Whoops. Tuesday Climate Meeting Agenda Doesn't Even Mention World's Oceans

[hatrack]

On Tuesday, the UN headquarters in New York is hosting the largest gathering of world leaders ever to address climate change. It is an enormously important event, intended to catalyse action ahead of next year’s Paris conference – where leaders have pledged to reach a new global climate agreement, and a great credit to secretary general Ban Ki-moon and his team.

But the summit is guilty of a major sin of omission: the ocean, over two-thirds of the planet, is completely absent from the programme. It is neither one of the eight “action areas” on which governments and other key players are invited to announce bold new commitments, nor one of the “thematic sessions” where states and stakeholders will share solutions. The summit is keeping its feet firmly on dry land and is highlighting the huge gap between scientific knowledge and political action.

The Global Ocean Commission is dismayed that the ocean appears to have been relegated to the status of an afterthought, something to bring up occasionally in the context of other, apparently more essential, concerns. This is particularly shocking coming at the end of a year in which the ocean has been consistently listed among the most critical elements of the climate change challenge, by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), and numerous scientific studies and reports – including our own report released in June.

Science is showing us that there can be no solution to the climate challenge without a healthy ocean, which is currently in sharp decline. The ocean absorbs a quarter of man-made CO2 emissions, and has taken on 90% of the extra heat generated since the industrial revolution. Without the ocean to clean up our mess, the impacts of climate change would already be far more severe.

This is where the alarm bells about ocean health should start ringing: human pressures on the ocean – both its chemical composition and its immeasurable biodiversity – are undermining its ability to carry out the essential services on which we all depend. The latest edition of the WMO Greenhouse Gas Bulletin warns that the increasing acidification of the ocean has caused its capacity to absorb our carbon emissions to drop to 70% what it was at the start of the industrial era, and this could fall to just 20% by the end of the century.

EDIT

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/sep/22/the-uns-new-york-climate-summit-is-guilty-of-a-major-sin-of-omission

[Nihil]

1. We knew this "summit" would be a joke but the scale of their incompetence isn't a laughing matter.

Bet the words "economy" and "growth" occur plenty of times.