Poor countries have accused richer nations of holding up progress on tackling the climate crisis at the latest UN talks in Madrid. Demonstrators and activists vented their frustration in the final hours of the two weeks of negotiations, with negotiators battling into the early hours of Saturday to salvage a result.

Carbon markets, governed by a provision of the 2015 Paris agreement known as article 6, were seemingly one of the major sticking points.

Brazil, India and China were singled out as acting to block agreement on article 6, as ministers from the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) warned that their countries would suffer most if there was no decision.

Simon Stiell, Grenada’s environment minister, speaking for AOSIS, urged all parties to reach a compromise. “Our countries will be rendered uninsurable if we breach 1.5C warming,” he said.

There was a widespread view among delegates that Brazil was refusing to compromise on article 6 as a means of holding up implementation of the Paris accord. Brazil’s right-wing president, Jair Bolsonaro, is hostile to the Paris agreement, and is accused of paving the way for devastating fires set by ranchers in the Amazon, but the government is still officially a party to the UN talks

Article 6 focuses on the role of carbon markets and carbon trading in helping countries to fulfil their pledges under the Paris agreement. Carbon markets allow countries to claim carbon credits for carbon sinks, such as standing forests, and for emissions-cutting efforts, such as wind farms or renewable energy projects.

These credits can be sold to rich countries, which can count them towards their own emissions targets. Carbon markets were introduced in the 1997 Kyoto protocol as a mechanism for directing financial investment towards poor countries which would otherwise struggle to implement clean technology or face economic pressure to cut down their forests.

Quoting from the 2015 IPCC report, 793 million tonnes of CO2 are produced each year, most of which is from natural causes and of that approximately 781 million tonnes is reabsorbed into the system, giving an annual increase of 11.7 million tonnes.

In the last 140 years, since 1880, we have increased CO2 by 38%, yet the predicted sea rise hasn’t happened. Look at Wismar, Germany? Wismar sits on the Mecklenburg Bend, in the Baltic Sea. It is halfway between Norway and Sweden, and the Netherlands. Both Norway and Sweden are actually rising, and have been doing so since the last Glacial Maximum, as melting ice removed weight. So, people in Norway are saying, “Hey, sea levels are falling!” Well, no, their land is rising. Then on the other side, you have Holland and Belgium. Here, the land is in fact sinking. It’s like a seesaw. Norway goes up, Holland goes down.

Wismar, Germany is in between the two of them — it is tectonically inert, it neither rises nor falls, and so is really good example of a region that can reveal what real sea level rise has really been up to.

And, since records began around 1850, Wismar’s constant and steady SLR has been due to oceanic warming as earth escaped the clutches of the Little Age Ice. The level has been totally unaffected by the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere:







Therefore, if sea-level is unaffected by rising CO2, the minuscule reduction that the UN are talking about, the 400 million metric tons, is not even going to be detectable. The sea level is basically unaffected by CO2. If 38% increase can’t make the sea level increase beyond the historic trend, any tiny reduction in CO2 that we make won’t affect sea level at all.







I know, I know.

Silly me.

“Shut up and pay your taxes.”





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Grand Solar Minimum + Pole Shift





And less we forget all those dire (and failed) predictions made ten years ago, at COP15: