COP28

What is COP28? It is the twenty eighth Conference Of The Parties, the parties in this case being the 198 governments that have signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and it begins today. In these uncertain times, we should pay it a little attention.

Here are some of the complicated and confusing numbers associated with this year’s conference.

133: the number of US and EU politicians who signed a letter to the United Nations calling for the removal of COP28’s president, Sultan Al Jaber who is also the CEO of ADNOC, the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company. ADNOC, the world’s 12th largest oil company, is the state-owned oil company of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), who are the hosts of COP28. There are those who feel that this is akin to putting the fox in charge of the chicken coop but we feel that handing the fire truck over to the arsonist might be a more apt metaphor.

Dubai, where COP28 is being held and an ADNOC terminal in Abu Dhabi

2: China and the USA, by far the world’s two biggest emitters of greenhouse gases – which will not be represented at COP28 by their presidents but by lesser delegates.

1.5°C: the limit to global warming agreed upon by COP21 in Paris in 2015, part of a legally binding international treaty referred to as The Paris Agreement. This is the one that President Trump signed the USA out of in 2017 and that President Biden signed right back into on the very first day of his presidency. One of COP28’s objectives is to mark our homework, to see how well we are meeting the targets that the Paris Agreement set for us. Here’s a sneaky preview: not well at all.

^{CO₂ emissions by country and COP21 celebrates the Paris Agreement in 2015}

196: the number of countries that are signed up to the Paris Agreement.

44,104 tonnes of CO₂: the size of Cop27‘s carbon footprint as calculated by the organisers. This number does not include the retailers, lobbyists, activists, journalists and onlookers that flock to these events. Here is a link to University College London’s Carbon footprint calculator for COP28.

116 million barrels per day: the amount of oil that OPEC, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (to which host nation UAE has belonged since 1967) predicts demand will rise to by 2045. Heavens, when are we going to start talking about falling demand for oil products?

18: the percentage of all land species that the IUCN projects will become extinct if we permit the global temperature to rise by as much as 2°C by 2100. We really do need our politicians to start taking this seriously.