If there is a deal in Copenhagen, which almost certainly won’t be until tomorrow, that’s not half of it. All the big countries seem committed to a political deal of sorts, but then the obvious question is whether it will be sufficient to save the world from the worst impacts of extreme climate turmoil. On that the signs are worrying. The leaked UN analysis of the progress of the talks suggests that the cuts offered so far would still lead, pace the claims of the main participants, to global temperatures rising by an average of 3C above pre-industrial levels, and the Stern economic review of climate change for the UK Government indicates the effects of this would be drastic. Nearly 200 million more people would suffer severa coastal flooding, nearly 600 million more would risk hunger, and a staggering half of all species would face extinction – a scything through biological ecosystems which will eventually undermine survival prospects for the human race itself. Why this is so dangerous is that even keeping the temperature rise down to 2C would still radically reduce crop yields worldwide both through increased flooding and intensified droughts, and would still only give species, including homo sapiens, a 50:50 chance of avoiding devastating climate catastrophe.

Despite the spin put on ‘a meaningful agreement’ and ‘a historic step forward’ to describe the result of talks between Obama, Wen Jiabao, Manmohan Singh and Jacob Zuma, it is clear that it is so vapid and incoahate that this is no detailed deal, more a skeletal outline of what might be desired at a future agreement – less a conclusion after 14 days of hard negotiations, more a set of aspirations expressed on day one. There are no details of agreed emission cuts, even less a confirmation that they are sufficient to keep global temperatures from rising above 2C, which is the object of the whole conference.
There is no indication of whether other parties, particularly the EU and the developing countries, agree with these proposals or not. There is nothing about enforcement or verifiable transparency, let alone about legally binding commitments, not even about how countries’ voluntary offers to cut enmissions will be monitored. On funding for developing countries to adapt to the most serious consequences of climate turmoil that cannot now be avoided, the US has offered to help put together the $100bn a year funds by 2020 that developing countries have been demanding, but there is no settled deal about who will pay and how much. This is not an agreement, it’s elastoplast over a void.

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