Climate change waits for no one

From the outcome of the UN climate summit in Copenhagen, you’d think we had all the time in the world to deal with climate change. Unfortunately, just because global leaders failed to agree on a treaty to reduce the world’s emissions, climate change is not slowing or stopping. It is only going to get worse, and fast.

The speed with which climate change is occurring continues to confound scientists, who admit that they cannot keep pace with climate impacts already being observed.

We're at a point no one thought would happen for many years. We have a very narrow window of opportunity to act before it's too late. The failure of Copenhagen lost us more time. The task of tackling this has never been so urgent.

Eminent climate scientists say global emissions must peak by 2015 and decrease rapidly from there. If this doesn’t happen, they predict the Earth's climate will reach a point of no return, and any action taken will be too late to avert runaway climate change.

“We are on a path that scares me”
Professor Steven Chu, United States Energy Secretary.

The UN climate summit in Copenhagen, December 2009, was widely considered to be humanity’s greatest opportunity to save itself. There, 192 countries and over 120 global leaders, including US President Barack Obama and Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao and New Zealand’s John Key, gathered in an attempt to reach a global deal to reduce emissions. They failed. National political self interests overrode the precious opportunity to resolve differences and agree a deal the world so desperately needed.

What we ended up with was a weak “accord”, cooked up by five large countries behind closed doors and intended to save the face of a handful of world leaders rather than the climate.

There has been widespread shock at the weakness of the declaration and the process by which it was obtained. In sharp contrast, however, were the historic events that occurred in relation to Copenhagen. Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets to demand a fair, ambitious, legally binding climate treaty and close to 15 million people worldwide signed on to the Global Campaign for Climate Action. This was the largest mobilization on climate change the world has ever seen. No democratically elected leader can ignore such an overwhelming public demand for a change to their climate politics. Climate science says we have only a few years left to halt the rise in emissions, before making the kind of rapid reductions that would give us the best chance of avoiding dangerous climate change. We cannot change that science, so instead we have to change the politics - and we may well have to change the politicians.

“[The draft Copenhagen text] asks Africa to sign a suicide pact, an incineration pact in order to maintain the economic dominance of a few countries” – Lumumba Stanislaus Di-Aping, Head of G-77 Group

“Copenhagen has been an abject failure. Justice has not been done. By delaying action, rich countries have condemned millions of the world's poorest people to hunger, suffering and loss of life as climate change accelerates – Nnimmo Bassey, Friends of the Earth International

The deal is “short of the aspirations and expectations” that people had – NZ Prime Minister John Key.