Discussion > The Fat Lady
I don't think the Northern Hemisphere Sea Ice Anomaly is the fat lady we're waiting for.
For a start, the graph you link to is only comprehensible to the few hundred thousand blog fans obsessed by climate change, on both sides of the fence. Governments will be addressing the other 99.9% of their electorate, and it's easy to make three quarters of a million square kilometres of lost ice sound like a big deal.
The hope lies in your second paragraph. Missing from your list of countries where faith is waning is France, which is hosting the 2015 meeting that will seal the fate of the planet. All eyes will be on the joint hosts, President Hollande, who is beating all records of unpopularity for a reigning President, and his Minister of Ecology, Ségolene Royal, his ex-mistress but three, and the mother of his four children.
The French are no more well-informed than the rest of the chatterati of the Western world about climate change, but they will be taking a keen interest in this debate. Hollande is already dead meat for the presidential election in 2017 (though he doesn't know it.) Ségolene (who is in no way the fat lady of your title, but svelte and ambitious) was narrowly defeated in the 2007 election by Nicholas Sarkozy, who will almost certainly stand again, but with dozens of examining magistrates on his tail investigating a half a dozen cases of alleged corruption.
The 2015 Paris conference on climate change promises to be explosive, but it won't be about sea ice anomalies.
geoffchambers
Don't bank on it James - the fat lady is just the tip of an iceberg and the only song she'll be singing is
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t99KH0TR-J4
http://www.commonfuture-paris2015.org/
not banned yet
not banned yet
Oh. I was rather hoping she'd be singing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CYjE9Gv3A4
geoffchambers
Fine choice Geoff - not seen that before! Could this make the short list?:
http://youtu.be/Mu2Qn4JOfh0
not banned yet
I can see a rather large woman standing in the wings, and she's starting her vocal exercises.
There is one year to go before the final deadline. The nations of the world are supposed to commit to binding limits on CO2 production by the end of 2015. The recent elections in the US saw the Republicans take control of both houses of Congress. It therefore seems extremely unlikely that the US will be able to agree to any meaningful climate targets. The Germans have recently reneged from their commitments. The Australians have a government that is none too keen. Ditto Japan, Russia, Canada. China and India have other priorities. They are more concerned with tackling poverty.
So, on the political front, things look pretty bleak for an international agreement on CO2 emissions.
It seems to me that political attempts to defeat climate change are dead in the water. But, is there anything that might defeat the *desire* to try to battle the planet's climate?
I've been watching this graph for a while:
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.anomaly.arctic.png
If the symmetry continues, and that graph bounces up again... is she going to sing?