Buzz of Weekend Activity Sets Up Copenhagen Climate Kick-off

Tonic recently wrote up a brief primer on the climate summit that gets underway Monday in Copenhagen. Events over the weekend and leading right up to the very opening of COP15 suggest that it will be an active week and a half. We hope that it is a fruitful one as well, and we will be watching events in Copenhagen closely.

Presidents don't change schedules and travel plans lightly. So when the news broke late Friday regarding President Obama's announcement to delay his trip to Copenhagen until the last days of the conference, it was largely interpreted as a hopeful sign. It indicates not just a willingness to be on hand when a the heavy heavy lifting and hammering-out of any agreement would most likely take place, but it suggests the perception of a better shot at actually putting something in place.

Representatives of the United Nations, the world body sponsoring the climate summit, are expressing optimism as well. The BBC reports that conference leaders point to the level of world participation and a very recent spate of announced emission reduction commitments that support a hopeful view of what may develop.

Meanwhile, figuratively bruised and bloodied, the climate scientists in the trenches of this entire matter have hit back at their critics, and fairly hard at that. There's no argument that the public perception of climate science took a body blow with what was revealed through the batch of private e-mails stolen and re-posted by hackers. Scientific American writes that leading scientists hold firm and maintain that the weight of evidence remains firmly behind a global climate whose change is fueled by human activity. The illegal breach is characterized as an act of desperation by those who know the science is not on their side, keen to derail progress by similarly desperate measures.

And speaking of climate science, the findings continue to march on uninterrupted. PhysOrg reports that University of Bristol researchers find that the Earth's climate may be even more sensitive to fluctuations in atmospheric carbon dioxide than previously thought. And BBC reports of an international study indicating that the level of carbon absorption provided by the oceans is not a steady amount year-in, year-out, but may fluctuate by several percentage points over even short time periods.

Lastly, the New York Times writes that the US EPA announces plans to move forward with the characterization of greenhouse gases as an environmental threat, setting the stage for potential regulation as a pollutant.

Stay tuned. If there's a thaw between industrialized and developing nations and the talks really start to heat up, Tonic will continue to take the temperature of events as they develop in Copenhagen this week and next.

Photo courtesy of Thue, via Wikimedia Commons