BAKU, Azerbaijan (AP) — Soaring rhetoric, urgent pleas and pledges of cooperation contrasted with a backdrop of seismic political changes, global wars and economic hardships as United Nations began Monday and got right to the hard part: money. In Baku, Azerbaijan, where the world’s first oil well was drilled and the smell of the fuel was noticeable outdoors, the two-week session, called COP29, got right to the major focus of striking a new deal on how many hundreds of billions — or even trillions — of dollars a year will flow from rich nations to poor to try to curb and adapt to climate change. The money is to help the developing world transition their energy systems away from planet-warming fossil fuels and toward clean energy, compensate for climate disasters mostly triggered by carbon pollution from rich nations and adapt to future extreme weather.
“These numbers may sound big but they are nothing compared to the cost of inaction,” the new COP29 president, Mukhtar Babayev, said as he took over. “COP29 is a moment of truth for the ” which in 2015 set a goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.
7 degrees Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times. This year, the world is on pace for in human civilization, the European climate service Copernicus announced earlier this month. But the Paris 1.
5 goal is about decades, not one year of that amount of warming. Signs of climate disasters abound The effects of climate change in disasters such as hurricanes, droug.