UN climate delegates failing everyone

They could have then helped educate conference delegates by explaining that the number of tropical cyclones making landfall in the Philippines has not changed in over a century. Globally, we are near a 30 year low in worldwide Accumulated Cyclone Energy, a measure of total cyclone activity.

Instead, our representatives let us down again. They resorted to the weak argument that loss and damage should be part of adaptation to climate change, already enshrined in the FCCC process, and that no new mechanism is needed.

After signing the FCCC, President Bush told a press conference:

"I think the third world and others are entitled to know that the commitments made are going to be commitments kept."

He was right. It's time to stop playing games with the poor of the developing world, admitting to guilt for natural events we do not cause and making ridiculous promises we have no intention of keeping.

Our representatives must start telling the truth about climate change and extreme weather, namely that tropical cyclones and other extreme weather events will continue to happen no matter what we do. Instead of wasting money trying to stop them or blaming human activity as their cause, we need to help people prepare for them.

A tropical cyclone of about same intensity as Haiyan struck the east coast of India near the state of Orissa about a month and half ago. Only a couple of dozen people died for one very simple reason: the Government of India was properly prepared, having learned their lesson from the tragic deaths of over 5,000 pilgrims when heavy rains and land slides struck the country in June. The Indian Met office had warned the state government to postpone the pilgrims' march to a special temple in the mountains, but officials ignored the warning and catastrophe ensued. So this time, when the tropical cyclone was seen approaching India, both the state and federal governments responded properly, evacuating about 100,000 people, resulting in relatively few casualties.

If the Philippines government had done the same, and had their storm shelters been properly constructed, the death toll from Haiyan would have been much lower. A similar typhoon struck Australia in 2011, a country which does have proper storm shelters, and there were no fatalities.

At UN climate conferences, adaptation and preparation for climate change takes a distant second place to attempts to stop what might happen decades from now. This backwards approach is happening all over the world. According to the October 2013 report of the Climate Policy Initiative, of the approximately $1 billion (USD) per day spent globally on climate finance, only 6% of it goes to adaptation. This represents the assignment of more value to the lives of people yet to be born than to the lives of those suffering today.

All representatives, from developed and developing countries alike, should tell UN conference organizers that this approach is immoral and must be changed. Better still, adaptation and loss and damage negotiations should be removed from FCCC meetings entirely and put under the umbrella of humanitarian aid where they should have been in the first place. Then they can be handled as foreign aid issues and debated in that context.

By cutting themselves loose from UN negotiations about stopping climate change, conferences that show little promise of progress, developing nations stand a far better chance of securing the assistance they need to adapt to the climate change and extreme weather threats they face now.

The time has also come for nations to start withdrawing from the FCCC, which is allowed under the convention's Article 25. The idea that human activity is responsible for dangerous climate change has been debunked by thousands of peer-reviewed science papers reported on in the NIPCC's reports. The original premise of the FCCC makes even less sense now than it did in 1992.

Climate change and extreme weather events have always been a constant threat to human societies and nature alike. But the proper response is to prepare for these phenomena as best we can, while continuing to fund scientific research so that someday we may be able predict what, when, and where extreme events will happen. Stopping such phenomena from occurring, the main focus of today's pointless and expensive UN FCCC meetings, is science fiction.