Hope is a dim bulb for “CopenCun” — so nicknamed the UN climate summit which begins Monday in Cancún, Mexico — in that maybe some of the agreements wished-for during last year’s Copenhagen confluence disaster would be finalized, or even discussed again.
Don’t bet the farm.

(Illustration found here).

As the chief UN official on climate change in Copenhagen stated recently that to expect any kind of accord out of Cancún would be “a bridge too far.”
What we’re seeking/looking for is any kind of bridge.
And from what I’ve read about the upcoming summit, not much will be done, other than to hold onto the flimsy agreements reached in Denmark without any new kind of approach to the most-greatest threat now facing the planet — the probable result in Mexico will allow the climate-change can to be kicked further down the pot-holed road to the meeting in South Africa next year.

One hundred ninety countries to be represented in Cancún.
In face of the above-mentioned ‘most-greatest threat,’  mankind’s entire attempt to secure a handle on this living-environmental nightmare is complete gobbly-gook, laced high with toxic, near-about-incomprehensible bullshit.
Check this intro nonsense from UNFCCC:

The United Nations Climate Change Conference to be held in Cancun, Mexico, from 29 November to 10 December 2010, encompasses the sixteenth Conference of the Parties (COP) and the sixth Conference of the Parties serving as the Meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol (CMP), as well as the thirty-third sessions of both the Subsidiary Body for Implementation (SBI) and the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice (SBSTA), and the fifteenth session of the AWG-KP and thirteenth session of the AWG-LCA.

WTF!
Yes, one can follow the whole spiel if one knows the proper alphabet sequence.
And this from The Ecologist — a quick “five-minute” guide to the 14 days of Cancún babble — and the Copenhagen more-than-disaster event:

Last year’s meeting saw the largest-ever collection of people come together for a climate change meeting, with 4,000 reporters and more than 120 heads of state in attendance, including US president Barack Obama and UK prime minister Gordon Brown.
The BBC sent 20 reporters to cover the event, but is reported to be sending just one to Cancun.
No heads of state are expected to attend, with energy secretary Chris Huhne and climate change minister Greg Barker due to represent the UK.
No actual agreement was reached, but instead a two-page accord was produced.
This called on industrialised countries to list their emissions targets, for all countries to monitor their emissions with complete transparency, to promote low-carbon technology and stated an ambition to keep global temperature rises below 2C.
An agreement is needed to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which was the last major international agreement for industrialised countries to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.
This protocol expires in 2012.
No countries signed the so-called Copenhagen Accord, so it is not legally binding, though they did agree to ‘take note of it’.

‘TAKE NOTE OF IT’ — question mark.
Not only is the fight against quick-evolving climate change itself, but humanity’s complete survival scheme is also greatly hampered by another man-made burden, Climate Zombies.
People who actually deny climate change are either so-damn ignorant they should be institutionalized, or they’re greedy, dumb-ass lovers of big oil, big money and big-lipped arrogance.
And what makes these deniers so infuriating to me is the glaring factoid that they’re obvious liars as all one has to do nowadays is look out one’s window, or on occasion go outside, to actual witness climate change — it’s the freakin’ weather you assholes!
And for the first time it seems, science and actual weather events coincide.
From Newsweek and Science Nails the Blame Game.

Finally, climate scientists see a way to stop being so wishy-washy and start assigning blame, through a technique called “fractional risk attribution.”
This technique uses mathematical models of how the atmosphere would work if we had not goosed carbon dioxide to 389 ppm (from 278 before the Industrial Revolution), plus data about ancient (“paleo”) climates and historical (more recent) weather.
The idea is to calculate how many times an extreme event should have occurred absent human interference, explains climate scientist Ben Santer of Lawrence Livermore National Lab, and the probability of the same extreme event in today’s greenhouse-forced atmosphere.
Result: putting numbers on extreme weather.
In their biggest success, climate scientists led by Peter Stott of the British Met Office analyzed the 2003 European heat wave, when the mercury rose higher than at any time since the introduction of weather instruments (1851), and probably since at least 1500.
After plugging in historical and paleo data, and working out climate patterns in a hypothetical world without a human-caused greenhouse effect, they conclude that our meddling was 75 percent to blame for the heat wave.
Put another way, we more than doubled the chance that it would happen, and it’s twice as likely to be human-caused than natural.
That’s one beat shy of “Yes, we did it,” but better than “There’s no way to tell.”

In that scenario, ditto the amazing Russian heat wave this past summer and the seemingly-endless flooding in Pakistan — climate change and major weather events.
And for you climate zombies/deniers/liars there’s even “crazy, extreme weather” right now right in the good-ole-USA.
And in the vernacular maxim of the age, the ‘new normal,’ will be the horror of these continually-expanding weather acting-badly events.
In Saturday’s New York Times, an opinion piece by Minnesota farmer, Jack Hedin, which depressingly describes arrival of the future, and it ain’t pretty.
A couple of bits (h/t Climate Progress):

The news from this Midwestern farm is not good.
The past four years of heavy rains and flash flooding here in southern Minnesota have left me worried about the future of agriculture in America’s grain belt.
For some time computer models of climate change have been predicting just these kinds of weather patterns, but seeing them unfold on our farm has been harrowing nonetheless.
…
In August 2007, a series of storms produced a breathtaking 23 inches of rain in 36 hours.
The flooding that followed essentially erased our farm from the map.
Fields were swamped under churning waters, which in places left a foot or more of debris and silt in their wake.
Cornstalks were wrapped around bridge railings 10 feet above normal stream levels.
We found butternut squashes from our farm two miles downstream, stranded in sapling branches five feet above the ground.
A hillside of mature trees collapsed and slid hundreds of feet into a field below.
…
The 2010 growing season has again been extraordinarily wet.
The more than 20 inches of rain that I measured in my rain gauge in June and July disrupted nearly every operation on our farm.
We managed to do a bare minimum of field preparation, planting and cultivating through midsummer, thanks only to the well-drained soils beneath our new home.
But in two weeks in July, moisture-fueled disease swept through a three-acre onion field, reducing tens of thousands of pounds of healthy onions to mush.
With rain falling several times a week and our tractors sitting idle, weeds took over a seven-acre field of carrots, requiring many times the normal amount of hand labor to control.
Crop losses topped $100,000 by mid-August.
…
Climate change, I believe, may eventually pose an existential threat to my way of life.
A family farm like ours may simply not be able to adjust quickly enough to such unendingly volatile weather. We can’t charge enough for our crops in good years to cover losses in the ever-more-frequent bad ones.
We can’t continue to move to better, drier ground.
No new field drainage scheme will help us as atmospheric carbon concentrations edge up to 400 parts per million; hardware and technology alone can’t solve problems of this magnitude.

Read the entire piece — a literary, articulate farmer.

During weekdays on cigarette breaks out behind the liquor store where I work, there’s always tractor-trailer trucks moving around, backing up, pulling forward, or just sitting at idle, making deliveries at a back loading dock of the 24/7/364 (closed on Christmas Day) Safeway super market next door.
Emblazed across a few of them is the phrase: Safeway — Ingredients For Life.
And what an ironic truth to that — do people, especially US peoples, fully understand and grasp the situational fact of where actual foodstuffs actually comes from, and what an arduous process it is to get those ingredients for life to Safeway shelves?
According to UC Davis: Anticipating a world population of 9 billion people by 2050, global agriculture faces the daunting challenge of increasing food production by 70 to 100 percent in the next four decades, without significantly increasing prices.
How to feed all the freakin’ peoples when the globe adds the equivalent of “two Pakistans or three Mexicos every four years” — along with disastrous regional climate bursts like those recounted above by Minnesota farmer, Jack Hedin.
Despite being late in the game, new research will begin shortly to analyze food production and climate change.
A $200 million, 10-year research project, known as the Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) and operate via the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) and the Earth System Science Partnership (ESSP) — more alphabet-soup — will seek ways to adapt agricultural needs as the global climate changes.
According to Bruce Campbell, director of CCAFS: “Climate change threatens to alter growing conditions so rapidly and dramatically as to require an intensive effort that draws on the combined talents of all of our centers and partners. We want to bring a sense of urgency to finding and implementing solutions and attracting more support for this effort.”
A decade’s worth of study when the earth needs action yesterday.

In a pre-Cancún conference warning-rally call, the UN’s planning chief, Robert Orr, admonished the planet in saying the next Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report on global warming will be much worse than the last one.
And the last one, the 2007 IPCC, was the first to flash on human’s as the main culprit in a climate change that was “unequivocal” — that report really changed how the vast majority of people viewed climate change and opened the floodgate of deniers/liars.
Orr told reporters last week:

…that negotiators heading for the Cancun conference “need to remind themselves, the longer we delay, the more we will pay both in terms of lives and in terms of money.”
He said UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon would make it clear to world leaders in Cancun “that we should not take any comfort in the climate deniers’ siren call.”
“The evidence shows us quite the opposite — that we can’t rest easy at all” as scientists agree that climate change “is happening in an accelerated way.”
“As preparations are underway for the next IPCC report, just about everything that you will see in the next report will be more dramatic than the last report, because that is where all the data is pointing.”
…
If governments “understand the peril that their populations are in, it is much easier to get over the political hurdles to do what you have to do,” he said.
…
Orr said no one should expect “the final deal” in Cancun.
But he said: “The time has come for some decisions on issues and therefore we do want some concrete results.”

Unless it’s too late, of course.
And if the government is broken and unable to create an understanding of ‘the peril’ to its frightened, ignorant populace, than the planet itself is doomed — the US will not be able to move properly against climate change for at least the next two years, even if then.
The old ‘victory gardens’ during WWII will become ‘survival gardens’ in the extreme-near future.