How long have we been talking about climate change?

The dawn of a brand new year is a good time to look forward.  It’s also a good time to reflect on the year that has passed.  Over the holidays, I found my thoughts returning again and again to something Anjali Appadurai, a youth delegate to the UN Climate Change Conference in Durban said:  “You’ve been negotiating all my life,” she said.  All her life!
As it happens, I have a daughter the same age.  Like Ms. Appadurai, she attends university.  Like her, she’s an articulate, passionate and capable young woman with hopes and dreams for the future.  (Yes, I am unabashedly proud of her – don’t get me started!) I have a vivid sense of the passing of her two decades marked by all the events of her childhood and teenage years.  Is it really possible that the discussion about what to do about climate change has been going on all her life?
I looked it up.  The negotiations that led to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change began in 1990. The Framework Convention was presented to the nations of the world at the UN Conference on Environment and Development – the ‘Rio Earth Summit’ on June 4th, 1992.  That was two days before my daughter’s 1st birthday.  So, it’s true.  Babies have grown into young women and young men while the nations of the world debated the finer points of who should do what to curtail carbon emissions.
Meanwhile precious little has been done, at least outside Europe, to avert the threat that uncontrolled climate change could pose to the quality of their lives.  Global carbon emissions rose 45% between 1990 to 2010 according to the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre and the atmospheric concentration of CO2 at Mauna Loa reached 390 ppm, a 10% increase from 1990, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
About all that was accomplished at Durban was an agreement to disagree and try again another day.  Canada is ‘cautiously optimistic’ that a new accord might be reached by 2015 and come into effect by the end of the decade.  Perhaps, but will it matter?
Exactly how long we can delay sorting this out before one of the self-reinforcing feedback mechanisms in the global carbon cycle yanks control from our collective grasp?  Does anyone really want to find out the hard way?
What is difficult now won’t be easier later according to the International Energy Agency: “If bold policy actions are not put in place over the next several years, it will become increasingly difficult and costly to meet the goal set at last year’s talks of limiting a global temperature increase to 2 degrees C.”
Bold action on climate change must be taken now, not yet another decade from now. We don’t need a global agreement before we get down to business.  What we need is action.  Now is the time to develop our renewable energy potential and make a big investment in energy efficiency.
The hopes and dreams of some remarkable young people may depend on it.