On days when news of the pandemic is especially bleak, I sometimes think of Rod Ponton. He is the Texas lawyer who logged into an online court hearing in February, only to make the appalling discovery that a Zoom setting on his computer had somehow turned him into a deeply confused-looking cat.
Months later, that moment remains a glimmer of brightness in the grey sea of virtual Covid life, where millions must still work, study and socialise on Zoom, with all its attendant glitches.
Grim as online life can be, the woes it causes most of us are trivial. When my wifi conks out, as it did last week as I was about to speak at an online meeting chaired by the Financial Times’s editor, the worst that happens is a briefly delayed discussion and some personal humiliation.
Much more is at stake in other gatherings, not least those that are supposed to help the world understand and prevent climate change.
From Monday to Friday last week, 280 experts from 70-odd countries met online to finalise parts of a mammoth new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the 33-year-old UN body that produces the most comprehensive assessments of climate science every six or seven years.
This is only the sixth report of its kind and if its predecessors are a guide, it will run to some 3,000 pages and weigh as much as a small two-year-old. As usual, it is being put together by hundreds of scientists volunteering their time to review thousands of studies.
Online difficulties
This time though, instead of flying somewhere to hash out their findings in person, Covid has forced some of the most important author meetings online. This has not gone entirely well, according to a report done on the first virtual meeting last year that reads like a history of pandemic working life.
People logged into the wrong sessions. They struggled to use Microsoft Teams. Their wifi cut out. They could not get a word in on discussions others dominated. They lived in time zones that made it hard to see some sessions and had to squeeze meetings in-between child care and day jobs.
On the upside, 368 tonnes of aviation emissions were avoided and no one missed the jet lag. All up though, a feedback survey found nearly 30 per cent of respondents felt they could not fully take part – far more than at earlier in-person meetings – and more of them came from poorer countries. Crucially, people missed what they called the “inspiring and constructive” impromptu chats in coffee breaks and corridors, where “much of the great progress is in fact made”.
COP26 concern
This is why there is so much concern about another even larger UN climate gathering due this year: the much more unwieldy COP26 summit scheduled for November in Glasgow. Thousands of people normally attend these annual talks, where negotiators from almost every country thrash out hugely complicated deals to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
A three-week online preparatory meeting has already been planned for June but the prospect of the entire COP26 meeting being virtual is a big worry, especially for developing countries plagued by power cuts and poor broadband. "There is no doubt the quality of negotiations will be impacted," says Dr Nurul Quadir, an experienced negotiator from Bangladesh. His nation is in the "least developed countries" negotiating group at the talks and he cannot imagine how they would co-ordinate online. "Normally, we meet in the morning, discuss issues from last night's negotiation and then go out to different meetings. At noon we come back and discuss what we've learned and look at what strategies we can take," he told me last week. "It would be very difficult to get meaningful outcomes through online negotiation."
Having been to many UN climate talks, I am sure he is right. On the other hand, these talks are about the most pressing problem of our age and Covid has already delayed them by a year. Like so much else in this unsettling time, they are bound to be at least partly online and imperfect, but it will be something if they happen at all. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2021
