Long way to go on climate crisis, but we're moving in right direction

As after every climate summit, the air is filled with shouts of rage and despair. What was agreed was unclear and inadequate, and what was left undecided or simply ignored was vast and terrifying. For example, they still haven't managed to agree that the world needs to stop burning fossil fuels.

What? Isn't that what this whole travelling circus is about? The climate is getting hotter because we're burning fossil fuels for energy, soon people will be dying in large numbers, in 20 or 30 years entire countries will become uninhabitable, so stop! Alternative energy sources are available! Act now, or global disaster will happen!

Yes, that's what it's about, and every year tens of thousands of politicians, experts, campaigners and lobbyists trek to a different location — Sharm-al-Sheikh this year — to debate and decide how to deal with this literally existential threat.

And in all those 27 years they haven't even managed to mention the name of the threat? No, they haven't. Last year, for the first time, they inserted the word “coal” into the final report, but the words “gas” and “oil” are still taboo.

This is what you get when a global institution is ruled by consensus. Everybody has a veto, including the coal-, gas- and oil-dependent countries.

This is the price you pay for belonging to a species still emerging from a long tribal past that has developed a high-tech, high-energy civilization before it was culturally equipped to manage it.

So what actually happened at Sharm-alSheikh?

`Loss and damage' is not charity; it's climate justice.

After the inevitable all-night negotiations (two all-nighters, in fact), they managed to agree on a new fund that will compensate poor countries that suffer “loss and damage” from extreme climate events. The money will come from the developed countries whose historic and current emissions are the reason for the damage.

“`Loss and damage' is not charity; it's climate justice,” said Nabeel Munir, climate envoy of Pakistan, whose floods made it this year's poster boy for the fund, and this time the message got through. That's about par for the course: if you bring up the same obvious injustice at the climate summits every year for a decade or so, eventually those who did the harm and should pay the price will admit that you have a case.

It should now take only two or three more years to set up the loss and damage agency and agree on the rules for who pays how much into it each year, and exactly what qualifies as climate-related damage eligible for compensation.

The biggest remaining question by far is what about China? It is still classed as a developing country, but actually it is a middle-income country and the world's single biggest emitter of carbon dioxide — bigger than all the developed countries together. Should it be paying into the loss and damage fund, rather than claiming money from it? And how about India? It's only third in total emissions now, after the United States, but it will also probably overtake America in the next 10 years.

So the titanic struggle over who pays for the climate-linked loss and damage will continue, but at least the next climate summit can also focus on other things. Just as well, because stopping at the “aspirational” target of no more than a 1.5 Celsius degree rise in average global temperature is probably a lost cause by now.

The “never-exceed” hard target is no more than plus 2 C, because after that we lose control. The heating we have already caused will trigger warming feedbacks in the climate system that we cannot turn off, and away we go into the nightmare future.

So it's good to see them getting a little more reasonable each year at these summits. There's still a very long way to go, but at least we're moving in the right direction.