ON MONDAY morning, St Mark’s Square in Venice, Italy, flooded to its highest level in 22 years. Just as the flood waters peaked, the latest UN climate negotiations opened in Poznan, Poland, to ominous warnings.
Polish environment minister Maciej Nowicki told delegates that without concerted action to halt greenhouse gas emissions there would be “global threats of great intensity: increasing ocean levels, huge droughts and floods, cyclones with increasingly more destructive power, pandemics of tropical disease [and] a dramatic decline in biodiversity”.
The two weeks of negotiations are meant to facilitate agreement on a successor to the Kyoto protocol, which…
