Extreme Weather Unlikely To Change Anything At Climate Talks This Year Or Next - Reuters

[hatrack]

Extreme weather in 2010 will spur more strident calls for action to combat global warming but is unlikely to break a deadlock at U.N. climate talks about sharing the burden between rich and poor. Islamabad, for instance, has blamed mankind's emissions of greenhouse gases for devastating floods that have killed up to 1,600 people. And Russian President Dmitry Medvedev similarly directly linked the summer heat wave on global warming.

But there is no sign so far that major emitters -- Moscow is the number three greenhouse gas emitter behind China and the United States -- are offering to do more to combat climate change to overcome gridlock at U.N. talks. One delegate at the last U.N. talks, in Bonn in early August, said there was a "huge sense of inertia" despite worries about extreme weather and U.N. projections that 2010 would be the warmest year since records began in the 1850s.

EDIT

"Climate change is becoming a much more firm reality on the ground for many countries," said Saleemul Huq, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Environment and Development in London. He said that would bring a greater sense of urgency at the next annual U.N. climate talks of environment ministers in Mexico, from November 29-December 10, after the Copenhagen summit last December agreed only a non-binding deal to slow climate change.

Rich and poor nations are already split about how to share out needed curbs on greenhouse gas emissions. Developing nations say the rich must make far deeper cuts while the rich want poor nations to do more to limit their growing emissions.

EDIT

http://planetark.org/enviro-news/item/59197

[azul]

1. "huge sense of inertia"

Just like people delay paying income tax until the last minute. This is the hidden energy tax that the oil industry failed to charge for as the cost of selling the product.

People will wait till the last minute because they don't want to pay this tax either, but the deadline and penalties are being hidden too, by the very industry that has everything to lose and much to gain by lying and deceiving till the oil runs dry.

The oil drum is the war drum is the stupid drum is the death sound, banging against our love of money.

[damntexdem]

2. Extreme human die-offs unlikely to change anything at future climate talks.

But total human extinction would.

[Nederland]

3. Extreme human die-offs?

We live in a world where over 60 million people die every year. While what is happening in Pakistan is on an individual level a tragedy, the cold hearted fact is that 1600 people dying from a flood doesn't even qualify as a blip in the global picture.

[hatrack]

4. Hell, official French government estimates were 14,082 heat wave deaths in 2003

And that was just France.

http://www.usatoday.com/weather/news/2003-09-25-france-heat_x.htm

Anybody notice any major changes in economic & energy policy since then? Maybe the amount of green rhetoric in EU leaders' speeches, and certainly more wind farms, but I haven't seen much else.

Massive, repeated crop failures might get some serious discussion going, but of course they couldn't be so bad that they'd disrupt travel to the climate talks conference site . . . :eyes: . . . . kind of hard to peel an onion that finely.