I suppose I should address the outcome of the Durban climate conference, but I don’t really know what to say. The countries assembled made an agreement to make an agreement. Seeing that they couldn’t make the agreement while all of them gathered in Durban, I don’t know why anyone believes they will make an agreement in 2015, which would not take effect until 2020. For the time being, the world will operate under the auspices of the Kyoto protocol, which only covered industrialized nations, and to which the United States, one of the world’s biggest emitters, is not a signatory. And Kyoto, a 1997 agreement without updated climate modeling, simply isn’t sufficient even if the US signed on.

Calling this a modest agreement is an insult to modest agreements. Considering that global emissions would have to peak by 2020 for the world to hold any hope of avoiding a more than 2 °C increase in global temperature, and that even the best-case scenario here would commence binding greenhouse gas targets in 2020, I think this agreement throws in the towel rather than forges ahead.

The climate fund was at least a tangible goal met at the talks, and it makes sense. If the world is blowing off the warnings of climate scientists, they will have to fund the consequences. It appears to be more of an adaptation fund than a transformational one, with the problem being that nobody seems to know where the money will come from.

The delegates also agreed on the creation of a fund to help poor countries adapt to climate change — though the precise sources of the money have yet to be determined — and to measures involving the preservation of tropical forests and the development of clean-energy technology. The reserve, called the Green Climate Fund, would help mobilize a promised $100 billion a year in public and private financing by 2020 to assist developing countries in adapting to climate change and converting to clean energy sources […]

“While governments avoided disaster in Durban, they by no means responded adequately to the mounting threat of climate change,” said Alden Meyer, director of policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “The decisions adopted here fall well short of what is needed.”

Europe wanted the binding targets, and in the end, they accepting something far less than that, an agreement to maybe agree to agree later. China and India, among other developing nations, along with the United States (hiding behind “equity” while compromised by disagreement among themselves), backed the Europeans down.

Brad Johnson argues that even the negotiators at Durban recognized the UN process has failed: [cont’d]

Recognizing that climate change represents an urgent and potentially irreversible threat to human societies and the planet and thus requires to be urgently addressed by all Parties, and acknowledging that the global nature of climate change calls for the widest possible cooperation by all countries and their participation in an effective and appropriate international response, with a view to accelerating the reduction of global greenhouse gas emissions,

Noting with grave concern the significant gap between the aggregate effect of Parties’ mitigation pledges in terms of global annual emissions of greenhouse gases by 2020 and aggregate emission pathways consistent with having a likely chance of holding the increase in global average temperature below 2 °C or 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels.

In other words, a “significant gap” exists between what has been agreed to and what is needed. And I don’t see any reason for optimism that the gap will get narrowed in the years ahead. Adaptation and mitigation seems to be the next course.

UPDATE: Dave Roberts has a somewhat cheerier take, even while acknowledging the ham-handedness of the agreement, which probably doesn’t even have much binding power behind it. Roberts argues that the lesser-developed countries turning on emerging markets like China and India represents an important shift.