COP29 climate talks grapple with trillion-dollar task

BAKU: Countries at the COP29 summit tried to make progress on how to raise up to $1 trillion in climate finance for the world’s most vulnerable, as political tensions overshadowed the talks.Most of the seventy-two thousand people registered for COP29 will be disappointed with analysis from the scientists at Climate Action Tracker today showing that, despite all their efforts, the world is still heading for 2.7 degrees Celsius of warming by the end of this century. That is unchanged now for the past three years.

According to climate scientists this means unimaginably worse extreme weather disasters than we are seeing now. The Director of the ICARUS Centre at Maynooth University Peter Thorne is attending the COP negotiations in an official capacity for the Global Climate Observing System. He said we are already at roughly 1.3 degrees Celsius on a sustained basis.

“The thing to be crystal clear about, is that climate impacts from rising temperatures increase sharply and in a non-linear fashion. Warming of 1.3 degrees might be bad. But 2.7degrees is unimaginable”, he said.

“It is my children’s future; it is everyone’s children’s future. We are deliberately impoverishing future generations. We are the first generation that is knowingly making the future for our children and our grandchildren worse.”