U.N. resolves to getting around to do something about climate after it's too late, by @DavidOAtkins

Despite the pleas of the Philippine commissioner and those of many others, the Doha Summit, was almost politics as usual. It did take 24 hours of overtime, but the Doha Climate Gateway was finally approved on Saturday. The agreement extends the Kyoto Protocol until 2020 when a more global emissions reduction agreement is to take effect.

“The Doha package represents a modest but important step forward,” said Connie Hedegaard, the European Commissioner for Climate Action, according to news reports.

Though the new, tougher and more inclusive treaty will be under negotiation until 2015, environmentalists warn that any deal that goes into effect in 2020 comes too late.

“We can’t wait until the 2020s to start cutting emissions, we are going to have to do it this decade,” said Samantha Smith, who heads the Global Climate and Energy Initiative at the World Wildlife Fund in a telephone interview from Doha.

The American media reported little on the climate talks, compared to European media. That may be in part, as my colleague John Broder reports: “It has long been evident that the United Nations talks were at best a partial solution to the planetary climate change problem, and at worst an expensive sideshow. The most effective actions to date have been taken at the national, state and local levels, with a number of countries adopting aggressive emissions reductions programs and using cap-and-trade programs or other means to help finance them.”

But, as John writes, climate change is “a problem that scientists say is growing worse faster than any of them predicted even a few years ago.”

“What this meeting reinforced is that while this is an important forum, it is not the only one in which progress can and must be made,” said Jennifer Haverkamp, director of the international climate programs at the Environmental Defense Fund. “The disconnect between the level of ambition the parties are showing here and what needs to happen to avoid dangerous climate change is profound.”

“The biggest problem is the disconnect from the science,” said Kumi Naidoo, the head of Greenpeace international, who also spoke to Rendezvous from Doha.

“We should peak in 2015 and then come down,” he said, referring to global emissions, “and we are just so far from that.”

Environmentalists charge that national economic interests took priority over the fight against global warming at Doha, even as an increasing number of people worldwide are becoming aware of the urgency of the problem.