Disappointment Mountain.

Today sees the start of a five day meeting of parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Bonn, Germany. This will be one the last opportunities to complete an agreement before the 21st Conference of Parties (COP21) Summit in Paris, France at the end of the year. As a result you can probably guess what I am going to be doing for the rest of the week.

One of the big issues from the process is whether the US will sign up to any agreement. After all if the largest emitter of greenhouse gases (GHG's) fails to sign up it's had to argue that there is any point continuing with an agreement. It is very disappointing then that the US seems intent on disrupting the meeting.

For example last night saw the MTV Video Music Awards (VMA's). With Miley Cyrus hosting you would have expected me to pay this at least a little bit of attention. With not very much going on at the moment that old friend of the UNFCCC Rihanna was only nominated for the video with a social message award for that Obama supporting anthem "American Oxygen." The award was actually won by another song called "One Man Can Change the World" which is supportive of Obama's race war.

Over the next two days Obama will be hosting the Global Leadership in the Arctic Conference (GLACIER) in Alaska, US. To a domestic audience Obama is keen for this to be seen as him providing global leadership on the climate change issue. In reality it is intended to rival the Bonn meeting by addressing the long running issue of who owns which bits of the arctic. This is important because nations want to exercise the right to drill for oil and other ghg emitting fossil fuels in the region.

Staging rival negotiations that only a select group of nations are invited to is only going to disrupt the Bonn meeting by creating a group within a group.

If that wasn't disruptive enough Obama intends to open the GLACIER conference by announcing that he is circumventing Congress to re-name America's tallest mountain and glacier "Mount McKinley" as "Denali." The argument behind this is that it is undoing years of racist colonialism by returning the name to the one used by native Alaskans.

The problem with this is that there are numerous native Alaskan tribes who use various names for the mountain none of which are "Denali." That name is the result of a European explorer going; "I can't be bothered to learn all your names let alone you're languages so from now on the word you use for that mountain is Denali. As such that name itself is an example of colonialism.

Also the move means that the mountain is no longer named after William McKinley - the 25th American President - who was something of an early environmental activist establishing the National Parks system for conservation. He also fought for the Union against slavery during the American Civil War. With the Democrats supporting the Confederacy and slavery during that war McKinney was obviously a Republican and like that other famous Republican Abraham Lincoln McKinney was assassinated in 1901 by a radical left-wing activist.

As such along with the recent attempts to ban the Confederate flag the whole thing does seem like yet another example of Obama and the Democrats trying to re-write history so it is more forgiving to them.

Beyond that the jokes really write themselves because if you swap the last letters of "Denali" you get "Denial" which suggests that Obama might be moving there permanently. Then of course the mountain is brownish/black in colour but covered in white snow. Obama is no doubt outraged by this example of white privilege oppressing the darker colours.

I think the biggest joke though is that General Motors make a range of hugely polluting SUV's under the Denali brand. As such Obama seems to be signalling support for climate change against the glacier.

This indigenous rights issue is rather a big thing within climate change negotiations. One of my favourite examples is a mountain in Australia. The first settlers to climb it took one look at the view and said; "Well that's disappointing." So they named the thing "Mount Disappointment."

12:20 on 31/8/15 (UK date).