Written by Karl Ritter

BONN, Germany (AP) — U.N. climate talks ran into gridlock Thursday as a widening rift between rich and poor countries risked undoing some advances made last year in the decades-long effort to control carbon emissions that scientists say are overheating the planet.

As so often in the slow-moving negotiations, the session in Bonn bogged down with disputes over technicalities. But at the heart of the discord was the larger issue of how to divide the burden of emissions cuts between developed and developing nations. Developing nations say the industrialized world — responsible for most of the emissions historically — should bear the brunt of the emissions cuts while developed nations want to make sure that fast-growing economies like China and India don’t get off too easy. China is now the world’s top polluter.

“There is a total stalemate,” said Artur Runge-Metzger, the chief negotiator for the European Union.

The negotiations in Bonn were meant to build on a deal struck in December in Durban, South Africa, to create a new global climate pact by 2015 that would make both rich and poor nations rein in emissions caused by the burning of oil and other fossil fuels. But on the next-to-last day of two weeks of talks there was little sign of progress, as different interpretations emerged on what, exactly, was agreed upon last year.

“There is distrust and there is frustration in the atmosphere,” Seyni Nafo, spokesman for a group of African countries, told The Associated Press.

The European Union claims China and other developing countries are backsliding on commitments made in Durban to bring the discussion on emissions cuts from both rich and poor nations into one forum, instead of the current structure, which has two parallel negotiation tracks. Developing countries — backed by climate activists — accuse the U.S., EU and other industrialized nations of trying to evade commitments made in previous negotiations and shift responsibilities for tackling climate change to the developing world.

“Developed countries like the U.S., Japan, Canada and Russia … have consistently blocked references to the existing legal principles, while continuing to ignore the fact that their meager emission cut targets expose the world’s most vulnerable people to climate change’s devastating effects,” said Mohamed Adow, a senior climate change adviser at Christian Aid.

Since their launch in the early 1990s, the U.N. talks have had little success reducing emissions of the heat-trapping gases that a large majority of climate scientists say are warming the Earth, with potentially devastating consequences for poor countries ill-prepared to deal rising sea levels, floods, droughts and other effects of a changing climate.

Actions taken and pledged so far fall well short of what the U.N. experts say is needed to achieve the goal of preventing global temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Fahrenheit (1.2 degrees Celsius) above current levels by the end of this century.

The only existing binding treaty, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, was shunned by the U.S. because it doesn’t impose any emissions targets on China, thus leaving out the two biggest carbon emitters on the globe. It was set to expire this year but countries agreed in Durban to extend it, though they haven’t agreed on how long. Meanwhile, Canada, Japan and Russia have refused to make any new commitments under Kyoto, meaning it only covers about 15 percent of global emissions.

Copyright 2012 The Associated Press

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We recently took a look at a new report from NRDC that found that thanks to climate change, most American cities will be seeing an exponential uptick in heat-related deaths. This one shouldn’t come as much of a shocker—as the world heats up, more people will perish from heat-related deaths. The report, Killer Heat, finds that “more than 150,000 Americans could die by the end of this century due to the excessive heat caused by climate change.”

And that’s certainly a pretty horrifying wide-lens impact. It makes for a big, ugly number that will certainly get thrown around the blogosphere, and justifiably so. But what we’re really talking about here is the heat getting cranked up on our cities. The report, which only considers the impacts of a warming climate on the nation’s 40 biggest cities, finds that the number of yearly deaths from extreme heat will triple by the end of the century.

As the NRDC notes, “Illnesses that are caused or made worse by extreme heat — including heat exhaustion, heat stroke, cardiovascular disease, and kidney disease — currently lead to hundreds of deaths each year.” Well over a thirteen hundred Americans die from the heat every year as it is, and that number will soon balloon to over 4,500. The report is focused only on cities because that’s where most of heat-related deaths occur. Kate Sheppard explains over at Mother Jones:

asphalt and glass amplify the heat and the dense population leaves more people vulnerable. Thirty-seven of 40 cities studied will see increases in heat-related deaths, [the researchers] predict. The hardest hit will be Louisville, Detroit, and Cleveland, researchers found. The average number of deaths in Louisville was 39 per summer from 1975 to 2004. That figure is expected to grow to 257 per summer by mid-century and to 376 by 2100.

That means more stress on already budget-strapped, recession-clobbered cities. More expensive health services, more electricity demand, much, much more unpleasantness. Excessive heat drains productivity, too.

And it’s going to be both a tough sell and expensive to adapt to these changes—but doing so could head off the nastier impacts. For instance, Chicago is already bracing for skyrocketing temps:

Thermal radar is being used to map the city’s hottest spots, which are then targets for pavement removal and the addition of vegetation to roofs. And air-conditioners are being considered for all 750 public schools, which until now have been heated but rarely cooled.

Cities everywhere are going to need to start considering such measures—children and the elderly are going to be most vulnerable, and some good city planning could prevent tragedy.

I probably don’t need to say it, but this is the ugly reality for dozens of cities across the nation—scientists expect global temps to rise between 4˚ and 11˚ Fahrenheit by the end of the century. It’s just going to happen. We must continue to draw down carbon emissions worldwide, but adaptation efforts must be undertaken too. Municipal governments must look at how and where they can reduce their vulnerability to extreme heat events, and how they might find innovative ways to keep residents cool.

Because the NRDC has a a fairly grim prognosis: “rising temperatures driven by unabated climate change will increase the number of life-threatening excessive heat events, resulting in thousands of additional heat-related premature deaths each year, with a cumulative toll of approximately 33,000 additional heat-related deaths by midcentury in these cities, and more than 150,000 additional heat-related deaths by the century’s end.” Buckle up.

This post was originally published by TreeHugger.

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Alley has followed his PBS show up with a new series of short Youtube videos intended to supply social media with something you can share and link to. It’s for those you know with their heads in the sand (like my dad) — so of course it is called “How to Talk to An Ostrich.”

They’re all here, but here are a couple of samples.

Alley describes how 19th Century Americans burned through forests and then moved on to hunt all the nearby whales close to extinction — “we burned the whales to light the evenings!” What happens if we burn through all the coal and oil, and — especially — America’s new fuel: shale gas?

You say: “Earth’s Climate Changes Gradually… We Can Easily Adapt.” Alley says: “Maybe, maybe not… because sometimes climate goes over the edge, and quickly. Perhaps we’d better take out some insurance.”

Go share.

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