All talk, no action: UN climate change powwow still amounting to naught

Nations will have to roll up their sleeves and make important compromises to meet the deadline, just 14 months off, for a global pact on curbing climate change, observers say. Experts said discussions from six days of UN talks in Bonn which ended Saturday fell short of their goal to set parameters for a ministerial-level drafting meeting in Lima in December for a deal to be inked the following year. The talks in the former West German capital ended with nations still divided loosely along developed-developing country lines on the most fundamental aspects of who will be required to do what to halt the march towards dangerous levels of climate change.

Some of those visions that are on the table, quite frankly, are not compatible… two opposite views of the world. Choices are going to have to be made.

Alden Meyer of the US-based Union of Concerned Scientists

They agree the best tool is to curb Earth-warming fossil fuel emissions, which requires an expensive shift to less-polluting energy sources. But poorer nations, many of them facing the highest risks from a predicted increase in climate change-induced sea-level rise, floods and droughts, insist the developed world must bear greater responsibility given their longer history of emissions dating back to the Industrial Revolution. Rich countries, in turn, point the finger to countries like India and China, which are now among the major emitters as coal powers their economic development. These are issues many wished had been resolved by now, so that actual bartering can start on the text of the agreement that must enter into force by 2020 to meet the goal of limiting warming to two degrees Celsius from pre-industrial levels.

World climate change