The president of the Dubai Climate Summit, Sultan Al Jaber, has assured this Monday that respects and believes in sciencewhich, as he has stressed, has guided his entire life and is what guides the principles and COP28 presidency strategy.

“Science has guided my life. Science has guided the principled strategy in the COP28 presidency,” Al Jaber has repeated on several occasions in a news conference in which he has been accompanied by the president of the UN group of climate scientists (IPCC), Jim Skea.

With these words and the staging with Skea, Al Jaber has faced the controversy unleashed after the publication of a video recorded on November 21 in the which states that there is no science that says that giving up fossil fuels will lead to achieving 1.5 degrees.

Science says that global emissions have to drop 43% by 2030 and that we must be net zero emissions by 2050 to maintain the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees at the end of the century, he stressed.

“Everything my team and I do is around science,” insisted Al Jaber, who after reviewing all the progress already made in the negotiations, assured that there is a lot of hope and optimism among the negotiating parties and we cannot lose this chance.

In this context, the Emirati, senior manager of the Abu Dhabi state oil company ADNOCwas “very surprised” by the “constant and repeated attempts to undermine the work of the COP28 presidency” and has reiterated that for him it is “inevitable” that fossil fuels must be reduced and abandoned.

“I sincerely believe that there is confusion and misunderstanding,” said Al Jaber about himself, which is why he took advantage of the press conference to present his resume, of which he highlighted that He is an engineer, so science is “my passion and conviction” and has allowed him to advance his career.

However, he has pointed out that as president of COP28 he has no “red lines” when conducting negotiations and that it is the parties who must reach agreements. “Please help me achieve this goal. “I am committed and determined to give the most ambitious response to the Global Review,” Al Yaber urged the press.

COP28 must close the so-called GST whose ultimate objective is to correct the deviation from the objectives of the Paris Agreement, in which the parties committed to work to limit warming to 2 degrees and, if possible, 1.5 degrees .

Teresa Ribera responds

Before this denial, and from the same climate summit, the person who responded to Al Jaber was Teresa Ribera, Minister of Ecological Transition. Ribera assured that “we do not want to return to the caves, we want a bright future.” According to experts, science has indeed pointed the way against global warming. Exactly, the IPCC report says about fossil fuels that, to maintain the 1.5 degree objective, their use is considerably reduced in all the scenarios that scientists handle: by 2050 the use of coal without mitigation (technologies that allow capture the CO2 emitted) disappears completely, oil consumption is reduced by 60% and gas consumption by 45%, Skea said.