"The twenty-seven Conferences so far have had no effect on total global emissions. "

Pic from Watts Up With That

"The forthcoming 28th session (COP28) of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) ... will convene from 30 November to 12 December in the United Arab Emirates. The ‘Parties’ are UN member states plus some observers. The last one, COP27 at Sharm el Sheik in Egypt, had 12,000 delegates from over 200 countries.
    "There has been one every year since except for 2020. All 27 have warned about the increasingly noxious state of the atmosphere and declaring that something must be done about it before it’s too late. ...
    "The CO2 content of the atmosphere has been measured since 1957 and has risen steadily every year. The twenty-seven Conferences so far have had no effect on total global emissions. Nations have realised their people’s need for electricity had to come first. The cheapest and quickest way to provide that is by way of fossil-fuelled power stations.
    "Leaders of nations may also have wondered at the increasingly manic shouts of: ‘global boiling’; ‘July the warmest in human civilisation’s history’; ‘oceansgrowing hotter … triggering global weather disasters … heat searing enough to knock out mobile phones’; ‘daily temperatures hitting a 100,000 year high’; ‘the September data shows … the planet’s temperature reached its warmest level in modern records and probably in thousands of years.’
    "Advisers to leaders of nations may have pointed out that we have only been measuring daily world-wide temperatures for about 140 years. NASA makes it quite clear that ‘before 1880 there just wasn’t enough data to make accurate calculations.’ The last ice age ended about 10,000 years ago; the advisors may have advised that it would therefore seem reasonable to expect that records will be broken, will continue to be broken, and may or may not have anything to do with global warming.
    "There has curiously been very little comment about the willingness of the UN to go on having Conferences calling for actions that don’t [and shouldn't] happen."

~ Ivor Williams, from his post 'Why COPs Should Have No Teeth'

"99% consensus on human caused climate change in the peer-reviewed scientific literature" ... "The conclusion does not follow from the data”

"Case closed," trumpeted the Guardian back in 2021. "The scientific consensus that humans are altering the climate has passed 99.9%, according to research that strengthens the case for global action at the Cop26 summit in Glasgow."

And now, just before all the private planes and well-fed bureaucrats fly into Dubai for COP28, in a Battle of the Peer-Reviews, Climate magazine has published a study concluding, in their own words, that "the researchers much-ballyhooed conclusion conclusion "does not follow follow from the data."

In other words, that the science is not settled.

Turns out the claim for a 99% Consensus as as inane as the oft-repeated claim of a 97% consensus.  (What exactly do they agree about—do they agree there’s a 'climate crisis'? -- that is entirely anthropogenic, i.e., human-caused? -- that we should also factor in the benefits of fossil fuels?") 

And not just inane, but inaccurate. As inaccurate as much of the climate science, and possibly representative of it.

The author of that much-feted 2021 paper that made the 99% claim told the Guardian “It is really case closed. There is nobody of significance in the scientific community who doubts human-caused climate change.”  Case closed? Not really, say the authors of the new paper in Climate, more like "case not even made." In their paper, they say, 

we point out some major flaws in the methodology, analysis, and conclusions of the [2021] study. Using the data provided in the study, we show that the 99% consensus, as defined by the authors, is actually an upper limit evaluation because of the large number of “neutral” papers which were counted as pro-consensus in the paper and probably does not reflect the true situation. We further analyse these results by evaluating how so-called “skeptic” papers fit the consensus and find that biases in the literature, which were not accounted for in the aforementioned study, may place the consensus on the low side. Finally, we show that the rating method used in the study suffers from a subjective bias which is reflected in large variations between ratings of the same paper by different raters. All these lead to the conclusion that the conclusions of the study does not follow from the data.

In short, the evidence doesn't fit the claim, and the authors drew more into their net than they should have, misclassifying "neutral" papers and discarding sceptical one. To paraphrase, Noam Chomsky, it's a manufactured consensus.

One that delegates might ponder as they take their private jets and ample delegations to Dubai, to offer therewith their advice on how the rest of us should cut back.

"The idea that the least developed countries in the world have received only the cost of industrialisation and not the many benefits is ahistorical."

"In his brilliant dissection of the climate extremists’ case in his book, 'Unsettled,' Steven Koonin, who served as undersecretary for science in President Obama’s Energy Department, notes that climate-related deaths have plummeted in the era of global warming. Citing data from the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disaster at the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium, he notes that 'weather-related death rates fell dramatically during the past one-hundred years' and are 'about 80 times less frequent today than they were a century ago.'
    "Why? Almost entirely thanks to improvements in infrastructure and mitigation enabled by rapid industrialisation.
    "[T]he idea that the least developed countries in the world have received only the cost of industrialisation and not the many benefits is ahistorical. The sophists at the United Nations insist that the new fund is a model of 'climate justice,' but it sounds an awful lot like a vehicle for the 'reparations' climate extremists have long demanded from the countries that were first to industrialise for supposedly having inflicted their environmental costs on the world.
    "If we in the West are to pay damages for the Industrial Revolution, shouldn’t we also consider the extraordinary wealth that process has helped spread around the world?"

~ Gerard Baker from his column 'The West Made the World Prosperous. COP27 Will Make Us Pay'

There really is a "climate emergency" ...

"It is now almost a third of a century since 1990, when the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) made its first predictions about the weather," Christopher Monckton reminds us.

So, since they're meeting again in what they call COP27, and gain making apocalyptic predictions about the decades ahead, let's see how their first third-century of crystal-ball gazing has gone.

What did they say in 1990?

Under the IPCC Business-as-Usual (Scenario A) emissions of greenhouse gases ... [t]his will result in a likely increase in global mean temperature of about 1 C° above the present value... [and 1.8 C° warming from preindustrial times to 2030."

=> This translates to 0.3-0.34 C°/decade medium-term warming. However, since 1990 only 0.14 C°/decade has occurred.

That's not what you'd call highly competent weather forecasting: while oft proclaiming that warming is far worse than they've been predicting, instead it's been less than half as much!

And their predictive power is even worse than it looks:

IPCC’s business-as-usual scenario was founded on the assumption that on business as usual CO2 emissions would increase by 10-20% by 2025. The truth, however, is that it is only 2022 and yet global CO2 emissions are not 20% above their 1990 level but 60% above it ...

Does this sort of error matter?

This matters. For global climate policy is based not on the unexciting observed reality, which is that in the real world global warming is slow, small, harmless and net-beneficial, but on IPCC’s and the models’ wildly exaggerated predictions, which have not been cut back to bring them into some sort of conformity with mere reality.

Based solely on these failing predictions, for example, we keep hearing that we are in a "crisis," that this is an "emergency," that (though not so much anymore) this is our "nuclear-free moment."

And yet, even on this allegedly. overheating planet, one is ten times as likely to die from cold weather rather than hot, that in general extreme weather is if anything decreasing rather than increasing, and that over the last century climate disaster deaths have decreased by 98%.

Even "the most plausible danger of rising CO2 levels and temps, rapid sea level rises that would destroy coastal investments," are only predicted by the bad predictors "to reach 3 feet in 100 years" -- and that's the most extreme of their predictions. Future, wealthier, generations can master that.

But there really is an emergency. The fake climate emergency has created a very real energy emergency.

The false idea that fossil fuels' climate impacts are an "emergency" that requires us to rapidly eliminate fossil fuels has caused an energy emergency ... [in which] skyrocketing energy prices are driving price inflation in every area of life.... the worst-affected are poor nations—who are getting outbid for today’s scarce energy supplies.

As Alex Epstein reminds us.

Today’s high fossil fuel prices are not primarily a “Putin price hike.”
They are caused by global anti-fossil-fuel “climate emergency” policies—which made fossil fuel prices artificially high before Putin’s war and prevented the free world from quickly increasing production in response.

Yes, it is galling seeing the same climate warriors who created this very real energy emergency winging their way to a resort in Egypt in order to berate all the rest of us to wear an energy hairshirt. Just remember when their carefully crafted headline predictions emerge how bad they've already been, yet how disastrous the emergency they've created.