The COP-26 organizers stopped researchers from accessing the negotiations in Glasgow, UK.

[NNadir]

This is from a Nature editorial: COP26 didn’t solve everything — but researchers must stay engaged.

Subtitle:

The climate summit’s organizers stopped researchers accessing the negotiations in Glasgow, UK. A zero-carbon world needs science and social science to bridge divides.

I believe the text should be open sourced.

An excerpt:

Many researchers are frustrated at the lack of more meaningful measures to cut greenhouse-gas emissions. They have every right to be angry. But it would be a tragedy if that led them to disengage with the COP process and with humanity’s fight to stop catastrophic climate change.

With due respect to the editors of Nature, one of the world's premier scientific journals, the conditional word "would" is not appropriate when discussing whether this will be a "tragedy." It is a tragedy, and the scientists were not disengaged because they were refusing to participate, they weren't allowed to participate.

An earlier excerpt:

But a study for the Climate Action Tracker website, by Niklas Höhne at Wageningen University in the Netherlands and his colleagues, showed that, if pledges announced at the COP meeting are implemented, temperatures are still projected to rise 2.4 °C by 2100, well above the 1.5 °C target agreed at the 2015 Paris climate summit. The effects of this are likely to be catastrophic.

Nature's happy. People committed to stopping to burn coal, unless I would guess based on events, as is happening in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, the wind stops blowing.

The editorial also states that no one could agree on what "net zero" means. I know what it means now: When the wind is blowing and the sun is shining, a country, state, or organization counts all the dangerous natural gas and coal it would have burned if the wind wasn't blowing and the sun wasn't shining. If that sum is more than the dangerous coal and dangerous natural gas it does burn, dumping the waste CO2 directly into the planetary atmosphere, when the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining, they give themselves a big pat on the back and declare themselves "net zero."

COP26 would have been as effective at addressing climate change if, instead of the meetings they did have, they held a modern dance competition under klieg lights.

Speaking only for myself, I'm almost done.

[hunter]

1. I had zero expectations for COP-26 and didn't pay any attention to it...

... so I wasn't disappointed.

The concluding paragraph of the editorial you cited is nothing more than an excuse for inaction:

Stopping global warming will not happen without a partnership between nations, or a contract that all sides believe in, and buy into. Right now, countries with different levels of economic development and climate vulnerability are far apart. From the earliest COPs, researchers and their work have helped to bridge these divides. They must continue to do so now and in the future.

A nation such as the United States could certainly "go it alone" and quit fossil fuels. This would have huge unpredictable economic impacts throughout the world, and might even open up new markets for exports of carbon free energy technology.

That's exactly what world leaders are afraid of. They don't want to upset the existing fossil fuel powered economy. They'll never acknowledge that "renewable" energy schemes dependent upon fossil fuels for their economic viability are just another form of climate change denial.

[NNadir]

3. Oh, I know. I realized this almost immediately and only paid attention to news items in the...

...scientific journals. I also read some trade journals and regularly scan the World Nuclear News

What I gathered was that the nuclear industry was treated as an annoying little brother by the "negotiators" whose chief role was to keep the fossil fuel companies happy by issuing some vague "by (insert year here)" nonsense that will only apply after everyone at the event will be dead.

It was a Greenpeace classic, I think. Blather about (insert year here), window dressing not actually designed to impact bourgeois consumption, and everyone running along happily dumping dangerous fossil fuel waste directly into the planetary atmosphere.

I think of it as an international dance contest with no real meaning, but I really couldn't expect otherwise. We live in an age where people will literally give their lives - and the lives of other people - to reject science.

[jeffreyi]

2. Earth to everybody:

We ain't going to do what it takes to "solve" this. Just not in our DNA. There's too many, consuming too much, unwilling to give up anything, especially replicating. We are just doing what we are biologically programmed to do, which is...use it all up before somebody else gets any. So the deck chairs get moved around a little bit. The tsunami is here already. Biology made us this way, and will eventually hit the reset button in our case, too.