Why ‘COP of Truth’ claims are a two-sided coin

President Lula has called COP30 the ‘COP of Truth’ and last night he and UN Secretary-General António Guterres announced that 13 countries have now agreed to a declaration on the integrity of climate information.

This is specifically aimed at targeting the disinformation and misinformation that is rife on climate change around the world, and which is often seen as a concerted attempt by vested interests to undermine efforts to affect positive change.

Indeed, there’s even disinformation about COP itself, which is actually happening on a disused airfield, although many people would have you believe that we’ve been cutting down rainforest with our bare hands during the negotiations.

There’s another side though to talking about a ‘COP of Truth’. For a long time, there’s been a disconnect between what scientists would tell you about the realistic chances of keeping below 1.5C of global warming and a fiction, which seems to exist around the negotiating table, of trying to pretend that something is still viable when it’s not going to happen.

There’s a subtlety in this, as the official agreement says that we should be aiming to keep global warming below 1.5C by the end of this century – so you can overshoot and come back down again.

But that does feel like a slightly questionable basis. If we overshoot by too much and for too long, then the damage that does is very considerable indeed.

If this is the COP of Truth, then as well as targeting misinformation from vested interests or from those with other axes to grind, we probably also have to look at ourselves and question whether we’re really being frank with people about how serious the situation is.

What, of course, that means is we have no choice now but to adapt for horrendous levels of global warming, even whilst we continue to work to bring emissions down, so that the very worst scenarios can be avoided.