Is Copenhagen Already a Failure?

Don't bother, please don't. That's the reaction of some key figures in the climate science/global warming movement to what they've been hearing is to be offered up at the Copenhagen global warming summit next week.

The head of the United Nations climate office, Yvo de Boer, says the numbers being put forward by the major emitters fall well short of scientific assessments of what will be needed to avoid the worst impacts of global warming. de Boer wants the major emitters to significantly increase emissions reductions.

America's chief climate scientist, NASA Goddard Institute chief James Hansen, hopes that Copenhagen is a total failure. Hansen told The Guardian that he fears the major emitters may strike a weak deal that will lull the world into a disastrous complacency.

In Hansen's view, dealing with climate change allows no room for the compromises that rule the world of elected politics. "This is analagous to the issue of slavery faced by Abraham Lincoln or the issue of Nazism faced by Winston Churchill," he said. "On those kind of issues you cannot compromise. You can't say let's reduce slavery, let's find a compromise and reduce it 50% or reduce it 40%."

He added: "We don't have a leader who is able to grasp it and say what is really needed. Instead we are trying to continue business as usual."

Hansen's view is reinforced by Angela Merkel's climate change advisory panel that favours strict budgeting of all future carbon emissions, a quota system that would require major emitters to largely decarbonize their economies and societies within a few decades at most.

Summit host, Denmark, made climate change news today when the Danish government had to rush through a law to thwart carbon-trading fraud.