A damp end for a burning debate?

The last few days in Ulaanbaatar have been shaking my previous faith in the truth of global warming, despite meteorologists’ assurances that the low temperatures are actually quite normal. But my doubts will pass, for in my experience June is a promise January always keeps. And once that happens I shall again regret that the Copenhagen climate summit should have ended so inconclusively, achieving so much less than the much-hyped possibilities. Maybe our initial hopes were indeed unreasonable and we should not mind the unclear deals at present as long as the dangers have been accepted as clear.

The accord is to be welcomed as a starting point for future commitments, but then, how many times will the world be given a starting point? It had one in Rio in 1992, another in Kyoto in 1997. The citizens of the world need to mount pressure on all countries to stop shifting the starting line and to get moving to arrive at a legally binding agreement in Mexico next year. Nations are many but humanity has only one earth to live in. We are not only citizens of a country, we are also citizens of an interdependent world.

The end of the conference on December 19 was certainly unexpected, if not dramatic. We are still reading accounts of what happened on the stage and behind the scenes and what they all mean. Everybody went home after “taking note” of the Copenhagen Accord - which did not provide any legal binding providing clear and time-bound national targets for reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. Should  we thus be content with the “essential beginning” of a new global agreement on climate change or should we be cynical that 193 nation-states spent their taxpayers’ money on what turned out to be no more than a jamboree?