Climate change talks in Poland showed the limits of international action to reduce global warming in a divided world and left it up to governments, cities and communities individually to stop the rise in temperatures.
Nearly 200 nations at United Nations talks in Katowice, in the mining region of Silesia, saved the historic 2015 Paris Agreement on Saturday by agreeing on a package of guidelines for its implementation.
However, the main question remained unanswered - how to achieve the governments' goals for reducing greenhouse gases.
Negotiations in Poland have delayed rules on carbon dioxide emissions - a boost to business - and made no firm promises to strengthen countries' targets to cut emissions by 2020, when the deal comes into effect.
Thus, the participants remained far from the goal of the Paris Agreement to keep global warming below two degrees Celsius, let alone the limit of 1,5 degrees, which is necessary to avoid extreme weather conditions, rising sea levels, and the disappearance of plant and animal species.
The world is headed for a temperature rise of 3-5 degrees this century, the UN World Meteorological Organization announced.
The Paris Agreement is based on individual promises, so expectations that the Polish negotiations will bring much more than rules on how to measure them have always been low. Reuters writes that the unity achieved in Paris has been shaken by governments putting national goals ahead of collective action.
Only a handful of state leaders were present in Katowice and the UN Secretary General had to return to the meeting to encourage progress.
"There is a lack of political will," he said Alden Meyer, director of the nonprofit Union of Concerned Scientists.
"However, governments, cities, companies, civil society and others have been motivated to work hard to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement."
For the chairman of the conference Mihal Kurtika, a good job was done in Katovice.
"Mission accomplished," he tweeted. "Our children will recognize that we made the right decisions in important moments like the one we are facing today."
The agreement, which did not define how the promised funding would be provided, is better than nothing for countries already suffering from climate change.
Simon Steele, the environment minister of Grenada in the Caribbean, told Reuters it was “just scratching the surface of what we really need.
Investors said more action will be needed at the level of governments to convince them to pump in the necessary money.
Next year, the climate negotiations, which have been ongoing since 1992, will be held again, when the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change was signed, obliging governments to avoid dangerous impacts on the climate system. Years of scientific predictions about global warming culminated in a report in 1998 that warned of the dangers.
Since then, these warnings have become clearer and scientists have eliminated the possibility that the global warming we have witnessed in recent years is caused by the forces of nature: it is a man-made problem, resulting from the use of fossil fuels and the release of carbon dioxide that "traps" heat in the atmosphere.
With current national greenhouse gas reduction targets, the world will reach warming of more than three degrees Celsius, scientists warn. Just two months ago, the world's leading body of climatologists, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, found that even 1,5 degrees Celsius of warming will cause sea level rise, coral die-offs, species extinctions, droughts, floods, storms and heat waves that will threaten world stability.
Levels of warming greater than that are believed to devastate parts of the world, wiping out agricultural production, melting the Arctic ice sheet and making many areas uninhabitable.
Only one degree creates extreme conditions
Climate and economic leaders say much more must be done, and quickly, to prevent dangerous levels of global warming.
Nicholas Stern, the former chief economist of the World Bank and the author of a study that showed that the costs of curbing emissions would be much lower than the costs of their effects, told The Guardian: "It is clear that the progress we are making is inadequate, given the scale and the urgency of the risks we face. The latest data show that carbon dioxide emissions continue to rise. A much more attractive, cleaner and more efficient path to economic recovery and poverty reduction is in our hands."
Johan Rokstrom, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Change Impact Research, believes that ambitions are not aligned with science at the UN negotiations.
"We are still on a path that will lead to a very dangerous 3-4 degrees Celsius warmer world this century. "Extreme weather conditions are already affecting people all over the planet, at just one degree of warming," he told "The Guardian".
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