Climate Expert: 30 Years of Climate Talks Haven’t Stopped Emissions Rise

As world leaders prepare to meet in Brazil for COP30—the first UN climate summit hosted in the Amazon rainforest—a sobering reality check reveals just how far off track global climate action remains.

Despite three decades of international climate negotiations since 1990, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels continue climbing at an alarming rate. Perhaps most shocking: roughly half of all CO2 emissions accumulated since the Industrial Revolution have been pumped into the atmosphere in just the past 34 years. This timeline coincides almost perfectly with when the world’s top climate scientists first sounded the alarm—the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its inaugural report in 1990, officially confirming that human activities were driving dangerous global warming.

Dr. Joëlle Gergis, an award-winning climate scientist from the University of Melbourne who contributed to the UN’s latest major climate assessment, argues that “net zero” targets have become a dangerous distraction from the urgent need to completely phase out fossil fuels. In her analysis, she suggests that political compromise and incremental half-measures continue to dominate climate policy, even as climate disasters intensify worldwide.

As scientists prepare the IPCC’s upcoming Seventh Assessment Report, Gergis warns that rigorous climate science is still being overshadowed by political considerations. Her message is clear: current global efforts remain “disastrously off track” to prevent the worst impacts of climate change, and bolder action beyond symbolic net-zero pledges is desperately needed to address what she calls the “scientific imperative” to eliminate fossil fuel dependency entirely.