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Hello from Dubai, Where the Fleece Quotient Is High

You know you’re at a climate event when ...

11/29/2023

Heatmap Illustration/Patagonia

One tool I have developed in my years of climate reporting might be described as the fleece quotient. This is the idea that you can generally predict if something is a climate event — a category I consider in its broadest terms, including but not limited to a scientific conference, a protest, or an international meeting — if more people attending it are wearing fleece than not. (It is distinct but related to the Patagonia ratio.)

This methodology is not perfect: In some cities, one can accidentally trip the fleece quotient on an ordinary Back to School night or even during a Sunday afternoon shop at Costco. And a true accounting of the fleece quotient (F.Q.) requires being attuned to microdemographic vagaries: If a fleece item is adorned with a third-party corporate logo, for instance, it is disqualified; but if it has an academic institution’s logo, then it counts twice. (If it’s embroidered with a major foundation’s logo? That’s five points, easy.)

But I have found it to be generally robust. In San Francisco (a fleece-friendly place to begin with), it is possible to tell when 25,000 Earth scientists arrive for their large annual conference because the city’s fleece quotient slightly but perceptibly rises.

This is all to say: Last night, I boarded a long-haul flight from Newark that had a fleece quotient to rival that of the Seattle REI. It was, of course, filled with people headed to the United Nations’ annual climate conference in Dubai — that is, the 28^th annual meeting of the Conference of the Parties of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, or COP28.

For the next week or so, I’ll be attending the conference and writing notes about what I see. (COP itself runs to December 12.) I’ll also be trying to decode and filter the daily flood of climate news that tends to characterize this week. COP is the one moment every year when the world focuses on climate change — and as I think we’ll see this week, that can be both for good and for ill.

I’m excited to write these notes over the coming days. If you’d like to receive them in your inbox, you can subscribe to Heatmap Daily, our daily climate newsletter, below:

Yellow

Robinson Meyer

Robinson is the founding executive editor of Heatmap. He was previously a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covered climate change, energy, and technology.

Sparks

Ditching the Paris Agreement Will Throw the U.S. Into COP Purgatory

This would be the second time the U.S. has exited the climate treaty — and it’ll happen faster than the first time.

Katie Brigham •

11/22/2024

Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

As the annual United Nations climate change conference reaches the end of its scheduled programming, this could represent the last time for at least the next four years that the U.S. will bring a strong delegation with substantial negotiating power to the meetings. That’s because Donald Trump has once again promised to pull the United States out of the Paris Agreement, the international treaty adopted at the same climate conference in 2015, which unites nearly every nation on earth in an effort to limit global warming to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius.

Existentially, we know what this means: The loss of climate leadership and legitimacy in the eyes of other nations, as well as delayed progress on emissions reductions. But tangibly, there’s no precedent for exactly what this looks like when it comes to U.S. participation in future UN climate conferences, a.k.a. COPs, the official venue for negotiation and decision-making related to the agreement. That’s because when Trump withdrew the U.S. from Paris the first time, the agreement’s three year post-implementation waiting period and one-year withdrawal process meant that by the time we were officially out, it was November 2020 and Biden was days away from being declared the winner of that year’s presidential election. That year’s conference was delayed by a year due to the Covid pandemic, by which point Biden had fully recommitted the U.S. to the treaty.

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