Day 5 (and 6, and 7)

I've been trying to post regularly, with about a day of delay.  But I was slammed with a headache on Saturday--the day I meant to post about Friday, my last visit to the Blue Zone. 

I'm worried that I ruined our trip to Versailles. It's a beautiful palace, but my extra-strength cynicism decided to rear its head. I couldn't stop thinking about how much money must have been wasted on all that gold leaf and silk. Mr. Westgard told me that the construction of Versailles used about half of France's yearly GDP, and that didn't help my headache. While Morgan, Filsan and Mr. Westgard explored Marie Antoinette's summer home, I wallowed in a small cafe.

I recovered (mostly) on Sunday. I would have written the post then, but I had a good excuse to skip it: the Louvre was free that day. I want to live there. It's built on a huge scale--I imagine that grandeur must be inherent to the French. The sprawling halls are as beautiful and large as the art itself. One room in particular, called the Galerie D'Apollon, made me tear up.

I took a million pictures, but I can't access them right now. This is from Djof on Flicker.

Now that my excuses are out of the way, I can rewind and talk about Friday.

Filsan (excellent at being in the right place at the right time, as always) discovered that Al Gore would be hosting a public forum-style conversation with observers and NGOs. Morgan, Filsan and I waited in a different side event and shuffled out half an hour early. It wasn't fair to the event, which was an interesting discussion on the economics of fossil fuel subsidies, but when else would I ever get the chance to see Al Gore? We powerwalked to Observer Room 3 and filed inside. The seats were packed. American English was more prevalent in that room than any other.

An apologetic staff member took the stage. She explained, among confused muttering, that everyone needed to file out in order to pass a security check before coming back. When Al Gore said NGOs and observers, he meant NGOs and observers; Party members were getting kicked out. The crowd flowed to the doors with the speed of cold molasses.

I'm used to lots of people in small spaces. I've been to a few concerts with overzealous fans, and I attended a gaming convention last year that drew around 45,000 people. I almost started laughing, because I got déjà vu, crammed in the space outside the room with Al Gore's fanbase. The impression got stronger when a new message rippled through the crowd. The venue had changed--Al Gore was now answering questions in Room 10--and a few people literally started sprinting. I broke away from the group and half-jogged down a side hall. My instincts proved helpful. I arrived at the door from a different angle and I was able to squeeze in quickly. I took a good spot for myself and one for Filsan, only about three rows back. (Sorry, Morgan.)

Finally, Al Gore took the stage. People started to cheer, a little booming in that echo chamber of a room, and I was hit again with the feeling that I was at a concert.

He said a short, positive preamble. It strayed to a few different topics--the role of civil society, accomplishments in the energy sector. I don't think he prepared anything, but he was a talented speaker, and he had the audience enthralled. He made me appreciate the role of politicians a fraction more. Some of them are great at raising morale, in spite of bleak prospects.

Al Gore ended up answering eleven questions, a few more substantially than others. I'll try to explain the most interesting conversations. Unfortunately, I didn't end up getting the names of anyone asking questions. Either the names were too foreign or too softly spoken for me to record.

An Inuit woman from northern Canada took the fourth question. "I am responsible for an area the size of Germany," she said. "We can see our clouds darkening. We can see and taste climate change." She was referring to black ice, pollution from oil rigs soaking into the land and snow. The color change impairs the snow's ability to reflect light, and melting accelerates, an added disaster on top of the yearly reduction in the extent of Arctic sea ice. The woman didn't have a clear question, so Al Gore didn't have a clear answer. Regardless, it was an educational discussion. He expanded on her points, explaining that nitrogen in fossil fuel emissions was feeding brown algae, further darkening Arctic water. "We should make the Arctic off limits," he said, eliciting cheers.

A woman from Bangladesh had the seventh question. "We talk about carbon emissions, but we never think about the fact that reproductive health rights are affected by climate change." I might have been projecting, but I thought I heard frustration in her insistent voice. Her question, summed up: did Al Gore think that gender issues should be part of climate negotiations?

I was particularly interested in this answer. The training modules released by the UNFCCC barely touch on women's issues, and I hadn't really considered climate change from the perspective of gender. Al Gore agreed that women's rights should play a part in the talks. 

"There are three factors to climate change," he said. "Extremely rapid growth of population, our reliance on dirty and inefficient technology, and our way of thinking." Women's rights affect the first factor. When women have better access to birth control and more education, their average number of children shrinks. Development goals for LDCs are inextricably tangled in feminism, but the issue seems ignored in relevant policy discussions. I've seen women's activist groups host exhibits and side events, but it's like they're screaming into the void, trying to get recognition of gender issues into the operational text of the new protocol. (Please correct me if I'm getting the wrong idea. I'd love to be mistaken about this.)

I'm adding both of those issues to the pile marked "Things I Need to Research." Hopefully, the smaller scale Climate Generations space (the "Green Zone") will be easier to explore, and I'll have some extra time to write up what I find. I made a to-do list yesterday--a dangerously long to-do list. Wish me luck.

Day 4

I started the day in the meeting rooms, getting turned around between identical fiberboard walls. Room 8, hosting an SBSTA meeting, was hidden in a corner. I managed to duck inside before the doors closed.

There were no seats without microphones--I felt like I was meant to be somewhere else. People with purple Party badges filtered inside, grabbing place cards. A British man with a tight collar announced the beginning of the session. Two women shuffled past the desks with stacks of papers. They appeared to be amendments on the SBSTA's priorities, especially regarding the GCOS system.

One item on the agenda caught my eye: the Parties had proposed better monitoring of extreme weather. I agree. The IPCC still doesn't have a great amount of certainty about the anthropogenic effect on storms, and we need to implement better weather adaptation practices in LDCs. Dr. Emily Pidgeon from the wetlands presentation had mentioned a typhoon that cleared 80% of the mangroves on the Visayan Islands. That's not just the loss of a valuable ecosystem--it's the destruction of thousands of livelihoods.

The man, whose place card said "co-chair" and nothing else, let us read for five minutes. I opened a new document on my laptop and took some quick notes.

"Five minutes have passed," he said softly, matching the muted atmosphere in all the meeting rooms. "Are there any points of contention?"

Nobody moved or spoke.

"I will take that to mean we're in agreement," said the co-chair. "Thank you for your time."

This was when I realized that I was in meeting 2 of 2.

I missed everything interesting in the first meeting, during which these amendments were apparently made. The second meeting was a check-in to make sure that the Parties were happy with the decisions. It was my one attempt at a policy-focused event, and I blew it.

Everyone stood, and the crowd flowed out of the room. I sat in my chair next to the fancy microphone and felt very, very stupid.

Thankfully, I recovered some dignity later, when I attended the "Oceans Under Pressure" event at the US Center. I think that marine science is fascinating and I was excited to see NOAA and NASA experts working together.

I got to the pavilion a little early.

The presenters: Jean-Pierre Gattuso, a member of the French National Center for Scientific Research and several other prestigious institutions; Alexander "Sandy" MacDonald, a chief scientist in the NOAA's office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research; and Michelle Gierach, a member of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the California Institute of Technology.

I felt much more competent listening to these presentations, since I'm familiar with the science. Gattuso did a brief overview on the importance of the ocean to climate. It's a huge heat and carbon sink, and it's been regulating our climate successfully for thousands of years, up until too much atmospheric carbon dioxide began turning it to acid. Gattuso also estimated the economic value of the ocean. Current use puts its economy at a value of 2.5 trillion USD, and the value of the ocean as a whole could be measured at 24 trillion USD. (Anyone have an extra 24 trillion lying around?)

Gattuso identified four main response options to the impacts of climate change. In a general sense, we can mitigate, adapt, protect, or repair ocean resources. "We are not very good at repairing ecosystems, especially marine ecosystems," he said, flipping through graphs on the health of phytoplankton and crustaceans. Some members of those organism groups need to extract calcium carbonate from the ocean in order to develop structures. That's hard to do when all they're finding is carbonic acid. The health of the ocean isn't excellent, but even optimistic climate models (such as RCP2.6) predict further damage to marine ecosystems. It's basically inevitable that the oceans are going to take a hit.

The next presentation was only slightly less damning. Sandy MacDonald stepped up to discuss the methodology behind his data collection. He has teams that take regional water samples, testing pH and aragonite saturation. Aragonite is an ion of calcium carbonate--higher levels are better. The data's showing some pretty significant decreases. MacDonald and his team continue to collect data via boats and buoys on a local scale, providing a valuable source of information. They do the detail work that NASA can't.

However, if you need information that's relevant on a global level, Michelle Gierach's satellite images are the place to look. She's very excited about the current satellite fleet. A series of altimeters have been collecting sea height data since '93, and some satellites can measuring changes in ice sheet mass by noting minute differences in gravitational pull. The most exciting future project is the PACE satellite, due to launch around 2022, which uses imaging spectroscopy. Forgive me for butchering the science; I think that, rather than sensing one to three spectral bands, it monitors a wider continuum. This means that PACE might be able to tell subspecies of phytoplankton apart--from space.

I managed to catch Michelle Gierach after the presentation. I wanted to talk so that I could try to understand imaging spectroscopy a little better. It was nice to meet a scientist who was as confused with all the policy decisions as I am--after a short discussion, she gave me some key search terms and her card.

I'm accumulating surface level details on too many interesting technologies. I'm tempted to drop another week of school just to study the new information.

Day 3

I woke up deliberately early, trying to match the eagerness of the man running the Korean booth on Day 1. His excited advertisement of Korea's newest recycling tech motivated me to wake up at 6 AM. The presentation was due to start at 10, but transit takes about an hour, and I take even longer to get out of bed.

Morgan and I were welcomed into the pavilion by a young woman wearing hanbok. (The word was mentioned on the pavilion's display--it's a general term for traditional Korean clothing.) She wore a beautiful floor-length silk skirt and a wraparound top with a high collar. I wanted to take a picture, but that felt impolite, so here's one of the small-scale models at the pavilion instead.

This model is a cheery example of South Korea's new cement production technology.

South Koreans tend to make up for their lack of perfect English with enthusiasm. I had to focus a little extra in order to understand them, which I was happy to do--there's no reason that they should be forced to have a particularly great grasp of English. The scientific process functions well in other languages, too. We settled into our seats, and our host played a video introducing the Korean Institute of Geoscience and Mineral Resources (or, KIGAM). He insisted that it was a series of "three short video clips." Altogether, the videos ate up a half an hour.

They were pretty hilarious. Words are much more easily translated than culture--the tone was too saccharine, proud, and dramatic for my cynical American eyes. The videos featured a lot of post-production lens flare, booming orchestral music, and odd slogans. My favorites were "Dream technology in limestone. Dream technology in KIGAM" and the Big Brother-esque "KIGAM will always stand right by your side." Also, halfway through the videos, the production company ran out of money for a fancy American narrator and just plugged their script into a souped-up Microsoft Sam.

Despite the cultural differences, I learned a lot about KIGAM. The institute has been around since 1918 and they've put a lot of research into uses for low-quality limestone. They partner with private companies like Hanil Cement and Hansol Paper, encouraging cooperation: for example, a byproduct of Hansol Paper's new recycling system can be used as a filler in construction, helping Hanil Cement. There was less about carbon sequestration than I had hoped, but there's a lot more detail on KIGAM's website.

I was excited to see a presentation with science that goes over my head. Plenty of the policymaking already does--I've said before, I'm not a policy person--but I've been able to understand the majority of the science I've seen in the conference. I don't mean to say that I'm a better scientist than the entire UNFCCC. Rather, most of the events I'd been only cover the fundamentals of climate science. The Koreans blew me out of the water.

A student of Kyungpook National University named Hyunwoong Park presented his research on solar powered water purification. Forgive me while I try to make sense of my frantic notes--I think that he developed a method to disinfect wastewater using sunlight and hydroxide as an oxidizer. Hydroxide is apparently very good at breaking up pharmaceutical pollutants, though it was tested on urine and algae, too. He mentioned that their electrode also had the capacity to generate ozone during the purification process. I think. (I'm not sure I'm getting this right. I was typing very quickly. I'll correct myself later, when I have more time for research.) Anyway, if that's true, he has a very powerful solar purifier on his hands. "Very easy to make," he insisted, flipping through prototype images of plumbing systems outfitted with his purifiers.

Rather than trusting my summary of this research, I'd advise a visit to the website for Kyungpook National University's Photoenergy Conversion Lab.

The host of the presentation sent Park away. "Thank you for showing us good toilet," he said, and he called up Ji-Whan Ahn, an engineer with her own lab under KIGAM.

Unfortunately, her English was very poor, even compared to the previous presenters. I say unfortunate only because her current project is fascinating, and I would have liked to understand it better. She's taking the calcium carbonate from shells and using it to kill algae. Algal bloom is a huge problem in Korean rivers--a study of the Han River showed a particularly frightening increase in algae, with 56 specimens per milliliter in 2012 growing to 13,357 specimens per milliliter this year. This contaminates the water and causes massive fish kills, since the algae use all the water's dissolved oxygen. The fish literally drown.

Ahn noticed that wasted shells from oysters and other edible shellfish were valuable sources of calcium carbonate--even oyster waste, easily collected from Korean oyster farms, contains 7% calcite. Here's where I become foggy on the details. Maybe I can do some Googling, or maybe I'm just not very good at chemistry, but I didn't understand the process of using shells to purify water. Either way, it was a great use of otherwise useless material.

That was a main theme during the presentation: reusing waste. Fly ash from coal plants can be used to fill in abandoned mines and potholes. Hydrogen can be harvested in the process of purifying human urine. Other mineral byproducts from coal plants are used to lower the temperature of cement production by around 100 degrees Celsius. Even though a few of the projects were only marginally related to climate change, they all theoretically save energy, and they're all very interesting.

I'm going to apologize again for my very limited understanding of this presentation. Unfortunately, that's all I did on Day 3, since I was a minute too late for the other meeting I wanted to observe, and I got locked out.

Here's a picture of a wind-powered generator shaped like a tree.

There are two of these outside the conference.

Day 2: The Sequel (More on the CCS side event)

Warning: If you're not interested in the politics of pumping carbon dioxide underground, this entry will be very boring.

Politicians and scientists are both notorious for being bad at naming things. When you mesh them together in a conference like this, you get monstrous titles. Yesterday, I attended a side event called Carbon Capture and Storage Achievements and Opportunities for Developing Country Involvement. Say that ten times fast.

CCS (carbon capture and storage) covers a broad range of technologies designed to capture carbon emissions from the energy sector. They've only recently started moving to industrial applications--my extremely basic understanding is that the industrial sector is a whole different can of worms, and that it's more difficult to filter pure carbon from those worms.

The most common form of CCS takes carbon from oil refineries and injects it into existing formations, like useless reservoirs or seams of unmineable rock. Again, I have a pretty limited understanding of the hardware involved; I know that there are systems in place to capture carbon emitted during or after the combustion process. That carbon is pumped into temporary storage tanks, driven to drills or piped offshore, and injected underground.

Mike Marks, the CEO of SaskPower (the primary electricity provider for Saskatchewan) presented his CCS success story. SaskPower's favorite child is the Boundary Dam coal plant--it produces a net value of 120 megawatts, after accounting for the parasitic electricity needed to pipe away its emissions. It was the first CCS system to be attached to an existing coal plant, and it's a big win (if you want to keep making a profit using coal power).

I found it interesting that Marks was quick to justify his application of CCS. He didn't let the project stand on its inherent benefits--he explained his motivations. The Canadian government had applied new restrictions on carbon emissions and essentially give SaskPower an ultimatum: make coal power clean, or drop coal entirely. He implied that, had the government not intervened, business would have continued as usual. I'm thankful that the Canadian government was willing to impose such severe limitations on a private company. Looking at you, United States.

Other panelists included Tim Dixon, who's involved with R&D for the IEA's greenhouse gas division; Philip Ringrose, an employee of Statoil in Norway; and Katherine Romanak, specializing in economic geology with the University of Texas. Ringrose and Dixon each spent half their presentations emphasizing the safety of current sequestration sites. Their PowerPoints were consumed with cross-section pictures of rock and seismic imaging. Ringrose in particular emphasized that Statoil has been pumping carbon dioxide under the North Sea for 19 years, and "nothing bad" ever happened. He forgot to mention a pretty big leakage scare in the Sleipner gas field around 2009.

But, as far as I know, he's right. Gas fields occur naturally underground (you may have heard of this; it's called "natural gas") and the IEAGHG has published whole papers refuting the possibility of leakage. It's a rough life for a CCS expert. Despite the research, people remain suspicious, and with good reason. A release of highly pressurized supercritical carbon dioxide would be a catastrophe. The study of CCS is an endless argument about the likelihood versus the impact of a given risk.

Ringrose was also careful to correct people who called CCS "permanent" storage. He insisted that it be called "long term" and then spent two minutes backpedaling--of course, for legal reasons, nothing could be an iron-clad guarantee. He'd ramble about naturally formed gas fields that have existed for millennia and describe all their space-age monitoring equipment.

The most glaring problem I have with geological CCS is that it really shouldn't be a permanent long term solution. It's a great placeholder while we transition to renewable energy, but we can't keep pasting new tech on our limited resources. Fossil fuels are like a house with a rotten foundation: you can reinforce that foundation all you want, but it's fundamentally unstable. It might be safer to move to a different house.

Day 2

I think I've figured out the issue with the Party leaders. I was attending a side event hosted by the Adaptation Committee, and one of the guest speakers mentioned that he was impressed with the Committee's coordination with national agencies. He said that national agencies tend to be "more nimble" than UN groups, i.e. not bogged down by layers of politics.

Speaking of politics, look at this fancy food. It was set out after the event.

The higher in the chain of command you are, the more broad your actions have to become. It's like energy transfer in organisms. There's an energy drop from primary producers to primary consumers to secondary consumers--a loss in calories by a factor of 10 at each level. The Party leaders, having responsibility over much larger groups, lose effectiveness in the specific. So, maybe I was being too harsh yesterday. A Party leader can affect the mood and general direction of their Party, but they can't be present in all of the groundwork. (Their presence in some of the groundwork would be nice.)

It's easy for me to try and pin the blame on a distant group. In truth, nobody wants to change their lifestyle. I've been indoctrinated by climate change science since I was in elementary school, and I don't even want to take shorter showers.

I visited the Gulf Cooperation Council pavilion, a large space done in red and white with gold trim. The GCC consists of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates--all of these countries are part of OPEC except for Bahrain and Oman, by the way. They had touchscreen tables (much larger than India's) displaying the latest eco-friendly tech; I watched a couple of informative videos on the work done by Saudi Aramco, a private Saudi Arabian oil company.

I was particularly interested in a prototype on-board carbon capture system for cars, mostly because it seemed pretty inefficient and expensive despite being based on some cool science. The video claimed that this device could be retrofitted onto any oil-based car. It did fail to mention some details--mainly, test results for the prototype and what a "small drop" in performance means. I grabbed my camera and started snapping pictures of the simplistic blueprints on the screen.

One of the attendants didn't like that very much.

I didn't get his name or country of origin for a couple of reasons: he was much shorter than me, so his badge wasn't in my line of sight, and I was too intimidated to remember to check.

"English?" He stared me up and down. Good guess.

"Yes," I said, and I tried to make a joke about knowing a little Spanish, too.

"You need 'Spañol? We have 'Spañol." He started motioning towards a different attendant, so I backpedaled.

I held up my hands. "English is fine, it's fine."

He nodded and launched into an aggressive explanation of the touchscreen's basic functions, such as how to start and pause a video. I tried to redirect him to the car prototype. Unfortunately, most of the pavilions' attendants aren't experts in any of the information in their displays. They're there to point and smile. When I asked for details, he started waving and called for a man across the room. "She needs more information on your cars!"

I'm regretting now that I didn't have a chance to go back and get this other man's name or home country. He must have worked for Saudi Aramco, or at least consulted with them, since he knew what I was talking about when I was asking if the capture system stores carbon as gas or supercritical fluid. (Both; once carbon accumulates to a certain level in the tank, the pressure is great enough for the carbon to stay in a supercritical state.) He said that the storage system wasn't on the market yet, but they were going to display a car in their gallery tomorrow.

I felt like a deer in headlights throughout the whole conversation. Clearly, this man was much more important and knowledgeable than me. I'm a high school student, and the attendant had shouted for his attention as if I was some important ambassador. I thanked him for his time and left pretty quickly for a different side event about offshore geological carbon sequestration. (Unfortunately, that's the short description.) An important note: don't ask those people if their technology is safe. They're tired of it. I didn't make that mistake, but a couple of doubtful questions during the panel had a Norwegian engineer about ready to rip his mustache off.

That event was fascinating, especially because the crowd was full of skeptics, and the panelists were kept on their toes. I might make an additional post about it later--for now, I have to run to that Korean presentation I mentioned on Day 1.

Day 1

There's a strong juxtaposition between public transportation and the conference grounds. Collin, Filsan, Morgan and I were crammed on the metro like so many sardines. I tried to keep a hand on my bag as I watched the concrete tunnels flit by, plastered with graffiti. We arrived in a different world: a sprawling, modern series of buildings painted green, white, and beige. The only words on those walls were directions to meeting rooms.

It took two trains and a shuttle to arrive at the conference. The entrance was decorated by a field of pillars, each painted with the flag of a participating Party. It was a good space for a media stunt.

I was shuffled along by the crowd, so I didn't get a chance to see what this was about.

We passed the initial security check easily, but we were refused entry for the opening meeting. Funnily enough, it was easier to watch the meeting on livestream from a cafeteria nearby. The French chefs started carving a ham, even though it was 10 AM, and we took notes while surrounded by the smell.

The meeting had some mood swings. Manuel Pulgar Vidal, the President Elect of COP 20 in Lima, opened by praising the Parties' current INDCs. The current President Elect, Laurent Fabius, appeared less confident--that, or his English translator was, emphasizing the dangers of climate change in a watery voice. He called the stakes too high to "make do with a minimalist agreement." This was a sentiment repeated by hundreds of voices, in hundreds of accents, during the Opening of the Leaders events later in the day.

In short, all the official events were filled by promises and posturing. I should have expected this from an international conference--no one wants to step on any important toes--but it was frustrating to watch leader after leader become a broken record on that stage. Everyone can feel the impending disaster, but nobody wants to pay for prevention or cleanup.

I found that countries' representative pavilions were a little more grounded. I had the opportunity to stop by Korea's pavilion and speak with a scientist about carbon sequestration in paper and a greener method of cement production. He motioned to a humble glass display with small-scale models, a little like a science fair. I received two business cards and a flyer for his presentation on December 2nd. That's definitely going on my schedule.

The opposite end of the flashiness spectrum was not underrepresented, though. India's pavilion boasted touchscreen tables, tablet stations, and an impressive fountain with lights going through the water. I'll add a picture when I have the opportunity--by the time I saw the fountain, I was due at the US Center for a presentation on wetland carbon sequestration.

Few people arrived for this presentation, and they missed out. Dr. Judith Drexler from the US Geological Survey passed around samples of sediment and peat. They're unassuming clumps of dirt and clay that can store up to 100 grams of carbon per square meter in a year. It's estimated that there are around 550 gigatons of carbon stored in peatlands right now, and we're losing part of that every year to degradation and permafrost melt. My cousin, Cameron Blake, has been studying the effect of higher temperatures on the microbes within peat for similar reasons--if the microbes release the carbon stored in peat, we're in trouble.

One of the objectives of the panelists was to spread awareness. Many countries don't have the framework to report wetlands in their INDCs, and the IPCC has only just released preliminary reporting guidelines. If they can't understand the value of wetlands to our atmosphere, then at least they can understand the monetary value: reducing wetlands degradation can earn a country credits within the UNFCCC's carbon market. Dr. Emily Pidgeon has been teaching indigenous communities in West Papua how to use that trade infrastructure. Indonesia is home to mangrove forests, which are highly valuable carbon sinks, and Dr. Pidgeon helps local communities both preserve those forests and profit from their preservation.

I got the impression that the Party representatives could learn a lot by sticking their hands in some mud.

Day 0

Paris draws historic events like flies to a corpse. (That's a morbid metaphor, but there's been plenty of death here.) The city has the benefit of being very, very old--so old that it was never established so much as settled around 250 BC--and in those long years, it has seen revolution after revolution. Knowing that, it's an appropriate site for COP 21. I can only hope that the 195 attending Parties will inhale the Parisian air and feel compelled to take drastic action.

We took advantage of the free public transit today and did some sightseeing. The Eiffel Tower barely had a line, and it wasn't because of the wind or the gray skies. The city inhaled and hasn't let out its breath since the attacks. It felt wrong to walk between the Tower's hulking pillars without shuffling past the masses. I could have done cartwheels.

In short: it was a quick journey to the top.

My view from the Eiffel Tower. I should know what this building is, and I don't.

We stopped in a French McDonald's. I displayed excellent foreign relations skills by holding up the line and being confused. The food was largely the same, with less salt.

Filsan and Morgan insisted on seeing the catacombs. I started shaking halfway down the winding staircase. The initial journey through blank limestone halls had me half-panicked. Ironically, I calmed down once we entered the actual graves. An enthusiastic tour guide pointed towards the worn skulls, repeating "bullet" whenever he found a hole, and showed us plague-deformed foreheads. I was so excited that I gasped when I found jaw bones. (Most of the walls were formed only by tibiae and jawless skulls.)

A few skulls. I liked finding the slight variations in bone structure, like the width of the eye sockets.

The skull-ridden catacombs and the Eiffel Tower have a powerful thing in common: symbolism. I've seen countless prints of skulls and piles of t-shirts featuring the Eiffel Tower. The silhouettes of both these objects are internationally familiar. I think this is what makes these tourist traps compelling. Very rarely do I see a real human skull, and I have never seen them piled together in the thousands. Today was the first time I was able to touch the Eiffel Tower. These objects and their shapes carry so much weight in our culture, and it was thrilling to be physically near them. The Eiffel Tower and the catacombs are startlingly real. I felt like I was meeting a pen pal for the first time.

Paris welcomed us with open, if tense, arms. Guides in green pointed us towards the COP 21 shuttles next to soldiers brandishing huge guns. The conference's registration process was painless, and I don't anticipate any problems using the metro. A lot of the transit system has been groomed to serve the visiting Parties. The city, wounded by the attacks, has scabbed over well.

We'll all have to be as adaptable as Paris if current emissions commitments don't change. The best that the world can promise still gives us a global temperature rise of over 2 degrees Celsius. This risks putting millions of people on islands or coastlines underwater, widening the range of disease vectors, and threatening biodiversity. Want to read a horror story? Skim the IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report. It's a summary of global climate data up to 2014, and it's not optimistic.

My badge says "Observer". I'm worried that it's predicting my future. I don't want to observe carbonic acid melting all the calcium carbonate in the ocean. I don't want to observe my country abandoning climate refugees at the border. I refuse to stare at the world when it falls apart. I know I'll take action when I'm older and qualified, but will those in power today even bother?

This conference has thousands of variables with thousands of possible outcomes. Am I going to observe a solution, or a disaster?