Blood, sweat and tears in Cancún

Reducing human carbon (dioxide) emissions will not work, as I argued in my recent papers, Re-interpreting Codex Cihuacoatl: New Evidence for Climate Change Mitigation by Human Sacrifice and The Aztec Solution to Climate Change. What will work is not for the squeamish.

The Mayans had a sense of sacred obligation, eerily similar to our concern for the environment. Without constant sacrifices, they believed the sun would become “angry”, temperatures would rise, corn yields decline and their world faced with imminent destruction. (Had they had the option of jetting off to international conferences at fabulous locations every few months it might have been a different - and less macabre - story.)

The President of Mexico, His Excellency Felipe Calderon, also spoke on December 7 of the danger of failing to face up to the challenge of climate change “The atmosphere is indifferent to the sovereignty of states,” he said. “It would be a tragedy if our inability to see beyond our personal interests, our group or national interests makes us fail.”

The President stressed Mexico’s vulnerability to “climate change impacts”. The country’s recent record-breaking drought and intense hurricane season had displaced thousands and caused 60 deaths. “Climate change,” he declared, “is beginning to make us pay for the fatal errors we as humanity have committed against the environment”. What were once described as acts of God have become acts of Climate Change, even in Catholic Central America.

Yet Mexico faces a more immediate - and dangerous - threat. Cancún has become an important trans-shipment point for Colombian cocaine, a centre of money laundering, drug smuggling and lethal cartel conflict. Humans are spilling much more blood in the country than the forces of Nature. In the past four years alone, drug-related violence has claimed over 28,000 lives.

Sweat

Sweat also flowed early at the Moon Palace Hotel, south of the border down Yucatan way. (Average maximum and minimum temperatures for December in Cancún are, respectively, 28C and 21C, with 96mm rainfall.) But the tropical heat and humidity were not the primary cause of high anxiety among COP-16 delegates.

“The environmental stakes are high,” said Figueres, “because we are quickly running out of time to safeguard our future.” The political stakes were high too, as “the effectiveness and credibility” of the COP-16 multilateral intergovernmental process was in danger.

She drew attention to three issues:

1. according to the UN World Meteorological Organization, concentrations of atmospheric greenhouse gases (human and natural, but excluding the most abundant one, water vapour) have reached their highest level (0.0385 per cent) since pre-industrial times (translation: despite the absence of any established scientific laws of climate change and consequently great uncertainty about  the precise causal relationship between anthropogenic carbon dioxide and global temperature, the WMO claims more carbon dioxide will mean higher temperatures, more “extreme weather events”, and so on.);
     
2. the poorest and most vulnerable people are already facing climate impacts and urgently need assistance (payment of controversial “climate debt”) to tackle “a problem that they did not cause” (translation: every destructive weather/climate event in the developing world is due invariably to carbon dioxide and greenhouse gas emissions from the developed world); and
    
3. the multilateral UN climate change process should remain “the trusted channel for rising to the challenge” (translation: we desperately need to justify our existence with some kind of agreement.).

Time was indeed running out for an agreement to supersede the Kyoto Protocol (PDF). Executed on December 11, 1997, it is due to expire on December 11, 2012. This is not any old date. Ominously, it is only ten days from a momentous event in Mayan - and for some - world history. December 21, 2012 is the end of one 5,125-year Long Count cycle on the Mayan calendar.

One of the few representatives of the Maya, Don Alejandro Cirilo Perez Oxlaj, Head of the National Maya Council of Elders of Guatemala and an Ambassador of Indigenous Peoples, has expressed incredulity at the developed world’s obsession with (climate and climate conference) apocalypse. For the Maya, the end of one Long Count cycle is merely how the gods make way for the next one. Down at the Moon Palace Hotel, however, some doubtless see the impending transition from the Fourth to the Fifth Sun, as a societal "paradigm shift". For them, it will be either an evolutionary step forward for humankind towards collective eco-consciousness and a decarbonised Eden, or a plunge into oblivion, the Hell of species extinction.

Tears

There were tears too. Vicky Pope, head of the climate predictions programme at the UK Met Office’s Hadley Centre, might have shed some on being stranded at Gatwick airport last week. One of many millions surprised by the unexpected arrival of a brutal early December cold snap, Pope was on her way to Cancún to announce, together with the UN WMO, that 2010 had tied (provisionally) with 1998 as “the hottest year on record”.