Stalled UN Talks Mean
No New Treaty for Years!
GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE EMERGENCY HEIGHTENED

Cancun = no new treaty.

The most recent chance for a climate agreement, at Cancun, Mexico last December 2010, failed to produce any sort of agreement to reduce emissions — not even a target year for a so-called global emissions "peak" to reverse the current increasing rate of emissions. No new treaty is in the wings. The so called "Cancun Agreements" were, in fact, merely referring to the several committees carrying on their discussions.

The next UNFCCC conference is in Durban, South Africa in December 2011. Christiana Figueres, Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), said at a Conference of the Secretariat General Iberoamericana, in Madrid in February 2011, that the Durban conference will merely "focus on finalizing and adopting the institution-building arrangements launched in Cancun, Mexico, last December, as well as the methodologies to provide the rigour and transparency."

With world energy projections to 2030 planned to be 80 percent fossil-fuel-based, with even more coal and tar sands oil at that, the world remains on course for global climate catastrophe.

Humanity is now facing the "oblivion" that United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon warned in 2009 would be the result if there is no new, strong, binding UN agreement to replace the Kyoto Protocol that expires in 2012.

In June 2010, outgoing UNFCCC Executive Secretary Yvo de Boer told the press that a treaty was not possible for at least 10 years. Incoming Executive Secretary Christiana Figueres told the press not to expect a treaty for decades. At the end of September 2010, she said there would be no new treaty coming from the UN climate talks, stating, "The fact is it's unreasonable to expect that there is going to be one large comprehensive agreement that will address all issues and will miraculously change the way we’ve been doing things for 100 years."

Nothing substantive has changed since the 2009 failed Copenhagen Climate Conference. We are left with the US-led so-called Copenhagen Accord. This accord has only one target, which we now know is a target for planetary catastrophe: the 2°C target.

The 2°C target, a so-called danger limit, has never been a science-based limit. It is a policy compromise that was arrived at by the European Union in 1996. Even then the EU stated that a global average temperature increase of 2°C was not safe and that it did not "eliminate the risk of runaway climate change" but "minimized it." Now with the Arctic changing decades ahead of computer modelled projections — with the meltdown of the Arctic summer sea ice and Arctic carbon feedback emissions — 2°C is a target for oblivion.

Otherwise all the Accord does is to reiterate the principles of the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change while failing to comply with them.

This situation is truly incredible, especially with all the severe climate change impacts that occurred in 2010, including the extreme heat waves and widespread forest wildfires in Russia, and in Pakistan flooding that the UN said was global climate change-induced and the worst disaster the world has ever had to face, impacting more than 20 million people.

Significantly, Russia (in the northern hemisphere) suffered major losses of its grain crop production. In Pakistan, the floods hit the country's best agricultural regions with large food production losses. No new treaty will mean more of these threats to our health and food security in the foreseeable future.

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