On November 28th, 2011, the New York Times reported from Washington that with intensifying climate disasters and global economic turmoil as the backdrop, delegates from 194 nations will gather in Durban, South Africa, today, Monday 28th of November. The delegates will try to advance, if only incrementally, the world’s response to dangerous climate change. To those who have followed the negotiations of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change over their nearly 20-year history, the conflicts and controversies to be taken up in Durban are familiar: the differing obligations of industrialized and developing nations, the question of who will pay to help poor nations adapt, the urgency of protecting tropical forests, and the need to rapidly develop and deploy clean energy technology.

However, many of the sitting members of the United States Congress doubt the existence of human influence on the climate and ridicule international efforts to deal with it. The negotiating process itself is under fire from other quarters, including the poorest nations who believe their needs are being neglected in the fight among the major economic powers. But scientists warn that these arguments serve only to delay actions that must be taken to reduce climate-altering emissions and to improve vulnerable nations’ ability to respond to the changes they say are surely coming.

Rajendra K. Pachauri, director of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the global body of scientists and statisticians that provides the technical underpinning of the United Nations talks, noted that the group had recently released a detailed assessment of the increasing frequency of extreme climate events like droughts, floods and cyclones. They highlighted the necessity of moving quickly to take steps to reduce emissions and adapt to the inevitable damage. The Durban meeting is formally known as COP17, for the 17th conference of the parties to the United Nations convention on climate change.

Negotiators entered the United Nations climate talks at Copenhagen two years ago with grand ambitions but left empty-handed. Now they are lowering their expectations and hoping to keep the process alive through modest steps. At Durban, the negotiators will broach the politically-weighted question of whether to extend the Kyoto Protocol, the 1997 agreement that requires most wealthy nations to trim their emissions while providing economic and technological assistance for developing countries to pursue a cleaner energy path. Also still on the agenda are the structure of, and the sources of financing for, a climate adaptation and technology fund that is supposed to reach $100 billion a year by 2020. One of the issues that is most contentious and least likely to be resolved involves the future of the Kyoto Protocol, which requires the major industrialized nations to meet targets on emissions reduction but imposes no mandates on developing countries, such as emerging economic powers and sources of global greenhouse gas emissions like China, India, Brazil and South Africa. The United States is not a party to the protocol, having refused to ratify it because of its asymmetrical obligations. But the European Union, the major developing countries, and most African and Pacific island nations would like to see the Kyoto process extended as a prelude to a binding international agreement after 2020 to reduce emissions so as to keep the average global temperature from ever rising more than 2 degrees Celsius, or about 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, above its current level.