-
More Voices Needed in Climate Debate
1
After two weeks of climate negotiations
in Doha,
bleary
-
eyed
ministers,
negotiators,
and
advocates
are
headed
back
home
to
the
various
regions
around
the
world.
Few,
if
any,
are
leaving
entirely
satisfied.
2
The pace of
progress on
climate change is still too
slow
and the
political
will
for
greater
ambition
remains
elusive.
Yet
these
talks
did
achieve
the
basic
goal
of
extending
the
Kyoto
Protocol
and
moving
countries
onto
a
single
negotiating
track
toward
a
new
climate
agreement. This
leaves the
door for
more progress ahead.
3
This
year's
talks
took
place
against
the
backdrop
of
two
disturbing trends. On
the one hand, there are multiple signs that
climate
change is here and its impacts
are already being felt around the world.
On the other hand, the world remains
tied to the consumption of fossil
fuels
that
drive
more
and
more
greenhouse
gas
emissions
into
the
atmosphere. With each
passing day that we don't shift directions, we are
increasingly locking ourselves into
more unstable climate future.
4
The
real
question
is:
Can
the
international
talks
have
a
real
impact on climate change?
5
But before we get to that question,
let's look more closely at
the two
trends:
6
First,
in
recent
years,
we've
seen
a
surge
in
climate
and
extreme weather events,
along with
analysis and
other evidence that the
world is on an
unsustainable course. The most recent and tragic
example
was Super Typhoon Bopha that
swept across
the Philippines
this week,
killing
at
least
500
people
and
leaving
tens
of
thousands
displaced.
Typhoons
aren't
unusual
in
the
Philippines,
but
this
one
is
the
most
southern on record and it arrived
particularly late in the year. The storm,
of course,
comes
on the heels of Hurricane Sandy, which
swept through
the
Caribbean
and
up
the
East
Coast
of
the
United
States,
leaving
hundreds dead, and thousands without
power or property. These are the
kind
of extreme weather events that are becoming more
common in a
warming world. Last month,
the US government has just reported, was
the 332nd in succession in which the
global temperature was above the
average
for
the
20th
century:
though
individual
areas
have
sometimes
suffered
cold
spells,
the
last
below
-
average
month
worldwide
was
February 1985. And the
effects are increasingly showing. Already we are
seeing that polar ice is melting
faster than expected
and sea
levels are
rising
beyond
many
projections.
For
instance,
NOAA
(US
National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration)
just
released a study showing
that
sea levels could rise
as much as 6.6 feet by the end of the
century.
7
The World Bank's report,
world
with
four
degrees
Celsius
of
global
temperature
growth.
The
picture
is
not
pretty.
Four
degrees
would
bring
more
intense
wildfires
,