It is easy to feel despair when we contemplate the accelerating pace of global climate change and lack of substantive action to deal with its impact. As we published this month’s edition, an annual assembly of countries struggling to come up with solutions to global warming was gathered in Baku, Azerbaijan, for the United Nations Climate Change Conference – COP 29.
Azerbaijan is led by Ilham Aliyev, the son of a former leader, Heydar Aliyev. He was elected to a third term as president in October 2013. Ilham Aliyev achieved COP notoriety with his opening speech to the conference in which he glorified fossil fuels.
His comments were condemned by some observers as inappropriate.
“If you host the conference, if you are the presidency, then what do you need to be? An honest broker,” Belgium’s energy minister, Tinne Van der Straeten, said. She noted that most of the countries represented at COP29 were: “confronted daily by the consequences of climate change,” towards which fossil fuel use is a major contributor.
Science writer, Jamie Morton, said in the New Zealand Herald that regional heatwaves (such as the one which fuelled New Zealand’s hottest summer on record) have become 12 times more likely due to climate change. Heatwaves could become ‘almost annual events’ within the next few decades, he stated, citing a study published in the International Journal of Climatology.
Morton noted that:
- Combined land and sea heatwaves, [such as] that behind our warmest summer, have become more common in New Zealand and may soon be almost annual events
- A series of these “compound” events within the last decade have been driving scorching summer days and nights, while melting glaciers, disrupting growing seasons and harming marine life
- It comes as the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) is predicting more above-average temperatures this summer.
- All of this suggests a depressing outlook for the state of our planet. However, one of the few slightly positive items I have seen about climate change recently came, unexpectedly, from global yacht racing.
The days of the early round the world races, and the conspicuously amateur backgrounds of helmsmen, have long passed and, these days, racing is very expensive and high tech, heavily dependent on sponsors and advertisers. So, it was a delight to read that sailors in the current Vendée Globe are taking scientific measuring equipment with them as it could secure much more accurate readings about what is happening with sea temperatures.
Reportedly, more than half of the skippers on the 10th Vendée Globe are taking part in a scientific collaboration project to measure temperatures in seldom-travelled ocean areas.
It is all part of an ambitious partnership between the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the Vendée Globe and the IMOCA class of yachts. The programme aims to advance oceanographic research and weather forecasting models.
UNESCO asserts that this contribution will allow essential data to be collected and distributed to scientists in real time:
‘This will help enrich global knowledge on climate and the ocean and improve operational weather forecasting services, particularly in the less frequented areas of the globe such as the Southern Ocean.’
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