater protection for nature. One such restructuring was recently announced by Belize where the debt money will now go to support marine conservation projects instead.”Vulnerable countries have unique needs – and public-private collaboration will be key to addressing them. Whether it is in debt for nature swaps such as the recent Belize announcement or in increasing public sector capability to structure investment projects to attract private finance, the aim is to accelerate progress in this area so that 2022 becomes the year of climate action solidarity.”

PART-2: CRITICAL COMMENTARY

RACISM IN THE GLOBAL NORTH IS BEST UNDERSTOOD IN THE CONTEXT OF THEIR RELATIONSHIP WITH THE GLOBAL SOUTH IN THE OLD COLONIALISM DAYS WHERE THE ASSUMPTION STANDS THAT THE COLONIES, {THE GLOBAL SOUTH} MUST ULTIMATELY SERVE THE NEEDS OF THEIR COLONIAL MASTERS {THE GLOBAL NORTH}. THAT MENTALITY STILL LINGERS SUCH THAT IT MAKES IT POSSIBLE FOR THE GLOBAL NORTH TO SELL THE MISERY OF THE DIRT POOR IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH AS A MARKETING TOOL FOR THEIR COP26 CLIMATE CHANGE AGENDA.

SO WHAT WE SEE HERE IS THAT THE POVERTY AND THE MISERY OF THE POOR IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH SERVES THE NEEDS OF THE GLOBAL NORTH IN THEIR COP26 AGENDA WHERE THE MISERY OF THE POOR IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH SERVES AS A SALES TOOL TO SELL THE COP26 AGENDA OF THE GLOBAL NORTH.

CLIMATE CHANGE IS COLONIALISM ALL OVER AGAIN