US will not send officials to COP30 climate talks | Hacker News Reader

US will not send officials to COP30 climate talks

reuters.com

76 pointsgeox27 comments

At the same time, the CO2 increase measured at Mauna Loa for 2024 was over 3.5ppm/yr, way up from the ~2.5ppm/yr seen previously this decade[0]

2025 State of the Climate report[1] said (on top of other horrible things)

> A dangerous hothouse Earth trajectory may now be more likely due to accelerated warming, self-reinforcing feedbacks, and tipping points.

I haven't seen hothouse earth mentioned in mainstream papers for a long time (decade+?), as it was deemed unlikely before.

Also The German Physics Society and the German Meteorological Society issued a joint statement warning about the possibility of 3 °C warming by the 2050s[2]

I am actually angry to people that they're irresponsible enough to vote for this without caring about others, but it feels like it was such a horrible timing for all this stupidity as well.

[0] https://www.carbonbrief.org/met-office-atmospheric-co2-rise-... [1] https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/advance-article/doi/10.1... [2] https://worldcrunch.com/focus/green-or-gone/global-warming-a...

They've got a solution to that too - page 185 https://www.commerce.gov/sites/default/files/2025-06/NOAA-FY...

"In coordination with the requested terminations for Weather Laboratories and Cooperative Institutes (see OAR-10) and Ocean Laboratories and Cooperative Institutes (see OAR-19), NOAA will close...Mauna Loa"

Re: likelyness of hothouse earth scenario: I don't think that the clathrate gun hypothesis [0] was ever really off the table. It's the thing that has me the most worried about the long-term future, both for myself and my children.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis

> Also The German Physics Society and the German Meteorological Society issued a joint statement warning about the possibility of 3 °C warming by the 2050s[2]

All the glaciers will have disappeared too by then. Pinky promise.

Many have called it COP-out for years simply because of how useless it has been, or worse yet actually is used to tighten the relationship better countries and companies that handle high emissions with the incentive to double down. That and that COP28 was held in the UAE the nation equivalent of a Gas station, this funnily enough doesn't feel like a big loss.

I'm not saying that we shouldn't try these things, but COP has become the poster child of the failure of these kind of events.

This is a controversial opinion but an outside view of COP is that in its most positive light, it has failed, miserably. It has not solved the climate crises, and even the few agreements which it has managed to pass have promised way to little and even then are still broken anyway.

I know the USA is boycotting for a different (and a very bad) reason, but I feel like (with hindsight) it would have been a smart move for other countries to abandon this conference and demand something better.

"and demand something better"

Demand from whom? If major players decide they don't give a shit, then this is the way it is.

The only major player that doesn't give a shit is the United States. Everyone else either isn't a major player or has policies in place to combat the climate crisis.

Hm. Russia really tries to show the world, that they are a major player and they do not seem to care about it at all.

And China does produce and installs tons of solar panels, windparks and batteries, but they also build as much coal plants as they can. African leaders all in all seems loud to use climate change as a means to get more developement funds/compensation and that's it. The arab world gets angry if the oil output gets reduced. Then there is south america, where from what I know of personal interactions, climate change is largley a unknown term, unless it is used to somehow attack the "west".

But yes, what to expect if the richtest country does not lead by example.

Something better? Than multilateral talks? Sorry, but can you expand on what you mean, a bit more?

Something better then yearly talks (only a portion of which are expected to end with meaningful agreements) with heavy sponsorships from the fossil fuel industry. Yes.

This is our climate we are talking about, failure to address climate change has dire consequences. I am simply asking our leaders to act accordingly, nothing less.

I guess the world has now given up on staving off climate change, and accepted it as inevitable.

Hopefully, or so the unstated thinking goes, it will be those poors who bear most of the brunt. Yes, many will perish or be uprooted, but humanity as a whole is nowhere near threatened with extinction.

Or, another strain of thought goes, technologies that are yet to be developed will suddenly appear to save the day...

> Or, another strain of thought goes, technologies that are yet to be developed will suddenly appear to save the day...

We have technologies that can reduce our carbon emissions... and they get fought against by the people saying that they're not worried because tech will be invented that solves the problems

Reducing emissions, even to zero, isn’t enough any more. We have to remove the excess carbon dioxide that’s already in the atmosphere if we don’t want the planet to continue heating for centuries to come.

The removal is what people claim some technology will magically appear to solve.

What you are talking about is climate tipping points, that is amount of warming which causes one or more of earth systems which previously prevented further warming to fail.

Now we have evidence which seems to suggest we have reached our first such tipping point[1], low latitude coral reef die-off. So even if we stop emitting CO2 into the atmosphere tomorrow, these corals are still going to die (most likely) and they are not coming back for at least a few centuries, meaning the CO2 which they store will be released into the atmosphere causing even further warming.

This is only the first of a more then a dozen tipping points, and since we have passed this one we are also likely to pass a couple more (Greenland Icesheet and North Atlantic conveyor), however that is not certain. And it is possible that if we take drastic action (which we 10000% should) we can (possibly) prevent other tipping points and even possibly use existing technology (like planting trees, reclaiming swamps, etc) to offset the carbon released by the dying corals.

So in short, while technically true, reducing emission to zero isn’t enough any more. We are not at a point (yet; possibly) where we can’t stop the warming with existing technology. But we must absolutely absolutely absolutely, and dear I say, absolute-effing-lutely reduce our emissions to zero, not net zero, but absolute zero, and we mast do it as fast as we can, no matter how much it costs.

1: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/10/251029002920.h...

No, I’m not talking about tipping points.

I’m talking about the fact that we’ve already released a ton of carbon and we can’t get it back out of the air. The carbon itself isn’t the global warming. The heat it traps is. Even if we stop emissions right this second, the carbon already in the air will continue trapping heat as long as it’s there. Natural cycles will take centuries to remove it.

I am not sure that is how carbon induced greenhouse effect works. The warming has pretty immediate effects and is pretty correlated with the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. The only warming beyond that (as I understand it) is from positive feedback loops via these tipping points. All else being equal (and without tipping points) if we stopped emitting carbon today, the rise in temperature would also stop relatively quickly. And if we did find a way (by some miracle) to remove carbon from the atmosphere it would start to cool again relatively quickly.

or the Green parties straight oppose them (as the UK Green Party does with Nuclear) one of a few reasons why I'd never support them (they also support unilateral nuclear disarmament and us leaving NATO...while their is an active land war in Europe with one side been a nuclear power and us supporting the other).

It's frustrating that intelligent solutions we can have now are just ignored.

The war against global warming will not be won with personal sacrifice or self flagellating like the EU, but with Chinese solar, wind, and batteries sold at dumping prices. Shame that the US won’t let them.

I feel these agreements are highly asymmetric and are used to gain market advantage by countries that don't have qualms violating these agreements behind closed doors.

This then leads to more pollution.

Before Trump, the US had a higher rating than China (though both were bad):

https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/usa/2024-11-13/

(Same as EU's rating: https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/eu/)

https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/china/2024-09-17/

The sad reality is that unless there is uniform compliance across major countries, these talks are just climate theatre.

Is there any proof that countries who agree to these accords are cheating behind closed doors?

As far as I can tell it would be a relatively straightforward thing to measure (how else are we getting these per country reports on emissions?)

Given that, I’d expect it to become obvious if they are cheating the accords.

And as far as markets go, I believe quite strongly that’s a failure of our economic system. It fails to account for externalities appropriately. If things were priced with externalities accounted for it would change consumption patterns dramatically

> Is there any proof that countries who agree to these accords are cheating behind closed doors?

Is there any evidence these aren't a fig leaf? What kind of leverage does this give countries to penalize others in the event of a broken agreement?

> What kind of leverage does this give countries to penalize others

In the case of China, it's pushed them to make headway in the process of building a manufacturing infrastructure that is more insulated from global energy price swings. IIRC they can also power much of it more cheaply (e.g. solar has no fuel cost), which provides them with a cost advantage.

As we have repeatedly seen, there is also leverage to be had in not having one's country internally levered to global oil prices.

So it provides leverage, but not to directly penalize.

It's not clear these "climate talks" have anything to do with China's domestic movements.

That’s usually true. But the US has more to lose in such a move. So and without the US it loses energy. So this is more about bringing the world to think harder about resource management

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