Officials from China and other countries are meeting in Bonn, Germany, until June 12 for more negotiations on a new set of global arrangements to prevent runaway climate change. The deal to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which ends in 2012, is supposed to be clinched at a climate summit convened by the United Nations in Copenhagen in December.
Concluding an effective agreement by then will be tough. But even as they defend national interests, negotiators need to bear in mind the latest evidence of the continuing build-up of heat-trapping carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere despite the economic slump, and the projections for a further massive rise as growth resumes, particularly in Asia.
The top US energy forecaster reported last week that, without new national policies and a binding international agreement to cut global-warming pollution, world carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels will rise, from 29 billion tonnes in 2006 to 33 billion tonnes in 2015 and 40.4 billion tonnes in 2030.
To put this into perspective, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of scientists and officials advising the UN said - in its most recent report to policymakers two years ago - that nearly 57 per cent of the 49 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere in 2004 came from fossil fuels.
The UN and the Kyoto Protocol seek to control six greenhouse gases. But just two of them, carbon dioxide and methane (the main component of natural gas) are responsible for 91 per cent of the global warming attributed to the six gases.
Earlier this year, researchers from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration measured an extra 16.2 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide and 12.2 billion tonnes of methane in the atmosphere in 2008 - despite the economic downturn in the second half of the year and the decrease in a wide range of activities that depend on fossil fuel use.