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Yet with the Kyoto Protocol still in limbo thanks to US and Russian intransigence, the conference is taking place in a political no man's land. The international process that began in 1992 at the first Earth Summit has yet to bear significant fruit. Despite plentiful proposals for windfarms, solar panels and hydrogen cells - enough to fill many glossy brochures - the grim reality is that the use of fossil fuels increases relentlessly, and with it the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases. So why are we proving so utterly incapable of facing up to the challenge?
First, let us remind ourselves of the magnitude of the threat. Global warming is already well under way: even if all greenhouse gas emissions stopped tomorrow, we would see a rise in planetary temperatures of 1.1 degrees C, twice the warming experienced over the past century, and enough to wipe out most of the world's tropical coral reefs as well as a good proportion of mountain glaciers. Bad as that is, it is still an unrealistically optimistic scenario. It is projected that greenhouse gas emissions will go on rising for decades; the IPCC predicts a global temperature rise of between 1.4 degrees and 5.8 degrees by 2100. At the lower end of this scale, large areas of agriculturally productive land will be destroyed; entire countries will disappear through rapid sea-level rise; and entire regions in the arid subtropics will become uninhabitable.
The financial impact of this, according to Munich Re, the world's largest reinsurer, will run at more than $300bn a year by 2050, while the IPCC estimates that the cost to Europe of climate change at the "moderate" end of its predictions will be $280bn a year.
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These dangerous trends continue almost unchallenged. Why? Because we appear to be experiencing a disastrous form of collective denial, more typically found among societies suffering major institutional human rights abuses - such as apartheid South Africa or Nazi Germany - where individuals may understand the reality of the problems, but refuse to accept the implications. In his book States of Denial, the sociologist Stanley Cohen terms this condition "implicatory denial" and identifies it as a natural defence that humans tend to adopt when faced with a morally unthinkable situation. It has resulted in, to borrow another term from psychology, "cognitive dissonance" among opinion-formers and the public. Nearly everyone professes to care about global warming while simultaneously continuing with set patterns of behaviour that make the problem worse.
http://www.newstatesman.co.uk/nscoverstory.htm 
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