This year’s Conference of the Parties who are part of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is in Baku, the capital city of oil-producing Azerbaijan.
About 50,000 bureaucrats, campaigners and investors will be at COP29 for the 11-day official summit, which this year has a financial slant. One of its main aims is to set up a new annual climate finance deal, to replace the existing $US100 billion ($NZ168.6b) a year fund available to developing nations since 2020.
Rising global temperatures continue to supercharge storm systems and contribute to sea-level rise, which can have especially devastating effects on these countries and low-lying island states.
In the face of continuing climate-fuelled disasters, it is clear this amount is nowhere near enough to fund adaptation and mitigation in the developing world.
A range of figures has been thrown about for a new climate finance fund, but a consensus seems to be building that it needs to be closer to $US1 trillion a year.
A good chunk of the discussion is likely to focus on the definition of "high income" countries which would pay and whether the current list should be lengthened.
Last week, as Donald Trump was celebrating his presidential victory in the United States, two Guardian articles provided an interesting perspective on climate change.
The first, an analysis piece, was headlined "COP29 could change the financial climate for the world’s wealthy polluters".
The second, a business story, said "Trump’s victory adds record $64b to wealth of richest top 10".
Those gains from stock market surges were according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Most notably, Elon Musk, the tech giant aligned to Trump and the world’s richest person, added $US26.5b in just one day to make his fortune up to an obscene $US290b.
Worth bearing in mind is the combined wealth of the top five billionaires on the list would easily cover that first annual payment of $US1t to support developing nations.
As far as climate-change progress goes, it is a disaster that Trump is heading back to the White House.
In his victory speech, he boasted of the vast "liquid gold" reserves of the US; at his campaign rallies, he fired up the crowds by belting out "drill, baby, drill".
Most of the world knows that fossil fuels, and oil and gas companies, are inexorably killing, if not the planet then aspects of life on it. Perhaps the only positive thing to say about Trump 2.0 in charge is that his scorn and disbelief might galvanise the efforts of others or encourage those wavering on climate change to accept the science.
On top of all the other extreme weather events which have killed people across the world this year, the deadly flooding in Valencia should remind us these events are exacerbated by extra energy in the atmosphere. The Guardian Weekly magazine appropriately labelled it an "unnatural disaster".
But it is not totally doom and gloom, which seems hard to believe. A study by Nasa scientists which featured in a recent New Scientist concluded the amount of heat the Earth is gaining has slowed this year compared with a spike early in 2023.
The researchers put this down to the triple-dip La Nina’s cold ocean waters in the Pacific soaking up more heat than they emitted, causing the spike, followed by an El Nino, whose warmer waters gave out more heat and reduced the energy imbalance.
Unfortunately, this is probably just a pleasing blip in the trends upwards of temperature, carbon dioxide concentrations and sea-levels, one which may not even be noticed in the grand scheme of things.
Average global temperatures are already about 1.3°C above pre-industrial times and some think this year may be the first to surpass the 1.5°C-above figure.
It is going to be increasingly difficult to keep it at that level, as agreed to at COP21 in Paris in 2015.
Let us hope the rest of the world forges on with its best efforts to reduce emissions, and to appropriately fund those who cannot afford to protect themselves, despite what Trump might decide.
