Work this one out. Hydrocarbon production is booming in the UAE, due to high demand. Its Dubai International Airport is the world’s busiest by passenger numbers. Next year it will host a conference that in theory at least wants to knock all that on the head, because… climate etc. At COP27 it fielded dozens of oil and gas lobbyists.
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If there was a sign the United Arab Emirates is taking its role as host of the next UN climate talks seriously, the 1,073 delegates it registered to attend the Cop27 summit in Egypt would be it, says Climate Home News.

The Persian Gulf petrostate came out in force in Sharm el-Sheikh with the second largest delegation in the history of climate summits, including 70 oil and gas lobbyists – a flavour of what is to come.

The UAE takes on the UN climate talks presidency from the Egyptians at the end of November next year, when it hosts Cop28 on the site of the Dubai Expo.

The Emirates are seeking international clout as the Gulf’s most proactive nation on climate action. It was first in the region to set a 2050 net zero goal. And at Cop27, it became the first to announce absolute emission cuts, instead of from a hypothetical business-as-usual baseline.

But its plan includes expanding oil and gas production, which is incompatible with limiting global warming to 1.5C [Talkshop comment – according to some climate theorists]. The UAE has pitched its role as providing the world with reliable and low-carbon intensity oil and gas for decades to come.

“The UAE is known as a responsible supplier of energy and will continue to play this role as long as the world needs oil and gas,” president Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan told the leaders’ summit at Cop27.

Two-pronged approach

In its climate diplomacy, the UAE is pursuing a two-pronged approach: an aggressive campaign to fund thousands of megawatts of clean energy at home and overseas and even greater efforts to boost its oil and gas production.

It is on the defensive, as the case for leaving fossil fuels in the ground gets more vocal. In Sharm el-Sheikh, more than 80 countries pushed to extend language on phasing down unabated coal power to oil and gas, but petrostates blocked it from formal negotiation. The issue is not going away.

“The Emiratis will find it difficult to deal with a fast-moving debate on fossil fuels, given their economy is structured around oil and gas,” Glada Lahn, a senior research fellow at London-based think tank Chatham House. “Sharm showed that the tide is turning. What’s missing are the great examples of diversification – the UAE could definitely elevate its work on that.”

A federation of seven emirates and home to nearly 10 million people, the UAE is the world’s eighth biggest oil producer in absolute terms and the second biggest per capita.

The discovery of commercial oil in the late 1950s bought enormous riches to Abu Dhabi, the largest of the emirates, where almost all of the country’s oil is pumped.

Today, the UAE says it has the world’s sixth largest crude oil reserves and seventh largest gas reserves.

It has made efforts to diversify the economy away from oil – grasping the need to do so earlier than most of its neighbours. Tourism is a key growth sector. Dubai is becoming a business and financial services hub.

Yet, more than half of government revenues still depend on the oil and gas industry, according to Carbon Tracker.

Full article here.

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January 8, 2023 at 06:47AM

By Paul Homewood

The extended visit of an immature male walrus to the UK last month (dubbed ‘Thor’, presumably from Svalbard, Norway) has precipitated the tired and vacuous ‘victim of climate change’ cries from the peanut gallery, including Bob Ward of the Grantham Institute. The facts, however, put all that to rest.

I wrote about Ward in my book, Sir David Attenborough and the Walrus Deception, because he has a habit of tenaciously filing official complaints when anyone says or writes anything sensible that just happens to challenge the reigning narrative that climate change is ruining everything and will drive virtually every beloved species to extinction.

And as usual, Ward is wrong again, this time about Atlantic walrus, who have been busily rebuilding their once-decimated populations brought to near-extinction levels by human slaughter over 350 years. Legal protections against hunting enacted by Norway in 1952 have allowed the species to recover, albeit slowly.

That’s because in some areas (like Svalbard) very few females were left to populate the old hauling grounds (NPI 2022), which markedly reduced the rate of recovery until very recently.

Atlantic walrus status

The IUCN Red List classified the Atlantic walrus as ‘near threatened’ in 2016: an important step below ‘vulnerable’ which takes into account current healthy population numbers. This was despite concerns the subspecies could possibly face a population decline of >10% within three generations due to sea ice loss (much less than the Pacific walrus suffered due to food deprivation back in the 1980s (Fay et al. 1989; Lowry 1985), before everything could be blamed on lack of sea ice).

The US Fish and Wildlife Service determined in October 2017 that the Pacific walrus is not being harmed by climate change and is not likely to be harmed within the foreseeable future (MacCracken et al. 2017; USFWS 2017). The IUCN Red List (2015) assessed the Pacific walrus as ‘data deficient‘ (Lowry 2015). Despite these findings, the IUCN listed the walrus species (i.e. both subspecies together), as ‘vulnerable’ (Lowry 2016), apparently based on modelled projections of future declines.

In Svalbard, however, Atlantic walrus numbers have been steadily rising as summer sea ice has been falling. The Norwegian MOSJ website has conveniently graphed this trajectory, copied below:

The numbers on the graph start with two baseline estimated numbers provided in 1980 and 1993 (1980=100 and 1993=741), and conclude with population counts from aerial surveys done in 2006, 2012, and 2018 (2006=2629; 2012=3886; 2018=5503).That’s 109% between 2006 and 2018, and 42% between 2012 and 2018: impressive increases for any species.

However, the 2016 North Atlantic Marine Mammal Commission (NAMMCO) Report on Atlantic walrus (updated in 2021) stated that the tendency of animals to pile on top of each other at haulouts makes it hard to see every individual, even if you are counting them in a photograph. Large numbers of animals in the water are similarly difficult to count, especially if they are close together and actively diving and swimming.

As a consequence, officials determined that all recent counts of Atlantic walrus were probably an underestimate of the true population abundance. This means the 2018 estimate based on an aerial survey was likely an underestimate, which means it’s highly likely (given other evidence) that numbers have continued to climb since then.

Read the full post here.

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January 8, 2023 at 04:38AM

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January 8, 2023 at 04:13AM

Will developing nations accept climate poverty?

The post The climate cabal has plans for you appeared first on CFACT.

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January 8, 2023 at 04:04AM