Climate drama looks elusive

2009-12-05 18:07

Copenhagen - For 20 years, as this crowded planet grew warmer, nations have gathered annually to try to do something about it. History now brings them to this chilly northern capital, and to a crossroads.

The world looks to Copenhagen "to witness what I believe will be an historic turning point in the fight against climate change", says Yvo de Boer, United Nations organizer of the two weeks of talks opening Monday.

It may witness, instead, history put on hold.

The change in US administrations a year ago had aroused hopes the long-running climate talks might finally produce an all-encompassing package in 2009 to combat global warming and help its victims.

Too little time and too little agreement, however, especially between rich and poor countries, mean the 192-nation Copenhagen conference is likely to produce, at best, a framework - a basis for continuing talks and signing internationally binding final agreements next year.

Two key building blocks for that framework may take shape here:

- Setting targets for controlling emissions of carbon dioxide and other global-warming gases, including by the leading contributors, China and the United States.

- Agreeing on how much rich countries should pay for poor nations' clean energy technology and for seawalls, irrigation and other projects to counter a changing climate.

Under the grand roof of Copenhagen's modern Bella Centre, delegates will also deal with a heavy agenda of other issues: the technicalities of protecting forests, measuring emissions, setting rules for "carbon credits", enforcing an eventual treaty, and other concerns.

Underlining Copenhagen's importance, at least 100 national leaders, led by President Barack Obama, will converge on the Danish capital to offer high-level backing to the talks.

On Friday the White House announced Obama would come to Copenhagen on December 18, the conference's last scheduled day. That's when the UN talks perennially go into overtime in last-minute wrangling and when other leaders are planning to take part.

The US chief executive's change in plans indicated the Americans see a chance for important political agreements in those final hours.

Slow progress has marked climate talks since the 1992 Rio treaty calling for voluntary controls on greenhouse gases. It took five more years to get the Kyoto Protocol, which ordered emissions cuts by 37 industrialized nations, an accord the US rejected. American resistance through eight years under President George W Bush then blocked most progress.

While diplomacy has inched along, climate change hasn't waited.

Global temperatures are rising by 0.19 degrees Celsius per decade and twice as fast in the far north, melting Arctic sea ice at record rates. In the Copenhagen talks' final days, the World Meteorological Organisation is expected to confirm this was the warmest decade on record.

Oceans, expanding from warmth and melting glaciers, are rising faster than predicted. The world's power plants, automobiles, burning forests and other sources are producing 29% more carbon dioxide than in 2000. Not in two million years has so much CO2 built up in the atmosphere, says the Global Carbon Project, an international research group.

That emissions path could drive temperatures by 2060 to at least four degrees C higher than preindustrial levels, scientists say. That would push the world deeper into a time of climate disruption, unusual droughts and powerful storms, species die-offs, spreading tropical diseases, coastal flooding and other, unpredictable consequences.

From the Arctic, from threatened Pacific islands, from industrial capitals, it's that fear that's bringing 15 000 delegates, environmentalists, business lobbyists, scientists, journalists and others to this quiet gray city of parks and bicycling commuters.

It will also draw hundreds of police reinforcements and protesters, activists demanding "climate justice", deeper emissions cuts by the wealthy, whose smokestacks first overloaded the skies with greenhouse gases, and richer compensation for poorer nations. Wary of confrontation, authorities have sealed off the Bella Centre with massive concrete blocks topped by 6-foot-high metal fences.

The emissions cuts offered this time around, to follow Kyoto reductions expiring in 2012, have disappointed scientists and poorer nations facing damaging climate change. They say greenhouse gases, by 2020, must be reduced by 25-40% below 1990 output. That would keep temperatures in the less dangerous range of two degrees C above preindustrial levels, they say.

The European Union approaches that target, pledging to cut emissions by 20% below 1990 levels, and more if others agree. Awaiting US congressional action, however, the Obama administration could make only a provisional offer of a 17% reduction by 2020, compared with a different baseline year, 2005. Against 1990, that represents only a three to four percent cut, experts say.

The developing world, for the first time, is offering its own actions - not straight reductions, but clean energy projects and other steps to slow the growth of their emissions.


De Boer hopes the Americans and others will up the ante once the talks start.

"The first thing I hope for is a good conversation among industrialized countries about how they can increase their level of ambitions if they are sure others are pulling their weight as well," the Dutch diplomat told reporters last week. He would also look for stronger offers from developing nations, he said.

- AP