The “COP of Truth”? (Or Yet Another Cop Out?)
As countries continue to reel from climate disasters, the 30th UN climate summit is about to open in Brazil. Will it be a summit of truth?
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, President of Brazil, speaks at the Belem Climate Summit Opening Plenary on November 6, 2025. Credit: © UN Climate Change - Kiara Worth, via Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
In 2022, record-breaking monsoon rains – intensified and enabled by planetary heating – triggered biblical flooding in Pakistan that displaced 33 million people, took more than 1,700 lives, and destroyed or damaged millions of homes and over 4 million acres of croplands. The unprecedented flooding inundated one-third of the country – becoming Pakistan’s worst weather-related disaster in its history.
“Millions were pushed into poverty, losing not only their livelihoods and dignity but their sense of security,” Dr. Shaikh Tanveer Ahmed, chairman of the HANDS Welfare Foundation, a Pakistani nonprofit organization, told reporters during a recent press briefing. “Three years on, recovery remains incomplete,” he said. “Many communities continue to struggle with displacement and economic hardship.”
On Oct. 28, 43 Pakistani farmers from one of the regions hardest hit by the floods commenced legal action against two of the largest corporate carbon emitters in Germany – the electric utility RWE and cement manufacturer Heidelberg Materials. The farmers are seeking to recover damages (of at least 1 million euros) related to two years of harvest losses, arguing that companies that contributed significantly to the climate crisis through their carbon-intensive business activities should help pay for the climate consequences that are disproportionately impacting the world’s poorest and most vulnerable.
The same day that this new climate justice case was announced, Hurricane Melissa made landfall in Jamaica as a monstrous category 5 storm, killing dozens and unleashing extensive destruction across the island nation. Melissa was the strongest hurricane ever to strike Jamaica, and like the devastating floods in Pakistan, it too was amplified by climate change. A new analysis released on Thursday by World Weather Attribution finds that human-caused warming made the hurricane more intense and the conditions that gave rise to it more likely.
“When a storm can explosively intensify from 70 to 185 mph in less than three days over ocean waters that are ~1.5°C warmer than normal, we are witnessing the dangerous new reality of our warming world,” said Jayaka Campbell, senior lecturer at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica.
“COP 30 will be the COP of truth”
World leaders are currently gathering in Belém, Brazil for the annual United Nations climate summit – COP30, as this year’s summit is called – the forum where countries discuss and negotiate and try to hammer out agreements on issues around reducing greenhouse gas emissions, scaling up climate finance, restoring ecosystems and protecting carbon sinks, and other matters critical to preserving a habitable planet.
COP30 is taking place amidst this “dangerous new reality” that scientists warn we are now facing, in which risks of crossing irreversible climate tipping points are increasing and extreme weather disasters are happening with greater frequency. Ten years after the adoption of the landmark Paris Climate Agreement, the world remains far off track from the goals enshrined in that accord to limit global average temperature rise to well below 2°C, and to strive to not exceed 1.5°C. Leading climate experts and UN officials – including UN Secretary-General António Guterres – are now saying that overshooting 1.5°C is inevitable. Current policies and pledges push the world even beyond 2°C, as the latest Emissions Gap Report (EGR) from the UN Environment Program, aptly titled “Off Target,” makes clear.
“While national climate plans have delivered some progress, it is nowhere near fast enough, which is why we still need unprecedented emissions cuts in an increasingly tight window, with an increasingly challenging geopolitical backdrop,” UNEP executive director Inger Andersen said in a press release accompanying the new EGR report released this week.
Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, speaking Thursday at a plenary leaders’ summit in Belém, referenced that report, which projects warming could rise by 2.3 to 2.5°C by 2100 if all current climate pledges (called Nationally Determined Contributions, or NDCs) are implemented. That level of warming translates into massive worldwide suffering and mortality. “Human losses and material losses would be drastic,” Lula said, noting that more than 250,000 people could die each year, and global GDP could constrict by 30%. That’s why, he said, “COP30 will be the COP of truth. It is now the moment to take it seriously, all the warnings of science.” The president of the country hosting this year’s COP is calling for moving away from “fine speeches” and “declarations of good intentions” towards action and implementation.
Whether that actually happens, of course, remains to be seen. The UN climate summits do not have a great track record and there have been calls for urgent reforms of these negotiations, including ending the influence of fossil fuel and other polluting industries. But when it comes to truth and taking the warnings of science seriously, might this COP, which many have said must be a “turning point,” perhaps deliver? Or is likely to yet again fall short, given the immense challenges of reconciling urgent climate action with geopolitical realities?
We shall have to wait and see what comes out of the next two weeks in Belém, the so-called “COP of truth.” Speaking of truth, there really does need to be a whole lot more honesty and truth telling when it comes to the climate emergency (and yes, it is a global emergency, scientists tell us). A dearth in communicating climate truth is one of three gaps that must be addressed, as Rueanna Haynes, director of Climate Analytics Caribbean, explained on a panel during Climate Week NYC in September. (The other two gaps are in courage and justice). Especially given that we live in a world “filled to the brim with misinformation,” a “resolve to defend the truth in the face of” all this mis- and disinformation is urgently needed, Hayes said.
With that in mind, there are three points, truths if you will, on climate change that I think are quite clear. And no, these are not the same three “tough truths” that Bill Gates discusses in his controversial new memo (which has gotten pushback from climate scientists, by the way).
There is no negotiating with physics
First, we must be clear-eyed about where we are headed – and the outlook is quite dire. As the 2025 state of the climate report says in its opening line, “We are hurtling toward climate chaos.” Greenhouse gas emissions and global temperatures are at record levels and continue to soar. Ecosystems and the planet’s life support systems are already starting to break down, and the impacts on human society in the coming decades will be profound. The stable climate under which human civilization arose simply no longer exists. And as long as humans continue to burn fossil fuels and engage in other activities that add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, the Earth will continue to heat up. It is basic physics, and physics does not negotiate.
“I stand before you today with the hard truth,” Celeste Saulo, Secretary-General of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), told delegates and leaders at Thursday’s plenary summit in Belém. “We cannot defy the laws of physics. Science does not lie… Concentrations of heat-trapping greenhouse gases are their highest in 800,000 years, thus committing our planet to a warmer and more dangerous future.”
UN Secretary-General Guterres, speaking moments later at the summit, said this: “The hard truth is that we have failed to ensure we remain below 1.5 degrees. Science now tells us that a temporary overshoot beyond the 1.5 limit – starting at the latest in the early 2030s – is inevitable. We need a paradigm shift to limit this overshoot’s magnitude and duration and quickly drive it down.”
Greenhouse gas concentration levels and increments of temperature rise may seem wonky and abstract. But the impacts are very real, and they are already being felt now. As the WMO noted in its latest update, extreme events throughout 2025, from wildfires and floods to deadly tropical cyclones, “caused massive economic and social upheaval and loss of life.”
Gates argues in his memo that temperature is not the best measure of progress on climate change and that we shouldn’t be overly concerned about it. “Climate change is not the biggest threat to the lives and livelihoods of people in poor countries,” he claims. That view misses the mark, according to climate scientists.
“There is no other problem that so disproportionately affects the poor and vulnerable,” Katharine Hayhoe, climate scientist at Texas Tech University, told reporters during a briefing this week. Kim Cobb, climate scientist at Brown University, noted that “the suffering is going to pile on” as temperatures rise. And Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources, said: “A 2.5-to-3-degree warmer world, it is a catastrophe.”
“No one can bargain with physics,” Guterres said during his speech on Thursday. Temperature rise definitely matters. Which brings us to point number 2.
“Clean energy is winning on price, performance, and potential – offering the solutions to transform our economies and protect our populations. What’s still missing is political courage.” - UN Secretary-General António Guterres
Every fraction of a degree matters
Science is clear that every fraction of a degree of planetary heating makes a difference in terms of the losses and damage and level of suffering.
“Every fraction of a degree means more hunger, displacement, and loss – especially for those least responsible. This is moral failure – and deadly negligence,” Guterres said.
Even though the road ahead is incredibly steep and the window of time remaining before the climate emergency spirals out of control is increasingly narrow, giving up or surrendering to complete despair is not an option. Especially since many of the solutions are already at hand.
“The solutions needed to course correct are available, they’re available at low cost, and they can deliver strong economic growth, better human health, more jobs, and energy security and resilience,” Anne Olhoff, chief scientific editor for UNEP’s Emissions Gap Report 2025, said during the report launch event this week.
“Every fraction of a degree of global warming avoided matters,” she noted.
Guterres also referenced the promise of climate solutions that come with the clean energy revolution. “Another truth is evident: we have never been better equipped to fight back,” he said. “Clean energy is winning on price, performance, and potential – offering the solutions to transform our economies and protect our populations. What’s still missing is political courage.”
Fossil fuels must be phased out, period.
That brings us to the third point. The primary driver of the climate emergency is combustion of fossil fuels, which account for more than two-thirds of greenhouse gas emissions heating the planet. The fossil fuel era must end if there is to be any shot at avoiding runaway global warming or a hellish hothouse Earth trajectory. There is no other way around it.
In an op-ed published in The Guardian on Thursday, climate scientist Joëlle Gergis, who served as a lead author of the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report, emphasized this point, noting the “scientific imperative to eliminate the primary cause of our overheating planet – fossil fuels.”
“Until our leaders have the courage to put a price on carbon to bring the era of fossil fuels to a definitive end, we are adding more and more carbon to the atmosphere, compounding the physical catastrophe now unfolding all around us,” Gergis writes.
Political courage in confronting fossil fuels and the fossil fuel industry has been sorely lacking. World leaders have started to pay lip service to the “f words”, agreeing at COP28 in Dubai in 2023 on the need to transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems. Since then, however, there has been no indication that they intend to follow through on that promise.
A small group of countries, led by small island states, is preparing to take action outside the UN climate regime and start negotiating what has been called a Fossil Fuel Nonproliferation Treaty. The first international conference for a phase-out of fossil fuels is slated to be held in Colombia in April 2026.
For the most part, however, fossil fuel phaseout is not part of countries’ climate action plans. The world’s top fossil fuel producing countries are planning to produce more than double the level of fossil fuels by 2030 than would be consistent with limiting warming to 1.5°C, according to the recent Production Gap Report. And as the Emissions Gap Report notes, so far no country’s Paris Agreement climate pledges (called NDCs) “include targets to reduce oil and gas production or phase out inefficient fossil fuel subsidies.”
Brazil is one of the countries that is expanding fossil fuel production, and the Brazilian state oil firm Petrobras was recently granted a license for exploratory drilling near the mouth of the Amazon River – a move that spurred criticism from environmental advocates as the country is set to host COP30, which officially starts next week.
“There’s a deep contradiction between calling on the world to protect our common home and approving new oil drilling at the mouth of the Amazon,” said Ilan Zugman, Latin America and the Caribbean director at 350.org. “This is indeed the ‘COP of truth’, and that truth demands action.”
Andreas Sieber, associate director of policy and campaigns at 350.org, also noted President Lula’s words at the plenary summit Thursday, at which the Brazilian leader referenced the “need to get rid of fossil fuels.”
“His legacy, and the credibility of COP30 itself, will depend on whether he turns these words into courage and follows up on his laudable ambition to accelerate the energy transition in Belém,” Sieber said. Lula, he added, “cannot be both a champion of climate justice and one of the world’s biggest oil expanders.”