Snapler

The most symbolic moment here at the Delhi Sustainable Development Summit, the first major global follow-up to Copenhagen, was a hug.

Rajendra Pauchauri, the chair of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been at the center of the controversy about inadequately vetted data on the melt rate of Himalayan glaciers. Before the news broke that the IPCC had included bad data in its report, Indian Environment and Forests Minister Jairam Ramesh had engaged for months in a public dispute with Pauchauri about this issue, saying that the threat was remote, not imminent.

(The reality appears to be that so little science exists on Himalayan glaciers that no one really knows how fast the glaciers here are melting  -- a shortfall that the government of India has at last committed to addressing. Regardless, the pictures of Himalayan glaciers that Skoll Global Threats Director Larry Brilliant showed Pauchauri today demonstrated that melt they have, just as in North America, Europe, and the Andes.)

Yesterday, the UN's climate chief, Yvo de Boer, said that Pauchauri was not personally responsible for the unsubstantiated claim that global warming could melt Himalayan glaciers by 2035, and it would be "senseless" for Pauchauri to step down. And when Pauchauri joined Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and other dignitaries on the dais, Ramesh gave him a very visible and very public hug -- just as Prime Minister Sigh had expressed in his remarks the Indian government's support for the IPCC (and by clear implication Pauchauri).

The solid support from the government has not prevented the Indian media from ganging up on Pauchauri, though. "Gotcha" journalism is not confined to the U.S.

But perhaps because we are in India, not the U.S., the overall conversation seems much more factually based. Prime Minister Singh hailed India's commitment to reduce the carbon dependence of its economy by 25 percent -- but also stated "in a poor nation, the interests of the present generation must be given at least as much weight as those of future generations." But other Indian experts yesterday pointed out that for the world to reconcile an expected 500 percent growth in world economic output with the need to cut carbon dioxide by 50 percent will require a staggering 1,000 percent decrease in carbon emissions per dollar or rupee.

But I continue to believe that framing climate diplomacy, as Singh did, as a problem of "burden sharing" is one of the major barriers to progress. Yes, in the long run, if we don't generate the new technology and economic strategies that make low-carbon solutions more competitive than high-carbon ones, there will be a burden to share. But in the short run we clearly know that steps such as restoring India's forests (half of which, according to Singh, are seriously degraded) are economic opportunities, not burdens.

The heads of states who appeared on the morning panel were diverse in many ways, but they all had one thing in common: They're on the front lines of disrupted climate.

Bhutanese Prime Minister Jigme Yoser Thinley described his flight to Delhi, reporting that for the first time there appeared to have been no snowfall on the Himalayas, and that the range had become gray instead of white. He earned the day's biggest applause for his call to replace GDP as a measure with his own nation's Human Happiness Index.

Anote Tong, the Prime Minister of Kiribati, made an eloquent plea for a legally binding global agreement as the outcome from the upcoming UN conference in Mexico, reminding the audience that already, when high tides hit his island nation at the full moon, communities that have been safe for hundreds of years are now being flooded.

Quebec Premier Jean Charest reminded the audience that after years of struggle Canada did get the U.S. to commit, and to act, on acid rain -- and that the Montreal Protocol had been tremendously successful in getting rid of ozone-depleting gasses.

Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou took more of this slant: "How do we translate the green economy into the daily lives and politics of our peoples? This is the first time we have been challenged to govern the globe together -- and Copenhagen revealed how weak our institutions for doing so are. Let us green our economies together."

Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg argued for a plan that his country has developed with Mexico, the host of the next UN conference, in which revenues from carbon taxes or cap and trade processes would be devoted to helping developing nations cope with climate change. He committed his country to becoming carbon neutral by 2030 (another round of applause) and reiterated the importance that Norway attaches to preventing tropical deforestation.

The session left me feeling, well, sobered by the steepness of the lift that is needed but also fascinated by how deeply these heads of state are wrestling with big issues -- in some ways, much bigger issues than climate change itself. Yes, the world is changing -- but time is our big challenge.

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