Will New Climate-Science Update Move Leaders?

Only days remain until world leaders meet in Copenhagen to hash out a new international climate treaty to replace the Kyoto protocol, and in recent weeks many world leaders have attempted to quell expectations that the world will emerge with a strong, fair, and binding deal. President Obama has hinted only that a “politically binding” treaty may be all we can hope for. And even though its citizens are embarrassed by a lack of federal leadership, Canada’s Harper government has all-but-declared that it intends to stand in the way.

But meanwhile, the hard reality grinds on. It has been more than three years since hundreds of climate scientists completed the Fourth Assessment Report for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) . In the meantime, many hundreds of papers have been published on a suite of topics related to human-induced climate change.

Since the next formal report is not due until 2013, and since many agree that Copenhagen represents our best and perhaps last chance to stop runaway warming, the international climate-science community today released an interim report summarizing their very latest findings.

The compendium of the very latest science is called the Copenhagen Diagnosis, and it’s a chilling tale. Everything is happening faster than the models predicted. They conclude that we must completely decarbonize the world within the century, and we must be 80 to 90 percent there by the time my kids hit middle-age:

The turning point must come soon: If global warming is to be limited to a maximum of 2 degress C above pre-industrial values, global emissions need to peak between 2015 and 2020 and then decline rapidly. To stabilize climate, a decarbonized global society – with near-zero emissions of CO2 and other long-lived greenhouse gases – need to be reached well within this century. More specifically, the average annual per-capita emissions will have to shrink to well under 1 metric ton CO2 by 2050. This is 80-90% below the per-capita emissions in developed nations in 2000.

Will this move the needle in Copenhagen? Alas, not likely. The U.S. health-care fracas has shuffled climate to the back-burner, and without a legal mandate from Washington, other nations will doubtful step up to the plate. Any deal will be symbolic only, another “resolution” without legal obligations to get there. Canada will love it.

It’s going to take a massive mobilization — millions from all walks of life filling in the streets, a show of political will from every direction — not a few scattered “environmentalist” protests here and there, not a few crazy media stunts involving smokestacks and banners. But how can you mobilize people who don’t think their voice matters, who seem locked into the pattern of day-to-day life? How can you make them notice what’s coming when it hasn’t yet sent a screaming-loud wake-up call? How can you move regular folks to act when it seems the only thing that does so is a big sale down at Wal-Mart?

As George Monbiot wrote recently, I am beginning to feel like a madman with a sign.

Really. I’m asking. Ideas?