By Gwynne Dyer
The plans for a new global deal on climate change lie broken and abandoned. The usual suspects are meeting again, this time in Durban, but there is even less hope of progress than there was in Cancun last year. The shadow of the disastrous failure in Copenhagen in 2009 still looms over the proceedings like a shroud.
Indeed, even to talk of "progress" is to miss the point. All the effort in Durban is going into preventing further backsliding on the commitments that were made fourteen years ago in the Kyoto Protocol to cut the greenhouse gas emissions of the developed countries. The idea of a better, bolder treaty is dead, and even the extension of the modest Kyoto targets for emission reductions beyond 2012 is gravely in doubt.
So the real world of physics and chemistry and global heat balances will just have to wait ten or twenty years while we human beings sort out our politics and diplomacy. If it won’t wait, then we will pay a very high price indeed. How did we get into this mess?
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