Antalya, Türkiye
The UN COP 31 climate summit opened Monday with delusion and dysfunction as the CFACT delegation and thousands of others stood in line for nearly four hours to enter the facility housing the event. It hearkened back to camping out waiting in line for concert tickets in the pre-internet age last century.
This year’s opening climate scare was uttered not by the UN Secretary General or some head of state warning the planetary doomsday clock was only minutes before midnight. Rather, it was Tedros Adhanom Gebreyesus, the long-discredited head of 
the World Health Organization. He warned—with zero evidence—that “the climate crisis is fueling outbreaks, driving higher rates of heart and lung disease, cancer and asthma”.
Such fatuous climate hysteria paints it worse than chain-smoking cigarettes for decades, which is a proven cause of lung and other cancers. Maybe we all should take up smoking and other vices to preclude the end of the world from climate Armageddon!
Upon finally entering the conference venue, we went straight to the food stand to reenergize. To our surprise, there were no lines, though by this time it was way past the lunch hour.
———
The theme of this COP31 is “Dialog Consensus Action,” which was strewn throughout the conference venue. So, I took them up on it by with a dialog with a couple of thirty-something attendees from Australia as we watched a protest of activists chanting against multi-national corporations that control most global agriculture and the carbon credit trading schemes that effectively grant indulgences to private businesses to exceed carbon emissions.
To these two young idealists, I and CFACT were anathema since I explained we emphatically were not aboard the UN climate train. Climate has always been changing; temperatures have fluctuated wildly through the millennia, I explained. Such was not “existential” to the planet – a position that even long-time billionaire climate hysteric, Bill Gates, now believes.
Such heresy was offensive to them, especially since I was not “a Ph.D.” “Australia was burning last summer!” one of them exclaimed. A one-degree Celsius increase in temperature in the last 150 years was ominous, they said. To which I responded that it was quite historically normal; and that the temperature changes more so on my drive to work.
Okay, that was a bit snide from me. “You’re too old to experience what’s coming” (or words to that effect), they responded. To which I countered that I’m old enough to know that every climate prediction made in the last 40 years has not panned out, along with the predictions before that of an imminent ice age.
That ended the “dialog”. There was no “consensus,” much less “action” to follow – at least in the same direction.
——–
Walking through the “Blue Zone” of the climate summit, dozens of nations had elaborate set-ups to showcase theircommitments to fighting climate change, including many tiny countries, which, if they blanketed their surface are with solar panels and wind turbines, would have zero impact on the global thermometer.
The nation of Azerbaijan, which hosted the COP29 summit two years ago, is preparing an underwater cable system in the Caspian Sea to transmit planned wind power from remote Turkmenistan, a sparce nation to the east of the Sea, to eastern Europe, and financed by the European Union.
Azerbaijan is a nation smaller than New England whose economy is built on oil and little else, and which has expanded the nation’s wealth and middle class since its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. Nowhere in the literature at this nation’s pavilion was mention of relinquishing this oil abundance or “a gift from God,” as its president described it at COP29.
Then there is Gabon, a tiny east African nation approximate to the center of the plant where the equator meets the prime meridian. It’s a poor, developing nation of 2.6 million people on a land mass of 100,000 square miles; about the size of the state of Colorado. Led by a family dictatorship for more than one-half century since its independence from France in 1961, the current president, General Nguema, seized power in a coup and eventually won 90 percent of the vote in an election. His portrait was prominently displayed at the pavilion.
In sum, Gabon’s agenda is “transition justice,” according to its handouts. That is, it wants financing as a “climate implementation bridge” to meet UN climate goals. Like so many other countries, they will participate in this UN climate farce if it gets them free money from wealthier nations.
Lastly, there is the embattled nation of Ukraine, which has been fighting a kinetic war with invading Russia going on five years. Why it bothers attending any climate conference and setting up a pavilion here is a mystery, and I had no desire to embarrass those who staffed the display. Civilians back home are under constant death threat, and dying from Russian firepower polluting the skies; yet, they are here on the climate bandwagon.
And such was the beginning of this climate adventure for the week.
———
I just learned the spelling of the host nation for this COP31 summit is now Türkiye, not “Turkey,” as was the case for most of my life; thus distinguishing the name and pronunciation from the ubiquitous winged creature consumed at the dinner table annually on the fourth Thursday of November by tens of millions of American households.