The Paris Agreement has been adopted by COP21

It's agreed. On Saturday 12 December at 7:31 pm (Paris time), 195 nations adopted a new, universal Paris agreement. A momentous step signalling a commitment to end the use of fossil fuels.

Watch the moment when the new, universal #ParisAgreement was adopted at #COP21 pic.twitter.com/b3F6p0KBWi

— UN Climate Action (@UNFCCC) December 12, 2015

COP21 update - highlights of the final draft agreement

In case you missed the live streaming of the final draft COP21 agreement, here are some of the key points. These are taken from the stirring speeches from the COP21 President H.E. Mr. Laurent Fabius, the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, and the President of France François Hollande.

Some highlights from the final draft agreement

Some of the main elements of the final draft agreement are:

• Keep well below 2C, and aim for no more than 1.5C
• Legally binding - a universal legal agreement
• Differentiated, depending on the circumstances and capacity of each nation
• Updated / stocktake every five years
• Includes an increased role for adaptation to climate change
• Cooperation on loss and damage - $1 billion a year at the base level to be be reviewed by 2025 (I think)
• Caters for: island states re sea level, Africa re development, South America re forest protection
• Also addressing food security, public health, poverty and peace.

This week governments try for a sane response while some in the climate world went a little bit mad

Today is the day when COP21 is hoping to finalise the climate change agreement. The meeting was extended by a day, with many people remaining hopeful that a meaningful agreement will be reached. The UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon put out a press release saying that while there were still some important issues to be resolved, there has been considerable progress.

The latest draft can be downloaded here. As at the time of writing, it's Draft 2. (You can compare it with Draft 1 to see the progress in negotiations. Where the brackets have been removed it signifies agreement was reached on that point.)

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UPDATE: I've just seen that the final text has been agreed. I'll let you know as soon as it's available - or you can keep an eye on the UN website. There's a press conference scheduled for 11:30 am CET today - Saturday (Europe time).

Sou 2:23 pm AEDT 12 December 2015

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This week there was real silliness from deniers and from people campaigning to stop climate change.

COP21 Week 2 - and open thread

The COP21 meeting in Paris continues this week and is due to conclude on Friday 11 December. There is a draft agreement on the table now, which runs to 46 pages including Annexes. There is also an addendum. The main document has the following at the start of the draft agreement:

Schoolboy sniggers at COP21 and conspiracy theories from WUWT deniers

While the leaders of the free and less free world have gathered in Paris to address the biggest problem the world is facing, there is nothing but schoolboy sniggers from deniers. You may remember sneering, sniggering lads or lasses in your class when you were at high school. The underachievers of low self-esteem who thought a leer, a forced swagger and a dab of Clearasil might get them the admiration they sought. These types were either ignored or scorned by the rest of the class, just as the world's leaders are ignoring the abysmal efforts by disinformers and deniers to make the world hotter instead of containing global warming.

COP21 begins in Paris - links to get you up to speed

COP21 of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is getting underway at Le Bourget conference centre just outside Paris. It will be a huge gathering of world leaders and delegates from all around the world. The meeting runs from 30 November to 11 December.

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UPDATE: I've just seen that the final text draft has been agreed prepared. I'll let you know as soon as it's available - or you can keep an eye on the UN website. There's a press conference scheduled for 11:30 am CET today - Saturday (Europe time).

Sou 2:30 pm AEDT 12 December 2015

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The purpose

COP meetings aren't scientific meetings, they are about action to mitigate climate change through intergovernmental agreement. The aim of COP21 has been described as "to achieve a legally binding and universal agreement on climate, with the aim of keeping global warming below 2°C".  The "legally binding" is probably not going to be achieved, because the agreement has to be accepted by all parties and there are some who won't be able to accept the legally binding part. The agreement won't be sufficient to guarantee "below 2°C", but will be an important pre-requisite.

The meeting

To keep up to date with drafts etc, here is a link to the main UNFCCC COP21 website and the provisional agenda and overview schedule. There is also an information hub, and live webcasts (I don't know if they will be open to a general audience or not).

Background and commentary

Below are links to some of what is being written about it. It's not exhaustive by any means. I mainly picked articles that provide information about what COP21 is about and what is to be achieved, hopefully.

• The Conversation has a big spread with lots of articles focusing on different aspects.
• From the UK Independent: Paris climate change talks: What the different groups attending expect from these crucial meetings
• Biwa Kwan at SBS (Australia) provides an overview: Paris Climate Meeting: What you need to know about COP21
• Climate scientist Simon Donner writes about the Seven Key Issues To Be Addressed At The Paris Climate Summit
• Matt McGrath of the BBC - COP21: Beginner's guide to the UN Paris climate summit
• The Guardian has a feature spread with lots of articles
• Australia's ABC is notable for it's lack of focus on COP21 apart from a couple of articles in the Drum opinion section and news items about marches and arrests - maybe there is more to come
• Ban Ki-moon, UN Secretary General - What I expect from the UN Climate Change Conference in Paris
• Brandon Miller, CNN - 5 things you need to know about COP21

UNFCCC Pledges, websites and reports

There is a special UNFCCC website, which has a the report "Climate Action Now", plus the pledges from each country. It's one of those highly irritating fancy websites designed for touch tablets, where you have to guess a lot, click a lot, scroll a lot, and get mini-bits of information in return - but it mightn't be the information you are looking for. I recommend this link for the Climate Action Now Summary for Policymakers report - although if you're on a notebook or desktop computer, you'll find the website almost as irritating. There's also a web page with a press release, which is easier to read.

It would be great if you can add other interesting links in the comments below.

Is this all there is before COP21? Crowd-sourcing the list of climate science deniers from 2009

There's a denier conference being organised for Paris, calling itself the Paris Climate Challenge. I think it's being organised by the Heartland Institute, but whoever is organising it is rather coy, and doesn't say. Going by the speakers, it could just be the political party, the UKIP. On the other hand, if it's the same as the Heartland Institute effort, then it hasn't decided on the name yet - is it Pandemonium in Paris or is it the Paris Climate Challenge?

Anyway, the one that's being promoted at WUWT (archived here and waybacked here) doesn't have much going for it. About all it's got is a plea for some speakers and a letter written six years ago, back in 2009. The 2009 letter is signed by people who are described as "climate experts", but most can make no such claim. Two of those signatories are listed as deceased: Ernst G Beck and Zbigniew Jaworowski. There may be more.

If you're thinking of signing up to fill one of what will undoubtedly be many empty chairs, you will be entertained by a sad and motley lot of ratbags:

• Stuart Agnew - a right wing politican from the UK (UKIP) - see comment
• Piers Corbyn - who manages to sell weather forecasts 
• Philip Foster -possible organiser - a retired vicar and continuing science denier, and director of the company that is listed as accepting donations for the effort, and who may be associated with the UKIP also (he goes to their conferences)
• Roger Helmer - another nutty politician from the UKIP
• Tom Harris - who says that climate science is a hoax, and gets his paleo-climate from the Old Testament 
• Murry Salby - who was sacked from Macquarie University and resurfaces every now and then to show how he can't do CO2 arithmetic
• Donna Laframboise - who writes books about dustbins 
• Viscount Monckton - aka the potty peer, who goes in for childish bluster
• Patrick Moore - who trades on his past time with Greenpeace while denying science 
• Nils-Axel Mörner - who twists charts to deny rising seas 
• Cliff Ollier - another denier for hire
• Ian Plimer - of iron sun fame, who's published (written? who knows) books denying climate science. He's all but disappeared from the scene after his disgrace at the hands of George Monbiot on the ABC with Australia's Tony Jones.
• Roger Tattersall - another organiser - aka Tallbloke, a denier blogger who once tried to get elected - another one associated with the UKIP. For a while he was thought too silly for WUWT, but has since been taken back into the fold. He registered the website for the Paris Climate Challenge (h/t Anonymous in the comments) - see this comment and this comment.

Crowd-sourcing details of deniers

Below is the list of people from the 2009 letter published on the 2015 "Paris Climate Challenge" website, for want of anything more recent. As I said, the list claims the following as "climate experts" but most have no expertise in climate science. They may be "expert" in science denial - a lot of them are associated with denier lobby groups.

I've linked quite a few of them. If anyone is willing to lend a hand, and pick out some and provide links to show their background, whether they are still in the land of the living, main denial "achievements" etc, that would be great. Even if it's only one or two people you look up - every bit will help. It can then be a ready reference for the future. If you do, can you list the number in the list, and their name and I'll add the links.

There are some websites that list science deniers and their background, including desmogblog, the Denier List, and SourceWatch. Links to in-depth articles are also helpful.

Paris is approaching, and deniers are on the back foot

In just two months, the 2015 Paris Climate Conference (COP21) will commence, alongside a big shindig for business, the Sustainable Innovation Forum 2015. By this time you might have expected the deniers to be in full swing, stealing emails from scientists, or otherwise getting up to their usual dirty tricks. There's nothing. Worse than nothing. Deniers are merely recycling ancient memes, and if anything, are on the defensive.

Anthony Watts at WUWT briefly stepped out of his hidey hole with a couple of articles over the past week, but all he did was act the fool. First in icy cold Greenland and then in sunny Spain. He wasn't just mocked here at HW, he didn't get much applause from his own crowd, either. So he slunk back into his hole and handed over the reins to his resident uber conspiracy theorist, Tim Ball.

Eric Worrall mocks the small island states that will go under

Eric "eugenics" Worrall has taken over Anthony Watts' blog WUWT from the look of things. I say that because he's no longer a "guest", he's now a WUWT fixture. Anyway, Eric doesn't like the Carribean. That's a surprise because he's indicated that he moved to the subtropics, north of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, to get away from the cold UK.

As you know we promote heavily ecotourism, and if action is not taken by the international community to halt greenhouse gas emissions we’re going to have a serious challenge.

Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit, Dominica

Today Eric's decided to mock a meeting of Caribbean leaders, who were preparing their submission for COP21, the UNFCCC meeting to be held in Paris later this year (archived here).

These leaders aren't from places no-one's heard of.  They are from the playground of the rich and famous and their countries are home to the rich as well as the poor. These are islands like the Bahamas, Belize, Barbados, Guyana, Haiti, Jamaica, Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago; and Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada, St Kitts-Nevis, St Lucia and St Vincent and the Grenadines.

There's a short report of the meeting by the Inter Press Service News Agency, which Eric didn't link to. He's not interested in such details. As I said, his mockery demonstrates that he couldn't give a damn about small island nations disappearing, as many will in a few short decades.