Conferring in Bali, Part I

Laurie is a science and environmental journalist and author. She wrote the Sally Ride Science book Our Changing Climate: The Oceans .

The United Nations Conference on Climate Change opened this morning in Bali, Indonesia. There have been quite a few important UN meetings this year on climate change—most of the others we’ve read about in the news during 2007 were basically scientific gatherings of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), where researchers from around the world gathered to present their observations of global climate change, and based on those findings, make their best predictions for what the future holds. Last month they completed that task and handed over their final report: a devastating appraisal of the likely environmental, economic and social costs of current global warming trends. But this meeting in Bali is different from those IPCC conferences: now it’s time for the movers and shakers--government representatives from 180 nations around the world--to return to center stage. The scientists have arguably given the topic their best shot, and now it’s a matter of what the rest of us will do with this information. Can’t say we haven’t been warned…

In comparison to the challenge just met by those IPCC scientists, who had to sort out the complexities of literally a planet’s worth of scientific data into one comprehensive document, the main goal of this two-week meeting seems pretty simple: just hammer out some sort of preliminary timeline, or roadmap, for how negotiations on the next set of international agreements for fighting climate change will proceed. The Kyoto Protocols expire in 2012: where will we go from there? This meeting is just to start the wheels rolling—it’s like the very first get together of a global party planning committee. And yet the sad fact is that given the overwhelming number competing national interests, and especially the resistance of the United States government to engage in any meaningful international discussion, even this relatively humble objective will be an enormously difficult task, and few are optimistic about how much will actually be accomplished by the time the conference closes.