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In Paris thousands, if not tens of thousands, of climate delegates, activists, government officials are now meeting for the 21st time with the aim of hammering out a binding climate treaty to “rescue the planet”.

Not only has the endless string of conferences been getting on the nerves of informed skeptics, but also on those of some major media outlets, like Spiegel here.

Spiegel journalist, doomsday believer, Christoph Seidler writes he has totally low expectations over the outcome of COP21 and what may be agreed on. He writes:

The climate summit in Paris is not going to rescue the planet. There is not going to be a treaty that will solve the problem of global warming.”

In short nothing substantial is going to happen – no matter how historic some may proclaim the outcome to be in the end. The travelling circus will continue for years and years. Seidler is sure of it, and predicts of COP21:

In the end the news of a big success will not come to pass. There is not going to be a treaty on the table that is going to save the planet. […] At most there will be a small step down a long road.”

Seidler does believe the planet is on the way to catastrophe, and that urgent action needs to be taken, but he is not optimistic anything is going to happen in Paris. On latter point many of us agree.

Perhaps the strategy of taking of small steps is intentional and is the way out of the madness. Move slowly and eventually the problem will go away before any real painful changes ever get enacted. By 2017 we will be feeling the full impact of the expected La Nina, and the embarrassing temperature plateau will have persisted over 20 years. Moreover the US may have a president who may have a far less sympathetic stance on the issue. The timeframe for reaching the theoretical 2°C target will also become even more absurd. Goalposts will be moved yet again, all accompanied by howls of laughter.

Indeed lots of sand is yet to be poured into the gears of the treaty machinery as it moves down “the long road”.

One reason Seidler is so pessimistic is that the treaty needs to be agreed upon by some 190 nations, all of whom are trying to tweak the text in their own favor. In the end it gets so complicated that no one is able to really understand it.

For Seidler the conference circuses are tough to witness, but in the end he concludes they are at least budging the process forward in the right direction. Seidler concludes, “All the senselessness makes sense.”