The 18th UN climate change summit is taking place in the small, but immensely wealthy Gulf emirate of Qatar, the largest per capita emitter of greenhouse gases in the world. Delegates, press, dignitaries and the legions of low-paid, foreign guest workers at the opulent Qatar National Convention Center all pass under an enormous spider, a 30ft-high cast bronze statue called "Maman", by the French-American sculptor Louise Bourgeois.
It was chosen by the emir's wife, and snapped up for a reported $10m. The Obama administration has been accused, rightly, of derailing the UN climate negotiations in recent years, which makes the spider an appropriate symbol, as famously described by the lines from an 1808 poem by Sir Walter Scott:
"Oh! what a tangled web we weave
When first we practice to deceive!"
Here at the summit, referred to as the COP 18 (18th Conference of Parties), I met up with climate scientist Bill Hare, one of the lead authors of a new World Bank report, "Turn Down the Heat: Why a 4ºC Warmer World Must Be Avoided". With the US media focused on the so-called fiscal cliff, I asked Hare how the world's historically largest emitter of greenhouse gases, the United States, could be expected to contribute to a global fund to combat climate change:
"We have a climate cliff … We're facing a carbon tsunami, actually, where huge amounts of carbon are now being emitted at a faster rate than ever. And it's that carbon tsunami that's likely to overwhelm the planet with warming, sea-level rise and acidifying the oceans."
No comments:
Post a Comment