Halfway through the climate summit: blah blah in the blue zone

So much anger. And hate: blah, blah, blah! This is what the echo of Glasgow sounds like. As expected, the climate protests halfway through the UN summit COP26 are merciless, often defamatory - and trivial. For Greta Thunberg, the summit is a single "festival of greenwash": Everywhere the climate sinners hang green cloaks. However, Britain's Prime Minister Boris Johnson, the host of the crisis summit, started with the undiplomatic mockery. "You will not forgive us," he called out to the heads of government and their diplomats at the start when Glasgow ends like Copenhagen eleven years ago. With blah blah, and with failure in the face of catastrophe. At that time this word was still taboo: catastrophe. After a state of emergency, climate change did not feel like it did for many in power.In any case, the hard blow of a hair's breadth survived financial crisis hurt more.

It's different today.

The massively accelerated climate change is now considered the mother of all possible ecological, economic and political crises, also in the financial sector.

And in the blue zone of Glasgow, the color of the UN, the corresponding horror scenarios are more present than ever at climate conferences.

From a diplomatic point of view, quite respectable

There had been concerns before the summit.

The severe damper from Corona, the political damage to multilateralism for which the populists are responsible - a week ago there was still a lot to suggest that global climate policy at its twenty-sixth meeting would no longer tie in with the historic moment in Paris six years ago, but with Copenhagen would.

But the first week of Glasgow was diplomatically respectable. The business world is now moving along with it, and climate protection is being stylized as a business with a trillion dollar perspective. Suddenly there is also acceptance of what has long been controversial: climate protection is progressive and pays off. And for the first time ever, the promises made so far by the signatory states with their announced climate protection measures add up to a hopeful package. The historic methane and forest agreements are promising approaches. The International Energy Agency has calculated that this would be plus 1.8 degrees warming compared to the pre-industrial level. For the first time, this would fall below the limit of two degrees originally set in the Paris Climate Agreement and defined by science as a minimum target.In Copenhagen one was still on the way to almost four degrees more. So global climate diplomacy is currently writing its own climate fairy tale.

Wine is preached, water is still served

However, this still has little to do with reality.

Wine is preached, water is still served.

In 2021, according to the figures presented by the Global Carbon Project in Glasgow, more coal and gas will be consumed again than before the pandemic.

Unstable relation to reality is what some psychiatrists now call the phenomenon when the protagonists assemble a dangerous and objectively false reality.

There are only eleven years left, which is frustratingly short, and at today's emissions level, the remaining fossil fuel budget of the world of 420 billion tons of carbon dioxide will be used up. In fact, more greenhouse gases are not allowed to get into the atmosphere if one wants to reach the maximum 1.5 degrees with a probability of at least fifty percent, which is now targeted as a target of the Paris Agreement to protect the ecological and economic capital on the planet.

In the virtual reality of climate diplomacy, this may still be possible. But if you listened to the opening of the Glasgow Summit, you can judge it better: The climate optimism is an illusion, explained UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, who, like some of the heads of state, warned against overestimating himself. The world is still a long way from finally pulling the lever, Guterres made clear.

In reality, we continue to dig at our own grave by measuring climate protection against numbers and goals that are talked about more beautifully from peak to peak and also look dazzling in theory, but do not survive the verification against reality.

This can be called creative climate accounting.

Or just greenwash.

The situation is similar with the dispute over the hundred billion dollars in climate aid for the countries of the south that are already hardest hit.

It has not yet been resolved either, although the money was promised for 2020.

COP26 would only be a success if the confidence and confidence of Paris 2015 could still be carried over to Glasgow.