The best site I’ve found so far for news from Copenhagen is this Greenpeace site. An alternative is the live Reuters blog.

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The Copenhagan Climate Summit started today and I am excited and terrified at the same time.

Excited because if we can pull it off, we might avoid the worst of climate change. And terrified because a large part of me thinks that we won’t get any sort of realistic agreement (unfortunately I put the odds at 10:1 against a meaningful agreement).

This is probably the most momentous, and certainly the most important, political meeting ever.

Why?

Because the future of our civilisation, and nature as we know it, is at stake.

Sure, the earth will survive climate change – it has in the past, and will do so again.

But will we?

Our society has evolved during a period of remarkable climate stability (since the last ice age) that has allowed industrial civilisation to flourish.

But as global warming is now a reality (with impacts decades ahead of predictions) and carbon dioxide emissions tracking (or above) the IPCC’s 2007 worst case scenario, civilisation’s continued flourishing is almost certainly going to come to a dramatic and rapid end.

Nature will always be OK (at least for the next several billion years) but will go through multiple changes along the way.

And I would like to think that human civilisation will be there too – at least for several more millenia. But we will need to work out how to live sustainably within the carrying capacity of the planet. And we will need to do that soon.

Links

Official Copenhagen site

BBC Copenhagen site

YouTube / COP-15 televised debate (next week)

Copenhagen in graphics

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