​COP stands for the Conference of Parties which is a United Nations organised project to bring the world’s countries together and find a global consensus into solving the problems of climate change. The science shows us, and the worlds countries agree, we are heading towards a massive destruction of our civilisation unless we can stop burning coal, oil and gas and get our energy from greenhouse gas-free sources.
We have now had 27 meetings since the first in 1995 and are beginning to get some recognition that the problem is real and that it is cheaper to fix the problem than have to pay for the damage from the problems we are causing.
The problem is that the richer, CO2 production countries, such as the USA, Canada, Australia, Russia and the middle eastern countries send teams of lawyers and politicians to defend the money these countries make from the sale of fossil fuel products and these are also among the richer countries that donate money to the poorer countries that are going to suffer huge problems.
The COP27 meeting that has just concluded, managed to agree to provide a fund that would help the nations most likely to be affected by climate change and these would be, typically, the Pacific Island nations that are going to be flooded by sea level rise or the floods in Pakistan and Bangladesh. This is the first time that the consequences of burning fossil fuels and producing CO2 has been recognised as a serious danger so that, despite my pessimism, the worlds countries have made a common agreement to acknowledge the problem and signed a declaration to do something.
COP27 had a massive participation by the oil and coal lobbyists, which is where the abundance of jet planes delivering executives came from, and it was reported that their number exceeded those from the ten smallest nations. There are powerful forces at work and we were lucky that Biden was the President of the USA, that Russia was disgraced by the Ukraine invasion and Australia has a new government.
This type of negotiation is a slow and painful business but the UN is the only way to get the 193 recognised countries in the world to work together for a common good. The internet has made the world a more connected place and, despite the explosion in alternative facts, a science-based approach prevails. The USA pulled out under Trump but the people of the USA threw him out and a similar fate befell the Liberal government of Australia.
Our form of democracy is not adopted by China but the government has to deliver benefits to the people or they will rise up, just as Mao did, and the results can be catastrophic to the leaders. Killing citizens as Iran and Myanmar do to keep in power is not an option against 1.3 billion people so a form of democracy exists even in China. 

Recent research by NASA, published in Nature, Climate change, shows that insects will decline by 65% over the next 50 to 100 years if the temperature continues to rise as forecast. The scientists built a model based on what is known about the climate and then introduced insects that has actual research on their behaviour under increasing temperature conditions.
Many insects are in decline due to the destruction of their habitat, such as frogs disappearing due to wetlands being drained, but there is also research that shows a decline where the habitat is unchanged. An example would be some Monarch butterflies who live at higher altitude where their habitat was intact and yet their population still declined as the temperature increased.
At typical scenario would be that prolonged exposure to temperatures outside the creature’s critical thermal maximum would increase deaths and push their numbers below replacement rate leading to a steady decline.
Humans are warm blooded mammals and can survive in a wide range of temperatures by adjusting diet or habitat. Insects are cold blooded and, largely do not have the luxury of travel or the ability to change diet.
There are already many studies showing a serious decline in insect numbers but most research is short term and does not have the luxury of going back 50 years or more and insects are not a glamourous subject like lions or polar bears so funding for research is scarce. It is also not helped that we spend most of our time trying to kill insects in agriculture and in the home which makes the concept of protecting insects a difficult thing to grasp.
However, insects are vital to out survival as they pollinate our crops and without them our farming of crops for food would not be possible. Living in a horticultural region we are already familiar with the practice of introducing bee hives to a kiwi fruit orchards to pollinate the fruit flowers but if we had to do it to fields of wheat the immense scale would make it impossible.
Of the 550 gigatons of biomass on Earth most are plants and bacteria, animals make up about 2 gigatons, with insects comprising half of that and fish taking up another 0.7 gigatons. Everything else, including mammals, birds, nematodes and mollusks are roughly 0.3 gigatons, with humans weighing in at 0.06 gigatons.
While humans are statistically a tiny part of the planet’s biomass, there are 8 billion of us and we are rabid devourers of the planets resources and have a profound effect on the environment by draining wetlands, keeping vast herds of animals for food, shifting millions of tonnes of rock and soil for mining, agriculture, roads and buildings. Most importantly we have already raised the temperature of the planet 1.1 C and with an additional 1.4 C or more to come.
The UN, COP27 meeting in Egypt is supposed to solve this problem but it looks very doubtful.