United Nations' climate change conferences are exercises in futility. That is becoming ever clearer as the 30th conference of the parties (COP30) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) opens in Belém, Brazil. The chief goal of the UNFCCC is to achieve the "stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system."
Since the UNFCCC was negotiated at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, the concentration of greenhouse warming carbon dioxide (CO2) in the global atmosphere has been anything but close to stabilized. Instead, it has increased from 359 parts per million (ppm) to 425 ppm this year. And the increase is speeding up. The World Meteorological Organization reports that from 2023 to 2024, the global average concentration of CO2 "surged by 3.5 ppm, the largest increase since modern measurements started in 1957." The increase is largely the result of rising emissions from burning oil, natural gas, and coal to produce the energy that drives economic growth.
