A Fair, Efficient, and Feasible Climate Agreement

What's new is just the degree of it. Even during the agricultural age there was climate change.

It would be immoral to leave these young people with a climate system spiraling out of control.

The country lies within the north temperate zone and has a changeable, maritime climate.

There is thus an imperative not only for regional integration in Africa, but also for a joint strategic vision and partnership to help build global energy and climate security.

But if world leaders abandon this target, they will have to make a fundamental strategic decision regarding the structure and stringency levels of a new climate goal.

The Lima deal is weak in many respects. But it also represents a fundamental breakthrough for shaping a comprehensive global climate regime.

It is too early to tell whether this blocking pattern is a manifestation of weather variability, a short term climate variation, or the result of climate change.

We look forward to good results from the ongoing discussion on the proposal to create an investment climate facility for Africa, which has been endorsed by the NEPAD secretariat and major multilateral and bilateral donor agencies.

The conference in Montreal the 11th such meeting should look beyond 2012, so that the world gets onto a safe and sustainable long term climate path.

If just three percent of the carbon locked up in the arctic permafrost is released as the world warms, it would offset all the savings that we need to make, in carbon, over the next 40 years to avoid runaway climate change.

Indeed, after nearly two decades of trying, the best climate deal that countries have been able to agree on is one that imposes no real obligations, sets no binding emissions targets, and requires no specific actions by anyone.

Being unprepared for the sudden change in climate, the survivors were those intelligent enough to invent new tools and ways of keeping warm and finding new sources of food (for example, adapting to ocean fishing based on prior fishing skills used in lakes and streams that became frozen).

World leaders increasingly seem to recognize this in theory, including at the just concluded climate change meeting in Lima, Peru. But they continue to depend on non binding commitments leaving the world on a dangerous climate trajectory.

Indeed, after nearly two decades of trying, the best climate deal that countries have been able to agree on is one that imposes no real obligations, sets no binding emissions targets, and requires no specific actions by anyone. Surely, there is a lesson here.