Changing climate targets in Poland  Reflections on this week's
events in Poznan from founder and director, Bill McKibben. This
piece is cross-posted from  The big international climate
conferences, at least the ones I've been to in Kyoto, the Hague,
and elsewhere, are pretty much the same: caffeinated,
adrenalized, endless, chaotic, and incredibly hard to read. Much
goes on behind closed doors, and small signals from the big
players at the last minute generally make the most difference.
I'm not going to Poznan until next week, for the last few days
of this conference. And in an odd way, it's been easier to
figure out the proceedings from a distance to make out the
forest for the trees.   For almost a decade now, the 'tough'
position has been that we shouldn't tolerate more than 450 parts
per million co2 in the atmosphere, nor more than a two degree
Celsius rise in temperature. When the Europeans proposed those
numbers in the 1990s, they were more stringent than the old
targets a vague attempt to avoid a doub