COP

On an average day, I see more cats than people and then only a very small number of cats. I’m comfortable with this arrangement. Last week¹, at COP28 – COP standing for the Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, 28 standing for the fact that there have been 28 of them – I saw more people in one room than I typically see in a year. They were all looking at me and somebody had just asked a question. Actually, they had just asked four complicated, multi-part questions. Behind me, on either side, my sweating face appeared on two pairs of screens the size of tennis courts in anticipation of my answer. I swallowed and my Adam’s apple, duplicated four times, worked slowly up and down like the counterweight on a medieval drawbridge. There wasn’t an answer yet; when it came, I’d learn about it at the same time as everyone else. I hoped it was good.

“Um,” I said. Not a promising start.

Estimates of how many people were at COP28 vary. I’ve seen figures up to 110 thousand people. That’s six times more people than live in the city I call home. I’ve been told it was the biggest COP so far, at least when it comes to attendees. The site felt large too, taking around a half hour to cross on foot. The day I arrived – the day before COP itself started – the queues were already snaking endlessly back and forth in the unrelenting sun², but there were still quiet corners of the site where you could get away from people.

By the time I left, every quiet corner was occupied by huddled groups deep in earnest and what one can only hope were interesting conversations, or individuals eating a yoghurt muesli pot with a thousand-yard stare, trying to eke out some personal space from a very very public space. The main thoroughfares were crowded and hot and the air a deadly suspension of particulates – dust, smog, partially-burned hydrocarbons, and heavy metals³ – that bleached the sky, smothered the horizon, and did unpleasant things to your lungs and mucus membranes.

Dubai

My feelings about large conferences are almost wholly negative and COP28 is the largest conference I’m every likely to attend. There’s more of all the bad stuff – more people, larger venues, longer lines, worse food costing more money, and the rest – but with fewer interesting scientific discussions to balance it all out.

COP28 being hosted in Dubai was very much on the con side too. Dubai’s dependence on oil and gas exports didn’t bother me so much – let he who is without sin etc⁴ – but before departing, I had dutifully read the FCO guidance. While I was unlikely to indulge in any public displays of affection, or to dress immodestly, I prefer to be in places where such things aren’t offences for which you can be arrested. As with Egypt the year before, the guidance suggested that photography was frowned upon, as was criticism of the country and its leaders both of which I consider hobbies and which are, for the time being, still nominally legal in France. Terrorism, I was assured, was very likely, but that seems to be the case everywhere you go these days.

When it came up in conversation, people who had been to Dubai would inform me that it was “unreal” and list the many activities I should indulge in – desert safaris⁵, shopping, visiting some pointless wonder of the modern world sustained by the expenditure of fantastical amounts of energy – none of which I had the slightest inclination or time to try. It all sounded like Dancers at the End of Time. They all also mentioned how safe it was. Everyone said – almost word for word⁶ – “you can leave your wallet and phone on a table, and it will be there when you come back”. I wasn’t madly keen to try this either and I made a mental note not to leave anything important in their care.

My first sight of Dubai was from the air⁷. It was dark, and from 6000 feet, I could see chemical haze pooled like a light phosphorescent mist in what little topography there was. Oddly shaped and light-trimmed skyscrapers were the scattered toys of a monstrous child, cast amidst an undisciplined concrete tangle of expressways, overpasses and complex junctions. I pressed my face against the little window until we were out over the blessed emptiness of the desert as the plane looped round for a final approach.

With all the formalities of arrival in a foreign country and the anxious wait for my luggage to appear on the conveyor, it was long after midnight before I finally stepped out of the air-conditioned airport into the Dubai night. When I left France, it was 2°C and sleety; in Dubai at 1am it was still in the high twenties and humid. The air poured over me like lukewarm dishwater. The sky was a charcoal grey⁸ with the lights of distant buildings embedded in it like LEDs in some titanic and utterly pointless appliance. Gigantic white billboards advertising new tower blocks that all promised to be iconic (and nothing else) obscured the otherwise unrelenting view of identical iconic tower blocks except when – completely absent any context – they showed a local gentleman in white robes five stories high staring wisely and benevolently into the middle distance.

It took the taxi maybe 40 minutes to get to the hotel. Clearly identifiable buildings would pass by on one side of us, and then twenty minutes later pass by in the opposite direction. At some point we performed a U-turn using the forecourt of another hotel. I gave up trying to keep track of where we were. Covering the final three hundred metres took ten minutes and all we had to do was cross seven or eight lanes of traffic⁹.

The hotel itself was around forty stories tall. The room was vast and chilly and I waited patiently while the guy from the lobby who had politely but insistently wrestled my bags from me showed me the bed, desk and bathroom and explained how light switches work. When he was gone, I found the thermostat and pressed various buttons but never succeeded in making it any warmer. Even seven or eight stories up, I could hear the roar of the passing traffic. That and the cheeping of something feathery nesting just out of sight of my window. The following morning, I took the elevator up to the empty gym on the top floor. Ignoring the signs specifying exhaustively what footwear was not allowed¹⁰, I went and stared out of the window. From this higher vantage point, staring out across a low-rise wasteland of roads and scrubland, the morning light and the dust made the clusters of buildings seem small and unexpectedly fragile. Here and there were gaps in the skyline, where cranes, scaffolding and wind-flapped tarps marked out building sites.

It was all quite dismal.

Purpose

All of which raises the question of why, if I was set on hating it so much, I was there in the first place? The main reason was to talk about the WMO State of the Global Climate 2023 report, first at a press conference for the launch, then at a couple of side events (one on the report itself, and another, led by Piers Forster on the IGCC). Finally, I spoke at Earth Information Day. The objective success (or otherwise) of all this effort is ultimately gauged by the presence and wording of a single sentence in one of the many documents generated each day at COP. Side quests included getting more clarity on things like climate indicators and monitoring temperature relative to long-term limits such as those in the Paris Agreement, supporting various things, giving interviews, and generally meeting people and networking¹¹.

Panels

In these capacities, I had to sit on three panels. I’ve always considered panels a rather strange thing but previously I had been considering them from the audience. Considered from the other side, they didn’t make a lot more sense and they were a lot more stressful. A handful of people sit at the front on comfortable chairs and pass a microphone back and fore answering questions hurled at them from the audience. This would make sense if the aim was to transmit information from the panel to the audience, but many of them are convened so that the panel can get information from the audience. This seems entirely backwards.

At COP25 in Madrid, I watched a lot of panels¹². I’d seen them before, at academic conferences. In academia they were relatively benign, with more-or-less predictable questions, and I had doubts as to their value. In Madrid, the questions were frequently unhinged – the kind of thing you’d¹³ yell at the president before disappearing under a dogpile of secret service agents – so the entertainment factor was much higher and I started to see a point even if it wasn’t the point.

Sadly, in Dubai, things seemed more sedate. I don’t know if the security screening was more thorough or simply that the organisation of the space discouraged passers-by from crashing events. In Madrid, everything was open with individual pavilions arranged inside a series of giant inter-connected aircraft hangars. As you wandered around, you could see what was happening in each one and (more or less) discreetly join at the back of the room. In Dubai, there were lots of individual buildings, each one containing a few dozen pavilions or something else entirely. You never knew prior to opening a door what exactly would be on the other side. It might be a large open space containing pavilions, it might reveal a mop and bucket at the bottom of a service staircase, or it might open onto a small office in which ten men in identical blue suits were arguing vociferously. It was hard to tell and there’s nothing like ten angry men going instantly silent and turning to face you to discourage a person from opening random doors.

Some people on panels have a very practiced and polished air. They exude an aura that gives the audience a sense of complete assuredness whatever the topic, like a TED talk for those with a short attention span. I instinctively distrust such people, not that my instincts are themselves especially trustworthy and they’re easily overruled if the person happens to speak sense. Others exude a kind of riveting earnestness or timeless wisdom. There are lots of ways it can go; whichever way that was, they all seemed to know their stuff. This was eating at me. I know stuff, but that stuff isn’t always available to me. Such knowledge that I have is apt to come out of me like a string of handkerchiefs from the pocket of a haunted, frantic clown. If you want a particular handkerchief, you are, I’m afraid, out of luck.

Sitting now in the comfy chair myself, I wasn’t exuding confidence. I was exuding whatever it is a rabbit exudes when staring down the headlights of an oncoming eighteen-wheeler. I’d scribbled everything I knew on the back of a folded sheet of A4 in case I forgot it, but I realised, glancing down that, I’d forgotten how to read. My legs were giving me trouble too. I’d had presentation skills courses that had covered everything from the waist up though they hadn’t put it in those terms – gestures, smiling¹⁴, eye contact, that sort of thing – but now, sitting down in front of all these people in an armchair, a seemingly everyday task, I became unusually aware of my legs.

I’d been sitting with my knees primly squeezed together, but something in the shape and softness of the chair made that tiring. I lifted one leg over the other, but that brought my boot within range of my neighbour’s foot, so I crossed my legs the other way with my left ankle resting on my right knee. This struck me as an unusually bold pose. Bolder than I could pull off anyway, so I slid the top leg further over till one knee was atop the other. Now, I realised that advancing years had left me unable to manage this without sinking so far back in my chair that my knee was practically level with my chin. I smoothly slid my left leg down and shuffled my butt backwards till my legs were straight out in front of me and crossed at the ankle. At this point I looked up, straight into the eyes of someone who was watching my armchair yoga session with horrified fascination.

Interviews

I had to talk to journalists. It was regrettably unavoidable. First up, there was a press conference for the State of the Climate report. In the past, I’ve watched these from the audience, or via a remote link on UN TV, which is where I’m happiest. This time, however, by some hazard of chance, I was on the podium.

Or at least, I was supposed to be.

A certain elasticity in the schedule meant that the official opening session of COP had slid backwards by five hours and now coincided with the press conference, in the same building. As I shuffled along with the huge crowd trying to push through the doors, a very large security guard raised his voice into the register used for delivering bad news to a lot of people.

“Plenary is full,” he said, “No one else is coming in.” And then, contradictorily: “Country delegates only.”

I was not a country delegate. I wormed my way to the front of the confused throng that was now trying to go both ways at the same time and stared up the guard’s nostrils. He stared down his nose at me.

“I have a press conference,” I said, and waved my phone under his nose. There was a map on the screen, but it was too small for him to see while I kept it moving. “Country delegates only,” he said over my head. “Press conference,” I said, and then I said it again while gesturing at the phone. Around the fifth or sixth time I said it, he stood to one side and muttered something like “oh for gods sakes, go on then.”

Inside, everything was very calm, but there was no sign of the press room. In the end – having circumnavigated the building and having passed through a security checkpoint from both directions – I found the press room.

I was about the only person who had. The press officer was there, and a small army of well-drilled technical staff. A few minutes before the scheduled start time, a few other people arrived, but there were still only one or two journalists. There should have been more, but they’d all been turned away by security. The floor manager gave us a brisk overview of how everything would work and fussed about our name plates and removing our security badges (it will look better on the livestream, he said). He then retreated to the back of the room, sent some junior techies scurrying, and counted us in. “Five,” he said, “four.” The cameras swivelled towards us, the lights dimmed in the room, and he mouthed “three, two, one” and with a flourish started the livestream. Or rather, he didn’t. Those watching at home were still listening to muzak and a screen that said “The livestream will start shortly” and would be for another twenty minutes. I didn’t have much to say, but the end of the livestream did catch me asking if I could keep the piece of folded cardboard with my name on it, so there’s that.

That same afternoon, I did an open-air interview which was farcically bad even by my standards. When I arrived¹⁵, the producer handed me a folder containing a lot of plastic pockets most of which were empty. She flicked through them till we reached a picture of the person who would be interviewing me, and while I politely read his bio, I wondered what I should do with this information and what had happened to all the others to leave so many empty pockets. I’d had the questions emailed to me the night before, so I ran through them in my head instead.

After a quiet conversation, the producer and camera man decided that it would be a good idea to film me in direct sunlight, facing straight into the late afternoon sun. From a purely photographic point of view, I could see the allure of all those photons, but I am physiologically optimised for a cooler, damper, altogether more sombre climate than that offered by Dubai. In addition, I was wearing a tweed jacket, a long-sleeved shirt and a tie, which was fine inside where everything was air-conditioned, but less practical outside.

They positioned me carefully and while the producer explained what was about to happen, the cameraman snapped open the catches on the kind of flight case that might contain a surface-to-air missile or a portable nuclear device. From it, he pulled a rugged and elaborate tripod which he proceeded to unfold. I couldn’t see into the box, and in my curiosity to see what kind of camera might justify such a sturdy mounting, I missed most of the instructions. “Of course, you’ve interviewed for us before,” said the producer. This was a surprise to me. “I have?” The producer tapped at her phone and showed me a picture of me being interviewed. “Ah, that one,” I said. I mentally replayed my half-heard recollections of what she had been saying and it all made sense – “make sure to look straight at the camera because your head will be very large on the screen and if you look around, you’ll look like a crazy person.” She’d clearly done her homework on me – there was the photographic evidence of me with my very large head on a screen looking either like a crazy person or a perfectly sane chameleon that had locked one eye onto a juicy fly. I still couldn’t see into the case, but then I realised that the camera was already in place on top of the tripod – it was a mobile phone of some kind. It looked very silly.

The cameraman was also the sound technician. He pushed something rubbery into my ear and tried to slip the phone it was connected to into my jacket pocket. The pocket was sewed up because I can’t be trusted not to fill my pockets with rocks and other shiny things that would ruin the line of the jacket. Instead, the phone had to go in my inside pocket. I was asked to count to ten, which went well, and then I was told that someone would soon speak to me on the earphone. I waited, but I couldn’t hear a thing. The technician retrieved the phone and put the volume up to full. I could just about hear someone. I poked the rubbery thing deeper into my ear and suddenly I could hear everything very clearly. The voice in my ear explained what was about to happen and that I would be on with the interviewer shortly.

I stared into the tiny lens on the camera. The sun really was very bright and by now ten minutes had elapsed. I could feel sweat dribbling down my forehead. I squinted and the salty sweat leaked into the corners of my eyes which started to sting. I could hear something – a distant voice – and absent mindedly wormed the earpiece further into the depths of my ear. I caught the tail-end of the question. I got the whole of the next question, but when I finished answering, there was a long silence. I stood there for a minute staring at where I assumed the camera was. All I could see now were rainbow-coloured afterimages of the sun and glare. In the end, I cracked. “I think they’ve gone,” I said. They had indeed gone.

It took a while to reconnect. Meanwhile, the flies had found me. Two things are essential in the desert: water and salt. In the subtropical sun and all the tweed, I had become a tempting source of both. I swatted at the flies ineffectually. I heard a voice in my ear say, “the earpiece is sticking out, it looks very strange. Can we fix that.” The technician pulled it out of my ear with a pop and re-seated it. I couldn’t hear a thing. “I can’t hear a thing,” I said. When that had no effect, I pointed at my ear and shook my head. “Nothing” I said. They ignored me. Then I heard the interviewer again. I tilted my head as you do when trying to hear a very quiet sound, then I remembered I was on camera and straightened up just as a fly flew up my nostril. I hit myself in the face. Despite this, I got most of that question, but I caught only one word of the next one and had to guess at an answer. Flies were hovering busily around my face and I tried not to look at them. Then we got cut off again.

I stood there in the sun for another five minutes before we decided it was best to just give in. Everyone apologised except the technician who had secretly hated me ever since he found out my pockets were sewed up. “Don’t worry” said the producer, “We have your answers. They will stitch it together. It will be like it all went perfectly.” She was right. After the first two seconds, they cut from a perfectly-lit image of me doing what appeared to be a Clint Eastwood impression so that my answers were delivered over a montage of drowning polar bears, unhappy people, and forest fires as a kind of visual metaphor for how the interview had gone.

The second interview was the morning show of an Irish radio outfit. It was conducted live over the phone. For various historical reasons, I have the kind of mobile phone contract you would arrange for an untrusted junior family member. I’d topped things up before leaving home, but I wasn’t sure what the overseas rate would be. When I enquired at the phone shop, they just shrugged. Even within Metropolitan France I have to ration it carefully. Here in Dubai, there was a very real possibility of being cut off midway through the first answer. I tried to explain this to the producer and suggested we use Whatsapp instead. “It’s sounds fine,” he said, “You’re on in a couple of minutes.” He said it in a practiced way that would have been reassuring if he’d actually understood what I’d said. Instead, I found myself listening to the preceding news item, a harrowing interview with a medic in Gaza which seemed to last forever. Ireland, I reflected, was not waking up to the happiest of news. When it got to my bit, my nerves were shot. The questions were easy yet thoughtful. Nevertheless, I answered them with the urgency of a man barking answers to his insurer’s automated telephone service to let them know his trousers had just caught on fire.

Plenary

My last day at COP was Earth Information Day and I was lined up to speak in the morning. We were in one of the plenary halls. A subset of the speakers gathered together and we were given a series of complicated instructions – how to mount and dismount the stage, where to sit, when to stand – that everyone promptly forgot. The session started about twenty minutes late, so my body had almost run out of adrenaline before it even began. I gazed over my shoulder at the sea of faces and an eerie calm descended upon me. I started counting. Twenty people in a row, each row doubled with ten rows is four hundred people. Multiply that by three because there are three blocks. Subtract a little for empty seats; add a little for people lurking at the back. Maybe five hundred. Maybe a thousand. More of the presenters were arriving. I shook hands and smiled¹⁵. The hum of the audience died down. People on the stage were talking. I watched their gigantic heads on the screens that flanked the stage, two on each side, each one the size of a tennis court. Then the talking stopped and the stage cleared. Someone ushered us up onto the stage. I sat down and surveyed my space – a bottle of water to spill everywhere, a glass to knock over, a button on the microphone to say stupid things, a device that could be used to advance my presentation by one more slide than intended – then looked up, which was a mistake. From up here I could see everyone quite clearly even if some of the people looked quite small because they were so very far away in the vast room. I smoothed my notes out, and checked my mobile phone was off. The chair was talking. I looked her way and nodded. These were good words, and I was mildly relieved to find I still understood them. Then it was my turn.

Afterwards, I staggered from the stage. I was playing the whole thing back in my head. The other presenters had been fantastic, spellbinding speakers. I managed to say “Three gey kreenhouse gases” not once, but twice. At the end, there had been a lot of questions and all but one of them had been directed at me. Considering this, I felt proud that I hadn’t needed to be removed from the stage on a gurney.

The view from the stage

The aftermath

That evening, I took a walk from the hotel out around the artificial lake. It was a soft, warm evening and the water was still, reflecting the lights of the tower blocks like a mirror. Somewhere up there, around the twentieth floor, someone had decked their balcony in rainbow lights that flashed and pulsed chaotically. Laughter and the sound of music drifted down. Along the waterfront, people walked slowly in ones and twos enjoying the night. Everyone was dressed modestly, but I saw a couple holding hands. While I waited for my fantastically cheap dinner to arrive, Dubai didn’t seem so bad. COP was over for me. I’d seen the worst that could happen* and, anyway, it hadn’t happened to me. I was vaguely aware that things of great pith and moment were happening or failing to happen. But¹⁶ they’d largely passed me by.

The flight back detoured over Kuwait and Iraq. Even from 30,000 feet I could see the long streamers of black smoke and the bright flames of burning oil or gas. And there I was – a climate scientist – on a long-haul flight back from a conference I barely understood. I had mixed feelings about the whole thing¹⁷.

-fin-

1. Time, as ever, is malleable. ↩︎
2. The snaking was intended to slow down the flows of people rather than to squash them into a smaller space. My abiding memory of this COP will be seeing the same slightly harried faces over and over again and worrying vaguely that it was the sight of me that was depressing these good people. ↩︎
3. I chatted to someone who works in health and they reluctantly told me all the bad things one finds in the air in Dubai and why. I like to know these things, but afterwards I’ve never been more thankful for my hairy nostrils. ↩︎
4. Though the news that they were using COP to make new oil and gas deals was enough to raise a weary eyebrow. ↩︎
5. What’s a desert safari? You go out into the desert in a buggy. What animals do you see? Why would there be animals? ↩︎
6. On the plane, the in-flight entertainment system played a constant propaganda loop for the UAE. Perhaps they heard it there. ↩︎
7. This might sound obvious, but when I arrived in Beijing by air, the dust was so thick that even at midday we couldn’t see the city until we landed. ↩︎
8. #454545 ↩︎
9. An evening bus trip to a restaurant took over an hour. After half an hour, we passed our setting off point again going the other way and it was so far past dinnertime that the surprised muttering sounded almost mutinous. ↩︎
10. No slippers, no high heels. ↩︎
11. I’m about as good at networking as any dedicated introvert. ↩︎
12. My favourite was about translating food – what dishes fill which cultural roles in each country – it was fascinating and because it was partly held in Italian, marvellously baffling too. ↩︎
13. OK, perhaps not you. ↩︎
14. Someone I know works in the US for a large corporation. They had portraits taken by a professional photographer and were asked to provide five levels of smile, from one – a mere tremor at the corners of the mouth – all the way up to five – the high-wattage, teeth-bared grin that the Americans mistake for happiness. After some experimentation with this system, I decided never to go above three. ↩︎
15. I was to meet the team in the flag-filled plaza at the hub of the site. It was a busy place and a popular one with the news teams**. The producer told me that I would be able to identify them by the fact that she was wearing a red dress. I was surprised by exactly how many people were wearing red dresses. ↩︎
16. I may have accidentally attempted a number four smile causing people to recoil slightly. ↩︎
17. Apart from an unexpectedly close encounter with Bill Gates. He looks just like he did on the Simpsons. ↩︎
18. Not least because I was heading to Charles de Gaulle airport, the first world’s worst airport. While waiting for my train there, an old man stopped in front of me gasping for breath and clutching at his chest. I approached him to see if he needed help and indicated that he might like to sit and have a sip of water. He sat next to me while he regained his breath and explained that he had been stabbed “over there”. He gestured back the way he had come. “Not today though” he added as I squinted down the concourse. We chatted for a while and I learned that not all airlines will let a blood stained elderly gentleman board a flight even if he wants to. We agreed that the world was not what it once was (though secretly I maintain that that’s exactly how CDG has always been. It’s probably built on cursed ground.). ↩︎

* The worst that could happen

It sounded like a moan of pain, the kind of sound you’d make if you accidentally drilled through your thumb. I got up and hustled over to the pavilion to see what was happening. On the screen, over the heads of the assembled audience, I could see the familiar subdivisions of a Zoom meeting. Someone was trying to give a presentation but, at the same time, someone was moaning. It definitely wasn’t pain, it was… Oh. Realisation spread through the audience slowly, then all at once as the source of the disturbing sounds took over the whole screen. People literally fled in horror. It stayed there for rather a long time before someone managed to pull the plug.

That evening, the people who were there had the task of explaining what had happened to those who weren’t. Which task they undertook with gleeful relish. It was a veritable symphony of euphemism, a masterclass in circumlocution.

Be careful with your zoom invites people.

** Navigating the site, one came across, walked around, bumped into, or accidentally starred in a large number of interviews. Whether these were a more traditional set up, with the interviewer holding a large microphone emblazoned with the channel’s logo, or someone doing a piece to their phone at the far end of a selfie stick, this must have been the most widely broadcast COP.