Upcoming climate conference COP22 previewed by State Department today

Special Envoy for Climate Change at the U.S Department of State Dr. Jonathan Pershing and Director for Energy and Climate Change for the National Security Council John Morton previewed the upcoming COP 22 Climate Conference for reporters this morning. The call began at 10:30 a.m. ET and included an opportunity for questions from reporters from Bloomberg, The New York Times, NPR, and Wall Street Journal, among others. Of the questions, a notable theme emerged: would the progress made following the Paris Agreement be for naught should Donald J. Trump become President? The conference kicks off in Marrakech, Morocco Nov. 7 and lasts through the 18th. Representatives and heads of state from all over the world will attend. Simultaneously, the 12th session of the Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol (CMP 12) will be held there. Morton introduced the call to cheer work being done on the part of the Obama Administration. "We’re coming into this year’s COP with a tremendous amount of positive momentum. Reaching the Paris Agreement in December of last year was clearly a watershed moment for the international community and one that was appropriately reported in that way," adding that by all measures, 2016 has been a "truly historic year for international climate action." Morton said in the last two months alone there has been a "rapid entry into force of the Paris Agreement" which has occurred, he claimed, "much, much faster, years faster, than most people expected. And with that entry into force, that puts us on a much accelerated path toward implementation of the goals that we laid out in Paris a year ago." On October 5 of this year, as noted on the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change website, "the threshold for entry into force of the Paris Agreement was achieved." The Paris Agreement will enter into force tomorrow, November 4. Thus, this will be the very first session of the Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties to the Paris Agreement. However, as the reporters' line of questioning today reveals, Americans and in turn the world, have much to fear should Hillary Clinton not win the Oval Office. Donald J. Trump does not believe climate change is real. Or if he does, he's hiding it behind the kind of inane and vitriolic nonsense that would be shameful in a fifth grade science class. Climate change is not a "hoax", as Trump alleges, and this conference is key. Pershing and Morton today expressed the importance of adaptive technologies and procedures, for example, which can help communities deal with the effects of flood, drought, and sea level rise on the heels of the warmest year on record. Morton said, "In many cases the focus is on adapting, but at the same time local and state governments have a lot to do and are doing a lot already on the mitigation side – [be they] policies, plans, codes, or zoning requirements," for example. These are often heavily as focused on mitigation as they are on adaptation "and we will have some adaptation-related announcements about this during COP." Pershing said three takeaways of the conference should be: 1. "To make the world aware we [meaning Americans and the global community, one assumes] are continuing to prioritize this issue"; 2 "To work to develop rules and guidelnes to put more flesh on the framework developed in Paris"; and 3 To work on implementing and putting into action what was drawn out in Paris, manfiesting from "both the US and a variety of people around the world" as there is an accelerated move toward emissions reductions.

READ the transcript of today's call here. PHOTO: Wikimedia Commons: By Wolf Gang - On global warming, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=48067856.